New York Art Tours celebrates the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s reopening to the public today with a look at this Seated Male Figure from the museum’s current ‘Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shores of the Sahara’ exhibition. Fueled by global trade and transformed by the arrival of Islam, the region’s empires produced masterpieces like this terracotta figure whose identity is unknown. (On view through Oct 26th. View the Met’s new guidelines before visiting.)
New York Art Tours celebrates the Museum of Modern Art’s reopening to the public today with a closer look at a panel by Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT’s Media Lab Neri Oxman from her reopened exhibition, ‘Material Ecology.’ This wax and resin panel is the first piece visitors encounter in an exhibition that showcases materials and processes that collaborate with nature. The panel’s attractively undulating structure is determined by the need to transmit light and accommodate heat change. (On view through Oct 18th. View MoMA’s new guidelines before visiting.)
New York galleries may have reopened in July and part of August, but most have now closed for an end-of-summer break before regrouping in early September. New York’s street art is ready to step in for our daily viewing pleasure, however, as proven by Brazilian street-art star Sipros Sipros’ delicious mural. Part of Bushwick Collective’s sprawling program in Bushwick, Brooklyn, this big-eared character (the artist’s signature) enjoys a sticky moment in donut-paradise. (On view on Troutman Street between Cypress Ave and St Nicholas Ave).
In a recent review, New York Times critic Robera Smith praised Warren Isensee’s new abstract paintings at Miles McEnery Gallery for having ‘taken a sharp turn for the better’ citing a new energy that almost transcends paint on canvas. Isensee’s ‘Skin and Bones,’ pictured here, leaps off the wall, turning color and shape into subject matter and sending the viewer’s eye bouncing around the picture’s lively geometry. (On view in Chelsea through Aug 28th. Appointments are not necessary but masks and social distancing are required.)
London-based German artist Nicole Wermers juxtaposes an ashtray with four tiers of sorted sea-shells in this provocative piece from Tanya Bonakdar Gallery’s current summer group show. Do the shells stand in for nature, dominated by human-produced toxins? Or should the cigarettes signal rebellious freedom that might not be at odds with a shell-strewn shoreline? Wermers leaves it up to us to sort through our associations in a piece that’s ripe for a variety of interpretation. (On view Tues – Fri by appointment through August 28th. Masks and social distancing required.)
