This quilt by an unknown South Carolina maker is a standout among innovative textiles from the 1930s to the 1970s from the Arnett Collection now on view at Marlborough Gallery in Chelsea. Working in a variety of styles and creatively adapting traditional techniques, the quilters produced vibrantly colored and patterned textiles in designs that jump off the wall. (On view through January 18th).
In his photographic images featuring cotton plants now on view at Chelsea’s Laurence Miller Gallery, John Dowell aims to ‘evoke the remembering, feeling and sense of wonder in African American ancestral strategies of survival.’ Dowell inserts cotton fields in photos of Central Park, Wall Street, Trinity Church and other famous New York sites, creating haunting images and recalling injustices inflicted on African American communities at these places and elsewhere. The show’s centerpiece, ‘Lost in Cotton,’ invites visitors to enter an enclosure of hanging panels that recall the artist’s grandmother’s frightening childhood experience of getting lost among tall cotton plants. (On view through Jan 25th).
Though her lined-based, labor-intensive drawings have been described as resisting language in favor of the emotional potential of color, Zipora Fried’s own words best describe the inspiration for her latest work. She explains that the ‘sky and mud colored lizards, soft-toned cicada shells, sunsets echoing exploding worlds…,” the tides and sands of Lamu Island, Kenya prompted her vivid color choices. Short repeated pencil strokes and tonal variety make each image appear to shimmer in an unfixed meditation on her experience of the island. (On view in Chelsea at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. through Jan 18th).
A host of fractured figures, relatives to the artist’s signature box-headed, grimacing characters, greet visitors to Rashid Johnson’s latest show at Chelsea’s Hauser & Wirth Gallery. Described by their past titles as ‘anxious men,’ Johnson’s new people bear titles relating to their brokenness, as if the damage to their psyche’s or bodies has become more profound. The show climaxes in Johnson’s new film ‘The Hikers,’ in which two men meet while ascending or descending a mountain in Colorado, enacting a dance that expresses their anxiety and extends the theme into the three-dimensional world. (On view through Jan 25th).
As machines take over tasks formerly performed by people, Addie Wagenknecht’s programmed Roomba has complicated the role of the artist. In her past work using Yves Klein blue, the Roomba replaced the female bodies Klein used as paintbrushes. Here, the machine paints using a mix of art media (linseed oil and turpentine), grooming products (cosmetics, botox and perfume) and stimulants (wine, tequila and CBD oil) suggesting the symbolic expressive potential of non-traditional art media. (On view in ‘Embedded Parables’ at Bitforms on the Lower East Side through Jan 19th).
