Pepon Osorio at the New Museum

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When he had a son in the 90s, Puerto Rico-born artist Pepon Osorio started thinking of how to raise him without perpetuating unwanted ideas about masculinity. This consideration (and a commission from Real Art Ways in Connecticut) led the artist to create the multi-media installation ‘No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop,’ now on view at the New Museum in a solo survey show presenting Osorio’s work from the 90s to today.  Originally installed in a working-class Puerto Rican neighborhood in Hartford, CT, the installation sprang from community conversations identifying barber shops as places where “…ideas surrounding machismo are formed and performed in Latinx culture from generation to generation.”  Overwhelming in its decorative detail, the recreated barbershop builds a powerful and absorbingly complex picture of male identity formation from the influence of actors, sports heroes and other public figures to the car culture alluded to in wall-mounted hubcaps.  (On view through Sept 17th).

Pepon Osorio, installation view of ‘No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop (En la barberia no se llora), mixed mediums and video installation, 1994.

Gabriel Chaile on the High Line

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Inspired by pre-Columbian ceramics in his native country of Argentina, Gabriel Chaile’s High Line sculpture ‘The Wind Blows Where it Wishes’ turns a vessel-shape into a living form with a delicate face positioned both front and back on the neck.  Made from steel and adobe, the sculpture recalls ancient handcrafting processes while being protected and animated by an undulating ribbon of dark metal which ends at the front in two small hands holding a tube-like instrument.  Towering yet humble, an object yet miraculously living, Chaile’s enchanting sculpture uniquely engages the park’s visitors.  (On view on the High Line over 24th Street through April ’24).

Gabriel Chaile, The Wind Blows Where it Wishes, adobe and steel, 2023.

Heji Shin at 52 Walker

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Fashion and art photographer Heji Shin’s self-portrait at 52 Walker gives and withholds information, depicting a holographic image of her brain made with a special MRI technique that pictures neural networks in brilliant color.  Though the scans allow us to literally see her brain, more telling about Shin’s thoughts are her studio photos of pigs – their faces full of character – that appear on the surrounding walls. Titled ‘Big Nudes’ after Helmut Newton’s boldly-posed 1981 images of nude women, the images question how both photos and their subjects are consumed. (On view in Tribeca through Oct 7th).

Heji Shin, Untitled, holographic installation; glass, pedestal, and four flat screen TVs, 66 x 68 1/8 x 58 ¼ in, 2023.

Elise Ansel at Miles McEnery Gallery

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Calling Old Master paintings her ‘powerful allies’ yet seeking to ‘shine a light on disparities’ in them, Elise Ansel considers the messages conveyed by iconic art historical works by reworking them as abstractions in new work at Miles McEnery Gallery.  A comparison of specific artworks, in this case, Paolo Veronese’s 16th century Allegory of Virtue and Vice and the similarly composed and colored piece by Ansel titled ‘Virture and Vice III,’ reveals how the colors of the original convey meaning; our eye is drawn to the hero at center, Hercules, as he flees the enticements and electric orange tones of the woman at bottom right for the more sober green color of Virtue.  (On view in Chelsea through Aug 31st).

Elise Ansel, Virtue and Vice III, oil on linen, 2023.

Nina Chanel Abney in ‘It’s Pablo-matic’ at The Brooklyn Museum

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Just around the corner from Picasso’s etchings of muscular minotaurs hovering over vulnerable sleeping nude women in the Brooklyn Museum, Nina Chanel Abney’s ‘Forbidden Fruit’ features very different hybrid characters – some with tenacles coming from their heads, others with horns or hair.  Enjoying a moment of communal relaxation, Abney’s characters adopt a picnicking pose familiar from Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe amongst other iconic artworks, while engaging a different kind of forbidden fruit – a selection of luscious watermelons, made sensitive because of their racist associations.  Both Abney and Picasso’s work feature in ‘It’s Pablo-matic:  Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,’ a group exhibition which rethinks Picasso’s oeuvre via art by twenty and twenty-first century women artists whose work disrupts traditionally masculine modernism.  (On view through Sept 24th).

Nina Chanel Abney, Forbidden Fruit, acrylic on canvas, 2009 in ‘It’s Pablo-matic’ at the Brooklyn Museum, July 2023.