artsbus - George Mason University

CURRENT EXHIBITIONS:
Museums and Galleries are Listed by District: Uptown, Chelsea, Soho and the burgeoning Lower East Side.

- You can "copy and paste" from the Artsbus Good Bets list below to customize your trip before you head to NYC.

- The list is collated each month of our GMU semester from visiting over 350 gallery and museum websites. The list is intended to be inclusive and instructive to our students, reflecting the broad currency of our visual arts curriculum at GMU.

- Each exhibit has between one and three exclamation points, which reflects my personal enthusiasm for the show. But, your curiosity and interests may reflect differently.

- You may link to specific galleries or museums at the links provided to the right of the "Good Bets" list.

So, enjoy your trip as a challenge and as an opportunity.

Peter Winant
Artsbus Director

Please link to "Getting Around NYC." for directions to gallery districts by use of the MTA system, and for general travel tips. You are advised to download and print these instructions before you board the bus.

ARTSBUS/GOOD BETS for April 18, 2009
See great Art ! Have good fun !
TAKE THIS HANDOUT WITH YOU (Please see accompanying materials distributed on the bus for reviews from: New York Magazine, the New Yorker, the New York Times and other journals for critic's favorites and pans)
EMERGENCY (only) # 301-873-3979

MUSEUMS: listed from north to south
- UPTOWN:
!The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum...2 East 91st St. Http://cooper hewitt.org ($10 students) "Curators Select; Recent Acquisition, 2003-2008" objects which demonstrate the myriad ways in which designers work and think.
The Guggenheim…5th Ave and 89th St. (students $15) http://www.guggenheim.org/new_york_index.shtml "The Third mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia 1860-1989" lluminates the dynamic and profound impact of Asian art and philosophical concepts on American artistic practices of the late 19th century, early modern, and postwar avant-garde periods. The exhibition will feature approximately 260 works by 114 American and Asian-American artists
! The Neue Gallerie...86th and 5th Ave ($10 students) "Brucke: The Birth of Expressionism in Dresden and Berlin 1905-1913" 100 works by utopian German artists such as Kirchner and Kandinsky (actually...a Russian)
!! The Metropolitan…5th Ave and 82nd st. (donation) http://www.metmuseum.org "Pierre Bonnard; The Late Interiors" the 80 paintings, drawings, and watercolors on display date from the artist’s later years. PLUS "Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard" The installation of hundreds of American postcards drawn from Evans’s collection will reveal the symbiotic relationship between Evans’s own art and his interest in the style of the postcard.. PLUS "Art of the Koren Rennaissance 1400-1600" has 45 examples from the Joeon dynasty
! The Whitney… Madison Ave. and 75th St. (students $10) http://www.whitney.org " Synthetic" This exhibition explores how new synthetic products not only allowed for a new look but also aligned with subject matter to change the direction of postwar American art. PLUS "Elad Lassry; Three Films". Lassry focuses on the surfaces and histories of the objects and individuals he captures, asking the viewer to reassess even the most quotidian images. PLUS "Sites" This exhibition, from the Whitney’s permanent collection, explores how the idea of sites allows for a more experiential role for the spectator as well the creation of new types of spaces, whose qualities might be unbound. PLUS, "Jenny Holzer; Protect Protect" A fifteen year survey exhibition of Jenny Holzer's pioneering approach to language as a carrier of content and her use of nontraditional media and public settings as vehicles for that content make her one of the most interesting and significant artists working today. Holzer's work offers an incisive social and psychological portrait of our times.
- MIDTOWN:
!!! Museum of Arts and Design…. #2 Columbus Circle (59th St and 8th Ave, just on the West side of Central Park) ($8 students) http://www.madmuseum.org The Museum has a brand new building with 3 inaugural exhibits: "Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary" combines prominent designers, Ingo Maurer and the Campana Brothers with prominent visual artists Tara Donavan, Al Anatsui and Do Ho Suh. ALSO Prime examples from the collection. ALSO, "Elegant Armor: The Art of Jewelry" surveys work since the 1940's that look at the conceptual and formal applications of jewelry.
!! MoMA…11 W 53rd St. ($12 students,) http://www.moma.org "Performance 1:Tehching Hseih" Performance 1 focuses on Hsieh’s earliest performance, Cage Piece (1978-79), which involved the artist spending one year locked inside a cage constructed in his loft in New York City. PLUS Martin Kippenberger whose paintings response to the somber 70's 'was to create his own party and cast himself as an artist-jester whose antics both disguised and permitted a piercing analysis of contemporary art and society.' PLUS "Tangled Alphabets" Leon Ferrari and Mira Schendel Their works address language as a major visual subject matter: the visual body of language, the embodiment of voices as words and gestures, and language as a metaphor of the worldly aspect of human existence PLUS " Into The Sunset:Images of the American West" is a photography exhibit of images fro 1850 to the present.
! American Folk Art Museum…45 W 53rd St (students $7) http://www.folkartmuseum.org/ Henry Darger; a showcase of eight of the nearly three hundred watercolors Henry Darger created to illustrate his 15,000-page manuscript The Story of the Vivian Girls PLUS “Ammi Phillips/Mark Rothko The Seduction of Light" includes large-scale canvases from Rothko's classic period of the 1950s and 1960s with Phillips's masterpieces from 1815 through the 1830s. Without abandoning representation, the artist pushed the limits of portraiture well beyond the constraints of his time, presaging a modern sensibility and engaging with his materials to create gorgeous and encompassing fields of color.
!! International Center for Photography…1133 6th Ave @ 44th st. ($ 8 students) http://www.icp.org/ hsa four exhibitions that explore fashion photography through the work of Edward Steichen, Martin Munkacsi, as well as contemporary and historical examples of the genre from the collection
- SOHO and LOWER EAST SIDE (LES):
!! The New Museum....235 Bowery (LES) (students $8)
"The Generational:Younger Than Jesus" is an exhibition of 50 artists under thirty from 25 nations. Known to demographers, marketers, sociologists, and pundits variously as the Millennials, Generation Y, iGeneration, and Generation Me, this age group has yet to be described in any way beyond their habits of consumption. “Younger Than Jesus” will begin to examine the visual culture this generation has created to date. PLUS Four new commisioned works: a film by Daria Martin of a dance performance based on a Rodin sculpture, Mathias Poledna's "Crystal Palace" a film of still shots of a New Guinea rain forest, a performance, public engagement piece by Jeremy Deller and documentation of the groundbreaking journal, Urban China."
!!The Drawing Center...35 Wooster St (SOHO)
"Unica Zurn: Dark Spring" works from 1950-1970 have a strong tie to surrealism and expressionism. She was acquainted with many artists in the Surrealist circle, including André Breton, Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp. Part whimsical cartoons, part intricate portraits, Zürn’s chimerical fantasies make for drawings that are deeply revelatory yet playfully imaginative.
OFF MANHATTAN:
! PS1...Keneth Anger; One of the most influential American avant-garde filmmakers, has been making motion pictures since 1947. This will be his first survey at a U.S. museum since 1980. Anger’s films constitute a radical critique of Hollywood production: they bring to light a very different approach to collective dreams, myths, and desire. PLUS Jonathan Horowitz "And/Or" Working in video, sculpture, sound installation, and photography examines the cultures of politics, celebrity, cinema, war. From found footage, Horowitz visually and spatially juxtaposes elements from film, television, and the media to reveal connections and breakdowns between these overlapping modes of communication.

GALLERIES, free entry:
- UPTOWN, MIDTOWN AND 57TH ST DISTRICTS: listed from North to South, and East to West Uptown galleries are situated along Madison Avenue, or right off it. They are often in imposing looking former mansions, and you will have to look for a gallery plaque, and push a buzzer to be let in. 57th St. galleries are situated in office buildings between Park Ave. and 6Th Ave. Often, you will have to go by a doorman and get on an elevator to visit the galleries. Usually, there is a plaque at the entrance with the gallery names, as well as one by the elevators. Many galleries' names are prominently in view in the windows of their second, third fourth and fifth floor spaces. The work in these galleries tends to be of very well established and late career artists.
- NEAR THE WHITNEY: (and free!)
! Barbara Mathes…22 E 80th St; Damien Hirst's Cathedral prints. Modeled after the artist's Superstition paintings these compositions of meticulously arranged butterfly wings create intricate patterns that evoke the rose windows of Gothic cathedrals.
! Mitchell Innes and Nash... 1018 Madison Ave; Allan D'Arcangelo - pop artist utilized a vocabulary of road signs, electrical wores and gasoline logos to form graphic, stylized American landscapes. A suryvey of his work dating from early 60's to 80's covering significant examples of his major themes: the American road, the industrial landscape and cultural myths.
!! Land M Arts…45 E. 78th St.; Donald Judd's Colored Plexiglass uses transparent plexiglas that he hand paints and relates directly back to glass, especially stained glass, with its ability to seal, admit light, reveal and color interiors,
!! Castelli…18 E 77th St.; A group exhibition entitled ‘Electricity.’ The use of neon and light bulbs has long been associated with the Minimal and Conceptual art movement of the late sixties. The exhibition brings together works from the sixties by eight artists (Jim Dine, Dan Flavin, Joseph Kosuth, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Keith Sonnier and Robert Watts) in an attempt to see how each of them approached the media.
! Michael Werner...4 E 77th St. ; Aaron Curry, "The Colour Out of Space" is a marriage of opposites: abstract and figurative. Drawing on the canon of 20th century sculpture and modernism, the artist infuses this history with an uncommon aesthetic born of comic book culture and science fiction with unsettling colors and quasi-biomorphic forms.
!! Gagosian…980 Madison Ave. ; Richard Phillips "New Museum” a series of nine paintings that derives its tension from his selective use of popular images that he subjects to his own techique.
!! Craig F. Starr... 5 E 73rd St.; Rauschenberg Drawings from the Sonnabend Collection.
!!! (top pick) Zwirner and Wirth… 52 E 69th St.; Franz West known for work that redefined the possibilities of sculpture and the ways that art is experienced. Since the 1970s, West has experimented with a variety of media and genres. While he is known primarily as a sculptor, his work has incorporated drawing, collage, video, and installation, and other diverse materials to create a conceptually coherent oeuvre that calls artistic and societal conventions into question.
!!Acquavella...18 East 79th Street; Zeng Fanzhi - 20 oil on canvas works in the exhibition, featuring Fanzhi's newest landscapes and recent portraits, will be shown publicly for the first time. Fanzhi is one of the most in-demand of his peer group, and set a new world auction record for Chinese contemporary art in May 2008.
- 57th STREET GALLERIES:
!Alexandre Gallery- 41 E. 75th - Lois Dodd - an exhibition of six recent large-scale paintings by Lois Dodd painted during the final years of the Bush Presidency. Each depicts the image of a rural house set fully ablaze.
!!! Bonni Benrubi…41 E 57th St.; Josef Hoflehner, “Seeing the Calm”. This exhibition encompasses some of the most emblematic images by the world-renowned landscape photographer. Traveling the globe from his native Austria across Europe to Japan, Vietnam to Iceland, India to New York to Dubai and beyond, Hoflehner captures unexpected stillness and serenity in his richly tonal black and white photographs.
!!!Howard Greenburg...41 E 57th St.; Edward Steichen broke many of the traditions that had characterized photography in the early part of the 20th century. This deeply personal and experimental phase of his career resulted in inventive works of art-- The exhibit is coupled with contemporary views of Indian culture by a variety of photographers.
!! PaceWildenstein….32 E 57th St.; Tara Donovan: New Drawings includes twenty-four large black and white drawings created from tempered glass, plate glass, and thread. Donovan has employed both types of glass in previous work, most notably in her Untitled (Glass) cube sculptures which require hundreds of sheets of tempered glass.
!Franklin Parrasch...20th 57th Street; Motion Parallax - works on paper by Jason Fox and Alexis Rockman from the early 1990's to the present. From 1988-2002 they also shared a studio space—divided by an eight-foot high wall—that kept them physically apart while audibly in close range. Over that wall, a flow of ideas, conversations about life and art, as well as a host of objects were lobbed back and forth on a continuous basis. The characters and scenarios concocted in Fox's images derive from sources as diverse as super-hero comics, science fiction movies, hard rock album covers, and news photographs. From the other side of the studio wall, Rockman's own altered state, eco-centric themes center upon the supernatural re-orientation of the natural. Gargantuan insects, morphed mammals, and carnivorous flora find center stage in his sometimes aggressive, sometimes tranquil, and often humorous landscapes.
!! Forum Gallery…745 5th Ave. (above 57th St. and 5th Ave) ; Michael Leonard: Charged Elements Painting - his models are caught in transitory positions bringing the picture edge in on the figures in his panels - figures are so closely cropped as to appear confined, and Steven Assael figurative paintings focusing on public and private aspects of urban life and the issues of intimacy, gender and personal identity.
!!Mary Boone…745 5th Ave,; Barry Le Va, whose pioneering scatter pieces on the floor, started in 1966, made him
one of the first of the so-called “Process” artists, started, in 1969, to create works with cleavers embedded in the wall or the floor.
!!!Edwynn Houk Gallery...745 5th Ave; Henri Cartier-Bresson 50 photographs covering his multi-decade career, starting with the young artist’s travels in Mexico, Spain, Italy, and his native France in the 1930s, continuing through China and India in the late 1940s, and concluding with his rarely seen photographs of the United States in the 1950s-60s.
!! Marlborough …#40 W 57th; gallery artists...a broad mixture of narrative, figurative and abstract paintings and sculptures from world class artists
!! Marian Goodman…24 W 57th St.; Tacita Dean - Well known for her compelling 16mm films, as well as her drawings, photographs and sound works, this exhibition brings together three of her most recent films, Michael Hamburger (2007), Darmstädter Werkblock (2007), and Prisoner Pair (2008), with a new gravure project, Fernweh (2009), a new series of large format painted photographs, and a smaller series, Painted Kotzsch Trees I-VI (2009). In this exhibition, Dean, who has been based in Berlin since 2000, shows works relating to the subject of Germany, incorporating subtle explorations of time and place, of memory and history, and of longing.
!! The Project...37 W 57th Street; Jessica Rankin - embroidery works and a new series of drawings and watercolors. Her hand-embroidered panels of organdy resume her exploration of memory, geographic displacement and the passage of time.
!!! Michael Rosenfeld…24 W 57th; Abstract expressionism featuring Charles Alston, Norman Bluhm, James Brooks, Jay DeFeo, Beauford Delaney, Hans Hofmann, Lee Krasner, Alfred Leslie, Norman Lewis, Conrad Marca-Relli, Joan Mitchell, Alfonso Ossorio, Richard Pousette-Dart, Milton Resnick, Charles Seliger, Alma Thomas, Mark Tobey.X
!Pace Print...32 East 57th Street; David Bates exhibition of woodcuts, etchings & monoprints that reflect the iconography of his Texas surroundings. He employs the use of heavy energetic lines with distinctive and brash colors creating expressionistic image. !Tibor de Nagy... 724 5th Ave; Jane Freilicher - creates intensely personal realistic paintings. She rejects prevailing artistic fashion to produce subtly colored, urbane, and atmospheric paintings and prints.

- CHELSEA GALLERIES: listed from south to north The Chelsea district has over 250 galleries located between 19th St and 29th, and 10th and 11th Avenues. You'll find emerging and established artists, and cutting edge as well as traditional work.
-W. 13th ST.
!! Sperone Westwater – #415; Malcolm Morely; paintings Inspired by motocross and NASCAR racing scenes.. Morley says, ".a young motocross rider and a colorful bike in midair doing an impossible maneuver in a blue sky. […] For me that is the modern myth."
W. 17th
!! Murray Guy Gallery - # 450; Barbara Probst - Despite the fact that the photographs in each piece were taken at the identical time, they provide an astonishingly varied range of perspectives. Her work challenges the idea that there is a single, definitive version of any event and also questions whether photography has the capacity to provide authoritative evidence
Between 18th and 19th on 11th Avenue-
!! Bellweather- # 134- 'Abby Williams; Still' Williams makes near motionless performances in a series of video portraits in which she superimposes herself over a still image, insistently trying and failing and trying to equal the figure in the frame.
West 19th-
!! Postmasters Gallery – #459; Wolfgang Stahle; new work digital projections of landscapes that shift in time
!! David Zwirner – #525; 'Adel Abdessemed; Rio' sculptures, videos, photographs, and drawings...The massive sculpture, Telle mère tel fils (2008), engulfs one of the galleries Over sixty-five feet long, the work is a braid of three airplanes, made of their original cockpits and tailfins, while the fuselages are reconstructed in soft felt filled with air...a sculpture made of a steel oil barrel, which functions as a real musical instrument...plus, Abdessemed films an encounter between mammals, reptiles, and insects. Revealed in a quick minute-and-a-half video loop is both nature and mankind’s propensity toward survival and destruction
W. 20th
!! 511 Gallery - #511; Jocelyn Alloucherie – The photographs that make up the exhibition are the result of Alloucherie’s observation of icebergs, which the artist describes as “non-sites on the sea where you lose all references to scale and get surrounded by ice.”
!! Jack Shainman Gallery - # 513; Gordon Cheung- surreal landscapes collaged and painted PLUS Zwelethu Mthethwa's photographs
!! Nicole Klagsbrun- #520 (temporary space); Adam Mcewen: machine carved graphite sculptures integrate with hanging fluorescent lights…
!! Josee Bienvenue Gallery – #529; Justin McAllister "Mirror-Signals" representational oil paintings of rural bonfires of houshold junk
!! Bitforms - #529; James Paterson...featuring painting, drawing and software works that are grown from a decade-long diaristic process. In his work, accumulated libraries of imagery rooted in daily experience revolve around the subjects of digestion, sex, self-critique and skateboarding. Using ink and programming as primary tools, James Paterson continually cycles through meditations on the everyday.
!!Jonathan LeVine Galleries – #529; Phil Frost; intense, post-graffiti, abstract figure/ground paintings done with spray paint PLUS Gary Taxali's demi-narrative paintings draw upon 50's advertising themes
!! Hasted Hunt - #529; Andreas Gefeller- C-prints of the details of architectural space, graffiti and the urban landscape
!? Anton Kern Galleries – #532; Marepe- a combination of installation work that focuses on habitat and Koons-esque creatures made from Christmas tree ornaments
W. 21st
!1 Anna Kustera Gallery - #520; " Objects of Desire" is agroup exhibit of generally subversive artists
!!! Gagosian...#522- Picasso; focusing on late works from 1963-1973
! 303 Gallery – #547; Ceal Floyer: Conceptually driven work explores a variety of media, including photography, ink on paper, sculpture and sound installation
!! Yvonne Lambert- #555; "Especes d'espaces" a group exhibition featuring works by Robert Barry, Louise Bourgeois, Michael Brown, Stefan Br�ggemann, André Cadere, Carter, Enrico Castellani, Liam Gillick, Jenny Holzer, Roni Horn, Bethan Huws, On Kawara, Zilvinas Kempinas, Anselm Kiefer, Louise Lawler, Zoe Leonard, Jill
Magid, Brice Marden, Jonathan Monk, Roman Opalka, Christian Vetter, Ian Wallace and
Lawrence Weiner...world class artists of every stripe.
W. 22nd
!!! (top pick) Max Protetch- #511; Siah Aramajani: new archi-sculpture works that engae viewers in a reconsideration of social space, including drawings
!! Matthew Marks Gallery - #522; Ellsworth Kelly: Diagonal - minimal paintings...black or white rectangle with a contrasting black, white, or colored rectangle placed diagonally on top and extending beyond the boundary of the canvas below. Four additional paintings are shown in the 24th Street gallery. A two-panel black and white relief, and only curved canvas the artist has made in the last few years, which shows Kelly’s more lyrical side.
!! 303 Gallery- #525; "3 Artists Selected by Dan Graham and a Work by Dan Graham" Graham makes installed environments that play with perception of space.
!! Susan Sheehan- #535; (gallery specializes in printmaking) ‘Women in Print’ shows legends…Hartigan, Bontecou, Apfelbaum, Joan Mitchel, Agnes Martin, Frankenthaler, Mary Heilman, Susan Rothenberg, Elizabeth Peyton and more
!! Leslie Tonkonow – #535; Ian Davis; ‘Strange Geometry’ narrative paintings of regimented hoardes of people, altered landscapes and cavernous gathering halls.
! Friedrich Petzel Gallery – #535/537; Stephen Prina; conceptually driven work pushes questions of modernism to arrive at new aesthetic and philosophical stances.
!! Sonnabend – #536; Clay Ketter; photography...past work has been of the textures and composition of the architectural patina of walls under demolition
!!! (top pick) Pace Wildenstein – #545; ‘Berlin 2000’ 60 works by 37 German artists who were active during the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989
!!! Chelsea Art Museum - #556; Jean Miotte is one of the important protagonists of Art Informel, his work is inspired by the desire of the postwar generation to create a universal human language in art, a path to peace after the horrors of war.
W. 23rd
!! Perry Rubinstein - #527; Richard Woods: Venice Biennial artist works with existing architecture and materials to completely transform structures and spaces, engaging them with reality and fantasy. Woods will cover the gallery floors with the cartoonish line drawings of flowers from his Floral repeat series (begun in 2000) on a vivid green background. The interior gallery walls and the front window walls will be covered floor to ceiling in his signature wood panel print.
W. 24th
!! Marianne Boesky Gallery - #509; "John Waters: Rear Projection" Baltimore's notorious filmmaker... Glorifying the struggle, the humiliation and the wild excitement of a life in show business, Waters uses an insider's bag of film tricks and trade lingo to celebrate the excess of the movie industry. Rewriting and redirecting existing film imagery snapped off the TV screen
!! (top pick) Metro Pictures - #519; Robert Longo: Beautiful, large scale charcoal drawing of a variety of subjects
!! Matthew Marks Gallery - #523; Ellsworth Kelly: Diagonal - The exhibition features eight two-panel paintings from 2007 and 2008, on view in the 22nd Street gallery and four additional paintings in the 24th Street gallery: A two-panel black and white relief, completed early in 2007, is the oldest work in the exhibition and anticipates the diagonal paintings. The only curved canvas the artist has made in the last few years, which shows Kelly’s more lyrical side, is a dark blue and white painting
!!! (top pick) Andrea Rosen – #525; Micheal Raedecker: canvases that are painted and stitched question the history of the picture plane !! Zach Feuer Gallery - #530; Dana Schutz: funky, colorful paintings play with figure and ground to comment on not-quite everyday life.
!! Zach Feur...#530; Dana Schutz: cartoonish paintings evoke a childlike quality, but play upon art history
!!! Luhring Augustine Gallery – #531; David Musgrave: English artist uses 2D and 3D to explore the perceptual territory between abstraction and reality
!!! Bruce Silverstein Photography – #535; ‘Cloud 9’ vintage photographs of the sky by Cunningham, Steglitz and Weston. PLUS E.O.Hoppe’s vintage photographs of pre-WW2 London.PLUS Andre Kertesz vintage photos
!! Charles Cowles ...#537- Gallery group show of photography, including Charles Burkowski's monumental photos of quarries and ship graveyards
!!! (top pick)Mary Boone Gallery – #541; Jeff Koons, Terrence Koh and Mike Kelly: works with biting, earnest humor replace the everyday with objects that sometimes literally reflect ourselves through our cultural detritus.
!! Freight and Volume...#542- Ali Smith; vibrant, abstract crowded paintings
!! Gagosian – #555; Yayoi Kusama:Huge optiaclly rich paintings and a dazzling room installation
Between 24th and 25th
!! Robert Mann Gallery... 210 11th Avenue; Mary Mattingly; intriguing chromogenic prints of startling, impossible, but beautifully detailed worlds
W. 25th
!! PPOW...#511 Room 301; "Bill Smith: Intuitive Visualization of the Unseen" clever, multimedia constructions that mimic vegetation
!! Daneyal Mahmood Gallery... #511; "Lisa Ross: Unrevealed" photographs of the eveidence of visitations to holy sites in China
!! Daniel Cooney Fine Art... #511; Francesca Romeo and Tema Stauffer – two photographers who shoot straight portraits of how the other half lives.
!! McKenzie Fine Art... #511; Laura Sharp Wilson: paintings employ intense graphic figure and ground relationships and a surreal interface of reality and abstraction.
!! Clamp Art... #521-31; ‘Kids Behaving Badly’ is a group exhibit of neo-nihlist photographers Nan Goldin, Larry Clark and several others…photos of outsiders and losers.
!! Yosi Milo...#525- Myoung Ho Lee; Near mystical photographs of solitary trees framed by large white sheet set in desolate environments
!!! (top pick) Pace Wildenstein ...#534;Richard Tuttle: this exhibit will not be for everyone, but his importance as a contemporary artist is undisputed.. Twelve new large scale works evolve Tuttle’s desire, ‘to create works that command attention through quiet means and humble or fragile materials.
! Betty Cunningham - #541; Group exhibit, ‘Core’ was curated ‘with the directive of finding a mysterious, psychological or personal center. “Core” refers to the center, the soul or the heart (as in French “Coeur”’)’
!! Cheim and Read - #547; Louise Fishman: lush abstract paintings.
W. 26th
!! Jenkins Johnson Gallery – #521; "Gerald Forster:Light Years" is a selection of Polaroid portraits of Arab, African and Middle Eastern people
!Robert Miller Gallery – #524; Music icon, Patty Smith’s B+W photographs use vintage cameras to record sights from her journeys around the world.
!! GRN’Namdi- #526; (gallery focuses on contemporary African American artists) Group show of gallery artists, including Sam Gilliam
!!! (MUST SEE) Gallerie Lelong- # 528; Alfroedo Jaar: Photodocuments explore the uncomfortable space between beauty, culture, politics and commerce.
!! Mixed Greens – #531; Dirk Westphal: ‘Super Uber” detailed photographs of mutant goldfish
!! James Cohan- #533- Naim June Paik: video/media pioneer's work from 1975-1994
!!Lehman Maupin - #541; Mickalene Thomas: paintings ‘adorned with rhinestones, enamel and colorful acrylics. Her depictions of African American women explore notions of black female celebrity and identity while romanticizing ideas of femininity and power. Reminiscent of 70s style Blaxploitation, the subjects in Thomas' paintings radiate sexuality’
!! Tony Shafrazi - #544; Thoralf Knobloch - His paintings show the ordinary, seemingly trivial moments, observed within the vicinity of the artist, within the familiar streets.
W. 27th
!!! Aperture...#547 (many good galeries in this building); "Jonathan Torgovkik: Intended Consequenses, Rawandan Children Born of Rape" is troubling, beautiful photo-documentation of human horror.
!!! Derek Eller Gallery – # 615; Alyson Shotz - Working in a variety of media, from large-scale installations to digital photography and painting, Shotz is intrigued by the notion of nature as purely a human construction.
W. 29th
!!Peter Blum- # 526 ; Ruben Ochoa and Richard Allen Morris….Ochoa’s work is usually massive installation, photography or sculpture that responds to the dynamic of unban construction and social dynamic. Morris is a long time painter of simplified figurative narrative
!! Sean Kelly- #528; Gavin Turk: paintings, photographs, sculpture and video appropriate Jackson Pollack and redirect the Pollack’s methods to explore aspects of Turk’s own identity.

SOHO DISTRICT: refer to map handout! The Soho district is bordered (North/South) by Houston and Canal Sts. and (East/West) by Lafayette and Hudson- once the most vibrant art scene in the world, many of SoHo's gallerists moved to Chelsea. Still, there are some excellent galleries here, including the Swiss Institue, Spencer Brownstone, Drawing Center, Artist Space, Feldman, Deitch Projects and the nearby Grey Gallery at NYU
!Artists Space...38 Greene Street; Saul Becker has spent the last two years collecting weeds near his home in industrial Brooklyn. From unlikely sites – gas stations, polluted Newtown Creek, corner vacant lotsthen by developing a system of electroplating each plant sample, he archives what is overlooked, undocumented, and generally stepped on or built over.
! OK Harris... #383 WEST Broadway Five revolving spaces focus on emerging artists engaged in traditional media usuing traditional and untraditional styles… always worth a look
! Ronald Feldman… #31 Mercer St; Bruce Pearson will exhibit new paintings and related drawings based on text that has been transformed to near indecipherability. Constructed from large Styrofoam slabs and carved with a “hot” wire, the creviced wall reliefs depict camouflage-like patterns and intricate web designs
!!! (top pick) Location One… #26 Greene St; Laurie Anderson "From the Air" uses a series of 3D projections, a technique Anderson has employed since the 1970s, to create a story about the artist and her dog. The second installation, Aleph, projects sound electronically into the gallery space. The text for Aleph is inspired by the unspeakable nature of this Hebrew letter, and the installation examines the unconscious process of putting ideas into words.
!! Deitch Projects… 18 Wooster St. ; Ryan McGinness work combines all-over composition, inspired by Jackson Pollock and the mechanical silkscreen process inspired by Andy Warhol, fuses naturalistic and contemporary pop culture references from a range of sources: dreams and hallucinations to song lyrics and fragments of art history.
! Deitch Projects…76 Grand St; Matt Greene -recent work is about finding a space for representational art in contemporary culture. The artist seeks to find some common ground between the historical form of painting and the indexed stacking of images created by digital media. In Pictures of Women, he presents large-scale works that further his investigations into the connections between sexual fetish, the female figure, and forms of nature. many, Andre de Dienes and Kurt Markus. This show reflects the people and landscapes of America.

!!June Kelly... 591 Broadway; Elizabeth Catlett’s work celebrates African-American identity, it is the female form to which she most often pays homage, endowing it with dignity, strength and sensuality, and frequently with maternal compassion and tenderness.
! TEAM… 83 Grand St.; Pierre Bismuth, "Following the Right Hand", projects a feature film onto a sheet of Plexiglas and painstakingly follows the movements of the lead actress’ right hand with a black marker. The resultant abstract drawings are then enframed over a 30 by 40 inch photographic print of a still image from the film.

LOWER EAST SIDE: refer to map handout!! This burgeoning district is anchored by the New Museum. The gallery spaces are more intimate, and the work often a lot more "emerging." This is an area where a year ago 12 galleries existed. Today, there are over 40 - and the number is growing! There is an incredible energy going on here.

- NORTH OF HOUSTON St.: NORTH/SOUTH DIRECTION STREETS: (listed from East to West)
! 33 Bond...#33 Bond St; Philippe Nuell documents his daily life through snapshots, which he then uses as models for large-scale paintings.
! Vand A....#98 Mott St; Scott Taylor paintings of altered physical appearance through color or proportion.
!Feature Gallery…# 276 Bowery, just below Houston St; Kinke Kooi: Let Me Comfort You, colored pencil and acrylics.
! DCKT....#195 Bowery St.; William Swanson - acrylic on wood panel paintings architecture attempts to hold rein in a tumultuous battle with natural forces. Each presents a fictitious setting and fuses elements of nature, technology and architecture.
!!Thrust Gallery....#114 Bowery St. Momoyo Torimitsu Angry chocolate bunnies.
! Envoy Gallery ...131 Chrystie St; James J. Williams III: I Love Everything – The show consists of the project's skeleton to which every day a few more pieces are added until the body of the show ends with an opening of its closing
! Canada...# 55 Chrystie St.; Luke Murphy - In one room with three large digital projections, a central pedestal holds three Geiger counters with their probes pointed at what appears, to be a glass vase. That vessel however is made of Vaseline glass, also known as uranium glass, which glows with UV fluorescence.
!Cuchifritos...Essex Street Market;Pedro Barbeito, Kim Beck, Justen Ladda, Fernando Mastrangelo, and Paul Thek,“Data Panic,” deals in various ways with breakdown and decay in societal and political contexts, an apt subject during one of the worst worldwide economic crises since the Great Depression. “Data Panic” makes reference to “Datapanik in the Year Zero,” a 1996 experimental punk-rock album by the Cleveland-based band Pere Ubu.
!! Sunday....#237 Eldridge St; Asuka Ohsawa builds upon on the legacy of the Japanese giga, which literally means “humorous picture,” a style of painting that used seemingly comical images, to inform an often politically motivated satire. Ohsawa’s unadorned graphic technique belies the tension of her drawings, exhibit cross-cultural and inter-species distrust.
!! Miguel Abreau Gallery....#36 Orchard St; ‘Practice vs. Object,’ gallery artists as well as the gallery’s founder focus on the ‘consumption’ of art and then the development of ‘taste’ for the art object. !Luxe...53 Stanton St.; Jan Baracz, Amelie Chabannes, Ellen Harvey, Pedro Lasch, Dominik Lejman, Basim Magdy, Marie Maillard, Trine Lise Nedreaas, and Diana Shpungin. tell us the stories of our restlessness. Playing with the constant variability of time, the contemplation of past selves embedded in the regret of age, the arbitrariness of borders displaying desperate tendencies of freedom, as well as, the use of ephemera.
- EAST/WEST DIRECTION STREETS (Listed from North to South)
! Smith Stewart…#53 Stanton St; Gimme Gimme, an exhibition at Smith-Stewart Gallery in New York City presents the work of six School of Art+Design Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree candidates. Embracing methods of collage, appropriation, representation and abstraction, the works of these emerging artists arecomprised of precious objects or common materials that warrant close reading, slow digestion and in some cases, raucous play.
!! Thierry Goldberg....# 5 Rivington St ;Swetlana Heger’s latest performance based exhibition, Lipstick Economy. On the heels, pumps, and sensible flats of the spiraling economy, Swetlana Heger sets the gallery as stage for a multi-layered dialogue on the economy, gender, and consumerism—all, she finds, marked by lipstick traces. As an affordable indulgence for morale-sake, lipstick sales have been noted to increase in trying economic times, indicating a little goes a long way attitude to altering one’s look.
!! Eleven Rivington...#11 Rivington St ; Ishmael Randall Weeks - encompasses site-specific installations, sculpture, and works on paper. The foundation of his work is the alteration of found and recycled materials and environmental debris, often on site, and includes such source materials as empty tins, books and printed matter, bicycles, boat parts, and building construction fragments.
!! Salon 94…#1 Freeman Alley (on Rivington St between Bowery and Chrystie Sts) ; Paul Graham has been very active in revitalizing the central core of photographic practice His photographs have consistently reflected intertwining of the classic issues of documentary photography with contemporary artistic practice.
!! Jen Bekman…#6 Spring St; Beth Dow - "Ruins", photographs using platinum-palladium printing, depicts faux Classical ruins found throughout the Midwest and challenges ideas of authenticity, nostalgia and the particularly American tendency to appropriate history.

!Janos Gat Gallery...195 Bowery; Judit Reigl - paints large canvasses by walking along them, leaving graphic-pictorial traces that follow the rhythmic, continuous movement of her stroll.

Luxe...53 Stanton St; Jeff Gibson - installation consisting of two photographic murals one abstract, one representational, both overlaid with upside-down text adhered directly to opposing walls of the gallery. Floor-bound mirrors abut the walls, doubling the imagery in an illusory subterranean space and correcting the inverted typography.
!Woodward Gallery...133 Eldridge Street; Margaret Morrison: large paintings are like high fructose versions of sweet treats send our mind skipping back in time – specifically, back to childhood.

Allow yourself plenty of time to:
BE AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM BY 7:00 ( 82nd and 5th Ave.)
for a 7:30 departure
emergency (only) # 301-873-3979

Richard Serra exhibit at Gagosian
photo: Scott Cress, GMU Art and Visual Technology Major