Author: Ashley Cook

“The Unusual Suspects: Art from Unexpected Materials” Hygienic Art, New London, Connecticut by D. Dominick Lombardi New galleries have a long history of bringing back bygone buildings where rents were once less expensive. SoHo, in lower Manhattan, is the one example spoken of most often that exemplifies the turnaround from scary streets to cutting edge culture. I remember all the loft parties and gallery openings I attended throughout the 1970s, as well as the feeling of being in a place related in part to the Dada movement of the 1910s in Zurich or the 1950s era Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village. Of course, those earlier examples and locations were markedly different from SoHo of the 1970s, especially due to the impact of two World Wars in the first half of the twentieth century. However, the zeitgeist, or the spirit of the times, had many commonalities. A spark of that past can be found today at Hygienic Art gallery in New London, Connecticut, albeit on a much smaller scale. Hygienic Art began with the transformation of a well-known but long neglected inner-city diner. It was reborn as a challenging exhibition space where the effect on the local culture ranges well beyond its walls.         The physical renovation at Hygienic Art left quite a bit of the history of the original eatery—the old, tiled flooring; a long, worn Formica counter, complete with swiveling stainless steel stools; and remnants of a working short order kitchen remain intact. There’s no mistaking it; this was once a diner.           Today, it stands as an edgy exhibition space consisting of four rooms. The entrance contains the repurposed kitchen and counter area with portions of an opposing wall available to install art. A larger space around the corner consists of two clearly connected flow-through rooms that offer ample space for wall works and sculptures where there once were tables and booths. A lower level down a flight of stairs has been completely renovated and turned into an open space for installation and wall art.         The nine artists featured in “The Unusual Suspects: Art from Unexpected Materials” are Kamal Ahmad, Howard el-Yasin, Carol Flaitz, Carla Goldberg, Eric Grau, Deborah Hesse, Alison McNulty, Suzan Shutan and Brian Walters. The exhibition’s theme, which maintains the idea of the found, unconventional, repurposed object as a primary medium is well covered by the curator, and exhibiting artist, Carla Goldberg.           Starting in the entrance room are a number of works by Carol Flaitz. Working primarily with encaustic on charred wood, Flaitz creates reflective earthscapes featuring intensified colors in fluid transitions. The two larger works are more dimensional than the small ones, as the artist is able to set a layer of blackened wood and cosmic color slightly above a dark background textured with crystalline salts and ground glass. This separation of bright color edged in burnt wood above an elaborate blackness suggests the ever-shifting plates of the earth that sometimes cause earthquakes and tsunamis. This darker read makes the colorful upper layer more about chemical spills and ground or water pollution rather than a wondrous and wild world.           In the second room are works by Suzan Shutan and Howard El-Yasin. Shutan utilizes craft store materials such as plastic straws, colorful fuzzy string, and tiny pom poms to bridge the gap between drawing, sculpture, and architecture. Shutan’s most striking work is Detrimental Sips (2000-25), a wall mounted construction in a triangle-based geometric pattern that looks like a “funky town” train trestle crafted with bent plastic straws and a tar-like glue. Judging by the title, Shutan is making a statement about the dangers of plastic straws on marine life, while the structure itself suggests a potential bridge across a worrisome waterway. This combination of references clearly highlights a separation of realities and pinpoints a lack of understanding or responsibility since almost every man-made structure in some or many ways negatively affects the environment.             Furthering the realm of political art are the works by Howard El-Yasin. Using baked banana peels to create Bananas, Bananas, Bananas (2018–19), El-Yasin focuses attention on the hidden atrocities of the burgeoning banana business. During the earliest days of production, the1928 Banana Massacre in Santa Maria, Columbia took place, wiping out as many as 2,000 innocent people. Overworked Brillo, which is a patchwork of squarish steel wool scrubbing pads, indirectly mocks Warhol’s famous Brillo Boxes (1964) and puts the emphasis on the drudgery of the woesome kitchen worker. Both works are about power inequities that seems to be getting worse by the hour.           Dominating the third space are the surreal sculptures of Erik Grau. Using concrete and natural and synthetic materials, Grau offers multi-level, fantastical landscapes that feature a fairy tale surface area with caves and transitional spaces below. The pure magic of it all punctuated by the presence of numerous mushrooms prompts visitors to open up, breathe, and wonder.           Sharing the space with Grau are works by three artists: Deborah Hesse, who constructs “spatial wall paintings” that float off the wall suggesting a multiverse of earthly locations; Brian Walters who weaves strips of rusted painted metal to create post-apocalyptic baskets; and last but not least, Carla Goldberg, who offers the eerily epic Eulogies (2022), made from the resurrected materials that once encircled the Jacob Javits Center on New York City’s West Side during the worst days of COVID. Hanging now a few inches from the gallery wall, Eulogies’s reshaped, recovered Plexiglas covered with scratched black pigment suggests the darkest days of the pandemic when New York City was totally unnerved and in full lock-down mode.           In the lower level are the works of two artists, Kamal Ahmad and Alison McNulty. Ahmad clearly reaches his lofty goal of creating an installation that speaks of “loss, survival, and resilience.” Using

“Write It Down, Draw It Out: The Comics Art of Carol Tyler” Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, Columbus, Ohio May 24–November 9, 2025 by Sean Bieri When Carol Tyler asked a colleague in 2005 why there were no female cartoonists featured in the “Masters of American Comics” exhibition in Los Angeles that year, she was told there were “no women of significance who had a large enough body of work” to justify their inclusion. (Looking at the list of men who did make the cut, there’s a nerdy debate to be had about that assertion. Lyonel Feininger’s comics career was brilliant but brief and obscure; couldn’t he be bumped to make room for Dale Messick? And as much as I love Gary Panter… more worthy than Lynda Barry?) The comment led Tyler to paint a portrait of herself in a frilly dress á la Queen Elizabeth I, with a crow quill pen for a scepter and an ink pot for a crown. Liz had said she was “married to England”; Tyler declares herself “married to comics.” This royal self-portrait greets visitors to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum’s exhibition “Write It Down, Draw It Out: The Comics Art of Carol Tyler,” a retrospective of the cartoonist’s long, unique career—plus a preview of her upcoming book—that confirms Tyler as a brilliant and singular figure in the canon of graphic narrative.         Tyler was wed to comics in more ways than one. Her late husband was underground cartoonist Justin Green, author of Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972), usually cited as the earliest and most influential example of autobiography in American comics. (The story of their turbulent relationship is beautifully told in John Kinhart’s 2023 documentary Married To Comics.) Binky Brown follows Green’s teenage surrogate as he wrestles, in humiliating detail, with puberty and “impure” thoughts while saddled with the twin impediments of a 1950s Catholic upbringing and what would eventually be diagnosed as obsessive-compulsive disorder. The comic was something of an “hallelujah” moment for a number of cartoonists, the genesis of a slew of self-deprecating, warts-and-all confessional comics to follow by the likes of Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Art Spiegelman, and Robert Crumb. As a painting student at Syracuse in the early ’70s, Tyler’s art had already tended to be narrative, but the revelatory experience of reading Binky Brown pushed her definitively toward making comics.           The exhibition comes with a zine-like “keepsake booklet” drawn by Tyler to guide the visitor through the phases of her oeuvre. The first stop is the giant plywood cutout head, another self-portrait, with a matching hand holding a pencil that reminds the viewer why it’s important to “Write It Down, Draw It Out”: “So you don’t forget!” jots the pencil. All around the gallery are coffee cans and cigar boxes full of ink bottles, pens, and other art supplies from Tyler’s home, along with journals, weathered furniture, and personal memorabilia that help immerse the visitor in the world of her graphic novels. Early works of art are tacked up on the wall, including a small handmade book inspired by a tattoo Tyler spotted on someone’s arm, entitled “The Wanda Comic”; it was the first time she used the word “comic” to describe her work.           Next stop is “Bloomerland,” a section featuring original art from her 2005 book Late Bloomer—an apt title for a twenty-year retrospective that was nevertheless a revelation even to folks who were hip to alternative “comix.” It collects Tyler’s earliest published work—short pieces originally seen in anthologies such as Weirdo and Wimmen’s Comics in the ’80s and ’90s— along with new material. In “Bloomerland” as elsewhere in the show, Tyler’s work is largely concerned with family matters, from her childhood being raised by the “Greatest Generation” in northern Illinois, to the joys and struggles of bringing up the daughter she has with Green, to chronicling the lives of her aging parents. Tyler’s sharp but humane sense of humor, and an unflinching honesty that even the notoriously unrestrained Crumb called “shocking,” are on display here. In her first published piece in Weirdo, Uncovered Property (1987), a naive nine-year-old Carol, in full view of her family, flashes her non-existent breasts at a city inspector in a desperate attempt to persuade him to install a water main (her teenage sister told her this would “drive men wild”). But that’s just the punchline—the real fun of the story comes from Tyler’s observations of family dynamics, mostly sibling antagonism and parental exasperation. A one-page cartoon from 1988 called Anatomy of a New Mom depicts Tyler’s post-pregnancy body like an “Operation” game board, with a belly of “uncoagulated jello,” “mashed potatoes” for brains, and a hand basket of “relics”—“creativity, solitude, focus, spontaneity”—from “pre-baby days.” (Tyler dedicated Late Bloomer to “anyone who has deferred a dream” due to child-rearing, illness, or loss.)           The old underground comics were usually black-and-white, but when color later became an option, it allowed Tyler to bring her painterly sensibilities to her comics. In the one-pager Once, We Ran (2004) Tyler delicately applies watercolors to her loose ink work to nostalgic effect, in a flashback to a summer day spent with her daughter, shopping at yard sales and running across hot asphalt in matching skirts. There are two pages here from Just A Bad Seed (1996), in which Tyler uses gouache to render an anecdote about calming her young child’s fear of the “evil” sunflowers bobbing outside her bedroom window. The six panels on each page are nested in frames of richly hued, slightly menacing flora, and a glowing night sky that recalls Van Gogh, who also contemplated sunflowers.         Tyler’s comics are often as formally inventive as they are beautifully crafted. The “Bloomerland” section closes out with a philosophically minded collection of illustrations entitled My American Labels (2004), a rumination on midwestern American values in the form of nine produce can

Figure of a Gentle Gay Manifesto: “Undercurrents” Nathan Brad Hall, Gallery Victor, June 20–August 30, 2025 by Michel Ségard Throughout history, figuration in art has almost always been the carrier of a message—religious, political, or social—beyond the immediate appreciation of the human form. This dual content is what makes studying the depiction of the human figure so interesting, even in our post-modern era. Gallery Victor is known for showing figurative works that have roots in historical realism yet have a contemporary punch. This exhibition of works by Nathan Brad Hall is a prime example. Hall uses all the techniques of realism developed during and since the Renaissance-particularly chiaroscuro, the careful shading of skin to achieve precise modeling or the meticulous rendering of hair. But he mixes these techniques with subtle areas of impasto—to him, a nod to expressionism—to call attention to certain parts of a painting. The results are a series of large dramatic images of nude male figures that speak to much more than the beauty of the male body.         Meant to be the centerpiece of the show, I Love You the First Time is an oil on linen painting measuring 80 x 120 inches that dominates by its sheer size. Mottled light creates a focus on the face. Two highlights on the forehead are areas with impasto that help call attention to the eyes. Note also the fine detail of the eyebrows and lashes, the reflection of the eyelashes in the whites of the eyes, and the mottling of the skin tones on the nose. Now, to be fair, Hall did not make up these details; he works from multiple photos that he takes of posed models. What is special is that he can painstakingly reproduce those details where necessary. In this painting, the result is an expression that, almost on the verge of being tearful, can be interpreted as conveying deep affection and honesty.           Threshold, another large canvas 60 x 96 inches in size, next caught my attention. This painting stands out as being the only frontal nude. Again, lighting is directed to dramatically emphasize certain parts of the body. We see a severely split face with the left side in bright light and the right in almost total darkness. Resting on a green chaise, the figure’s right hand, is strongly lit, while the left is barely visible. The inner right thigh is highlighted next to genitalia which are almost completely in shadow. The presence of a silhouette of an open mouth on the wall behind the subject draws us away from the figure and to some unknown dream space. This state is reinforced by the looser rendering of the figure than is seen in other paintings. Note that in the face, the beard is not rendered in as fine detail as in I Love You the First Time. In contrast to other paintings, the chest skin is depicted in broader swatches that show the brush strokes. From a purely technical standpoint, the execution of the hand is masterful. All of this reinforces the dreamlike nature of the painting. It also elucidates a hidden meaning in the work: the important aspects of a person are their mind and their skill; their sexuality is nearly irrelevant.           That is not to say that sexuality should be dismissed. Elsewhere is the only painting in the show that is overtly sexual. Yet it is just a provocative image of a face. It demonstrates how compelling youth and beauty can be—especially when there is an undertone of androgyny. Note the exaggerated eyelashes (enhanced by mascara?) and the pouting voluminous lips, along with the flowing, tousled, blond hair. But don’t miss the slightest hint of a mustache above those Nicki Minaj pink lips (almost certainly more makeup). This image is pure sex in its most carnal form. It reminded me of sex workers, drag queens, and Andy Warhol’s movie Flesh. Elsewhere is the conceptual opposite of Threshold, and an acknowledgement of the existence of strong libido in the Gay world. But Elsewhere shows us a camp incarnation often perceived as the gay norm in the straight world.           For me, the most compelling painting was Gossamer. This painting is of a ballet dancer casually seated on a rug, the light focused on his back, buttocks, and feet making a gentle arc. The first thing one notices is how thin he is—his ribs and the vertebrae of his upper spine are visible. The impasto technique is employed on the left buttock, highlighting the most muscular part of the dancer. His feet are meticulously detailed, calling attention to the other main part of a dancer’s physique. But what is unusual is the rendering of his hair. It does not have the fine detail seen in Elsewhere; it is more like the hair seen on Greek statues, thick matts of curls casually sketched in. The model radiates a quiet androgyny with his gentle pose, giving the painting a romantic air. It is the same pose seen in one of the figures in Scott Tuke’s The Bathers from 1890. That painting depicts three naked adolescent youths on a sailboat—the one on the lower left positioned in the same pose. The painting was was in the exhibition “The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity 1869–1939” at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago earlier this year. In Gossamer, we see the image of Platonic innocence in the young, relaxed dancer, in contrast to the seductive allure of Elsewhere.   Then there is Day Break, a self-portrait of the artist in a fetal position. Lying on a heavily patterned rug, there are no “separate” highlghts calling attention to particular parts of the body; it is entirely highlighted. What gives this piece its tension is the fact that the subject’s hands are over his head, as if trying to protect itself from something. So, the pose becomes defensive—suggesting the anticipation and fear

Expo Chicago 2025 Navy Pier, Festival Hall, Chicago, April 24–27, 2025 As is our custom, the New Art Examiner sent two reviewers to cover this fair, a staple in the Chicago contemporary art scene for more than 40 years. Below are Evan Carter’s and Michel Ségard’s perceptions of the fair.   Cultural capital is pretty much just capital now by Evan Carter         We report on every iteration of EXPO Chicago. Since little changes year to year, it seems appropriate this time to treat the event as a snapshot of the contemporary art market and the role the Midwest plays in it.         EXPO has gradually shifted from the presentation of a broad scope of materials, methods, and scale to a painting salon with galleries and artists both functioning as the participants.          It is unlikely that we will encounter sights and experiences akin to what was presented in the earliest iterations of EXPO Chicago. Activities like Tarot Card readings by Rhonda Wheatley or a floor-to-ceiling sculpture of colorful laundry baskets by Jessica Stockholder seemed to be a punny critique of the art fair itself. Pieces such as these skewed away from monetary value and toward the value of cultural experience. The shift away from this kind of work is lamented by some and celebrated by others.         I ran into a friend who is an artist and professor and, to my surprise, was glad EXPO was not pretending to be something other than what it is. They were also pleased about what it does for the city in terms of cultural and economic activity. EXPO always has its haters who express disdain for an elite and capital driven art world, but this attitude tends to ignore the fact that artists need funding and support to enable them to produce work and reach an audience. The event also brings commerce to the city and activates other galleries and cultural spaces throughout Chicago.           So, what kind of work did we see? What did galleries from around the world bring to present at this salon-style event? As mentioned earlier, the works presented were almost entirely two-dimensional, consisting mostly of painting. This makes sense given that flat works are easier to transport and sell. Within this consistency of constraint, it is more interesting to consider each gallery’s approach. Chicago’s Secrist | Beach had prime real estate and used it to effectively showcase a roster of artists they represent. Secrist | Beach often presents thoughtful figurative abstraction with lively palettes that are rarely garish. Though the materials and methods differed the overall aesthetic vision of the gallery was clear. The same could not be said of other galleries presenting multiple artists. For example, Ethan Cohen Gallery displayed a hodgepodge of mixed media works that evoke the kind of art experience one might encounter at a mid-tier mall kiosk. These kinds of thrown together displays were rather common and had a diminishing effect on the respective artists’ whose voices felt muted. For a gallery with two locations in New York and a penchant for exhibiting politically charged work, their curatorial voice and vision also seemed lost.           Some works, like Devan Shimoyama’s Le Monde at New York’s De Buck Gallery booth, managed to stand out in these situations. De Buck Gallery also packed many works into a small space. However, it is important to note that galleries have difficult decisions to make in choosing what to ship. Their concern may be making up the cost of participation in an art fair with a high buy in. According to the EXPO website, the smallest booths (400 square feet) start at $26,400 and the largest (1000 square feet) at $66,000.            These price points are nothing for the heavy hitters like Hauser & Wirth and David Zwirner, who currently dominate the already domineering New York art market. Hauser & Wirth profited handsomely from sales of paintings by Lorna Simpson that sold for close to $300,000 each. With five locations in capital art cities around the globe, Lisson Gallery also pulled in six figure sales from works by Stanley Whitney and Carmen Herrera. Early sales figures by even the most high-profile Chicago galleries were significant but hardly equivalent, according to artsy.net. It begs the question of how well other local and international galleries fared in their endeavors to reach a wider audience. There were a few of those that stood out not just for the quality of work displayed but also because the galleries made the choice to represent single artists at their booths.         Here are just a few: Scott Wolniak—Goldfinch          Goldfinch, one of Chicago’s younger galleries, is adept at striking a balance between traditional media and innovative ideas. In recent years, longtime Chicago painter Scott Wolniak has found a creative rhythm that has yielded what could be his definitive body of work. He does what so few others (if any) do these days–lending modes of abstraction, figuration, pattern, color, and symbolism with a playful kind of effortlessness that produces images that have the capacity to pull the viewer away from the turmoil of the world without being overly escapist. If anything is left to be desired in this work, it is relative to the constraints placed upon the medium of paint. Layers of thin washes are predominant, but interesting things could happen if the material were to be handled with a more expansive range. Perhaps it will be in future work.    Jacob Feige—Pentimenti         Pittsburgh’s Pentimenti Gallery presented a series of works by artist Jacob Feige whose abstract portraits of nameless ambiguous faces have a distinctly iconic quality. Even without discussing them with a gallery representative, these otherworldly iconographic mixed media works are clear byproducts of the digital age. They are almost like cubist self-portraits, made by Artificial Intelligence

“The Gun Violence Memorial Project” Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), May 2–July 10, 2025 by K.A. Letts Gun violence in America is a subject we are sick of yet can’t leave alone. We come back again and again to this wound that never heals with another poignant, yet seemingly futile, lament for the dead. “The Gun Violence Memorial Project,” which opened on May 2 and will continue until July 10, 2025, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), adds a new and viscerally wrenching entry into the public discourse on the social contagion of gun violence.           Sacred silence surrounds the four room-size white chapels arranged, side by side, in the museum’s Woodward Gallery. Visitors can enter the pristine, stylized structures, which bring to mind columbaria found in cemeteries or church yards. Each house of remembrance contains 700 alcoves, corresponding to the approximate number of gun deaths every week in the United States. Much like the panels of the AIDS Quilt, the glass-enclosed, honey-comb coffers contain the physical traces of individuals whose lives were taken by gun violence—baby shoes, graduation tassels, and photographs offered up by the families of the victims. No distinction is drawn between school shootings, shootings in public places, or church-related violence, though that information, along with the unending variety of the shooters’ deranged motives, is available in awful detail online. All ages, races and religions are represented in a visual litany of endlessly repeated quotidian brutality.           A brief video documentary, filmed in Chicago, Washington D.C., and other U.S. cities, interviews survivors of gun violence and brings their grief into focus. Each story in “Comes the Light,” directed by Haroula Rose, is a simple retelling of events that are all-to-familiar yet earth-shattering for the bereaved.           A research and remembrance library installed in the gallery for the duration of the exhibition provides a site where art can meet advocacy. In addition to literature that directly confronts gun violence in the U.S., visitors can read about the history of protest art and study the philosophy of architecture as a social influence.           First presented at the Chicago Architecture Biennial in 2019, “The Gun Violence Memorial Project” has traveled to Washington, D.C. and Boston before coming to Detroit, a city with historically high gun violence rates. At each stop in the Project’s travel throughout the country, object collection events have been organized, during which families are invited to contribute artifacts memorializing loved ones lost to gun violence. The artifacts are then added to the memorial houses. There are plenty of open spaces.           “The Gun Violence Memorial Project” is organized by a variety of anti-gun violence organizations, some national and others local. The design and fabrication of the architectural component for the exhibitionis a collaboration between Songha & Company, with artist and creative director Hank Willis Thomas, and the Boston-based social justice/architectural collective MASS Design Group. Purpose Over Pain, a Chicago-based community organization that advocates for safer communities with programs like Safe Saturday Nights, 3 on 3 basketball tournaments, mentoring services, parent support days, and unsolved cases forums, among other programs, is also a facilitating partner in the project. Local Detroit sponsors include University of Michigan’s Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention, Got Grief House, End Gun Violence Michigan.         MOCAD, as a non-collecting institution, is an ideal venue for this project. Unlike traditional museums that prioritize the maintenance of an art collection—and often inadvertently reinforcing established social and artistic norms—MOCAD focuses on embracing urgent social priorities that can inform its mission.         Jova Lynne, MOCAD’s Artistic Director, states, “As a contemporary art institution rooted in Detroit, we are committed to providing space for artists and communities to confront complex realities and envision new futures. “The Gun Violence Project,” with its powerful intersection of personal narrative, public memory, and collective grief, exemplifies how art can serve as both witness and catalyst for understanding.”           But the underlying question for creatives and art institutions at this moment is, how much real effect do projects of this kind have on creating societal change? No matter how well-intentioned, exhibitions that decry social ills without moving toward concrete solutions merely constitute high-minded aesthetic handwringing. To their credit, the organizations collaborating on the project have, through their many supporting events and programs, thought strategically about how to leverage public art to serve concrete political ends. We can hope that their persistent, multi-disciplinary advocacy, sustained over months and years, might—just might—result in meaningful change. K.A. Letts is the Great Lakes Region editor of the New Art Examiner,a working artist (kalettsart.com) and art blogger (rustbeltarts.com). She has shown her paintings and drawings in galleries andmuseums in Toledo, Detroit, Chicago, and New York. She writes frequently about art in the Detroit area.

Jack Whitten: The Messenger Museum of Modern Art, New York City, March 2–August 2, 2025 By John Thomure As he has proved to be one of the most inventive and unique abstract painters in the United States, a proper retrospective of Jack Whitten’s work has been long overdue. Whitten always embraced and adapted new technologies as materials, tools, and metaphors in his practice. In an interview with Kenneth Goldsmith, Whitten explained “My metaphors are found in scientific processes.”1 He believed that we live in a scientific age and that art should reflect the time it was made in. On display throughout the exhibition were the wide array of tools which Whitten built himself in order to achieve the unique surfaces of his paintings. These tools dictated the aesthetics of Whitten’s paintings. He was endlessly creative—from his earliest forays into painting to his later mosaic works. “Jack Whitten: The Messenger”documents the evolution of an artist who reinvented painting again and again from the discovery of his unique style of painting in the 1960s to his innovative smeared acrylic works made between the 1970s and 1980s to his final mosaic inspired body of work which he labored on until his death in 2018.         In his initial paintings, Whitten used all manner of approaches and materials, but with a decidedly political bent. A searing quote included in didactic text sums up Whitten’s intentions as an artist: “My paintings are designed as weapons; their objective is to penetrate and destroy the Western aesthetic. Their final objective is political in nature.” He mixed figuration and abstraction, struggling to find a way of assimilating his political ideas with his technical skill. Born in Bessemer, AL, under what Whitten referred to as the “American apartheid” of segregation, he was politically radicalized at a young age. A meeting with Martin Luther King Jr. compelled Whitten to participate in marches and protests for civil rights.2 These experiences demonstrably shaped his early work.           As Whitten grew into his multifaceted style, his political intentions became less heavy-handed and obvious. He turned to abstraction in an attempt to craft a new culture for Black Americans. He wrote in his journal that Black people in America had been cut off from their culture, and that it was his role as an artist to invent a new cultural paradigm.3 Whitten’s titles referred to prominent Black artists and philosophers. A painting like Sorcerer’s Apprentice alludes to Miles Davis’s album Sorcerer, revealing Whitten’s interest in augmenting his process paintings with chance operations inspired by the musician’s improvisational explorations. “There must be a visual equivalent to jazz… an actual object expressing the same pathos. I want my art to show this.”4 Jazz is a defining part of Black culture in America. Most especially in the 1960s and 1970s, it was opposed to American pop music in that it valued collaboration, history, and community over monetary success and crass individuality. Likewise, Whitten’s work sought to challenge dominant notions of painting brought about by the Western interpretation of art history.         Whitten was an early adopter of acrylic paint, a relatively new medium at the time. It became the foundation of his painting practice. Siberian Salt Grinder exemplifies Whitten’s 1970s style. It was created by pushing acrylic paint across a floor-mounted canvas with a unique invention, The Developer, a large plastic squeegee mounted on a massive wooden t-joint. The large size of The Developer allowed Whitten to smear a swath of paint in a single stroke. He would continue to invent attachments and iterations of The Developer including combs, rakes, and such to provide new textures in his paintings. To complicate the image even further, Whitten would place pieces of wire under the canvas to create impressions of lines and forms like fossils amongst sedimentary layers of paint. Whitten likened this process to photography in that it captured a moment in time instantaneously.5 This technique would evolve as he would take fragments of paint and place them onto still drying layers, allowing him to create more complex and dense compositions. The “painting-as-collage” works compress disparate instances of time—captured with The Developer into a single plane.6 His studio was like a laboratory of innovation, from the materials used to the tools he invented to the ideas he documented across his life in his journals. Breaking new ground is what excited him.           Whitten’s aesthetic experiments extended past just painting to his forays into printing after receiving a grant from Xerox. Liquid Space I was created by soaking the paper in water before applying the Xerox’s toner ink to the surface. The ripples generated by the paper drying created the form of the composition.           Seeing Whitten’s work as an oeuvre, it becomes clear how organic and self-generating his painting practice was. Despite the constant fluctuation of his painting style, Whitten’s work displays a persistent ingenuity. His final mosaic works are the culmination of all of his previous experimentation in unorthodox materials and procedural image making. Each piece of these domineering paintings are small fragments of acrylic paint, cut into blocks and composed into sculptural paintings which suggest cityscapes, nebulas, or circuits. Additionally, Whitten would pour acrylic paint over manhole covers and corrugated steel and pull the dried paint up to create relief molds. These reliefs would be collaged onto the surface of the canvas alongside the small mosaic pieces, embedding his surrounding environment into his works.           This retrospective proves how important Whitten has been to the development of Black art in America. Like other Black abstract painters, such as Sam Gilliam and Norman Lewis, he defied the stereotypes placed on him and believed whole-heartedly that his art could change society by changing the perception of the audience. His work endures because of his innovative methods and the underutilized materials that defined his aesthetic development from the 1960s to his death in 2018. His constant

Greenwich Connecticut Shows Off By D. Dominick Lombardi “Paul Manes Solo Exhibition” Trimper Gallery, Greenwich, CT, May 15–August 15   Paul Manes thinks like a sculptor and paints like it’s nobody’s business. Never one to follow trends, Manes finds inspiration in the works of seventeenth to early twentieth century painters such as Rembrandt, Velasquez, Goya, and Cezanne rather than concerning himself with current trends. With finesse and boldness, making changes and reinventing on the way, Manes carves his own path as he moves from representation to abstraction and back again—often on the same canvas.           The best way to understand the ever-changing thinking process and approach to painting of Manes is to start with the three small works near the entrance. In one, the application of overlapping and oddly cut pieces of unprimed canvas in Goin’ Up (2024) clearly shows how Manes often paints over textured surfaces. The painted element, a snaking line that has been through a series of changes in tone and color, ends up as pewter—a visual shift that exemplifies changes in tone and color that are sometimes seen in other works in this exhibition. Then there is the cohesive flow of the composition that arises when the uneven edges of the pieces of cut canvas and the curves of the line slowly harmonize.         Noche en Torrijos (2024), which hangs across the room, is a painting made in the same year as Goin’ Up. Filled with detail and representation, Noche en Torrijos was created using endless applications of precisely painted browns and tans that represent a fantastical field of wildflowers. The result is a canvas that looks like it could have been painted in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, if pure landscape painting was a thing back then. Although handled differently in Goin’ Up, Noche en Torrijos has a clear concern with texture, line, and tonal range, and how they play off each other.           Two additional paintings created on textured surfaces are Marigot (1991) and Tangled Up in Red (2021). In both, the canvases are covered in cut and torn paper and printed materials. The minimal tactile quality created by the paper layer is quite different from Goin’ Up, where here the texture is more visual than actual. Marigot is about contrast between the geometric and the organic when looking at line as opposed to edge, and about how those two formative fronts create a rhythmic composition that is both beautiful and meditative. At first glance, Tangled Up in Red, a title that refers to Bob Dylan’s “Tangled up in Blue,” has a strangely uplifting and slightly imperiled effect, like the first time one ventures onto a trampoline, and is both curious and cautious. In painting a number of cascading bowls (consisting of colorful lines, mostly red) to having others more fully resolved in tones that mimic the warm gray color of the ink on the printed materials results in this profound back and forth in the picture plane.           Woman with Pearls (2018) and Untitled Plane (2024) are the two most distinctly different paintings in the exhibition. Woman with Pearls, because the subject summons up a bit of humor through the slightly cross-focused eyes, demands our attention. As a portrait, the framing of the subject is very tight to the form, cropping off the crown of the head and most of the shoulders. This zooming-in is combined with an imposing stare, dark arching eyebrows, and ruby red lipstick that are somewhat filtered through a veil of thick gray netting. The netting contrasts, but does not significantly lessen, the strong presence of the subject. From a painter’s standpoint, the fact that the color of the netting was changed at least once says a lot about the dedication of the artist to his craft and aesthetic. Another markedly different work, Untitled Plane (2024), brings to mind the mid-century fighter planes that were romanticized to the hilt in World War II films made in the US. The crosshairs in the area of the cockpit, which when combined with the stormy skies, intensify the visceral effect of the work.   “Martin Kline: The World in all its Plenitude” Heather Gaudio Fine Art, Greenwich, CT, May 3–June 14         Unlike Paul Manes, the art of Martin Kline is far more focused and color specific. The primary medium in “Martin Kline: The World in all its Plenitude” is very thick or built-up blue encaustic. Roughly half of the art here has the encaustic applied and inevitably shaped with a brush, while others are formed by casting the encaustic in variously sized bubble wrap creating mechanical looking grids of concave circles. As paintings, each piece is distinctly sculptural—encaustic paint, like candle wax, that can be shaped as it cools and hardens. In some instances, the encaustic is less tactile and more reliant on color changes from light to dark blue, with the artist applying overlapping same-sized streaks in a crisscross pattern.           Most of the paintings are done on what looks like birch panels. Where the color of the warm wood peeks through the thickly applied blue encaustic, there is a distinctive inner glow, an element that hits your peripheral vision as a quick afterimage. In Blue Lilac Jewel (2023) and Memento Mater (2024), the depth of the medium descending from the center to the edges has a hypnotic effect, while simultaneously suggesting soundwaves looking something like the Chladni patterns created when strong waves of sound hit flat metal plates resulting in amazing reverberating geometric patterns in sand. The patterning in Blue Leda Tondo (I) (2024) is quite different, and more like what you would see when tiny bits of metal get caught in magnetic fields. With all three works, the application of the blue encaustic is intriguing at a distance and awe-inspiring at close range.           The bubble wrap cast pieces by Kline

Rediscovering Black Genius The Collection of the Johnson Publishing Company at the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center (currently on view) by Charles Venkatesh Young From the early 1940s on, the Johnson Publishing Company (JPC) filled a crucial niche that no other conglomeration of its time could: it represented Black America as it saw itself. Through its flagship magazine Ebony and sister publication Jet, JPC navigated fluidly through the Civil Rights movement (in all its incarnations, dedicating large articles to both the March on Washington and the Black Power movement) while maintaining exhaustive coverage of African American creative producers.         Though JPC moved out of its Michigan Avenue high-rise in 2010, its legacy and possessions have continued to provide gratification for Chicagoans—only now through museum exhibits, not print media. Theaster Gates recently assembled a great deal of JPC’s original furnishings at his Stony Island Arts Bank, where a three floor installation carries on the company’s endeavor of celebrating Black greatness. Those wishing to immerse themselves in JPC before Stony Island reopens in February 2026 need not fret, as a concurrent show at the DuSable Museum showcases highlights from its eclectic art collection.           JPC tended to collect artists similar in temperament to their publications: vivifying of everyday Black life while being socially engaged about racial inequality. (Or, as Ebony’s first edition put it, to “talk turkey” while acknowledging race as “the No. 1 problem of America.”) One such artist was Garrett Whyte, who contributed a satirical comic strip entitled “Mr. Jim Crow” to the Chicago Defender in the late 40s. (Issues featured a beaked caricature of segregationist politicians embroiled—hilariously, despite the serious subject matter—in the contradictions wrought by racist ideology.) His Rose of Sharon, created two decades after his comic stint, evinces his taste for more poignant subjects: it depicts with breathtaking stillness a swarthy, Madonna-esque woman against a gold background.           JPC’s fondness for comic artists with religious underpinnings also led them to collect the work of Alvin C. Hollingsworth, represented here by a shoulder-up portrait of Jesus carrying a cross. The subject’s usual trappings—halo, crown of thorns, crowd of disciples—are rendered by Hollingsworth with gleaming contours of red and blue. While Whyte and Hollingsworth employ those conventionally thought to belong to the Renaissance, the stern countenances which figure so heavily in each work give these once-opulent scenes a sense of divine solemnity.           Though its publications centered on the Black experience in America, JPC’s collectors didn’t hesitate to incorporate paintings by non-Americans. Natives of Haiti figure especially prominently: Fritz Rock’s The Market Scene, for instance, renders a scene of hustle and bustle in his hometown of Port-au-Prince. Its buyers and sellers are rendered economically with a sharp-edge geometry that can start to feel cubist—each figure seems to tumble into the next. (Its clutter of bodies recalls the nightlife paintings of Archibald Motley, an artist represented in the DuSable Museum’s permanent collection.)           Conversely, Philton LaTortue’s Terrestrial Paradise series encloses a profoundly calm instant in a populous jungle. That LaTortue, another Port-au-Prince native, was labeled a “naif” (“naive” in English) artist by a prize he won in 1980 is oddly patronizing—he was formally educated at great length, including at Paris’s prestigious Academie des Beaux Arts. JPC recognized artists like LaTortue not under the condescending banner of “naive artists” or “outsider artists” but as no-strings-attached “artists,” bringing long-deserved recognition to names who were often overlooked.         Susan Simmons’s 1983 canvas of JPC’s high-rise on Michigan Avenue brings to mind its unparalleled achievements: it was the first African American-owned building in downtown Chicago and remains today the only Chicago high-rise designed by a Black architect. JPC’s effects in the media world were similarly groundbreaking, resonating with African Americans en masse like nothing else since. Though its headquarters has since been converted into an apartment complex, the JPC sign—which endorses its two flagship publications—remains, attesting to the continued legacy of Black greatness that the company embodied. Charles Venkatesh Young is a Chicago-based journalist of the arts interested in fusing art theory with bodily experience. He has contributed to the New Art Examiner, Chicago Reader, Newcity, and Whitehot Magazine.  

The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity 1869–1939 Wrightwood 659, May 2–July 26, 2025 This exhibition chronicles the evolution of the meaning of the word “homosexual” from its genesis in 1869 until its usage in 1939, which is not much different than the word’s meaning today. This is shown via works of art collected from all around the world that illustrate how the term developed through the kind of images that artists made at a particular time. Strictly speaking, this show is more of a history lesson than an art exhibition, and it is open to varied interpretations depending upon the orientation of the viewer. With that in mind, the New Art Examiner has assigned three different writers to review it. Paul Moreno, our New York editor, looks at it from the point of view of a practicing Catholic gay man. (His visit to Chicago was made possible by Tom Tunney and the Ann Sather Restaurants who underwrote his transportation.) Annette LePique examines it as a woman familiar with the LGBTQIA+ community, and, in early July, Andrew Hart Benson will respond to the show from the perspective of a nonbinary member of the LGBTQIA+ community. We hope these three views will give the reader an appreciation for the depth of content present in this show.   A Word is Worth a Thousand Pitures by Paul Moreno         The title of this exhibition, The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity 1869–1939,” demands to be parsed. The conceit of the show is that in 1869 the term “homosexual” was coined by Karl-Maria Kertbeny, and as it was disseminated, an identity was born. The homosexual (adj.) was one thing—a word that might be used to describe a singular act or a fleeting moment or a passing fancy—a concept we knew about from the ancient Greeks, at least. But the Homosexual (n.) was something altogether different and, for some, troubling. This was a person whose very nature, whose repetition of homosexual acts, whose identity, was now named and othered. This exhibition looks at these others, combing the history and margins where they lived, often in plain sight, and attempts to re-create a very concentrated tableau of the art this intellectually rich margin left us. The show points out that the artists involved were not the first to experience homosexuality but were the first to have their work subjected to the power of that word. Further, work that preceded the invention of this word was now viewable through a new lens that gave that work a new appeal to some and a new stigma to others.           The challenge of a show like this is that unlike one dedicated to an artist, a movement, an era, or a genre in art history, the criteria for inclusion become quite vast. Even an exhibition dedicated to landscape, which could include artists as different as Caspar David Friedrich and Joan Mitchell, would still have some established qualities of “landscape” by which to estimate the relevance of selected works. In this case, there is not so much a list of qualities as much as a keeping an eye out for a vibe. Is the artist or the subject of the work doing something, blatantly or tacitly, to evoke a kind of knowing? The show contains over 300 objects, many by artists you very likely have never heard of, that were gathered to illustrate something that is not at all subtle but by its very nature, is not obvious. The show almost feels like a dance floor crowded with queers, where, if you are a queer, you at once feel safe in the panoply of faces and bodies, and when you leave, there are things that amalgamated indistinctly into the aforementioned vibe. But there will likely be that handful of faces, bodies, moments, that become indelible and fill your mind with thoughts and fantasies. Here are a few of mine.   *     *     *           This painting was easy to walk past in a passageway surrounded by larger works, yet, in an almost humorous moment, it caught my eye and has since remained in my mind. Four male figures in pale blue-gray habits are paired off and engaged in sexual acts. The environment is a barely lit room, but the cluster of men are illuminated, almost glowing. One pair is concentrated in their activity, and both their heads are severely bowed, while in the other pair, one attentively watches the first couple and one looks into the darkness. Though the chiaroscuro of the work is not unusual for the 1700s, the quickness and vagueness of the brushwork feels quite modern. It is in some places hard to understand what exactly is being depicted—for example, is the platform one pair occupies a table or a bed? And what is the golden explosion of light upon it? The head and face of the friar to the furthest left is a blob of light and shadow. Still there is a fussiness of details: the erotically large sandals that rest in the foreground, a toppled jug and goblet, an open book that appears to have fallen on the floor. But there is the tidy stack of books on a stool, and the shelf at the top of the painting contain a sparse collection of vessels.         The wall text accompanying the picture reads, “This scene from the first decades of the 1700s satirizes the monastic vow of celibacy—while underscoring how contemporary assumptions about monks in monasteries have a long prehistory.” I have to imagine this painting was shocking at the time of its creation. It is still a bit shocking now. I would posit though that the shock is not from the sex depicted, as I would also speculate that viewers of the show have seen such things depicted elsewhere, if not maybe even seen them live and in person. The tantalization is generated from

Malice and the Phallus Robert Polidoro at 1969 Gallery, March 21–April 26, 2025 by Charles Venkatesh Young Robert Polidoro’s Oh the Places You’ll Go, an April show at Tribeca’s 1969 Gallery felt something like a temporally disjointed tennis match. Polidoro’s propensity for referencing the fiercely intellectual and utopian “isms” of the past few centuries (all stemming, in one way or another, from big bad Neoclassicism) is constantly belied by a contemporary sense of petulant banality. “We must make the world anew!” he seems to say—before lamenting his inability to make his bed. Coming from Polidoro, a painter of pretty pictures, this conceit is invigoratingly fresh; aesthetic dogmas seem to realize their own multiplicity, resulting in landscapes as sleek and sharp as they are eclectic.           Polidoro’s industrial subject matter seems to place him within the realm of the precisionists: pipes with void-like mouths, out of which small water drops fall tantalizingly. Yet the beauty of a hardline precisionist painting like those by Charles Sheeler—which stems from the sense that the industrial society depicted is completely self-sustaining, an economic cogency rendered in aesthetic terms—is absent from Polidoro’s work. His paintings are pathetically impotent, evoking, if anything, the inability of the artist and Western society to conquer nature—or, for that matter, to master their own bewildering desires. That is not to say that Polidoro is a nihilist: his canvases are far too serene to fit into such a package. Polidoro wants us to pick a lane: either the optimistic aesthete who believes in art’s power to effect a social good or the down-and-out realist who scarcely believes in paint’s ability to illustrate something beyond itself. But he makes each ideological package seem ridiculous once we’ve considered its implications. The aesthete realizes the true nature of his pipe dream, and the realist is nagged at by the canvases’ latent (but never obvious) beauty.           This is to say nothing of the experience of viewing Polidoro’s work–the way their craftsman’s charm allures you at first glance before their blatantly phallic cynosures render you embarrassed. It doesn’t take much imagination to read sex organs and erogenous zones in the tubular pipes—always slightly dripping!—and bulbous hills of each painting. They hit you like a dirty joke, yet in the same breath manage to encapsulate the lives and deaths of great empires, the struggles between nations, the constant interpersonal struggle that seems to be the tragedy of human life–but via a juvenile illustration of sexual frustration. To say that Polidoro does a lot with a little would be a gross understatement: the ideological heights achieved by his bare bones celestial abstractions make fertile land of a pulpy aesthetic bog.           Viewers come away from Polidoro’s work without any aesthetic revelations, but they are vastly more aware of their present position. He makes you run on a hamster wheel for the duration of your viewing, forcing you to confront both the ridiculousness of early-twentieth century utopian art movements and your complete inability to disavow the aesthetic frameworks to which they gave rise. The upshot is oddly affirmative: if Western art is built on delusional thinking, Polidoro cautiously reasons, at least it’s made some pretty mistakes. Charles Venkatesh Young is a Chicago-based journalist of the arts interested in fusing art theory with bodily experience. He has contributed to the New Art Examiner, Chicago Reader, Newcity, and Whitehot Magazine.