(flyer via Manhattan BP Gale Brewer)
Arlene Schulman: The First 100 Years
Reception Tuesday September 20 at The David N. Dinkins Municipal Building, 5 pm to 7 pm. On view through September 29.
Bronx-born Arlene Schulman has had a robust career as a photographer, with an array of published books, including the award-winning The Prizefighters: An Intimate Look at Champions and Contenders. Her photos reflect a lifetime living in the city, and I mean lifetime: she started taking photos when she was a mere eight years old. They focus on the everyday and the working class, portraying subjects like police officers and boxers in large-format prints. And photography isn’t all she does– she also writes, edits, and teaches. This exhibit, presented by Manhattan BP Gale A. Brewer, seeks to showcase her large body of work and the unique way she sees the city. But careful, don’t go offering her the chance to shoot artful pictures of any lima beans or olives—she writes on her website that she hates those.
Sally Mann
Remembered Light, Untitled (Flamingo and Blinds), 2012
Gelatin silver print
16 × 20 inches (40.6 × 50.8 cm) Edition of 3 (photo via Gagosian Gallery)
Remembered Light: Cy Twombly in Lexington
Opening Thursday September 23 at Gagosian Gallery, 6 pm to 8 pm. On view through October 29.
While Schulman’s photographs contain memories and histories of an entire city, this exhibit of acclaimed artist Sally Mann’s photos is far more specific in its documentation of memory and life. It centers on capturing the essence of artist Cy Twombly’s “working habitat,” who was a mentor and close friend of Mann’s. Rather than documenting Twombly’s person, she has elected to focus on the places where he made his mark, including their shared landscape of Virginia. The result is an array of images, taken between 1999 and 2012, taking peeks at slices of the everyday, such as a room’s corner lit by the slight shafts of light creeping in through the blinds. Sure, you’ll have to travel up to Gagosian’s location on Madison Ave and 77th Street, but it very well may be worth it.
(photo via Christopher Stout Gallery / Facebook)
The Trump Tombstone
Opening Friday September 23 at Christopher Stout Gallery’s Brooklyn Fire Proof Pop-up, 6 pm to 10 pm. On view through October 2.
Remember the Trump Tombstone? Also known as “Legacy Stone,” it was a 400+ pound granite tombstone created by artist Brian Andrew Whiteley initially placed in Central Park, bearing the name of one Donald J. Trump. It had no death date but rather the message “Made America Hate Again.” It briefly mystified the public, but was ultimately unmasked as being made upon request at a South Slope memorial shop, and was confiscated by the NYPD.
In July, Whiteley was able to retrieve it, and now gallerist Christopher Stout will be displaying it at a pop-up location via East Williamsburg’s Brooklyn Fire Proof. The original stone will be present, alongside a photograph of it in the Park taken by Ventiko as well as a grave rubbing of the stone, created in collaboration with “master printer” James Stroud. As much as the term “grave rubbing” in association with Trump makes the bile in my stomach start to creep back up, I can almost certainly assure you they don’t mean it like that.
(image via American Medium)
Local Atonement: A Nutshell Study of Unexplained Death
Opening Saturday September 24 at American Medium, 7 pm to 10 pm. On view through October 30.
For the duo Wickerham & Lamox, where one works can be just as important as the work that is produced. Their 2012 show “DUO4XLarkin” examined the compulsion to personalize the workspace through bright “digital paintings.” This show, their first NY solo show in four years, will present an even wider view of one’s surroundings, by examining “the idea of location as character and the insidious aspects of its effects on its occupants.” This outside-in approach is, in a way, the opposite of IUD, the gallery’s recent show centering around contraception and internal bodily woes by multidisciplinary artist Kristin Smallwood.
A virtual booklet that accompanies an online preview of the duo’s show features a short script centering around two people and their interactions with new apartments, an antique store, a donut shop. Locations and the people they contain have iconography associated with them, the artists write, and eventually these icons will grow to be antiques. The tie between objects and people is clear in the show, which features imagery like a severed arm drafting a “letter of discontent.” Just imagine being so upset with someone that your arm has the sheer independent will to continue its siege of them after leaving your body.
