7 New York Shows to See during Armory and into Autumn
Left to right: Lee ShinJa, Dawn; Legend (both c. 1980). Exhibition view: Weaving the Dawn, Tina Kim Gallery, New York (22 August–28 September 2024). Photo: Hyunjung Rhee.
Anticipating New York's Autumn art fair season this September, we have selected seven must-see exhibitions. From Lee ShinJa's intricate tapestries at Tina Kim to Ibrahim Mahama's installation repurposed from colonial-era railways at White Cube, here's what to see.
Patricia Perez Eustaquio: Emporium
Silverlens, 505 West 24th Street
5 September–19 October 2024
Expect: an exploration of the materials and cultural symbols of colonial-era Philippines and its trade history that spotlights craft-based mediums.
Manila-based artist Patricia Perez Eustaquio has long been interested in neglected objects and histories. Her practice brings visibility to the otherwise unnoticed, often questioning artistic and cultural constructs through the mediums of craft and design.
Emporium explores how materials—textiles, fibres, ceramics—can be leveraged to explore histories of colonialism and exchange in the Philippines. Crossing the gallery space is a monumental, braided-rope sculpture woven from Manila hemp, a plant native to the Philippines that became a colonial-era commodity used to make shipping ropes (Fountain, 2024). Its interlocking design is adapted from pre-colonial Filipino gold jewellery, bringing in another lost practice.
Large-scale tapestries in the gallery transform historical paintings into black-and-white iterations achieved through computer-printing technologies that both disrupt the potency of the original image and highlight the colonial gaze.
Among them, the five-metre-tall White Lies (Balanced on a Ball) (2023), based on a 20th-century photograph taken by Americans when they occupied the country, shows a Filipino acrobat balancing on a ball, wearing Western clothing and surrounded by American flags.
japan in/out brazil
nara roesler, 511 West 21st Street
4 September–5 October 2024
Expect: works by three artists from the Japanese diaspora in Brazil who impacted Brazilian art history or its contemporary scene.
Addressing the role of Japanese artists in shaping Brazilian art history, japan in/out brazil gathers the work of three artists from the early 20th century to the present, who were born in Brazil or had close ties to the country.
A pioneer of geometric abstraction, Tomie Ohtake started experimenting with hard-edged painting after moving to Sao Paulo from Kyoto in 1936. Early series such as the 'Blindfolded Paintings', rendered while blindfolded, prioritised sensibility and intuition. Devoid of the rigid edges of Neo-Concrete art, the dominant movement then, they introduced new possibilities into Brazilian art.
Contemporary painter Asuka Anastacia Ogawa was born in Japan, spent her adolescence in Brazil, and trained in Europe and the U.S. Her work, abundant with dark-skinned characters with probing eyes, reflect the convergence of these influences with references to Japanese and Brazilian culture and the absence of geographical locations.
Sao Paulo-born artist Lydia Okumura expanded geometric abstraction into space during the onset of conceptual art in the 1960s. Her installations—mostly three-dimensional shapes made of string or wire, or prisms painted on large, standing canvases—contested the boundaries between painting and sculpture, inviting viewers to enter the artwork.
Mary Sully: Native Modern
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Avenue
18 July 2024–12 January 2025
Expect: rarely seen works by a modernist who was not recognised by the mainstream art world during her lifetime.
The first museum exhibition dedicated to the late Dakota Sioux artist Mary Sully, who was born on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota in 1896, reveals how her largely self-taught work—mostly coloured-pencil drawings of abstract patterns and the occasional figurative scene—was the result of her unique perspective on America and American culture.
Her series of abstract triptychs, totalling 134, represent personalities such as Amelia Earhart, Thomas Edison, and Gertrude Stein, or ideas around Native history and religion. These 'personality prints', as Sully called them, have been characterised as a reversed ethnographic act.
Sully's practice was ground-breaking in marrying Indigenous and modernist art practices. In Good Friday (undated), for instance, a department-store shopping scene unfolds across six quadrants, boxes stacked upon boxes. Conversely, in The Indian Church (c. 1938–1945), Indigenous churchgoers wait at the entrance of a ceremonial tent overseen by a white cross.
Ibrahim Mahama: A Spell of Good Things
White Cube, 1002 Madison Avenue
5 September–31 October 2024
Expect: an installation and charcoal drawings referencing Ghana's colonial-era railways and the labour that supported its development.
Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama often works with repurposed materials that reference Ghana's trade and resource-extraction history. His latest exhibition draws on the country's railways—a symbol of development and exchange—and their material and ideological residues.
Once under British colonial rule, Ghana gained independence in 1957, ushering in now-thwarted optimism toward the nation's future prosperity. The name Ghana was chosen by the country's first prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah, after the ancient Empire. But, as the artist told Ocula Magazine, 'the name was more of a dream ... to excavate a moment when people were truly free and managed their own destiny.'
Referencing this period of growth and subsequent failure, Mahama's titular installation at White Cube comprises an assemblage of beds from the Tamale Teaching Hospital in Northern Ghana and train interiors from the former Gold Coast railway system.
Opened in 1974, the medical institution is currently in decline, unable to obtain sufficient resources to operate. Alongside the beds, leather sheets—some ripped from the insides of trains—are marked with the names of those who died unexpectedly while under hospital care.
Charcoal drawings on the second floor illustrate the country's establishment off the back of human labour. In Owusu se M'amma (The Driver's Lament, 2024), workers carry a steel beam along a topographical map, while beneath, a train is propped up by a sea of faceless bodies.
Helen Mayer Harrison, Newton Harrison: Survival Piece #5: Portable Orchard
Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street
29 June 2024–5 January 2025
Expect: a reminder of the precarity of our food systems facing ecological crisis and a tentative solution by two pioneers of the eco-art movement.
On the eighth floor of the Whitney Museum, 18 citrus trees are being kept alive by individual lighting systems as part of a project conceived in the 1970s by the late artists Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison for an imagined future in which natural farming practices are obsolete.
The Harrisons were prompted by growing environmental movements at the time to collaborate across art and research. Portable Orchard is one of seven 'Survival Pieces' (1970–1972) they developed as sustainable food-production systems, alongside a hog pasture and a shrimp farm.
The artists planned for the future implementation of these projects by making detailed instruction drawings, one of which was recently acquired by the Whitney Museum. The work is on view in the gallery, alongside archival materials, recalling the ongoing need to protect our environment.
Lee ShinJa: Weaving the Dawn
Tina Kim Gallery, 525 West 21st Street
22 August–28 September 2024
Expect: five decades of work by a South Korean artist whose innovative approach to craft-based mediums anticipated their widespread acceptance.
A pioneer of the tapestry genre in South Korea, Lee ShinJa's woven-fibre surfaces are remarkable in their detail and nuance, appearing almost painted in the convergence of colour and pattern, building into sunsets and mountainscapes.
Lee came to textiles as a child by watching her mother and grandmother sew. She gravitated towards embroidery—then among the limited options for women in applied arts—which she initially innovated using dyes and appliqué before later moving on to deconstruct the fabric and incorporate abstraction.
While some critics argued that she was destroying traditional Korean needlework practices, others applauded her inventiveness. In the 1980s, her work expanded into monumental installations that incorporated bold colours and extensive weaves.
Weaving the Dawn surveys the artist's 50-year practice, from her early appliqué works of the 1960s to her more recent series 'Spirit of Mountain' (1996–1998), which pays tribute to her hometown of Uljin on the Sea of Japan's eastern coast.
In Spirit of Mountain (1997), made from wool and synthetic threads, an abstraction of mountain ranges spreads across four quadrants, with inverted and graduated colour palettes that recall contemporary photo-editing tools, attesting to Lee's imaginative approach.
Cameron A. Granger: 9999
Queens Museum, Flushing Meadows Corona Park
19 May 2024–19 January 2025
Expect: a playful inquiry into the impacts of segregation and gentrification on Black communities via a video game landscape.
As part of his fellowship at Queens Museum, Cameron A. Granger conceived 9999, a narrative that evolves across film, print, and sculpture, building off the structure of video games to hint at methods of solving the systemic injustices faced by Black communities in the U.S.
The exhibition title refers to the threshold of damage to a character that could be registered on-screen in early video games. Here, Granger explores how such damage could form a parallel to the invisible harm that impacts marginalised segments of society.
In a dark gallery, Granger's main video, 9999, visualises the wounds left by structural violence as black holes ripping through New York. Videos, prints, and sculptures, which share knowledge from historical Black figures, intimate potential resolutions.
Granger's print series 'Movements' (2022–2024) shares the artist's feelings of loss, hope, and love across resolved crossword grids. 1st Movement–Catastros Cartography (2022), for instance, confronts the inhumanity of urban planning, which can result in what the first puzzle prompt describes as 'messy lines' that 'constrict like throats'. —[O]
