There's something powerful that happens when students step onto a stage and the entire community shows up for them. Events like this bring families, staff, and students together in a way that builds pride, connection, and a real sense of belonging.
"It's an amalgamation of the Chicago neighborhood aesthetic with a Bulls fan, quite literally. It's kind of on the nose, but that's how I juxtapose the elements of my work, with the structure of a home and then a figure who is around or in the home."
April's lineup at the Brooklyn Museum includes programs around 'Seydou Keïta: A Tactile Lens,' designed for accessibility and interactivity, featuring stroller tours for caregivers and infants.
The show features pieces by participants in JASA's programs. The organization, which serves more than 40,000 older adults every year, offers art classes and creative workshops designed to bring people together while encouraging self-expression. The results will be on full display here, from paintings and textile work to other handmade pieces that reflect the artists' personal stories and styles.
Kamrooz Aram is everywhere this year, from Mumbai Art Week to the Whitney Biennial, and critic Aruna D'Souza is grateful. She pens a beautiful meditation on his work, reading his abstract paintings as not simply a denunciation of Western modernism nor a reassertion of Islamic visual motifs, but something else entirely - something gestural, exuberant, riotous, and incomparably his own.
"These works are an exploration of the human body's elasticity and capacity to metamorphose. Informed by my own experience of pregnancy and the birth of my first child last year, these paintings are a meditation on physiological transformation and the body's underlying animalistic and mammalian nature."
Hong Kong's particular and seductive Metabolist city planning is an ode to consumption as a great totalizer of culture, and to contemporary art as merely a niche commodity form among many others.
"These paintings merge the landscape and the intimacy of windows through the framing of the car, bridging the two realms I've typically explored separately. The car becomes a meditation on transition, on existing simultaneously here and elsewhere."
On Franklin Street in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, one non-commercial gallery fosters 'a small, stubbornly human space for friction.' Friction—the ubiquitous buzzword that captures the simultaneous delight and discomfort of doing things the slow way—is at the heart of artists Pap Souleye Fall and Char Jeré's current show at Subtitled NYC. It also reflects the overall spirit of this little exhibition space and of a burgeoning movement to reject our culture of optimization in favor of a bumpier, more intimate, less alienating experience.
At the end of November of 2011, I saw my dad take his last breath. I came back to the United States after participating in all the death-related rituals that helped organize my pain in México. New York City was not a place to live my mourning, and right around December of the same year, I felt an intense longing to become small again. I needed to work with children.