The New York Times: Ablaze With Art: Thriving Galleries in Lower Manhattan
Will Heinrich heads to TriBeCa, where new galleries keep popping up and strong shows abound.
By Will Heinrich
Oct. 15, 2020
Walking around TriBeCa galleries recently felt strangely, blessedly, heartbreakingly close to normal. Some bars and restaurants — like the upscale diner in Cortlandt Alley — remained closed, but Lower Manhattan is ablaze with art. Just across the street from that empty diner, at Andrew Kreps Gallery, I visited Kim Dingle’s overhead views of restaurant tables, which she made in the 2000s while operating a restaurant in Los Angeles, and over at Canada I thrilled to Joan Snyder’s delicate but explosively colorful abstractions. (Note that both shows close Oct. 17.)
Luhring Augustine has opened a branch on White Street with a killer show of watercolors and found object sculptures by the Brazilian artist Lucia Nogueira (through Oct. 31), and a new project called Broadway has opened with a show by the Indigenous video artist and photographer Sky Hopinka. Ortuzar Projects is hosting a retrospective of Lynda Benglis’s sculptural works (through Dec. 3) in concert with uptown’s Cheim & Read gallery.
Vikky Alexander has incisive photo collages and eerie glass sculptures at Downs & Ross (through Oct. 25); Peter Freeman’s rotating group show (through Dec. 19) of 20th-century masters from Agnes Martin to Walker Evans is particularly strong; and you’ll want to catch Steve Mumford’s captivating graphic journalism at Postmasters (through Oct. 31). Below are six more exhibitions in or near TriBeCa — from Varick Street to the Bowery, more or less — that have stayed with me.
William Cordova’s “Tetragrammaton (tusuq, laykas, CCB, MCSD),” 2020, ink, graphite, oil, paper collage, glue on paper. Credit William Cordova and Storage
The inaugural group show at this new project space, founded by the artist Onyedika Chuke in his own basement art studio, is a powerful mix of explicit politics and formal verve. Three of Emory Douglas’s graphic cover designs for the Black Panther newspaper remain as arresting as they were when he composed them 50 years ago. The Miami-based artist Yanira Collado contributes a spare, evocative sculpture reminiscent of a rooftop antenna, and a series of black-and-white photographs that document performances by Alicia Grullón are surprisingly striking in their own right. Two monumental works on paper — one, by William Cordova, a polymath of patterns, features a grayscale check pattern, and the other, by the Houston artist Rick Lowe, has a tidal wave of black marker lines on a golden yellow ground — are tacked directly to the walls, adding an extra burst of studio-visit excitement to an already energetic roundup.