Gallery Chronicle (May 2016)

Amy Lincoln, Spring Moonlight, acrylic on panel, 34 x 24 inches/Courtesy: Morgan Lehman Gallery

THE NEW CRITERION
May 2016

Gallery Chronicle
by James Panero

On “Amy Lincoln” at Morgan Lehman Gallery; “Paul Resika: Recent Paintings” at Lori Bookstein Fine Art; “Rob de Oude: Tilts & Pinwheels” at DM Contemporary; and “Thornton Willis: Step Up” at Elizabeth Harris Gallery.

The challenge facing a realist painter is often not how to portray the visible world but rather how to visualize the unseen. Like the separation of man from beast, the pursuit of the ineffable separates art from illustration. To get from one to the other requires a leap of faith, and, for much of art history, that faith was Faith. In modern times, the fracturing of religious consensus has not so much dampened realism’s spiritual interest, as might be expected, but rather placed artists in an even more central role as both shamans and craftsmen. In making manifest their own sense of the unseen, they advance their own spiritual programs.

There can be little doubt that bunk and questionable faith, from Theosophy to Mammonism, have often informed modern art’s spiritual expression. At the same time, it must be said that bearing witness—even (perhaps especially) false witness—has led to much of modern art’s visual charisma.

An interest in animism, or a belief in the spiritual animation of animal, vegetable, and mineral, has produced some of modernism’s most arresting visual expressions of the natural world. In the first half of the last century, the American artist Charles Burchfield, for example, looked to reproduce not just woods and fields but also “the feelings of woods and fields, memories of seasonal impressions.” Painting nature with redolent waves and golden halos surrounding bushes and trees, Burchfield wrote, “I like to think of myself—as an artist
—as being in a nondescript swamp, up to my knees in mire, painting the vital beauty I see there, in my own way, not caring a damn about tradition, or anyone’s opinion.”

 

The painter Amy Lincoln follows in Burchfield’s muddy footsteps, looking not only to plant life but also to what might be considered the inner life of plants. Drawing on the obsessive horticultural precisionism of Henri Rousseau, Lincoln incorporates an outsider-artist sensibility for symmetry, overgrowth, and oversaturated color. Now at Morgan Lehman Gallery in Chelsea, she is showing a selection of her smaller acrylics on panel, all created in the last year.¹

Lincoln has been focusing on the life of plants since I first began seeing her work in the off-grid galleries of Bushwick several years ago. Over time these still lifes have become more active, energized by increasingly surreal colors, ominous forms, and ever stranger settings. Following a residency last year at Wave Hill, the stunning horticultural estate overlooking the Hudson River in the Bronx, and one with consistently excellent artist programs, Lincoln has incorporated a wider variety of plants in her paintings along with architectural details from the garden grounds. Greenhouse windows, Hudson River ice floes, and the cliffs of the Palisades have all appeared in recent work.

At Morgan Lehman, the beaux-arts balustrade of Wave Hill’s terraced gardens peeks out from behind several of her compositions and unites the work together. This selection may be Lincoln’s most uncharted and otherworldly. Sun, moon, and stars illuminate bloodleaf, caladium, taro, and rubber plants with unnatural light. Colors shift in radiating waves and give her leafy shapes, rendered up close, an ominous presence.

 

Amy Lincoln, Pink Caladium, 2016, Acrylic on Panel, 20 x 16 inches/Courtesy: Morgan Lehman Gallery

At times the hyperreality can become cartoonish. Her stars in Caladium Study (2016) would have been better left as single sources of light rather than rendered as five-pointers. The same goes for her sun waves in Veranda Study, which seem drawn from a box of
Kellogg’s.

Yet aside from its overdone lunar craters, the most unsettling and successful work in the exhibition is Spring Moonlight, a mountain landscape of pink-purple light and daffodils. Here the strangeness is so overdone, so saturated, that the image verges on kitsch. Yet like a velvet painting of Elvis, the composition also fully inhabits a world of its own idols and idolatry. Whether we should believe in it, or whether Lincoln even believes in it, is an open question, and one we should enjoy trying to answer.

For eight decades Paul Resika has painted with a timeless immediacy by working in dialogue with an academy of Masters, from Old to Modern. Hans Hofmann, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Canaletto, Puvis de Chavannes, Camille Corot, Gustave Moreau, Georges Rouault, Claude Monet, and Théodore Rousseau, to name a few, all appear to be frequent collaborators. Resika looks to them as uninterrupted sources to connect with his brush, drawing seemingly disparate artists and time periods together.

Now on view at Lori Bookstein, his eighth solo show at the gallery, Resika is exhibiting a series of paintings mostly based on a single theme, a still life of pitchers and shells, processed in different modes through his pantheon of influences.²

I saw a selection of these paintings in advance of this exhibition on a visit to Resika’s Upper West Side studio, a space where the Ashcan School used to meet, and through which Resika draws his own connections. Ranging from realistic to impressionistic to abstract to points in between, the series is a concise statement of Resika’s broad reverence for the artistic past. Through its uncanny variety of styles painted with equal, unironic affection, the series could not be the work of any other artist.

What ties it all together is a sense of touch. The Venetians did not need to sign their own paintings, since their brushstrokes served as their signatures. Resika similarly has developed his own way of handling paint. Like the haze of the Venetian lagoon, he imbues his work with an atmosphere of color-filled strokes.

Resika’s body of work has never been an easy fit in the history of modern art. Yet he attributes his nonconformist sensibility to his modernist mentor, Hans Hofmann, who unexpectedly laid the groundwork for his classical and renaissance explorations.

 

After finding early artistic success in New York, his hometown, Resika traveled first to Venice in his twenties to live with the Tintorettos in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, and later to Vaucluse to walk in the footsteps of Corot.Such wanderings may at one time have been considered insufficiently forward-thinking, uncommitted to the mandates of the present moment. But Resika’s stylistic freedom now seems ahead of its time—that of a modernist painter who joyfully refuses to break with the past.

Rob de Oude, Puncture Pattern, 2014, oil on panel, 12 x 12/Courtesy: DM Contemporary

From Salomon van Ruysdael to Piet Mondrian, the Dutch have always had a particular feel for the line. On view last month at DM Contemporary, the Amsterdam-educated, Bushwick-based painter Rob de Oude brought a Dutch sensibility to New Amsterdam in a solo show of his square oils, all featuring straight colored lines.³

Would it be too much to attribute this exhibition titled “Tilts and Pinwheels” to the influence of the horizon line of the Lowlands, intersected by masts, steeples, and windmills? Perhaps that would be tilting at windmills. What is clear is that de Oude uses grids and intersections to produce remarkable optical effects—moiré patterns of uncontrolled waves that somehow radiate out of his ruled precision.

De Oude is following in a tradition of optical painting that goes back more than a century. Yet like other contemporary painters reevaluating this visual terrain, de Oude looks for more than just optical dazzle, towards paintings with personal feeling and mood. At DM Contemporary, his earlier work on display showed an interest in collapsing systems. In Puncture Pattern (2014) and Keep On Keeping On (2015), an abundance of threaded lines build from a screen into a thicket.

More recently, de Oude has turned those inward forces around. Always a colorist, he now employs complex color gradations to explode his forms into shimmering constellations—works that are at their best when they retain some mass, such as in Grid Shift (2016) and Forward in Reverse (2016). Ever more accomplished as a visual technician, de Oude will now need to keep his compositions grounded as they look increasingly up.

Thornton Willis, totem #2, 2014, oil on canvas86 x 70 inches/Courtesy: Elizabeth Harris Gallery 

Thornton Willis, the painter’s painter, returns to Elizabeth Harris Gallery for “Step Up,” his latest exhibition of new work.⁴

An original Soho abstractionist, and an artist whose work has appeared often in this column, Willis has grown ever more energized and primal since coming of age in the downtown painting scene nearly half a century ago. Willis’s compositions can appear simple, especially in reproduction, but such simplicity supports Willis’s sophistication in his handling of color, edge, and line. Whether push and pull, or figure and ground, Willis looks to place his compositions on point, ultimately leaving the viewer in the balance. In the current exhibition, Willis continues with a motif from his last two shows by layering step-like blocks and stairways. In Stairway to the Stars (2015) and Lockstep (2015), the pieces of his compositional puzzles rest in their own notches. In another series here, his most recent, colorful squares and rectangles teeter on edge.Step Around (2015) and Spin Step (2016) work through a push-pull dynamic that is not so much in and out but up and down, with the precarious block stacks fighting against the pull of gravity.

A third series, and my favorite, revisits Willis’s lattice constructions, but here as vertical stripes called “totems.” These simplest of shapes, slightly variable in length, read as both windows and obstructions, barriers to entry and power chords of energy, balanced in Willis’s uniquely confident way.

Timed to this show is a new hard-bound collection, Interviews & Essays, about Willis’s life, featuring critical writing by Julie Karabenick, Vittorio Colaizzi, and Lance Esplund. I am pleased to be included in this selection as well. The time has come for this painter whose work has taught me much about abstraction to receive wider attention and appreciation.

---

1 “Amy Lincoln” opened at Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, on March 31 and remains on view through May 7, 2016.

2 “Paul Resika: Recent Paintings” opened at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York, on April 28 and remains on view through June 4, 2016.

3 “Rob de Oude: Tilts & Pinwheels” was on view at DM Contemporary, New York, from March 11 through April 23, 2016.

4 “Thornton Willis: Step Up” opened at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York, on March 31 and remains on view through May 7, 2016.

"Joe Zucker: Armada" exhibition essay

EXHIBITION ESSAY

Joe Zucker: Armada
by James Panero

This essay has been occasioned by “Joe Zucker: Armada,” a forty-year survey of Zucker’s works on paper and the first to focus on his images of the sea. Organized by James Panero, “Joe Zucker: Armada” is on public view at The National Arts Club from May 2 through May 28, 2016. (Image: JOE ZUCKER, Capt. Murano’s Fleet of D’How at Sunset, 1980, Felt tip marker on paper, 18 x 24 inches)

Joe Zucker was born in 1941 to a Jewish family on Chicago’s South Side, at a time when the Irish and Italian gangs of the area sparred over territories embroiled in the tensions surrounding black migration and white flight. He got out through varsity basketball and found a moment of jock glory on the squad at Miami University in Ohio. Yet Zucker also happened to be blessed with one of the more interesting minds in American art. This complicated his athletic career and his artistic one as well. Zucker has long been out of step with the dullness that has come to dominate contemporary artistic production.

In 1961, Zucker gave up playing basketball and returned to Chicago to enroll at the Art Institute, where he had been drawing in his spare time since the age of five. His teachers were thinking Braque and the School of Paris. Zucker was more interested in potboilers and the narrative art of Thomas Hart Benton. He passed through the Institute’s bachelor’s and master’s programs, and followed this up with a teaching stint in Minnesota.

Zucker arrived in New York in 1968, one of modern art’s more fruitful moments, when the avant-garde had just passed through the rabbit hole of minimalism and was beginning to re-embrace the craft and process of painting.

At the time, modernism’s recursive instinct seemed to have reached its end-game. Minimalist art and sculpture had folded form back on itself to an infinite and emptying degree. Like other artists of his generation, Zucker used minimalist logic to structure his artistic practice, but he sought to expand this logic to maximal effect.

“You can be tempted into reducing and reducing to the point of emptiness, simply repeating terms dictated by the perimeter of the paint,” Zucker noted in an interview. “I wanted to breach the perimeter and get into the very substance of the painting. I saw that as a way of evading the self-defeating outcome implicit in the reductive logic of modernism.” By infusing his work with narrative and humor, Zucker charted out a singular artistic path.

From his graduate-school days, the subject of the painter’s materials has been one of Zucker’s recurring interests. It was the substance of oil, after all, that received the lion’s share of attention by the Abstract Expressionists. Taking a cue from the revival in weaving and craft-based art, Zucker turned this relationship around and moved the canvas to the foreground, from surface to subject matter. An early series of Zucker’s work consists of abstract weavings of colored strips, recalling the warp and weft of a painting’s canvas.

In the 1970s, Zucker developed work based on the “history of cotton,” which he first showed at New York’s Bykert Gallery, run by Klaus Kertess and Jeff Byers. These large canvases depicted various sepia-toned scenes of the antebellum South: a paddle boat in Amy Hewes (1976); slaves and an overseer in Brick-Top, The Field Hand, and Lucretia Borgia (1976); bales of cotton stacked and hauled in Reconstruction (1976) and Paying Off Old Debts (1975); and the neoclassical facade of Old Cabell Hall in University of Virginia Law School (1976). Yet the layers of representation in Zucker’s cotton constructions complicate a single historical reading.

Like the history of cotton, Zucker has long woven stories of the sea into his diverse body of work. The sea, after all, carried the cotton, the textiles, and the human cargo that created the raw materials of art. As in all of American history, American art history passes directly through the Middle Passage.

In his 1950 book The Enchafèd Flood, W. H. Auden observes how the sea represents a “state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilization has emerged and into which, unless saved by the effort of gods and men, it is always liable to relapse.”

Pirates, whalers, and slave traders have recurred in Zucker’s undulating imagery, which has engaged with the sea’s creative energy and destructive menace. In his expansive oeuvre, the sea is both the endless horizon and the picture plane of unfathomable depth. For unstable works on paper, water also both creates the medium and can easily destroy it. By building his work through a self-invented process where craft, image, and logic come together in one worked-out puzzle, Zucker’s art becomes both medium and content, work depicting its own history of production as much as the American past. Zucker’s history of modernism is Roger Fry by way of the Jolly Roger—a picture plane shot through with cannon balls.

An experienced fisherman, Zucker is finally an artist who appreciates the sea first-hand. As we onced fished together for striped bass on his small boat “The Rodfather” along the rips off Montauk Point, Long Island, Zucker suggested that the fish beneath our boat lived in a state of chaos—a dog-eat-dog, or, rather, a fish-eat-fish existence of swirling chaos—that would be unimaginable to our terrestrial sensibilities. That dizzying sensation of looking down into the water from our storm-tossed boat calls to mind the feeling I get from Zucker’s own body of work, and one that I hope is reflected in the selection for this exhibition.

JOE ZUCKER, Dusk, 1998, watercolor on paper, 15 x 24 inches

JOE ZUCKER, Pirate dividing treasure on Skull Island while their vessels ride at anchor in the roadstead, 1978, felt tip marker on paper, 19 x 24 inches

JOE ZUCKER, Final Study Captain Kidd Hanging from the Gibbet, 1986, acrylic on glassine, 101 x 47 inches

Gallery Chronicle (April 2016)

Meryl Meisler, Self-Portrait, A Falling Star North Massapequa, NY, January 1975 Vintage gelatin silver print, printed 1975, 10 x 8 inches/Courtesy: Steven Kasher Gallery

THE NEW CRITERION
April 2016

Gallery Chronicle
by James Panero

On “Meryl Meisler” at Steven Kasher Gallery, New York; “The Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts” at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; and “Michelle Vaughan: Generations” at Theodore:Art, Brooklyn.

Photography becomes powerful when it combines inscrutable complexity with instinctive attraction. While we may understand little of a medium that engages our lives with ever-greater frequency, we can be compelled by its magic the less we know. After all, on its surface a photograph presents a moment of refracted light captured through near unfathomable means, either through digital impulses or analogue emulsion, imprinted largely without comment for our interpretation of its point of origin. Yet this surface works in contrast with a photograph’s absorptive depth, a space that draws us in almost automatically, and where we find reflections of our own emotions in a light of strange and often disorienting affinities.

In his 1980 book The Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes drew a distinction between a photograph’s cerebral propositioning, what he called the studium, and its emotional hook, which he called the punctum. I like to think that Woody Allen hit on something similar a few years before Barthes in his character Alvy Singer’s famously ill-received words with Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall: “Photography’s interesting, ’cause, you know, it’s—it’s a new art form, and a, uh, a set of aesthetic criteria have not emerged yet.” For which a subtitle appears as translation: “I wonder what she looks like naked?”

The photographer Meryl Meisler arrived in New York City in the mid-1970s at just the Annie Hall moment, bringing her own sensibility for revealing the disquieting humor of urbane sophistication in dialogue with middle-class Jewish values. Her work is both a fascinating document of a lost time and a delivery vehicle for its intoxicating, riotous sweetness. “I see funny,” she recently said. “People come out funny.”

Now at Steven Kasher Gallery, Meisler is showing her earliest photographs from the treasure trove of her rich body of work, which has only surfaced within the last few years since she retired from a career as a New York City Public School teacher in Bushwick, Brooklyn.1

For an unassuming retired civil servant, Meisler has been on an astonishingly meteoric rise since her work first started coming to light following the publication of two recent books of her photography, A Tale of Two Cities: Disco Era Bushwick andPurgatory & Paradise: SASSY ’70s Suburbia & The City.

The titles speak to the boundaries Meisler once regularly crossed with her camera: from her family home in the Long Island suburb of North Massapequa, to the demimonde of the clubs and dancehalls of the city’s punk, disco, and burlesque scenes, to the school children of Bushwick finding life in the burned-out streets following the blackout riots of 1977. Rather than indulging in the decadence and decay, Meisler looked for the humanizing touch in the wreckage, the sleaze, and the schmaltz, often positioning herself and her own maturation at the comedic fulcrum.

The selection at Steven Kasher brings together Meisler’s Massapequan adolescence with her first penetrating forays into the nightlife of the city. Black and white and square in format, the photographs draw on the work of Diane Arbus, an acknowledged influence, in both their stark appearance and offbeat eye. Yet Meisler manages to capture a warm light that ultimately eluded Arbus, a depressive who took her own life in Greenwich Village just a few years before Meisler’s own arrival.

In contrast to the stripped-down punk aesthetic of the city, Massapequa of the 1970s was high suburban rococo. In Meisler’s photographs, the postwar refuge of middle-class flight have become its own overgrown cul-de-sac. Clean mid-century modern lines have been inundated by the wild patterns and overwrought furniture indicative of a period we might call the South Shore Regency.

Meisler first took up the camera while studying illustration at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1970s. Returning east, she enrolled in classes with Lisette Model, the photographer who had taught Arbus. Meisler first turned the camera on herself, posing in her childhood uniforms back home. In Self-Portrait, The Girl Scout Oath, North Massapequa, NY, January 1975, she sits in the family “rumpus room” giving the three-finger salute while wearing her old uniform and former hair braids, both saved by her mother. Meisler looks out with a deadpan gaze from the near-camouflage patterns of the matching cushions and drapes. The odd symmetry of the scene is undercut by an incongruous barbell intertwined by her feet, sweatily wrapped in grip tape and on loan, it turns out, from her brother. Another image, Self-Portrait, A Falling Star, North Massapequa, NY, January 1975, finds her in what appears to be an old tap-dance outfit, smiling as she slides headfirst off the La-Z-Boy. Look closer and her frivolity amidst the suburban order of the decorous side cabinet and framed wall prints appears imperilled by a porcelain tiger prowling in her direction out of a collection of chinoiserie.

Urban archeologists will undoubtedly appreciate the grit and glamor Meisler soon found in the city’s nightlife. Stringer contracts and late-night tenacity brought her past the velvet rope of Studio 54, backstage at cbgb’s, and into even more risqué after-hour venues, where she also worked as a hostess. Yet through a 1978 ceta Artist grant, Meisler then returned to North Massapequa to create a series of photographs on Jewish identity for the American Jewish Congress. Back in the hair salons, wedding halls, dens, bedrooms, and Rosh Hashanah dinner tables, she found a world even more exotic than the exotica of the adoptive city she temporarily left behind.

Installation view of the 2016 Invitational Exhibition of the American Academy of Arts and Letters with work by Cullen Bryant Washington, Jr., Lisa Hoke, Guy Goodwin, and Patrick Strzelec/Photo: James Panero

Now through April 10, “The Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts” offers one of the few annual opportunities for outsiders to visit the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the fantastical honors society encased in beaux-arts amber at the far end of Archer Huntington’s Audubon Terrace, at Broadway and 155th Street.2

Behind the scenes, we can only imagine that this “invited” exhibition is a battleground of competing interests among the Academy’s august membership. Yet what regularly results is often one of the best annual survey shows of serious and lively contemporary art. Well displayed, and spanning a wide variety of media and styles, from abstract sculpture to hyperrealistic figuration, light installations to watercolor sunsets, this year is no different, with thirty-seven artists selected from two hundred nominations, displaying over one hundred works spread across the Academy’s campus.

The Invitational is the first part of the Academy’s series of honors. The Academy then annually distributes $250,000 to the artists of the exhibition through awards, prizes, and purchase funds, with the winners returning each May for the Academy’s “Exhibition of Work by Newly Elected Members and Recipients of Honors and Awards.” This year’s recipients, just announced at press time, reveal the Academy’s catholic interests—and good judgment. Top prizes go to Guy Goodwin’s intriguing colorful abstractions of acrylic, tempera, and cardboard; Anthony McCall’s sculptural light installation created by “computer, Quicktime movie file, video projector, and haze machine”; Nancy Mitchnick’s painterly abstractions found in the profile of Detroit’s demolished buildings; Joan Snyder’s joyful kitchen-sink assemblies of oil, acrylic, papier mâché, rope, wooden hoop, burlap, silk on linen, etching fragments, rosebuds, twigs, and glitter; and Lee Tribe’s haunting, dissolving portraits in charcoal and steel. Also honored are the lyrical-, fantastical-, and hyper-realisms of Patricia Patterson, Carmen Cicero, and Aleah Chapin, and the expressionistic abstractions of Chuck Webster. Still others, including the fraught patterning of McArthur Binion and the riotous sunsets of Graham Nickson, have been purchased for donation to American museums.

All told, the “Invitational Exhibition” again confirms that no single style holds an exclusive ticket to that “funicular up Parnassus,” in Alfred Barr’s choice phrasing—and how fortunate we are to have exhibiting institutions that operate outside of museum mandates. While the exhibition is free, visitors should be mindful of the Academy’s limited hours, while also leaving time to see the reinstallation of the Charles Ives Studio, Anna Hyatt Huntington’s sculptural program lining Audubon Terrace, and the jewel-box museum of the Hispanic Society, now fortunately chaired by the Metropolitan’s legendary retired director, Philippe de Montebello.

 I would point out that the Bushwick galleries of 56 Bogart Street are having a particularly strong month, but exceptionalism there now seems to be the rule. Among standout exhibitions are the sound pioneer Audra Wolowiec at Studio10, the disaster artist Joy Garnett at Slag, a vertiginous, cubistic interpretation of the L Train by Isidro Blasco at Black and White Gallery, and a group painting show at Life on Mars featuring Glenn Goldberg, Steve DiBenedetto, and Brenda Goodman, along with their selection of younger artists in the project space.

Michelle Vaughan, King Charles II of Spain, coefficient 0.25, 2013, Archival digital print, 30 x 22 inches/Courtesy: Theodore:Art 

An exhibition called “Generations,” on view at Theodore:Art, may be the most unnerving.3 The artist Michelle Vaughan uses a variety of copying processes, from digital reproduction to pencil drawings, to explore the history of European portraiture—in particular, the “consanguineous unions in Europe’s royal houses” from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. By overlaying portrait faces of the Spanish and Austrian lines of the Habsburg dynasty—such as Spain’s King Philip IV and Mariana of Austria, both his niece and second wife—Vaughan demonstrates how their shared physiognomies revealed increasingly compromised genomes through generations of planned and ill-fated inbreeding.

 

Working with genetic historians, Vaughan uses artistic means to show how the repeated intermarrying of the Habsburgs led to high and ultimately destructive “inbreeding coefficient numbers” that eventually “ranged higher than the offspring produced by a brother and sister” due to sequential uncle–niece marriages and prior intermarrying. For anyone who has wondered at the strange faces staring back at us from a Velázquez, it is both interesting and terrifying to realize that these deformations were not the mannerisms of Spanish style but most likely artistic improvements over genetic reality.

A degraded digital print of a 1685 portrait by Juan Carreño de Miranda of Charles II of Spain, the son of Philip IV and Mariana of Austria, is the most haunting of the exhibition. With a quarter or more of his genome consisting of identical pairs, or “coefficient 0.25,” Charles II was riddled with recessive abnormalities, leading to pronounced mental and physical retardation. Known as “the Bewitched” (el Hechizado), Charles was defined by his elongated face, a protruding “Habsburg jaw,” and a tongue so overgrown that he could barely speak or chew. Just as this print’s digital data has dissolved into a cloud of bits, Charles was an ineffective and impotent monarch, childless and heirless, whose rule marked the end of the Spanish Habsburg line.

Vaughan brilliantly overlays science, art history, and creative practice in a confluence of interests. Here is a museum-quality exhibition (attention, Met Breuer) that will change the way I look at museum portraiture.

---

1 “Meryl Meisler” opened at Steven Kasher Gallery, New York, on February 25 and remains on view through April 9, 2016.

2 “The Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts” opened at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, on March 10 and remains on view through April 10, 2016.

3 “Michelle Vaughan: Generations” opened at Theodore:Art, Brooklyn, on February 26 and remains on view through April 3, 2016.