Lorenzo Homar was a pioneering printmaker, poster designer, calligrapher, painter, illustrator, caricaturist, and costume and theatrical set designer. Active from the 1950s through the 1990s, few equal his impact and influence as a teacher of poster design and printmaking in Latin America. 

This exhibition focuses on his poster output over a thirty year period during which time his work reflected the complex history of Puerto Rico, encompassing elements of Taíno, Spanish, and African cultures as well as the rising tensions between tradition and modernity under the Luis Muñoz Marín government. His influence is so extensive that today he is known as the father of the Puerto Rican poster.  Info

Save the date: First Friday, April 4, 1-7 pm:

Stop by the Poster History Timeline on First Friday for a printmaking demonstration led by Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop! This month, try your hand at linoleum block printing inspired by the new exhibition Puerto Rico in Print: The Posters of Lorenzo Homar. Tickets $10

Accessibility Note: Masks and clear masks are available free of charge at the museum. Assistive listening devices and stools are available. ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation or a CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation) is available upon request. Please contact access@posterhouse.org or (914) 295-2387 to request interpretation services and to address any other accessibility needs. For other event-related questions, please contact info@posterhouse.org.

Poster House, 119 West 23^rd Street, New York, NY Info

National Arbor Day—the last Friday in April—highlights the unofficially designated Arbor Month, with all kinds of activities all around town. At Madison Square Park, which believes that every day is Arbor Day, you can craft a poem, share a joke, or write a letter about your favorite trees there and deposit your creation  in one of the “mailboxes” stationed throughout the park. As an accredited Level II Arboretum (the only such designation in Manhattan), Madison Square Park boasts over 300 trees and a rich diversity of species and shapes, making it hard to choose a single favorite.

Letters to the Trees is a favorite traditions among the organizers at Madison Square Park. They look forward to reading your submissions and will share a few of their favorites in a future newsletter and on social media. 

Click here to find out more and view the map highlighting all the mailbox locations in the park.

Maison Square Park, along Fifth Avenue between 23^rd and 26^th Streets, New York, NY Info

Syd Mead | Future Pastime In Chelsea

If you thought the future would be cooler, you may have Syd Mead to blame. His serene and sensual landscapes, full of muscular androgynes and chrome-coated spacecraft, informed everything from automotive and electronics design to the appearance of more than a dozen iconic Hollywood movies. His paintings, which shaped our image of the future as much as any twentieth century art, are aglow with the promise of what might have been––and hopefully may yet be. Above: Syd Mead, Running of the 200th Kentucky Derby, 1975. Gouache on panel

Although best known for his designs for dystopian sci-fi films such as Blade Runner, TRON and Aliens, Mead was unshakably optimistic, and in his own work technology is always put to good use. This idealism was grounded in scientific fact: guided by his industrial design training, Mead drafted future architecture and technology to seem plausibly real. As a result, his paintings are as prescient as they are fantastical: from gleaming new hyperbuildings in Asia to our arti- ficially intelligent mobile phones, much of our contemporary world looks just as he envisioned it. Mead’s prediction for the Los Angeles Skyline 2015 (1985), painted just a few years after he designed the dingy street scapes in Blade Runner, feels like a sunny riposte to that neo-noir LA, with boulevards that are sparkling clean. Behind the iconic City Hall, an angular skyscraper rising beyond the painting’s frame seems to presage the downtown towers that have broken ground over the past decade. 

Space in a Syd Mead painting is always radiant and dynamic, full of elements moving gracefully at supersonic speed. Although in- spired by early futurist illustrations by Chelsey Bonestell and others, it has few true precedents in the art-historical canon. On the other hand, Mead’s process, which he likened to analogue computer map- ping, links him with the great painters of an earlier age. His favored medium, gouache on panel, is shared by artists as disparate as Hans Holbein and JMW Turner. Mead called it “old school”, the deceptively simple trick of “applying paint to cardboard with animal hairs at the end of a stick.” The light in his paintings, meanwhile, is soft and lustrous as if viewed through a camera lens or a pool of still, clear water. It has
a distinctly Pre-Raphaelite feel. That school of Victorian painting was informed by advances in photography; Mead’s art similarly depicts quantum machines with a much older technology. 

Through May 21, Tuesday-Sunday, 10am-6pm at 534 West 26^th Street, New York, NY Info 

A Rose Is at Flag Art Foundation

Drawing inspiration from Cy Twombly’s monumental, four-part painting The Rose III (2008, above), this exhibition situates the rose—both physically and figuratively—as an icon of beauty, enticement, excess, and abjection, all at the same time. Across a wide array of media, including video, sculpture, painting, and text, the exhibition considers the rose in all of its symbolic and ritual complexity, ultimately seeking to complicate our familiarity with it as a vehicle for consumption and desire. 

Throughout the exhibition, viewers are invited to consider the flower as a site of overlapping and contradictory meanings. Though the combination of advertising and cultural ritual has made the rose synonymous with Valentine’s Day and romantic gestures more broadly, it has equally strong associations with funeral processions and end-of-life commemorations. James Lee Byars’s sculpture Rose Table of Perfect (1989) highlights this duality, as 3,333 freshly cut red roses are studded into a perfect red sphere, only to fade and eventually die over the course of the exhibition. Like the Twombly painting, Byars’s sculpture complicates our familiarity with the rose by combining its conventionality with its ultimate undoing. As a foil, Tony Feher’s funeral wreath Saint Rosalie Intercedes on Behalf of the Plague Victims of Palermo (1991) positions white plastic roses into a perfect circle, creating a dime-store gesture that will never diminish. Equal parts glamorous and devastating is Peter Hujar’s photograph Candy Darling on her Deathbed (1973), made at the performer’s invitation on the occasion of her inevitable passing due to terminal illness. Surrounded by lavish flower arrangements—as if in her dressing room after a show—Darling is recumbent under dramatic lighting, wrapped in hospital bed sheets, her make-up just so, with a single long-stem red rose lying next to her failing body. 

Artists include: Farah Al Qasimi, Polly Apfelbaum, Arakawa, Genesis Belanger, Louise Bourgeois, Joe Brainard, James Lee Byars, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Ann Craven, Sara Cwynar, Alex Da Corte, Jay DeFeo, Ethyl Eichelberger, Awol Erizku, Cerith Wyn Evans, Tony Feher, Allison Janae Hamilton, Gabriella Hirst, Peter Hujar, John Jarboe, Anna Jermolaewa, Sarah Jones, Anselm Kiefer, Lee Krasner, Dr. Lakra, Linder, George Platt Lynes, Robert Mapplethorpe, Katie Paterson, Nicolas Party, Kay Rosen, James Rosenquist, Taryn Simon, Charles Sheeler, Kiki Smith, Haim Steinbach, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, among others.

Flag Art Foundation, 545 West 25^th Street, New York, NY Info

Continuing: Lynda Benglis at Bueno & Co.

Bueno & Co is pleased to present Focus, a curated series dedicated to highlighting rare and significant works of art. The inaugural work in this series is DYANE 1986 (above) by Lynda Benglis, a striking example of her celebrated pleated metal sculptures. Benglis's pleated works are characterized by their fluidity and tactile presence, achieved through the artist’s meticulous folding and twisting of wire mesh. This process, followed by a metallized finish, creates a contrast between the polished surface and the textured crevices between each pleat, emphasizing the sculpture’s organic forms and movement.

Benglis’s innovative use of materials challenges the boundaries between hard and soft, liquid and solid, embodying her unique approach to transformation and texture. The physicality of her sculptures fosters a visceral connection, allowing viewers to experience the tactile nature of her creations, which blur the lines between the manmade and the natural. DYANE 1986 stands as a testament to this bold experimentation and is an exceptional example of her mastery in this medium. Also currently on view are works by Joan Mitchell, Sean Scully, Andy Warhol, and Matthew Wong. 

Bueno & Co., 508 West 26 Street, Floor 6, New York, NY. Info