Continuing through December 14: Howardena Pindell at Garth Greenan

Howardena Pindell’s decades-long career seems to be an effort to map and capture this secret order of the universe. Her enigmatic works revolve around what remains unseen and unexplained, blending abstract intuition with the rigor of scientific observation. Moving fluidly across media, her practice combines elements of mystery with a precision that recalls the logic of natural systems. Above: Howerdena Pindell, Tesseract #25, 2024

A career survey, now on view at Garth Greenan Gallery, provides an invaluable look at Pindell’s rich and diverse body of work. She stands among a trailblazing group of African American abstractionists—including Sam Gilliam, Jack Whitten and Frank Bowling—who, for too long, were sidelined by the dominant narrative of postwar abstraction. Recently, however, these artists and their ilk have begun receiving the recognition they deserve. Pindell’s approach to abstraction, in particular, is deeply spiritual rather than purely expressive, rooted in a personal and enigmatic symbolic system. Her work seems to trace the connections, links and central forces that hold the universe together, offering a profound meditation on the nature of existence.

Garth Greenan Gallery, 545 West 20th Street, New York, NY Info

Continuing: Ceremonies Out Of The Air | Ralph Lemon at MoMA PS1

The exhibition  features more than sixty artworks made over the last decade across disciplines and marks the debut of several collaborative performances. One of the most significant figures to emerge from New York’s downtown scene, Lemon has expanded the capacity for storytelling across contexts and traditions. Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon comprises dance, drawings, photographs, sculpture, paintings, and video throughout the museum’s expansive third-floor galleries, alongside a synchronous program of live works staged in a dedicated performance space. 

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Rant redux (2020–24), a major four-channel video and sound installation realized with Kevin Beasley and based on the live performance Rant (2019–ongoing). The performance program includes the US debut of In Proximity (2022) and the New York premiere of Tell it anyway (2024), and invites a series of special guests to respond to Lemon’s drawings from Untitled (The greatest [Black] art history story ever told. Unfinished) (2015–present). Lemon’s work takes the body as an archive of raw emotion, physical labor, and received histories to challenge the ways we have been taught to see the world. Program Calendar

Through March 24, 2025 at MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Queens, NY Info

Thursday, November 21, 6–8pm: Cecilia Vicuña | La Migranta Blue Nipple at Lehmann Maupin

The exhibition, encompassing all three floors of the gallery, are informed conceptually by the principles of “Arte Precario,” or Precarious Art, the artist’s own autonomous aesthetic system that foregrounds ephemerality, intangibility, and that which disappears. The title of the exhibition, La Migranta Blue Nipple, makes reference to Vicuña’s personal experience with migration and to the brutal treatment of migrant and immigrant communities that she has witnessed while living in this country. 

Visitors to the exhibition will encounter a series of paintings completed this year that recreate, in oil on canvas, drawings Vicuña made in 1978 but which have since been lost or destroyed, existing only in the artist’s memory and in limited photographic documentation. She then traveled from Bogota to Rio de Janeiro, across the Amazon, where she encountered the sacred world and living rituals of the local Indigenous and mestizo Afro Brazilian peoples.

In response to her journey, she made 30 drawings in chalk and pastel on brown wrapping paper. Many of these works contain references to Orixás––deities worshiped in the Yoruba religion which Vicuña learned of during her time crossing the Amazon––combined with popular culture images collected from her dreams, popular songs, common phrases, and other vernacular sources such as common insults used in her native Chile. Her new paintings bring these original drawings of hybrid Orixás back to life in forms that embody mermaids (Iemanjá), Pachamama (Incan earth mother / mother of space & time), Santa Bárbara (mother of the home), La música latinoamericana (goddess of Latin American music), Flora (goddess of fertility), and San Martin de Porres (patron saint of social justice, racial harmony, and mixed-race people), among many others.

Lehmann Maupin, 501 West 24th Street, New York, NY Info

Thursday, November 21, 6-8 pm: Book Talk at National Academy

The National Academy of Design invites you to a conversation about the new book, ‘Building Culture: Sixteen Architects on Hove: How Museums Are Shaping the Future of Art, Architecture, and Public Space’ by Julian Rose. Above: Rubell Museum interior, Annabelle Selldorf, Architect

‘Building Culture’ gathers interviews with celebrated architect, about the design of art museums. In this event, the author and architects featured in the book, including Annabelle Selldorf and Donna Dennis, explore the relationship between contemporary art and architecture, discussing the complex challenges faced by architects in creating spaces for art and by artists in taking on architecture as their medium or subject. Admission is free, but RSVP required

National Academy of Design, 519 West 26th Street, FL 2, New York

Tuesday, November 26, 6:30-8:30pm: Gong() GatheringWorkshop & Participatory Performance at EFA 

The Gong workshops, collaborative sound-making, and participatory performances, are inspired by a community gathering gong ensemble found throughout Southeast Asia. Gong() Gathering is a collaborative platform for sharing, exchanging ideas, and collective conscious raising where elekhlekha invite guest artist collaborators MORAKANA, an outskirt, Melissa Almaguer, and participants to collectively investigate, consciously reflect on, and unfold Southeast Asia's layers of political complexity through the continuity of oral and aural history and sound cultures' lineage. 

Different roots and communities and their way of collaborative sound-making delve into ritual, history, and political complexities of the region. The struggle to unlearn the current dominant system, relearning local histories, and discovering a common ground from Southeast Asia, the Global South, and beyond the nation-state leads to defining decolonized possibilities.  Free with RSVP

EFA Project Space, 323 West 39^th Street, FL2, New York, NY Info