Alexander Gray Associates

Alexander Gray Associates, New York presents Melvin Edwards: Lots of Work to Do, the artist’s eighth solo show with the Gallery. A focused survey of nearly sixty years of work, the exhibition takes its title from the artist’s 2019 interview with The Museum of Modern Art in which he outlines his commitment to “… making sculpture … that will remind my human compatriots in the world that we got lots of work to do.” Featuring a selection of freestanding sculptures, wall reliefs, and works on paper, the show highlights Edwards’s ability to weld personal and collective memories into steel—an action that charges his work with a political urgency that resonates today. Edwards created Lynch Fragment Landscape (1963–64) the same year as Some Bright Morning (1963), his first Lynch Fragment. Much like this series of wall reliefs, Landscape incorporates industrial and agricultural tools, as well as scrap metal, into its structure. By presenting objects associated with mechanical and artistic production that can also serve as weapons, the sculpture invites overlapping interpretations centered around labor, creativity, and oppression. “Metaphorically, I wanted to load it up,” Edwards explains. “I really did want to find some way to have my concerns about social matters be some sort of starting point for my work.” Distinguished by their evocative materiality, works like Homage to the Music and the Musicians (1966), abstract African instruments into basic geometric volumes. Roughly arranging each form—allowing them to bounce against one another until they achieve a delicate balance—Edwards suggests the pounding dynamism of percussion. Similarly, Pamberi (1988) uses its rocker form to translate the pendulum-like kineticism of Alexander Calder and Jean Tinguely’s works into a syncopated motion that recalls the rhythmic structures of African Diaspora music. As Edwards outlines, “When I rocked … it lagged behind in terms of gravity … So it affects what would be the normal balance. … So I said, whoa, [this] syncopates the motion of the rocker! … And I use the word with a sense of sensitivity to syncopation used in relation to African American music, as an emphatic quality.” For Edwards, there is an intrinsic connection between welding and composing music. Creating a sculpture from salvaged scrap—uniting disparate pieces of steel imbued with polytemporal cultural histories—is akin to, he argues, “… creating music. ... The same sound one time is a beautiful high point in an aria, another time it's just a scream.” Simultaneously aria and scream, Edwards’s Lynch Fragments like Tilt (2015) transform tools for work and violence—chains, railroad spikes, hammers, pipes, etc.—into a sculptural language that gives voice to multiple narratives. Complicating the series’ direct connection between material and form, the artist notes, “The work has nothing that is literal. … There are some elements like chains, people love to jump to slavery and oppression—that can be, but nobody remembers why chains were invented. … I know that’s the human invention of a stronger kind of rope. Everything else is implication.” Also dealing in implication, Edwards’s 1970s works on paper feature brightly colored silhouettes of barbed wire and chain, creating a jarring disjunction between the pictured materials and their potential use. Deliberately siting his work in this disjunction, Edwards reminds viewers that there is still work to do. Rooted in process, his sculptures and drawings look backwards and forwards, across generations and continents, to reflect on social and political events. As Edwards once concluded, “Yesterday always proposes tomorrow.” Edwards’s work is the subject of the 2024 survey Some Bright Morning, presented by the Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany; this exhibition will travel to Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland and Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France in 2025 and 2026. Other major retrospectives of his work include Melvin Edwards: Five Decades, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX (2015), traveled to Zimmerli Museum of Art, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ (2015) and to Columbus Museum of Art, OH (2016), and Melvin Edwards Sculpture: A Thirty-Year Retrospective 1963–1993, Neuberger Museum of Art, State University of New York at Purchase (1993), traveled to The Art Museum at Florida International University, Miami (1994), Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH (1994), and to McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX (1995). His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Dia Beacon, NY (2022); deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA (2022); Public Art Fund, City Hall Park, New York, NY (2021); Baltimore Museum of Art, MD (2019); and Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil (2018), among others. He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including New York: 1962–1964, The Jewish Museum, New York, NY (2022); The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (2021), traveled to Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, TX (2021); Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom (2017), traveled to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK (2018), Brooklyn Museum, NY (2018), The Broad, Los Angeles, CA (2019), de Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA (2019), and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX (2020); Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic 1945–1965,Haus der Kunst,Munich, Germany (2016); and the 56th Venice Biennale: All the World’s Futures, Italy (2015). Edwards’s work is represented in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, NY; Dia Art Foundation, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. Edwards taught at Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey, from 1972 to 2002. In 2014, he received an honorary doctorate from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston. Edwards is also represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin and New York.

Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown, presents Alannah Farrell: Erect, an exhibition of recent works on paper. For the artist, the show’s title is a personal tribute to Emily Brontë, who wrote, “Having levelled my palace, don’t erect a hovel and admire your own charity …”

Alexander Gray Associates, New York presents Carrie Moyer: Timber!, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the Gallery. Moyer’s new abstract paintings and works on paper speak to the sensations provoked by social and environmental instability. The show’s title, Moyer writes, “is a warning best imagined in a comic strip. It brings awareness to one’s surroundings. Waiting for something to fall, the other shoe to drop.” Throughout her career, Moyer has deployed abstraction as a vehicle for queer expression and politics. As she attests, “The main impetus for my work is always what can I do with this material, acrylic paint, and what can it suggest (poetically, conceptually, materially, physically, etc.)?” In her recent paintings, movement, gravity, and stasis are investigated anew through an expanded repertoire of materials that radically alter the surface of the canvas as well as the flow of poured paint. Inspired by the magnitude of geological processes, atmospheric currents, and planetary orbits, Moyer explains, “I am thinking about very large forces, and how they might show up in a painting.” The artist’s recent canvases such as Tears on My Pillow (2024) incorporate pumice, an extrusive volcanic rock. Other compositions like Etna’s Folly (2024) integrate powdered minerals derived from semi-precious stones, metal, and graphite. Using these shimmering natural substances, Moyer invokes associations between painting and alchemy. In doing so, she complicates an art historical lineage stretching back to prehistoric cave painting by adopting materials linked to extractive industries. Moyer’s canvases and collages present physical and social transformation as a process that occurs across multiple strata of perception. “I want to make surfaces that are expansive, that operate both microscopically and macroscopically,” she states. Her carefully layered compositions juxtapose vivid, fluid drips and luminous expanses of pigment with fixed contours and matte grounds. Works such as Crying – Waiting – Hoping (2024), with its undulations of fiber paste, echo both anatomical curves and molten flows, while compositions like Pyroplastica (2024) interlock bodily and natural phenomena in moments of uncanny sensual contact. Emphasizing the sensorial, the artist employs techniques drawn from the legacy of post-war abstraction—drawing, pouring, staining, rolling, sprinkling, and mopping—while integrating strategies of graphic design. Meanwhile, the quick-witted titles of these works point toward, per Moyer, “the myriad problems we face as humans, as nations, as a planet … and yet we go on. There’s something funny about it.” Moyer’s paintings and drawings expand traditional notions of abstraction by imbuing associations between process, form, and content with her feminist socio-political perspective. The artist’s recent works speak to, in her words, “both the pleasure and precarity of the moment.” Moyer’s work has been the subject of numerous solo and two-person presentations, including Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe: Tabernacles for Trying Times, Portland Museum of Art, ME (2020), traveled to Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2021); Carrie Moyer: Pirate Jenny, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY (2013), traveled to Canzani Center Gallery, Columbus College of Art and Design, OH (2014), and SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2014); and Carrie Moyer: Interstellar, Worcester Art Museum, MA (2012), among others. Moyer has participated in many group exhibitions, including Making Their Mark, Shah Garg Foundation, New York, NY (2023), traveling to Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA (forthcoming 2024); Whitney Biennial 2017, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); Agitprop!, Brooklyn Museum, New York (2015), and others. The artist’s works are represented in public collections, including Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including National Academician, National Academy of Design (2019); Guggenheim Fellowship (2013); Anonymous Was A Woman (2009), and others. Moyer is a Professor and the Co-Director of the graduate studio program at Hunter College in New York. She is also on the Board of Governors at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.

Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown presents Groundswell, a group exhibition bringing together historical and contemporary works from an intergenerational group of artists who use landscape to suggest alternate, yet familiar worlds. Featuring work by LaKela Brown, Teresita Fernández, Anders Hamilton, Kat Lyons, Donald Moffett, Katie Stout, Alexandria Tarver, and Eva Watson-Schütze, the show spotlights paintings, sculptures, and photographs that blur boundaries between the existent and the fictional. Approaching contemporary landscape as caught in a delicate equilibrium between ruin and regeneration, Groundswell finds beauty amidst the precarity of our current global environmental and sociopolitical moment. Central to this presentation, Eva Watson-Schütze’s ethereal early twentieth-century photograph, Nude Woman on a Rock (1904), speaks to past perceptions of the natural world. One of the founding members of the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony, the artist created this image in Woodstock, NY. Reflective of the colony’s founding utopian principles, this evocative image transforms the landscape of the Hudson Valley into an otherworldly backdrop for mythical figures. In opposition to its mythic and picturesque qualities, in recent years the environment has emerged as a significant site of conflict. Along these lines, Teresita Fernández examines the landscape as a space where the physical and social meet—where the aggression and violence of imperialism and the disenfranchisement and resistance of the colonized color reality. Collaging together an ashen tropical landscape, Yucatán (Burned) 1 (2023) elicits contemplation on the destructive, yet regenerative powers of environmental practices. In parallel, Donald Moffett takes both the cosmos and the canvas as a surface of incision. Long recognized for embedding social, political and sexual issues in his work, Moffett’s Lot 021007/20 (OO, night loop) (2007/2020) goes beyond mere abstraction to include references to the natural world—emblematically assaulted, yet radiant. Meanwhile, Kat Lyons’s large-scale canvases examine the complexities of animal life to question the nature of human categorization and understanding. “I’m interested in how we relate to animals as both physical and symbolic capital and how those relationships shape their world,” Lyons explains. In compositions such as Root (2024), her animal subjects transcend anthropocentric realities by traversing various planes of existence, challenging normative frameworks of perception. In contrast, Anders Hamilton and Alexandria Tarver’s works meditate on landscapes mediated by urbanity. Working in Brooklyn, Hamilton intervenes within natural phenomena. In sculptures like Obelisk (Auxin) (2023), he entombs the ashes of twigs, leaves, and flowers collected from around his studio in clay. Likewise, Tarver's process begins on evening walks around New York City. These forays are when she discovers small floral scenes, which she photographs before translating them into paint—an act that transposes the blooms into a landscape sited at the juncture of memory, idealization, and presence. LaKela Brown and Katie Stout craft sculptures from flora that references personal and collective histories. Coopting the iconography of bouquets, Brown’s monochromatic arrangements of vegetables and fruit present the landscape as a witness to diaspora and displacement. Works like African/American Bouquet with Six Collard Green Leaves (Upright) (2024) assert a migratory and still under-historicized Black American culinary tradition and identity that has indelibly shaped the land. Like Brown, Stout’s work also mines the history of horticultural display. Her dynamic, vase-like vessel synthesizes centuries of art history, borrowing from the visual lexicon of Rococo decorative arts, as well as modernist biomorphic sculpture. Stout’s exuberant display of gilded floral abundance—a burgeoning micro-landscape—reflects her interest in meditating on the ephemerality of the natural world. As a result, the sculpture emerges, in the artist’s words, as a “strong metaphor for life, death, and sexuality.” Groundswell offers an expansive view of landscape as a genre that meaningfully intersects with political realities—past, present, and future. Considering the environment as both alien to and entangled with human existence, the works on view chart manifold paths through the complicated nature of their surroundings.

Alexander Gray Associates, New York presents Conjuring Tenderness: Paintings from 1987, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Hugh Steers (1962–1995). The exhibition takes its title from a 1994 quote by the artist: “It's like conjuring ... It's as if painting it will make it become real. That painting of a man holding another man is conjuring that tenderness, that hope that someone will still care about you and will be there.” The works on view track subtle, but significant shifts in the artist’s style and subject matter throughout 1987—the year of his positive HIV diagnosis. In this body of work, Steers transforms his relationship to academic portraiture and the human figure, depicting intimate scenes that speak to creative persistence amid tragedy. Works like Chess (1987) capture the increasingly sophisticated painterly realism Steers developed in the service of painting the “nullities of life,” a phrase he borrowed from a 1990 review of a biography of Vincent van Gogh. “So much of art is about the great climactic moment,” Steers explains. “My work is concerned with confronting the horror at existence—the discovery that you may never love someone or get beyond a certain point or realize certain aspirations.” Juxtaposed figures hunched over a chessboard recall the compositional drama of Caravaggio, the restless color of Pierre Bonnard, and the melancholy visual economy of Edward Hopper—a painterly triumvirate Steers encountered at the National Gallery during his childhood in Washington, D.C. It follows that Steers’s painterly finesse is grounded in art history; he once described his work as “allegorical realism” created “to draw the viewer in through the lure of a comfortingly recognizable style and then confront him with a subject matter of a challenging nature.” Scenes such as those depicted in Dropping In (1987) and Kneeling and Standing (1987) reference religious iconography and craft compositional hierarchies between the figures. For Steers, traditional narratives offer a shared cultural history to be directly invoked, but immediately disrupted through the use of vibrant color and bodily distortion. Steers’s figurative scenes define a dramatic sphere both supported and subverted by its domestic surroundings. Lush materials and warm sources of light populate his barren apartments, infusing an evocative romanticism into each spartan interior. Moreover, works such as Shower Curtain (1987) and White Room (1987) evince the artist’s interest in scenes of bathing and states of undress, a genre common in Renaissance and Baroque art. Related to various themes of affliction, voyeurism, and intimacy, Steers’s bathers remain intentionally ambiguous—only ever partially exposed to the viewer. Despite the portentous nature of these works—Steers ultimately succumbed to AIDS-related health complications in 1995 at the age of 32—these compositions trace the artist’s commitment to capturing the banal surreality of daily life while also foregrounding his desire for human connection during a time of personal and global tragedy. Reflective of the artist’s state, Conjuring Tenderness: Paintings from 1987 offers poignant remedies to the loss, isolation, and uncertainty of lives and communities that hang in the balance. Steers’s paintings have featured in group presentations at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden, Norway (2022); RISD Museum, Providence, RI (2021); Denver Art Museum, CO (2020); Museum of the City of New York, NY (2017); Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw, GA (2016); The Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY (2016); Alphawood Foundation, Chicago, IL (2016); and Tacoma Art Museum, WA (2015). His work has also been exhibited at ANOTHER SPACE, New York, NY (2023); David Zwirner Gallery, Paris, France (2021); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2013); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY (1994); Richard Anderson, New York, NY (2000, 1997, 1994, 1993, 1992); and The Drawing Center, New York, NY (1987), among others. Steers’s work is in private and public art collections, including the Denver Art Museum, CO; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Walker Art Center, Minnesota, MN; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, among others. In 1989, Steers received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship. A comprehensive monograph of Steers’s work was published by Visual AIDS in 2015.

Alexander Gray Associates, New York presents Ronny Quevedo: Composite Portals, the artist’s second solo exhibition with the Gallery. Positioning Andean textiles as conduits between the precolonial past and our postcolonial present, Composite Portals approaches the body as a site where history is accumulated and worn. The works in the exhibition abstract the visual languages of uniforms, tunics, and quipus to reflect on identity and cross-cultural exchange. They serve, per Quevedo, as “tribute to places known, unknown, and lost.” Quevedo’s new works weave together personal and collective histories to map connections between lineage and inheritance. Taking inspiration from precolonial textiles, these compositions examine traditional patterns of distortion, abstraction, and deconstruction to underscore the ways in which the past is constantly re-formed by the present. Works such as Powers of 10 (a fifth floor walk-up) (2024) and broadway wiphala (2024) take up the gridded design of centuries-old Andean garments as a geometry with universal and culturally-specific meanings. For Quevedo, this pattern provides the means “to create movement within the static structure of the checkerboard.” Its marriage of interlocking opposites challenges binary thinking and fixed systems of meaning by simultaneously referencing pre-Columbian and modernist art histories. Quevedo notes the continued influence of Édouard Glissant and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui on his new body of work. His compositions continue both postcolonial thinkers' projects of advocating for multiplicity, pushing against reductive dichotomies to make space for complex interconnection. Illustrative of this approach, works such as el valle de la periferia (the valley of the periphery), an ode to Don Francisco de Arobe y sons Pedro and Domingo (2023) illuminate untold histories of the colonial matrix. Quevedo re-envisions the past, describing this pursuit as “[reimagining] points of origin.” Through his embrace of polyvocality, Quevedo situates his work between histories and identities. Works like myself when I am real – sin ti soy nadie (2021) seamlessly insert symbolic materials from his parents’ biographies into indigenous Andean cultural traditions—an action that, per the artist, “unearths a personal past that migrated many places and times.” The interstitial space occupied by this and other related works allows Quevedo to approach abstraction not as a formal tool, but rather a transformative lens through which displaced, marginalized, or obscured cultures are transposed onto our present moment. Weaving together opposing materials and diverging narratives, Quevedo upholds a commitment to “interlacing a wide span of time and space. From the Andes to The South Bronx, these interpretations of a re-imagined self … give life to an ancestry of abstraction and transformational figures.” Ronny Quevedo’s work will be featured in upcoming solo and group presentations at Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; The Menil Collection, Houston, TX; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA. In 2022, he was commissioned by Delta Air Lines in partnership with the Queens Museum to create a large-scale permanent installation at LaGuardia Airport, Queens, NY. Other solo presentations of Quevedo’s work include Ronny Quevedo: ule ole allez, Locust Projects, Miami, FL (2022); Ronny Quevedo: offside, University Art Museum, University of Albany, NY (2022); Ronny Quevedo: at the line, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, CO (2021); and no hay medio tiempo / there is no halftime, Queens Museum, NY (2017), traveled to Temple Contemporary, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Philadelphia, PA (2019), among others. His work has been in numerous group exhibitions, including El Dorado: Myths of Gold, Americas Society/Council of the Americans, New York, NY (2023); Gilded: Contemporary Artists Explore Value and Worth, Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NC (2022), traveled to Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN (2023), and Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, Hanover, NH (2024); Pacha, Llacta, Wasichay; Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2018); and The World’s Game: Fútbol and Contemporary Art, Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL (2018), among others. Quevedo’s work is in the collections of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, NY; Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, CO; Denver Art Museum, CO; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. He is the recipient of many awards and grants, including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Grant (2022); Joan Mitchell Fellowship (2021); Jerome Hill Artists Fellowship (2019); Socrates Sculpture Park Artist Fellowship (2017); Queens Museum / Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists (2016); and Eliza Long Prize, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2014 & 2013), among others.

Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown presents Bethany Collins: Years, an exhibition of recent work by the artist that maps the interconnection between loss and identity. Building on Collins’s first exhibition with the Gallery in 2023, this focused presentation foregrounds her Years series—black, blind embossed prints of public notices placed by formerly enslaved individuals seeking loved ones. The black paper used in these works obfuscates the notices’ text, and, by extension, the missing family they describe. In this way, the dark, textured surfaces of prints like Years, 1865 (The Black Republican) (2023) force viewers to grapple with illegibility and the unknown—that which remains lost. Imbuing words with absence, Collins’s Years transforms the act of reading into endless searching—a metamorphosis that echoes the subtext of the notices, themselves, as well as the actions of the men and women who first placed them. Literalizing the connection between language and loss, the 2023 artist book The Battle Hymn of the Republic: A Hymnal physically excises paper from its binding until all that remains is, in the artist’s words, “the dust of language.” The book collates one hundred different versions of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a patriotic Union song written in the midst of the American Civil War, lasering out the shared score and leaving a charred corpus to past (in)cohesion. “[Erasure] makes me feel I can control a text that feels out of my hands,” Collins explains. “I feel a physical mastering of language. By deciding what’s legible, I’m dragging out the meaning already there.” As such, Collins’s Southern Review turns to erasure as a method for revealing meaning. Using charcoal to obscure the text of the venerable literary journal, the artist translates the language of redaction into a formalist play of black and white—a gesture that makes visible the ways in which race is embedded in its pages. Collins ultimately uses language—and its absence—as a charged lens through which to critically examine history, uncovering hidden structures and identities. Her works collapse past and present, fracturing texts to rewrite American narratives. Collins concludes, “… struggling with the duality of language—its potential and inevitable failure to make sense of the world—remains the basis for my making.” Collins’s work is the subject of a solo exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum, WA (2024), in recognition of her having won the museum’s Gwendolyn and Jacob Lawrence Prize (2023). Her work is also included in the triennial the future is present, the harbinger is home, Prospect.6, New Orleans, LA (2024). Other recent one-person exhibitions include Bethany Collins: Accord, Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Arts, Auburn, AL (2023); America: A Hymnal, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK (2021); Chorus, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO (2019); and Benediction, The University of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington, KY (2019). Other group exhibitions include Monochrome Multitudes, Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, IL (2022); The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA (2021), traveled to Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, TX (2021), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2022), and Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, CO (2022); and Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA (2020), traveled to Seattle Art Museum, WA (2021) and The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (2021), among others. Collins’s work is represented in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Saint Louis Art Museum, MO; Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, IL; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY, among others. She is the recipient of many awards and grants, including the Joan Mitchell Fellowship (2022); Lucas Artist Fellowship, Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, CA (2019); Artadia Award, Chicago, IL and Atlanta, GA (2019 and 2014); Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship, Chicago, IL (2019); Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, New York, NY (2018); and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2015). Bethany Collins is also represented by PATRON Gallery, Chicago, IL.

Alexander Gray Associates, New York presents Jennie C. Jones: Tonal Center, the artist’s third solo exhibition with the Gallery. Turning to the geometry of musical notation, hushed colors often activated by red tones, and poetic language to create evocative abstractions, Tonal Center highlights Jones’s ability to synthesize reductive compositional strategies and measured improvisation, crafting objects that bridge visual and sonic perception. This new body of work expands upon the concerns of the artist’s most recent New York exhibition at the Guggenheim in 2022. Tonal Center borrows its title from a recent piece of Jones’s writing, wherein she describes her “search for a free and shifting tonal center with sound, paint, and collage.” The term—a synonym for the key of a composition, or the note around which a composition’s chords and melody harmonically meld—embodies the steady yet ranging deconstruction of modernist visual languages that Jones’s practice embarks upon, making space for new meaning through, in the artist’s words, “the radicality of refusal and the courage that it requires.” In a departure from earlier Acoustic Panel Paintings, which were constructed from noise-absorbing fiberglass panels, Jones’s recent canvases also employ architectural felt, an industrial material also known for its sound-dampening qualities. Just as the use of felt pushes Jones’s paintings into more sculptural, relief-like domains, so too does the mingling of fiberglass and felt allow each object to create its own hushed sonic environment. The artist wraps the sides of her recent canvases in felt, viewing this dynamic gesture as a simultaneous crescendo and diminuendo for the work. In this way, the felt both punctuates the canvas’s relationship with the wall and allows the work to expand and diminish in impact as it reaches its visual conclusion. Bridging wall and floor, Phrasing to the floor, softly (Active Pedal) (2024) literalizes Minimalism’s recasting of painting as object while subverting its art historical constraints, using built up geometries and monochromatic blocks of color. Its composition and that of other related works emphasize, per Jones, “a maximalist minimalist approach [which] means my practice is rich in metaphor, research, concept, yet paired down to its vernacular.” The exhibition’s works largely diverge from the cool grays of Jones’s characteristic palette; instead, they draw on a warmer variety of neutral hues made available by a specialty acoustic textile manufacturer. Activating contrasting visual echoes, Jones’s tonal progressions create alternating moments of dissonance and harmony through the counterbalance of serial repetition and rhythmic development. Tonal Center highlights the interrelated visual chords that Jones’s work has built over time, channeling through her hybrid objects the spirit and tradition of experimental music as well as its critique by Black sonic practitioners. Recent variations in the color, materiality, and architectural physicality of the work bring to a pitch evasive transformations within Jones’s oeuvre—a series of slow transpositions that refuses to be codified. In 2024, Jones was announced as the artist selected for the final chapter of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Roof Garden Commission, producing her first multi-work outdoor sculptural installation for the Museum’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden in 2025. Jones’s solo exhibitions include Jennie C. Jones: Dynamics, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2022); Jennie C. Jones: Constant Structure, The Arts Club of Chicago, IL (2020); Compilation, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, TX (2016); Absorb/Diffuse, The Kitchen, New York, NY (2013); Directions: Jennie C. Jones: Higher Resonance, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (2013); Counterpoint, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2011); and RED, BIRD, BLUE, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, GA (2009), among others. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including In With The New..., Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA (2022); Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, New Museum, New York, NY (2021); Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, New Orleans, LA (2020); Ground/work, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA (2020); Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (2020); and The Shape of Shape, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2019), among others. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2017); Rose Art Museum, Ruth Ann and Nathan Perlmutter Artist-in-Residence Award (2017); Robert Rauschenberg Award (2016); Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2013); The Studio Museum in Harlem, Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize (2012); and William H. Johnson Prize (2008).

Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown presents Luis Camnitzer: "Alteration of the World (1967–78)," the artist’s eighth solo exhibition with the Gallery. The show highlights core tenets of Camnitzer’s practice—the deconstruction of language, the questioning of individual authorship, and the critique of art’s commodification. Encompassing printmaking, photography, and sculpture, the exhibition emphasizes the irreverent juxtaposition of text and image—at turns humorous and polemical—characterizing Camnitzer’s work for over five decades. In "Envelope" (1967), ten identical geometric etchings are accompanied by unique yet equally viable one-word captions. Assigning different descriptions to matching images, Camnitzer unsettles the expectation of viewers for definitive meaning, beckoning instead acts of individual imagination and cognitive engagement. This schema typifies the formal experimentation and anti-authoritarian ethos of The New York Graphic Workshop (1964–70), the trailblazing printmaking studio that Camnitzer cofounded with Liliana Porter and José Guillermo Castillo following his arrival in New York from Uruguay. Reflecting on his text-based works made since the late 1960s, which eschew or subvert pictorial representation, Camnitzer wrote in 1977, “I thought that the verbal description of a visual situation could elicit the creativity of the spectator in a better way than the visual situation itself.” This principle also underpins "The Disappearance of…" (1971–73), a brass plaque inscribed with that suggestive but fragmentary phrase, which encourages the viewer to mentally complete the unfinished sentence. Camnitzer’s "Object Boxes" (1973–80) similarly transform their audience into active participants in the formation—and disruption—of meaning. They are wall-hung wooden sculptures that enclose drawings, found images, and objects between glass panes, accompanied by brass plaques bearing phrases in either Spanish or English. The correlation of text to image or object remains indeterminate—an open-ended narrative completed in the mind of the viewer. Also on view are several unconventional self-portraits that satirize the mythology of the artist. "Signature by the Slice" (1971/2007) is a paper sculpture made of bread-shaped slices bearing Camnitzer’s laser-cut autograph. By associating art and food as necessities of relative social value, Camnitzer extols the nourishing quality of art while lampooning his self-veneration as author. His incisive wit is also manifest in works like "Signature by the Inch" (1971) and "Check 492" (1972), which tabulate the cost of their own production, including prices for the artist’s signature and the concept of the artwork itself. Camnitzer’s ironic suggestion that the significance of a work of art is equivalent to its commercial worth exposes the deficiency of that premise. "Alteration of the World (1967–78)" surveys Camnitzer’s destabilization of artistic conventions and accepted truths during a period of significant cultural and political change globally. Reflecting this heady context, the exhibition title is borrowed from a 1971 drawing, present in the show, which is composed of the artist’s handwritten declaration, “Alteration of the world by transposition of ink from bottle to paper.” Camnitzer’s conviction in creative self-expression—and the relationship it establishes with the viewer—constitutes a revolutionary act. Retrospectives of Camnitzer’s work have been presented at El Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain (2018); Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá (2012); El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY (2011); Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Germany (2003); and Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, NY (1991). The artist’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at El Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Santiago, Chile (2013); Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, MO (2011); Daros Museum, Zurich, Switzerland (2010); El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY (1995); and Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, Mexico (1993), among others. His work has been included in many group exhibitions, including "HOME—So Different, So Appealing," Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA, traveled to Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX (2017); "I am you, you are too," Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (2017); "Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today," Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2014); and Information, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (1970). He has been featured in several international biennials, including the Bienal de la Habana, Cuba (2009, 1991, 1986, 1984); documenta 11, Kassel, Germany (2002); Whitney Biennial, New York, NY (2000); and Pavilion of Uruguay, 43rd Venice Biennale, Italy (1988). Camnitzer’s work is represented in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain; El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; São Paulo Museum of Art, Brazil; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. His honors include the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982 and 1961. From 1969–2000, he taught at the State University of New York (SUNY) College at Old Westbury and is professor emeritus.

Alexander Gray Associates, New York presents Bethany Collins: "Undercurrents," the artist’s first solo exhibition with the Gallery. Undercurrents features new cast paper works alongside a body of song-based drawings and compositions from the artist’s "Antigone" and "Lost Friends" series. These works mine a range of historic sources to uncover currents of resistance and perseverance while simultaneously exposing the cataclysmic forces—undertows of violence and conflict—that shaped them. Speaking directly to these prevailing currents, many of Collins’s "Antigone" compositions focus on characters’ dissent, metaphorized as treacherous journeys across the sea. Collins creates these works by meticulously erasing handwritten passages from different translations of Sophocles’s tragedy. Rendered across multiple panels, she obscures every word of the text save for selected passages. These few legible lines illuminate fraught, uncertain courses, and find new resonance in today’s political climate. In contrast, "Lost Friends" isolates quotes from public notices placed by formerly enslaved individuals seeking their loved ones. Originally published in African American newspapers before the end of the Civil War through the 1920s, the series has a haunting charge. Centering the experiences of castaways of subjugation and war, it speaks to the primal fear of being set adrift, forever lost and unmoored. Collins further expands on her investigations into the histories of the American South in her collection of song drawings. In these series, she engages with the concept of contrafactum, a musical term used to describe a song where the text is altered, but the melody remains the same. The drawings present Union renditions of “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” a song that was sung by Confederate soldiers during the Civil War, as well as “By and By the Roses Wither,” a popular nineteenth century American ballad. Obscuring the lyrics and scores of these airs with plume-like clouds of charcoal, Collins simultaneously evokes centuries-old acts of racial violence, as well as the tear gas fired on Black Lives Matter protesters. By allowing the present to be caught in the swirling eddies of the past, she reasserts the centrality of language as “… a prism through which to explore American history and the nuance of racial and national identities.” Finally, in a radical departure from her text-based drawings, Collins’s "Old Ship" works are cast from handmade paper mixed with granite from a destroyed Confederate monument pulverized into dust—part of the artist’s first sculptural project to be presented by LAXART and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2025. Collaborating with Dieu Donné in Brooklyn, NY, Collins created these compositions from molds based on architectural details from the Old Ship AME Zion Church, the oldest Black church in the artist’s hometown of Montgomery, AL. Each cast pays homage to the building and congregation that hosted prominent Black speakers like Frederick Douglass, Senator Blanche K. Bruce, and Dr. Booker T. Washington. Together, these four distinct bodies of work speak to the undercurrents of power, race, and violence that inform history. Executed as tributes, portraits, and portents, Collins’s poetic works emerge as evocative meditations on how the riptides of the past continue to give shape to the present. Collins’s work is currently the subject of a solo exhibition "America: A Hymnal" at Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA (through 2024). Other recent one-person exhibitions include "America: A Hymnal," Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK (2021); "Evensong," Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN (2021); "My Destiny Is In Your Hands," Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, AL (2021); "Chorus," Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO (2019); "Benediction," University of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington, KY (2019); and Occasional Verse, The Center for Book Arts, New York, NY (2018); among others. Her works have been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including "Monochrome Multitudes", Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, IL (2022); "The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse," Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA (2021), traveled to Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, TX (2021), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2022), and Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, CO (2022); "Direct Message: Art, Language, and Power," Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL (2019); "Between Words and Images," Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, AL (2017); and "Material Histories," The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (2014), among others. Collins’s work is represented in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, AL; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Saint Louis Art Museum, MO; Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, IL; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY, among others. She is the recipient of many awards and grants, including the Gwendolyn Knight & Jacob Lawrence Prize, Seattle Art Museum, WA (2023); Joan Mitchell Fellowship (2022); Lucas Artist Fellowship, Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, CA (2019); Artadia Award, Chicago, IL and Atlanta, GA (2019 and 2014); Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship, Chicago, IL (2019); Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, New York, NY (2018); and Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2015); among others. Bethany Collins is also represented by PATRON Gallery, Chicago, IL.

Alexander Gray Associates, New York presents Joan Semmel: "Against the Wall," the artist’s eighth exhibition with the Gallery. These new paintings—all made on the advent of Semmel’s ninth decade—continue her long-standing project of reclaiming the female nude from the objectifying lens of popular culture. Collapsing the distance between artist and subject, these intimate self-portraits foment an uninterrupted and inward facing gaze, advocating for an approach to female sexuality freed from fetishization. In these new works, Semmel captures her body in continual movement. Paintings like "Shadowed" and "Parade" (both 2023) foreground the artist’s own shadow. This silhouette’s flatness and deeply saturated hues are juxtaposed with the expressive rendering of the artist’s flesh, whose corporeality is further underscored by thick, near impasto brushstrokes. To Semmel, these alternative approaches to describing her form underscore the “irrevocable interconnectedness of the two figures,” their interplay and contrast “becom[ing] a kind of dance.” Meanwhile, paintings like "Morphing" (2023) build on the artist’s earlier Shifting Images series (2006–13), in which Semmel layered multiple images of her body to evoke the sensation of time passing. As in these earlier paintings, "Morphing" portrays what the artist has referred to as “the actuality of how one sees and experiences oneself.” She explains, “We do not experience the moment in isolation from the past. Rather, each moment is part of a layering process, moment over moment, by which we build meaning from our past and present experience.” Reflecting this layered understanding of time—one in which the present is always reframed through the lens of the past—Semmel’s new canvases nod to her early training as an Abstract Expressionist. Her gestural technique and palette of intensely saturated and diluted hues often blur the distinction between representation and abstraction, occupying a liminal space in which flesh is transfigured into pure pigment. For Semmel, this transformation results in “another kind of dance, full of surprises and pirouettes.” This dance unites shadows with figures and color with form; it ultimately draws its steps from Semmel’s decades-long commitment to championing an expanded understanding of female subjectivity grounded in distinctive imagery that, in the artist’s words, seeks, “… a truth that stretches to encompass time.” Semmel’s work was the subject of a career retrospective, "Skin in the Game," presented by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA in 2021, followed by Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY in 2022. Other one-person exhibitions include those held at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY (2013); Jersey City Museum, NJ (2000); and Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, NY (1998); among others. The artist’s work has been featured in group exhibitions at Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom (2023); Brooklyn Museum, NY (2023 and 2016); The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY (2020); Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, Germany (2018); The Jewish Museum, NY (2018 and 2010); Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (2016); Dallas Contemporary, TX (2016); The Museum of Modern Art, NY (2014); National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC (2014); Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen, Germany (2013); and Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Arnhem, The Netherlands (2009); among others. Semmel’s paintings are in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; The Jewish Museum, NY; Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; Orange County Museum of Art, CA; Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY; Tate, London, United Kingdom; and Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, among others. She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award (2013), Anonymous Was a Woman (2008), and National Endowment for the Arts awards (1985 and 1980).

Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown presents "Between Us," an exhibition gathering works by an intergenerational group of queer artists advancing the practice of portraiture. Confronting the cyclical progress and backlash of the last forty years, these artists bear witness to civil rights and gay liberation movements, the AIDS crisis, the rise of online communities, and the recurring culture wars around LGBTQIA+ rights that have come to a head in recent years. The works on view are charged with an emotional resonance—infused with curiosity and risk, exuberance and desire, grief, and impermanence—testifying to the evolving realities of queer life. Throughout the exhibition, popular culture is deconstructed and recontextualized as artists intervene in discursive narratives around gender and sexuality. G.B. Jones and Paul P. have a longstanding, collaborative friendship—Jones being known for her queercore music and drawing practice and Paul P. for his ethereal paintings of young men whose likenesses, culled from 1970s pornography, are rendered with a soft, lyric romanticism. Likewise, Joey Terrill’s adaptation of popular modes of figuration and appropriation of mass media imagery satirizes the commodification of queer and Chicanx identities. Other participating artists turn their gaze upon themselves and those closest to them, creating works that delineate the politics of human relationships, archiving individuality as testament against historical erasure. Lyle Ashton Harris is known for his exploration of photographic space as a fusion of performance and authentic self-presentation. Harris debuts a triptych of an Ashanti bodybuilder photographed in Accra, Ghana, where the artist lived from 2005–2012. Harris’s sensitivity to his subject—whose bearing is simultaneously naturalistic and performative—is also evident in Alannah Farrell’s compositions. Farrell, who is trans-identifying, draws from life, portraying themself, friends, lovers, and others in intimate states of self-assured repose that destabilize cisgendered notions of the gaze. Queerness is taken up as a political position through which one’s identity is made indeterminate, exteriorized, and consciously enacted. Cabaret performer and activist Justin Vivian Bond’s graceful self-portraits address identity formation as relying upon a “subjective association with an external image.” Hugh Steers’s poignant scenes of male figures, including an apparent self-portrait, are suffused with erotic and introspective tension—a tenet of the artist’s depictions of everyday life under the specter of the AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The indexical capacity of portraiture offers a framework for processing collective trauma. Kang Seung Lee reconstitutes underrepresented histories of queer expression, revisiting art historical precedents and relying upon archival research to memorialize artistic forerunners whose lives were cut short by AIDS. Steve Locke’s paintings focus on the vulnerability of male desire, reflecting his experience as a Black gay man navigating a prejudiced society. His portraits question how meaning is made and ascribed by looking. They often feature Locke’s perennial motif of a man with his tongue out—a polysemic expression that is at once comedic, disturbing, and suggestive. "Between Us" takes an expansive view of portraiture, complicating notions of representation and visibility. The acts of seeing and being seen are deployed as creative vehicles through which to reflect on representation, intimacies shared with friends, lovers, and strangers, and as a mutable mirror by which artists recognize others and, in turn, realize and reinvent themselves.

Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown presents "I Spy," a group exhibition of paintings, works on paper, and sculptures by Jennie Jieun Lee, Carrie Moyer, and Betty Parsons. Spanning more than a half-century of artmaking, "I Spy" spotlights alternative, yet complimentary approaches to abstraction that embrace optical pleasure and compositional play. Together, Lee, Moyer, and Parsons use nonrepresentation to challenge divisions between content and form, embedding pseudo-figurative imagery into their work for viewers to parse out over time. All three artists employ color to inject a sense of spontaneity and verve into their abstractions. Deeply influenced by Color Field painting, which she championed at her eponymous gallery, Parsons filled her canvases with expressive fields of deeply saturated pigment—acid greens, bright oranges, and mellow blues and grays. For the artist, color was not only experiential, but also referential. She used it to infuse an agitated buzz into the organic shapes of "Forms" (1976) while also applying it to evoke the effects of a sun-dappled lawn on a dazzling spring day in "Spring Start" (1976). In her paintings and works on paper, Moyer pays homage to the history of chromatic abstraction that informed Parsons’s practice. Her compositions and techniques nod to influential female modernist painters like Helen Frankenthaler and reflect her long-standing engagement with feminist and queer theory. Combining elements of Pop Art with Color Field painting and graphic design, paintings like "Spilt Milk" (2023), which boasts a thin, milk-like splatter of white paint, freely move between representation and abstraction. This playful seesawing—a simultaneous rejection and embrace of formalism—allows Moyer to elevate the visual, to revel in luminous expanses of acrylic, glitter adorned shapes, and textured biomorphic forms, while infusing these elements with content. Like Moyer, Lee crafts works that erode divisions between figuration and abstraction. Her ceramic busts reference a history of three-dimensional portraiture while challenging the conventions of the genre. Bathed in dripping, layered rivulets of glaze, the colorful, animated surfaces of these sculptures have an uncanny physicality that transfigures them into something distinctly other. In contrast, the rhythmic groupings of vessel-like forms, curving tubes, and slabs of clay that define Lee’s wall reliefs possess a meditative lyricism. With titles that allude to specific dates and times—"May 27, 2020" (2020) and "Monday at noon" (2019)—these constructions read as still lifes, tributes to past moments. Lee, Moyer, and Parsons’s distinct approaches to abstraction are united by their shared joy in exploring the potentials of their chosen mediums. Their works use color and referential forms to speak to present moments while also looking beyond them. As Moyer concludes, “But I’m getting such joy—to use a corny word—in the studio from just the process of making work. It’s like, ‘Oh, wow, look at this, enjoy this, come into the space where you get to be transported.’ I think we are living in a particular atmosphere right now. Perhaps the desire to protect an emotion like joy is more political than ever.”

Alexander Gray Associates, New York presents Harmony Hammond: Accumulations, the artist’s sixth exhibition with the Gallery. The show features a selection of paintings from the last three years that continue Hammond’s project of imbuing abstraction with bodily content and a corporeal narrative, disrupting the utopian myth of modernist abstraction. Underlying this practice is the artist’s belief that materials and the ways they are manipulated can bring social and political content into formal abstraction. Sited in the intersection between painting and sculpture, Hammond’s new works expand on her signature thick paint and near-monochrome palette. She explains her heavily layered surfaces—“stained and disturbed” by colors asserting themselves from underneath—as dealing with “material transformation and healing.” Works like Chenille #11 (2020–21) and Chenille #12 (2021) incorporate rough burlap, straps, and grommeted holes in layers of paint. While the raised patterns and warm white color recall the soft texture and domestic warmth of chenille bedspreads, the irregularities of the torn and frayed fabric revealing obscured color “mirror the imperfections and experiences written upon our bodies.” Building on her ongoing series of Chenilles, Hammond’s Cross Paintings are punctuated with protrusions, holes, and seams, foregrounding notions of suture and concealment. For the artist, the agitated cross form in Black Cross II (2020–21) simultaneously serves as a stand-in for the figure, an intersection, and a plus sign, signifying both agency and accumulation. She describes, “The pieced and patched background pushes up from underneath the cross form, struggling to fit in or pull away from the confines of the painting surface and rectangle.” The occasional incorporation of repurposed linens—tablecloths, towels, placemats, and quilt covers–situates the composition’s suggestive narrative within a domestic environment. In Bandaged Grid #10 (La Mesa) (2022), the repetition and order of the grid—rooted in both textiles and modernist painting—is interrupted by color and strips of fabrics emerging from the field of grommeted holes above a torn and stained embroidered tablecloth. While the layered grid evokes the bandaging of the body, the ripped, patched, and stained sections accentuate what is covered—the narrative hidden beneath the surface. In many of the works, Hammond employs women’s traditional arts as a metaphor for female bodies. Patched (2022) incorporates a stained and frayed red and off-white patterned quilt cover. By positioning slit blood-stained cotton patches centrally within the cross-like areas of the grid-based chain pattern of the quilt cover, Hammond charges the stitched composition with gendered brutality. She states, “the painting alludes to voices of resistance that refuse to be silenced.” Responding to social unrest and political upheaval—including the United States Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe vs. Wade—the punctured and patched surface of the work speaks to the violence and precarity of our current times. Further highlighting Hammond’s interest in “material engagement,” diptychs like Then and Now and Now and Then (both 2022) juxtapose the artist’s visual strategies from the 1970s with her current formal and conceptual concerns. These two-part works combine her Bandaged Quilts with panels that recall her Weave Paintings (1973–77). In these compositions, Hammond draws parallels between minimalist monochromatic painting and vernacular gendered craft traditions, advancing her mission of advocating for an expanded art history that challenges reductive, sexist historical narratives of abstraction. A survey exhibition of Hammond’s work, Material Witness, Five Decades of Art, was presented in 2019 at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT, and traveled to the Sarasota Art Museum, Ringling College of Art and Design, FL in 2020. Other one-person exhibitions of her work include Becoming/UnBecoming Monochrome, RedLine, Denver, CO (2014); Big Paintings 2002–2005, Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe, NM (2005); Monster Prints, SITE Santa Fe, NM (2002); and Ten Years 1970–1980, Glen Hanson Gallery and W.A.R.M, Minneapolis, NM (1981), among others. Hammond’s work has been included in many group exhibitions, including Women in Abstraction, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2021), traveled to Guggenheim Museo Bilbao, Spain (2021); Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2019); Wack!: Art and the Feminist Revolution, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2007), traveled to National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC (2007); MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2008); and Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia (2008), among others. Hammond’s work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM; Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. She is the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including the Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2014); the Lifetime Achievement Award, Women’s Caucus for Art (2014); the Distinguished Feminist Award, College Art Association (2013); Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship (2007 and 1989); Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (1998); John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1991); and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1983 and 1979), among others. Hammond’s book, Wrappings: Essays on Feminism, Art and the Martial Arts (1984), is a foundational publication on 1970s feminist art. Her groundbreaking book Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History (2000) received a Lambda Literary Award and remains the primary text on the subject.

Alexander Gray Associates, New York presents Harmony Hammond: Accumulations, the artist’s sixth exhibition with the Gallery. The show features a selection of paintings from the last three years that continue Hammond’s project of imbuing abstraction with bodily content and a corporeal narrative, disrupting the utopian myth of modernist abstraction. Underlying this practice is the artist’s belief that materials and the ways they are manipulated can bring social and political content into formal abstraction. Sited in the intersection between painting and sculpture, Hammond’s new works expand on her signature thick paint and near-monochrome palette. She explains her heavily layered surfaces—“stained and disturbed” by colors asserting themselves from underneath—as dealing with “material transformation and healing.” Works like Chenille #11 (2020–21) and Chenille #12 (2021) incorporate rough burlap, straps, and grommeted holes in layers of paint. While the raised patterns and warm white color recall the soft texture and domestic warmth of chenille bedspreads, the irregularities of the torn and frayed fabric revealing obscured color “mirror the imperfections and experiences written upon our bodies.” Building on her ongoing series of Chenilles, Hammond’s Cross Paintings are punctuated with protrusions, holes, and seams, foregrounding notions of suture and concealment. For the artist, the agitated cross form in Black Cross II (2020–21) simultaneously serves as a stand-in for the figure, an intersection, and a plus sign, signifying both agency and accumulation. She describes, “The pieced and patched background pushes up from underneath the cross form, struggling to fit in or pull away from the confines of the painting surface and rectangle.” The occasional incorporation of repurposed linens—tablecloths, towels, placemats, and quilt covers–situates the composition’s suggestive narrative within a domestic environment. In Bandaged Grid #10 (La Mesa) (2022), the repetition and order of the grid—rooted in both textiles and modernist painting—is interrupted by color and strips of fabrics emerging from the field of grommeted holes above a torn and stained embroidered tablecloth. While the layered grid evokes the bandaging of the body, the ripped, patched, and stained sections accentuate what is covered—the narrative hidden beneath the surface. In many of the works, Hammond employs women’s traditional arts as a metaphor for female bodies. Patched (2022) incorporates a stained and frayed red and off-white patterned quilt cover. By positioning slit blood-stained cotton patches centrally within the cross-like areas of the grid-based chain pattern of the quilt cover, Hammond charges the stitched composition with gendered brutality. She states, “the painting alludes to voices of resistance that refuse to be silenced.” Responding to social unrest and political upheaval—including the United States Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe vs. Wade—the punctured and patched surface of the work speaks to the violence and precarity of our current times. Further highlighting Hammond’s interest in “material engagement,” diptychs like Then and Now and Now and Then (both 2022) juxtapose the artist’s visual strategies from the 1970s with her current formal and conceptual concerns. These two-part works combine her Bandaged Quilts with panels that recall her Weave Paintings (1973–77). In these compositions, Hammond draws parallels between minimalist monochromatic painting and vernacular gendered craft traditions, advancing her mission of advocating for an expanded art history that challenges reductive, sexist historical narratives of abstraction. A survey exhibition of Hammond’s work, Material Witness, Five Decades of Art, was presented in 2019 at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT, and traveled to the Sarasota Art Museum, Ringling College of Art and Design, FL in 2020. Other one-person exhibitions of her work include Becoming/UnBecoming Monochrome, RedLine, Denver, CO (2014); Big Paintings 2002–2005, Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe, NM (2005); Monster Prints, SITE Santa Fe, NM (2002); and Ten Years 1970–1980, Glen Hanson Gallery and W.A.R.M, Minneapolis, NM (1981), among others. Hammond’s work has been included in many group exhibitions, including Women in Abstraction, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2021), traveled to Guggenheim Museo Bilbao, Spain (2021); Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2019); Wack!: Art and the Feminist Revolution, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2007), traveled to National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC (2007); MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2008); and Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia (2008), among others. Hammond’s work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM; Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. She is the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including the Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2014); the Lifetime Achievement Award, Women’s Caucus for Art (2014); the Distinguished Feminist Award, College Art Association (2013); Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship (2007 and 1989); Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (1998); John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1991); and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1983 and 1979), among others. Hammond’s book, Wrappings: Essays on Feminism, Art and the Martial Arts (1984), is a foundational publication on 1970s feminist art. Her groundbreaking book Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History (2000) received a Lambda Literary Award and remains the primary text on the subject.

Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown presents Present in a Lonely Image, a group exhibition spotlighting the artistic practices of current and former Gallery staff. The show foregrounds the singular approach of seven artists while bringing to the fore their shared proclivity towards introspection. This inclination—defined by both self-representation and/or a critique of the illusory nature of visual art—unites the seemingly disparate works and mediums in the presentation. Of the exhibition, Alexander Gray commented, “We deeply value the contributions of artists on our staff, who balance their own practices while advancing the Gallery’s mission of supporting artists. They are part of a long lineage of artists working in the arts, contributing to New York’s expansive creative cultures and economies. It is an honor to turn the spotlights to these remarkable individuals and their innovative art." Akhira Montague’s photographs of herself and friends condense the ennui of young adulthood into poignant images that are both intimately confessional and withdrawn—a contradiction reflecting the social isolation of the Covid-19 epoch during which they were captured. Departing from conventional media, Edward Cabral’s baked bread sculptures transform food into idols of cultural heritage and historical superstition. They draw viewers’ attention to the physical object of art, as do Al Svoboda’s handmade assemblages, which ensnare abstract paintings within oversized wood and metal scaffolding. The tension between support and precarity in Svoboda’s work is likewise enacted by Sam Cherof’s nuanced pigment dispersions, which register the movement of paint across raw canvas. A pensive, even morbid, temperament also pervades this exhibition. Wade Nobile’s found-object sculpture manifests personal recollections of fraternal kinship in the form of jet-black effigies that signal both threat and trepidation. A similar duality is palpable in the multi-species fantasy world depicted by Caroline Beatrice Bennett whose large-scale figurative gouache conflates ecstasy and agony in a carnivalesque satire of life and the afterlife. Evan Halter’s paintings are also attuned to mortality. His appropriations of iconography from centuries-old art historical precedents are distinctly elegiac, fixating on memento mori and void-like architectural elements to uncanny effect. Cumulatively, the artworks in Present in a Lonely Image underscore the often-solitary act of making art. And yet, in each work, a part of the artist is left present for the viewer to encounter, transforming that independent act of creation into an ever-expanding dialogue.

A presentation of new work by Locke directing the viewer through an examination of themes of race and power through portraiture in both two and three-dimensional forms

A group presentation of selected works on paper by Gallery artists spanning geographic borders, generational contexts, and artistic practices

Quevedo's first one-person exhibition with the gallery featuring works materializing the artist's cultural and familial heritage that reflect upon migration, indigeneity, and community

Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown presents Harmony Hammond: Monotypes. This exhibition follows the evolution of Hammond’s monotypes, featuring a selection of works from three series that trace her deep engagement with process: the Bleeding Manuscripts made at the Vermont Studio Center in 1997; a series of “near-monochrome” works created at the Anderson Ranch in Colorado in 2008; and her recent body of Grommetypes (2011–ongoing). Hammond’s works on paper represent an extension of her interest in post-minimal concerns with materials and process, simultaneously in conversation with her painting practice while pushing the boundaries of traditional printmaking. Whereas her paintings imbed fabrics and metal grommets in thick layers of pigment, her monotypes involve a slow build-up of thin layers of ink or paint on a printing plate that is then imprinted onto paper. Viewing the press itself as a collaborator, Hammond works in a “state of peripheral control,” or intentional unpredictability, allowing the pressure of the press to move the ink and activate the surface.

Alexander Gray Associates presents "To Name a Place: Contemporary Landscape," a group exhibition organized by independent New York-based curator Anna Stothart. Through its title, which references the poetic practice of marking, remembering, claiming, and identifying place through naming, the exhibition offers a more expansive depiction of what landscape is, and how history, culture, identity, labor, and community indelibly inform our changing sense of place. Bringing together the work of an international group of artists—Miya Ando, Luis Camnitzer, Mel Chin, Justine Fisher, Coco Fusco, Valeska Soares, Ryan Trecartin, and Arnie Zimmerman—"To Name a Place" responds to locations across the globe—Japan, Cuba, Congo, America, and Canada—engaging with the social and historical specificity of each artist’s chosen landscape.

Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown announces Steve Locke’s first exhibition with the Gallery, "Homage to the Auction Block." This focused presentation of the artist’s ongoing "Homage to the Auction Block" series revisits Josef A. Albers’s pivotal body of the work, "Homage to the Square" (1950–76). Imbuing Albers’s iconic compositions with an unsettling charge via the abstracted form of a slave auction block, the exhibition’s works explore the intertwined histories of race and modernism.

Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown presents "Melvin Edwards: B-Wire," an exhibition of "Here and There" (1970/2022), a barbed wire installation, and historic works on paper. The show builds on Dia Beacon’s large-scale installation of Edwards’s previously unrealized barbed wire works—a number of which recently entered Dia’s permanent collection—which opens on May 6, 2022. Foregrounding the artist’s ability to imbue formalism with meaning, Here and There simultaneously references rural life and histories of violence and incarceration.

Alexander Gray Associates, New York announces "Lorraine O’Grady: Body Is the Ground of My Experience," an exhibition of the artist’s pivotal 1991 black-and-white photomontages. Drawing on formal strategies of Surrealism and on O’Grady’s own visceral, nuanced engagement with aesthetics, representation, and cultural history, these diptychs are both a turning point, from live performance to wall installation, and a refined iteration of the complex politically and personally radical theses and practices that have occupied the artist throughout her career.

Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown presents "Teresa Burga: Dibujos (1974–2019)." The exhibition features nearly five decades of works on paper by Burga (1935–2021), paying tribute to the late artist who died in Lima, Peru roughly a year ago from Covid-19. Foregrounding the figure, "Dibujos" traces the development of Burga’s experimental approach to color and form while centering the eccentric geometry and flattened subjects of the artist’s late drawings.

Alexander Gray Associates, New York presents "Hassan Sharif: Political Paintings (2008–2009)." While Sharif (1951–2016) is best known for his sculptural compositions, he was a dedicated painter—insisting, “It is so easy now for me to give up painting and make objects, but time and time again I feel painting is important.” Highlighting the medium’s primacy in his practice, the Gallery’s presentation brings together political cartoons from the 1970s and paintings and works on paper from the late 2000s to center the artist’s unflinchingly wry observations on contemporary life and politics. Trained as a painter, Sharif first received critical recognition for his figurative images. By the mid-1970s, he had applied his compositional skills to drafting caricatures for a variety of United Arab Emirates newspapers and magazines. Using his platform to critique everything from the United States’s foreign policy in the Middle East to the changing economic realities of life in Dubai after the establishment of the U.A.E. in 1971, Sharif’s images have an immediacy and irreverence that makes their outspoken commentary all the more compelling.

Alexander Gray Associates is pleased to announce Broken Year, Valeska Soares’s third one-person presentation with the Gallery. Conceived as a broken calendar that marks the artist’s experience of the passage of time, Broken Year is Soares’s response to the COVID-19 global pandemic. The work takes the shape of a gallery-wide installation organized as a physical calendar: Stretched linen-canvas panels are grouped in the familiar grid of a traditional calendar. For each panel, Soares selects pages from books with particularly meaningful or evocative phrases, which are applied to the canvas to mark the calendar days. The work is bookended by two significant dates: March 1, 2020, when she began self-isolating, and March 29, 2021, when she received her second dose of the vaccine.

Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown presents "Between Perception and the World," a two-person exhibition of work by Hassan Sharif (1951–2016) and Regina Silveira (b.1939). Placing these two artists in dialogue, the Gallery’s presentation highlights Sharif and Silveira’s shared interest in questioning societal structures. The show takes its title from a 2009 statement by Silveira: “[M]y most important concern … is the nature of visual representation, its function and the role (poetic and political) of the image as the intermediary between perception and the world.”

Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown presents Acqua Alta (2019), an iterative installation by Valeska Soares. Acqua Alta draws its name from the annual flooding that surges through the city of Venice, intensified in recent years by the effects of climate change. The installation is composed of hand-blown glass vessels of varying shapes and sizes, filled with water. Although its name and inspiration originally come from Venice, the vessels are filled from the nearest natural body of water in the location where it is presented. The variances in the color, opacity, and density of the water from each location are a succinct and evocative distillation of the effects of pollution––a problem that may look different from place to place but is nonetheless consistent and universal.

Alexander Gray Associates, New York presents Jennie C. Jones: New Compositions, an exhibition of 2021 paintings and drawings. In these works, Jones continues to explore the perception of sound within the visual arts while experimenting with new materials.

Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown presents Subliminal Horizon, the second iteration of an exhibition curated by Alvin Hall. Subliminal Horizons: Part 2 continues as an open-ended survey of Black, indigenous, brown, and Asian artists living and working in the Hudson Valley in New York.

Alexander Gray Associates presents Subliminal Horizons, an exhibition curated by Alvin Hall as an open-ended survey of Black, indigenous, brown, and Asian artists living and working in the Hudson Valley in New York. BIPOC creators and their predecessors have always been present in the Hudson Valley. They numbered among its original inhabitants and labored in its agrarian and industrial economies. They have been a force in the countercultural and creative communities that have historically been drawn to the area and are now driving its ongoing transformation into an arts-driven economy. Nonetheless, their work has largely been left out of a cultural narrative that historically gives primacy to the nearly all-white, all-male Hudson River School. Bringing together painting, sculptures, and drawings by an intergenerational group of BIPOC artists living and working in Hudson Valley, Subliminal Horizons invites a fluid, open-ended consideration of the area’s cultural life oriented towards an expanded field and a more complete context. Rather than presenting a purely critical thesis, the exhibition offers a point of departure for this expanded field. The artists and the works on view are connected by loosely recurring art historical themes such as the contrast between the sublime, realist landscapes of the Hudson River School and the figuration, interiority, textuality, or abstraction of much contemporary work; and by the possibilities for community and collectivity embedded in their shared geography. “I’ve looked at the Hudson River and the surrounding landscape so many times during train rides. The metaphor of the estuary—a body of water that flows in multiple directions—resonates in the works,” says Alvin Hall. “One can locate the covering and uncovering of personal and social histories; a blurring of distinction between the representational and the abstract; the conflicts of the documented and imaginary; and a tension among traditions, modernism, and contemporary art’s growing pluralism in the diverse works in the exhibition.” A necessarily incomplete intervention, Subliminal Horizons is an exercise in building community, shifting narratives, and reframing dialogue. Generous rather than exclusive, responsive rather than prescriptive, the exhibition aims to strengthen and extend community ties by uncovering existing histories, affinities, and artistic connections. Collectively, the artists and their works speak to the many ways the Hudson Valley is today an important magnet for artistic expression, intellectual pursuit, and emotional expansion. Participating Artists: Diana Al-Hadid Huma Bhabha Henri Paul Broyard Karlos Cárcamo Lisa Corinne Davis Melvin Edwards Kenji Fujita Jeffrey Gibson David Hammons Lyle Ashton Harris Jennie C. Jones Laleh Khorramian Glenn Ligon Adam Pendleton Martin Puryear Angel Otero Tschabalala Self Xaviera Simmons Kianja Strobert Carlos Vega

Alexander Gray Associates presents Subliminal Horizons, an exhibition curated by Alvin Hall as an open-ended survey of Black, indigenous, brown, and Asian artists living and working in the Hudson Valley in New York. BIPOC creators and their predecessors have always been present in the Hudson Valley. They numbered among its original inhabitants and labored in its agrarian and industrial economies. They have been a force in the countercultural and creative communities that have historically been drawn to the area and are now driving its ongoing transformation into an arts-driven economy. Nonetheless, their work has largely been left out of a cultural narrative that historically gives primacy to the nearly all-white, all-male Hudson River School. Bringing together painting, sculptures, and drawings by an intergenerational group of BIPOC artists living and working in Hudson Valley, Subliminal Horizons invites a fluid, open-ended consideration of the area’s cultural life oriented towards an expanded field and a more complete context. Rather than presenting a purely critical thesis, the exhibition offers a point of departure for this expanded field. The artists and the works on view are connected by loosely recurring art historical themes such as the contrast between the sublime, realist landscapes of the Hudson River School and the figuration, interiority, textuality, or abstraction of much contemporary work; and by the possibilities for community and collectivity embedded in their shared geography. “I’ve looked at the Hudson River and the surrounding landscape so many times during train rides. The metaphor of the estuary—a body of water that flows in multiple directions—resonates in the works,” says Alvin Hall. “One can locate the covering and uncovering of personal and social histories; a blurring of distinction between the representational and the abstract; the conflicts of the documented and imaginary; and a tension among traditions, modernism, and contemporary art’s growing pluralism in the diverse works in the exhibition.” A necessarily incomplete intervention, Subliminal Horizons is an exercise in building community, shifting narratives, and reframing dialogue. Generous rather than exclusive, responsive rather than prescriptive, the exhibition aims to strengthen and extend community ties by uncovering existing histories, affinities, and artistic connections. Collectively, the artists and their works speak to the many ways the Hudson Valley is today an important magnet for artistic expression, intellectual pursuit, and emotional expansion. Participating Artists: Diana Al-Hadid Huma Bhabha Henri Paul Broyard Karlos Cárcamo Lisa Corinne Davis Melvin Edwards Kenji Fujita Jeffrey Gibson David Hammons Lyle Ashton Harris Jennie C. Jones Laleh Khorramian Glenn Ligon Adam Pendleton Martin Puryear Angel Otero Tschabalala Self Xaviera Simmons Kianja Strobert Carlos Vega

Alexander Gray Associates, New York presents "Strange State of Being," an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Hugh Steers (1962–1995). A figurative painter, the artist was diagnosed with HIV in 1987, ultimately succumbing to AIDS-related complications in 1995 at the age of 32. The Gallery’s show takes its title from a 1994 quote by the artist, “There seems to be a buzz. … I’m in such a strange state of being, and nothing’s ever going to be the same.” Reflective of his state, Steers’s compositions, enigmatic scenes of sickness and tenderness, unflinchingly bear witness to the true cost of the AIDS epidemic while speaking to our present health crisis and political fragility. Works like "Two Men and a Woman" (1992) and "Hospital Bed" (1993) capture the vicissitudes of disease. Transforming these intimate scenes into melancholic tableaux, Steers’s men and women inhabit worlds suffused with love and potential loss. “In a real way those characters were Hugh’s constant companions,” the artist’s friend Julie Heffernan explains. “Avatars of love and friendship that every one of us needs in order to survive day-to-day.” These anonymous figures reveal Steers’s hunger for companionship as he navigated a society wracked by AIDS. Other paintings and works on paper depict the sociopolitical impact of the epidemic. "Official Letter" (1990) features a woman wearing a bag over her head. Through its reference to hooding, the composition draws parallels between an execution and a positive HIV diagnosis. At the same time, it metaphorically references the US government’s refusal to acknowledge the full devastation of the AIDS crisis—a willful blindness that parallels the initial national response to Covid-19. Similarly critical of American leadership, additional works by the artist employ megaphones, gas masks, and US flags to underscore the lack of a timely response to the epidemic. In contrast to these overt critiques, the majority of Steers’s compositions articulate his inner fears and desires as he made art under the specter of the virus. Highlighting the influence of the Western canon on his practice, a series of images, including "Girl in Blue and Red" (1987), feature an imp-like child whose eerie presence recalls that of the creature from Henry Fuseli’s "The Nightmare" (1781). In "Gold Box" (1988), Steers presents this being blinding a man as a snake slithers from an open box. Referencing the myth of Pandora, who released sickness into the world, this menacing painting—created one year after the artist tested positive for HIV—expresses his despair at the diagnosis. Similarly ominous, additional canvases from this period also contain snakes, as well as harbingers of death like crows. Despite these portents, while indelibly shaped by the AIDS crisis, Steers’s work always rises above its grim realities. As the writer Justin Spring suggests, at the core of the artist’s oeuvre is “… a lingering desire for something transcendent.” Searching for transcendence in the midst of the epidemic, Steers’s paintings gain new resonance in 2021. Their imagery, limned by what the artist once described as the “soft glow of brutality,” anticipates the isolation, loss, and uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic. Hugh Steers’s work was featured in "AIDS at Home: Art and Everyday Activism" at the Museum of the City of New York, NY (2017) and "Art AIDS America," curated by Jonathan Katz and Rock Hushka, at the Tacoma Art Museum, WA (2015); West Hollywood Library and One Archives Gallery and Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2015); Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw, GA (2016); Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, NY (2016); and Alphawood Foundation, Chicago, IL (2016). His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2013); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY (1994); Richard Anderson, New York, NY (1992); Midtown Galleries, New York, NY (1992); Denver Art Museum, CO (1991); Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY (1988); and the Drawing Center, New York, NY (1987), among others. Steers’s work is in private and public art collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Walker Art Center, Minnesota, MN; and Denver Art Museum, CO.In 1989, Steers received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship. A comprehensive monographic catalogue of Steers’s work was published by Visual AIDS in 2015.

Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown presents "Betty Parsons: 1950s Works on Paper," its third exhibition of work by Betty Parsons (1900 – 1982). The Gallery’s presentation highlights a pivotal moment in Parsons’ artistic career after she abandoned figuration to fully embrace abstraction. Comprised of dynamic, intimately scaled works, the exhibition foregrounds what would later become the artist’s signature approach: fortifying the nonrepresentational with the richness of lived experiences, constant travel and exchanges with prominent artists, writers, and curators. Building on her training as a landscape watercolorist, Parsons’ 1950s works on paper are direct and often urgent interpretations of impressions, places, and times. Rather than making a journal entry or taking a photograph of a particular moment, Parsons was known to open her sketchbook and set gouache to paper as she sought to capture the “sheer energy” of a place. These deft “plein-air” works like "Stansford" (1951) revel in an animated, playful fluidity that stands in contrast to the considered formalism of the artist’s paintings from this period. Even after Parsons was able to concentrate more heavily on her painting practice following the construction of her Tony Smith-designed studio in Southold, Long Island in 1960, she remained committed to creating works on paper. On paper, Parsons felt free to challenge the rigid theoretical framework of modernist abstraction with works that are indexical not only insomuch as they’re documents of places, but also of a certain freedom and ease of expression that came while her eponymous gallery in New York was at the height of its success. Her notebooks and sketchbooks reveal the extent of her expressive improvisation, which would ultimately influence her paintings and sculpture. Gouaches like Untitled (c. early 1950s) offer unique formal arrangements and a keenly melodious sense of color. Meanwhile, the luminosity of "Maine" (1958) lends a transportive quality that conveys distinct impressions of locales and emotions. In all works, washes of color are built up quickly in thin layers; often the wet gouache is vigorously incised with the back of a brush to further enliven the composition. Active and energetic—like Parsons herself—these works offer a personal connection to one of the seminal figures who shaped twentieth-century art. Betty Parsons’ work has been the subject of numerous one-person exhibitions at Art Omi, Ghent, NY (2018); The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, East Hampton, NY (1992); the Montclair Museum of Art, NJ (1974); Whitechapel Gallery, London, United Kingdom (1968), and The Miami Museum of Modern Art, FL (1963). Parsons’ work is represented in prominent public collections including The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY; The High Museum, Atlanta, GA; The Montclair Museum of Art, Montclair, NJ; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; The Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY; The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY among others.

Alexander Gray Associates, New York presents "Crossings," its fourth exhibition of work by Harmony Hammond (b.1944). Featuring paintings dating from 2018—2020, the show’s large-scale canvases boast built-up surfaces that further refine the artist’s interest in “material engagement,” expanding and subverting modernist abstraction to bring social and political content into the nonrepresentational realm. In "Chenille #7" (2018), fraying pieces of coarse burlap and grommets are embedded in Hammond’s signature layers of thick paint. Appearing at first glance to be a monochrome, up close, underlying colors are visible through cracks and peek out from flaps in the painting’s sculptural surface. Patterns created by the work’s raised grommets recall the soft, cozy texture and domestic warmth of white tufted chenille bedspreads. At the same time, reds, browns, and golds assert themselves from underneath the surface, oozing, discharging, and staining their surroundings to draw attention to what has been muffled, obscured, and covered over. In this way, the painting alludes to political threats and social unrest—marginalization and suppression—and lays claim to the physical vestiges of resistance and survival. Meanwhile, Hammond’s series of "Bandaged Grids" transform strips of canvas into bandages that stanch paint leaking from grommeted holes. Recalling the artist’s use of found fabric scraps in the 1970s, the seeping grommets and red-stained cloth of "Bandaged Grid #9" (2020) refute the non-objective nature of the modernist grid, interjecting a corporal narrative and violent edge into its strict formalism. As the artist notes, “A bandage always implies a wound. A bandaged grid implies a disruption of utopian egalitarian order—but also the possibility of holding together, of healing.” Building on the conceptual framework that informs Hammond’s "Bandaged Grids," her series of "Bandaged Quilts" use paint and other materials as a metaphor for the body. Featuring lengths of burlap and canvas arranged in quilt-like patterns, "Double Bandaged Quilt #1" (Horizontal) (2019), "Double Bandaged Quilt #3 (Vertical)" (2020), and "Fringe" (2020) subvert the (male) legacy of Minimalist monochromatic painting, reclaiming these abstract compositions through the vernacular of (female) craft traditions. Similarly evocative, "Black Cross" (2019–2020) and "Red Cross" (2019—2020) feature wide swaths of rough burlap superimposed like giant cross-shaped bandages on white fields of grommets. “They are crosses and not crosses,” Hammond muses. “I began these paintings during the summer of 2019. What reads as crosses weren’t initially meant as crosses, but rather as Xs marking the spot, as plus signs and intersections. And yet, I have to admit, that they are crosses. There are many kinds of crosses and many kinds of crossings.” Despite the scale and muscular materiality of the "Cross Paintings," as a sign, the cross is indeterminate; its form references diverse cultural associations, including religious iconography, emblems of medical and humanitarian aid, and the modernist art historical canon. A crossroads for meaning—where the metaphorical and formal meet and are transmuted—Hammond’s "Cross Paintings" and other recent works ultimately invite multiple readings rooted in the primacy of the canvas as a stand-in for the body. Presenting her paintings as sites where paint is transfigured into skin, the artist constructs surfaces that simultaneously express trauma and recovery. Recuperative paintings for this moment—wounded, yet protective—Hammond’s works embody vulnerability, strength, and defiance to resonate in a time of radical social change. Harmony Hammond has exhibited nationally and internationally. In 2019, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT presented a fifty-year survey exhibition of her work, which traveled to the Sarasota Museum of Art, FL in 2020. Other institutions that have featured her work include: Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (2020); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL (2019); Des Moines Art Center, IA (2019); Brooklyn Museum, NY (2018, 1985); Museum of the City of New York, NY (2016); Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung, Ludwig, Vienna, Austria (2016); Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA (2015); National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC (2011); MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2008); Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada (2008); and Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Internacional Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico (2007), among others. Hammond’s work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM; Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. Her archive is in the permanent collection of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA. She has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim, Joan Mitchell, Pollock–Krasner, Esther and Adolph Gottlieb, and Art Matters Foundations, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Hammond’s book, "Wrappings: Essays on Feminism, Art and the Martial Arts" (TSL Press, 1984), is a foundational publication on 1970s feminist art. Her groundbreaking book "Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History" (Rizzoli, 2000) received a Lambda Literary Award and remains the primary text on the subject. In 2013, Hammond was honored with The College Art Association Distinguished Feminist Award. She received both the College Art Association's Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award and Anonymous was a Woman Award in 2014.

Alexander Gray Associates, New York presents "Between the Lines," a group exhibition of recent and historic sculptures and works on paper by Luis Camnitzer, Jennie C. Jones, Hassan Sharif, Valeska Soares, and Jack Whitten. Borrowing its title from a 2013 piece by Camnitzer, the show juxtaposes each artist’s distinct visual approach while underscoring the conceptual rigor and seriality that unites their disparate practices. Jennie C. Jones anchors the presentation with two 2016 groupings of drawings from her ongoing series Score for "Sustained Blackness." Much like Jones’ celebrated "Acoustic Panel Paintings," which integrate musical structures into their compositions, this series incorporates gesture into musical notation. Recalling expanded understandings of music that were advanced by Fluxus artists and composers like John Cage, the works deconstruct a musical staff. Transforming wild mark-making into booming crescendo, through repetition they establish a connection between drawing and the sonic. Shown in conjunction with "Song Containers" (2011), elegantly spare aluminum sculptures that replicate the packaging of analog playback technologies, Jones seamlessly integrates the formal with the aural to create a new abstract language. Just as the hollow forms of Jones’ Song Containers allude to silence—what can no longer be listened to—so too do the empty boxes of Valeska Soares’ "Palimpsest I" (2016) suggest what is obscured—what can no longer be seen. Recontextualizing a series of Brazilian boxes with wooden marquetry tops that depict landscapes, the installation subsumes the makers of the boxes and the objects they might have once held in favor of producing a grand vista. Staining the boxes’ lids and carefully installing them so that they share a horizon line, Soares crafts a mysterious panoramic nightscape whose individual trees and hills are effaced to emphasize a new collective narrative based on a tropical idyll. Also imbuing mundane items with an evocative artistic charge, Soares’ "For To (X)" (2017) repetitively layers dedication pages torn from antique books into a tight oval on the wall. Exploring concepts of ephemerality and nostalgia, the formally austere work highlights the lives of authors and gift-givers, inviting viewers to read between the lines to construct past personal histories though messages of love and thanks. Displaying a similarly inventive use of materials, Jack Whitten’s groundbreaking 1974 "Xerox Project" monoprints experiment with toner as a medium. Carefully applied to rice paper, this powder allowed him to achieve a range of spontaneous effects—from deeply saturated volumes to delicate, streaky lines of pigment—while interrogating gesture and form. At once suggesting topographical mapping and satellite photography of the moon, these prints recall the artist’s time spent as a cadet at Tuskegee University. Works like "Xeroxed!" (1975) forward a process-driven approach to seriality by presenting multiple toner monotypes arranged in a grid and mounted on canvas. Eroding distinctions between drawing and painting, the piece marries gesture with technical experimentation. Ultimately establishing Whitten’s artistic framework, his Xerox monoprints paved the way for the aesthetic innovation of later series like the artist’s celebrated Greek Alphabet paintings. Like Whitten, who sought to develop a more conceptual approach to painting, Hassan Sharif also invented alternative, cerebral ways to draft an image. Beginning in the 1980s, he coined the term “semi-system” to describe his compositional techniques, which were based on invented calculations and seemingly endless repetitive permutations. Sharif’s "Semi-Systems," like "Seven Points Angular Lines - Part 2" (2013) both follow and challenge the logic of these self-imposed rules. Presenting viewers with a system that is constantly on the verge of breaking down, the work’s agitated, pseudo-calligraphic strokes echo the frenetic development that occurred in the United Arab Emirates as it became a global economic hub. In contrast to Sharif’s quasi-mathematical formalism, Luis Camnitzer uses language, itself, as a medium. His ten-part work, "Between the Lines" (2013), presents viewers with variations of the same sentence inscribed on lined paper. Beginning with the phrase “When I read between the lines the paper stares back at me …,” each iteration constructs its own poetics around the creative process while forwarding an expansive understanding of that process based on the repetitive potential of constant revision. Although Camnitzer ultimately concludes his 2013 artwork by writing, “When I read between the lines the paper stares back at me telling that I haven’t wondered enough,” the artists in the Gallery’s exhibition are always wondering—challenging and expanding upon established methodologies. Relentless innovators, they read between the lines of a musical staff, audio recording packaging, the horizon, books, toner, an algorithm, and a page to redefine approaches to art-making.

Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown presented Jennie C. Jones’ first exhibition with the Gallery, "Passing Tones and Broken Chords." The show features new 2020 "Acoustic Panel Paintings" that further expand on the artist’s research into the sonic, honing her use of materials and approach to color and form. Seamlessly integrating the visual with the aural, Jones’ paintings’ titles underscore their connection to sound. Drawing on musical terminology, works like "Tempo Grave (Marking Dark Time)" (2020) and "Tempo Largo (Marking Dark Time)" (2020) reference slow, dirge-like speeds of music. Reinforcing this solemnity, the canvases’ black panels also allude to mourning. Signaling Jones’ return to black monochromes, these two paintings are the first the artist has created since 2014. In a departure from earlier black pieces, "Tempo Grave (Marking Dark Time)" and "Tempo Largo (Marking Dark Time)" incorporate painted acoustic panels into their compositions. Jones describes how the process of allowing paint to evenly soak into the fabric panels to create subtle tonal variations “…became an existential back and forth struggle...towards an impossible flawlessness.” Expanding on the considered nature of her works’ surfaces, she writes, “Underpainting is becoming more and more critical to my process. The layering with the ‘memory’ or passing time of previous brush work is apparent in the soft impasto and ghostly brush strokes embedded in the monochromatic surfaces.” Like Jones’ "Tempo" works, the layered surface of "Bright (Red) Gracenote" (2020) also suggests the passage of time. The painting’s richly pigmented planes juxtapose painted felt against canvas, and recall Jones’ assertion that her surfaces “…are not flat if you move with enough deliberation, step to and from them as if within them.” Highlighting the labor required to create such effects, the artist ultimately challenges the connection between the reductive and Minimalism, characterizing her own Minimalist process as defined by “maximalist” techniques to erase her hand. As she argues, “The idea of lack can be turned on its head in order to be perceived as pure potential and opportunity. Perhaps this relates directly to African American improvisation and creative utility, to working inventively with spare means.” Further capitalizing on the “pure potential” of her materials and evocatively spare visual language, in works like "Fractured Crescendo, Red Rest" (2020) Jones experiments with new applications of color. Foregrounding what she characterizes as a “hot” red acrylic, the canvas boasts a diagonal line of bright red paint across two acoustic panels. In contrast to this slashing introduction of color, "Deep Structure (Oxide Rest)" (2020) features uneven bands of darker red pigment that accent the channel between two panels. The artist explains, “The subtle lines inside the picture plane rather than at the edges are a way of almost painting the shadows of form, which is again a shift toward amplifying objecthood.” Emphasizing objecthood, Jones’ painterly approach ultimately interrogates the legacy of Minimalism. “There are social and political ramifications to rejecting ‘subject’ and embracing ‘object’—as an African American woman, much more is at stake,” she concludes. “Minimalism becomes a radical gesture empowering a refusal to sell my narrative or bodies.”

"Cutting Out CONYT" (1977/2017) returns to Lorraine O’Grady’s 1977 series, "Cutting Out The New York Times (CONYT)," which consisted of 26 found newspaper poems made between June 5 and November 20, 1977 from successive editions of the "Sunday Times." Building on the successful transformation of public language into private in "CONYT," in "Cutting Out CONYT" O’Grady repurposes the work to achieve a failed goal of the earlier series: the creation of what she terms “counter-confessional” poetry. "Cutting Out CONYT" culls the original poems and reshapes the remains into 26 new works that adopt a form the artist refers to as “haiku diptychs.” Each of the haiku takes as its source a single poem from "CONYT." Produced following a similarly rigorous set of rules as those that dictated "CONYT," "Cutting Out CONYT" isolates and rearranges panels from the 1977 work without altering them in any way. Newly combined, the resulting compositions are eloquent in their brevity, while their printed, collaged forms evoke the materiality of the original series.

Alexander Gray Associates presents its second exhibition of works by Betty Parsons (1900–1982), "Heated Sky." The paintings and works on paper from the height of Parsons’ engagement with abstraction from the 1960s to mid-1970s foreground the artist’s attunement to nature and the landscape. Parsons’ keen observation of the natural world was the ground for compositional methods ranging from loose biomorphism to geometric order, always featuring a dynamic sense of color. Inspired by a visit to the 1913 Armory Show in New York, Parsons determined to become an artist from a young age, undertaking training in figurative sculpture and later watercolor. In 1947, one year after founding the Betty Parsons Gallery, she made her first abstract painting, thereby initiating a transformative new direction that would engage her for the next 35 years. The completion of Parsons’ light-filled studio in Southold, NY, in 1960 ushered in a decade of work characterized by a simplification of form and color. Designed by architect and artist Tony Smith and overlooking the Long Island Sound, it fast became the artist’s regular weekend retreat and the site of concentrated art-making. In paintings such as "Pasture" (1963), Parsons combined a monochromatic field of color with free-floating island-like shapes in colors both analogous and complementary. Works from later in the decade introduced line-based compositions as featured in the graphic immediacy of "Early Morning" (1967), with its rhythmic repetition of gold and red stripes interwoven with white, black, and gray. Alongside her paintings, Parsons filled numerous sketchbooks and notebooks with spontaneous observations. Gouaches such as the red, gold, and blue "Heated Sky" (1976) feature highly saturated color and Parsons’ harnessing of the medium’s speed and fluency. Counting many of the period’s leading painters among her former and current gallery artists, Parsons was immersed in the languages of abstract painting. Her own work, however, was rooted in the marriage of her powers of observation and interpretation. As she described in an interview with Lawrence Alloway in 1968, “When I start a painting I try to become a blank and only let an emotion come into me. If I say, for instance, I have an idea that I want to paint an atmosphere that I see out of the window, I try to become a blank when it comes to choice of forms and colors. I go up to the canvas with a brush and suddenly decide and I pick out a gray or brown or whatever the atmosphere is and put it on very spontaneously. That color introduces an idea for another color, and I go on from there.” The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue, featuring a new essay by art historian Elizabeth Buhe and an introduction by Rachel Vorsanger, Collection and Research Manager for the Betty Parsons Foundation.

Known as the “father of modern art in the United Arab Emirates," Hassan Sharif combined a London-based art education with the singular experience of living in the young and fast-developing culture of the U.A.E. He began making his "Objects" in the 1980s, using materials sourced from industrial and commercial contexts. Inspired by Duchamp’s objects made of inexpensive and readily available materials, Sharif employed things like fabric, rope, and paper to make sculptures based on a logic of accumulation. "Iron No. 3" (2013) foregrounds Sharif’s engagement with weaving, which appealed to him for its simplicity of construction. Strips of rusted iron are woven together and covered with a web of thin steel wires hooked and twisted to one another. An artist who imbued everyday objects with a poetic sensibility, Sharif perceived a softer side to these industrial materials, explaining, “The rusted surface looks similar to a tree’s bark. It’s in nature, for example, and it protects itself. And with iron, if you leave it exposed to the elements, the surface becomes rusted, so rust is protecting the iron. Protection might become the narrative.”

Alexander Gray Associates presents its sixth exhibition of Luis Camnitzer’s work, highlighting two key installations, "El Mirador" [The Observatory] (1996), and "Territorio Libre" [Free Territory] (2018). For over five decades, Camnitzer’s interdisciplinary practice has influenced discourses around Conceptualism, pedagogy, and politics. In 1988, Camnitzer represented Uruguay in the 43rd Venice Biennale, where he produced a series of works that combined physical objects, printed images, and text. In the context of the end of Uruguay’s military dictatorship (1973–1984), these works addressed themes of torture, abuse of power, and repression, combining seemingly disparate elements to elicit poetic interpretations. Despite political instability during the transition to democracy, Camnitzer agreed to participate in the Biennale, realizing that “keeping one’s purity could be in the way of more important things like the cementing of a regained democracy.” Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, Camnitzer built upon the political themes in his work, developing new series and projects, including "The Agent Orange Series" (1985) and "Los San Patricios" (1992). Conceptually building on the work he debuted eight years prior at the Venice Biennale, Camnitzer presented El Mirador in 1996 at the São Paulo Biennial. Consisting of an enclosed room that is only visible to the viewer through a narrow slit in the wall, El Mirador evokes multiple spaces of confinement: a prison cell, a psychiatric hospital, and a torture chamber. Various objects are placed throughout the white-walled room, which is starkly lit with glaring light, lending the installation a surreal quality. In this tableaux, uncanny elements are gathered––an iron bed frame with a single glass sheet as a mattress, a shattered wall mirror, a house of playing cards, and a window with panes made of Astroturf grass––resulting in a hallucinatory aura, meant to destabilize the viewer’s initial interpretations. In addition to alluding to an observatory, the work’s title also implicates the one who is looking––the viewer––in the act of surveillance. In our contemporary moment, "El Mirador" takes on additional meaning: suggesting that our data-driven society functions as a self-sustaining surveillance system, supporting hegemonic structures of power and the status quo. "El Mirado"r can elicit various metaphoric interpretations ranging from political imprisonment to censorship, and ultimately, the instability of one’s own perception. Similarly, "Territorio Libre" represents Camnitzer’s ongoing engagement with borders and ideas of freedom. This recent installation consists of projected text on the floor that is encircled by razor wire in a darkened room. Labeled as “free territory,” the inaccessible space is guarded by the razor wire––as a result, the viewer experiences the work in the dark, from the “outside.” Inviting associations with current disputes about borderlands, the refugee crisis, and international powers, Camnitzer’s Territorio Libre is a timely interrogation of fictitious boundaries. In a metaphysical sense, Camnitzer explains: “In the end everything is a prison: the body, the limits of intelligence and imagination, the limits of society. The real prison is an example of an infinite number of prisons. We are always carrying around a prison, wearing it like a suit.”

"Quimera" is described by the artist as a “visual paradox” in that the illusion of a single lit lightbulb casts a dark, looming shadow, instead of illuminating the space with light. For decades, Silveira has explored "skiagraphia" (the study of light and shadows) in her multidisciplinary practice. In many works, shadows are elongated and distorted, subverting their original reference points, and encouraging subversive interpretations. In "Quimera," the uncanny paradox is illustrated through the impossible shadow of the lightbulb. The single, dangling lightbulb invites associations with the darkened interrogation room or perhaps even a torture chamber, alluding to the sense of foreboding in these spaces. Perception, for Silveira, is a malleable playing field, in which the artist’s imagination plays a critical role. In "Quimera," light and darkness are simultaneously complementary and contradictory, destabilizing the viewer’s sense of space.

Alexander Gray Associates presented its fifth exhibition of work by Melvin Edwards (b.1937), "Painted Sculpture." An influential figure in African American art, Edwards’ practice reflects his engagement with the history of race, labor, and violence, as well as with themes of the African Diaspora. The Gallery’s exhibition features historical painted sculpture and works on paper—many of which have not been exhibited for decades. Extending Edwards’ extraordinary range as a sculptor, the presentation highlights the artist’s commitment to formal innovation. Edwards created his first painted sculptures in 1968 during a summer residency in Minneapolis, MN. After he left the city, under the aegis of the celebrated museum director Martin Friedman, these chromatic works comprised one of the Walker Art Center’s first solo outdoor sculpture exhibitions. Later that same year, Edwards joined the Smokehouse Associates in New York, which was founded by fellow artist and friend William T. Williams. Together with other members of the collective, he painted vivid, abstract murals in Harlem, transforming vacant sites in an effort to revitalize the neighborhood. Adapting the color and geometry of these projects, Edwards’ primarily monochromatic painted sculptures harness the potential of paint to establish relationships between disparate elements while introducing the unexpected. These large-scale works are in multiple museum collections, including Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, as well as on display outside Bethune Tower in Harlem, NY. Edwards’ approach to color is instinctual. “It is so hard to explain the meaning of the color/form relationship,” he explains. “Once my intuitive sense is in gear I tend to see the possibilities of some color relationships and their implications.” Meanwhile, his works’ forms expand on the modernist vocabulary of Alexander Calder’s stabiles while inviting comparisons to Julio González, David Smith, and Mark di Suvero’s steel constructions. Characterized by an inherent dynamism, Edwards’ painted sculptures are calligraphic—their linear quality recalling the artist’s interest in capitalizing on the potential of sculpture to function as, in his words, “drawing in space.” Works like "Felton" (1974), a homage to the artist’s grandfather, James Felton, and "Mozambique" (c.1974), titled in tribute to the East African nation, reflect this interest in the graphic. Juxtaposing static structures with curved and swooping shapes, Edwards characterizes these pieces as giving the impression of “motion captured and frozen." At the same time, by combining autobiography with formalist concerns, "Felton," "Mozambique," and other painted sculptures imbue abstraction with complex histories and sociopolitical issues—recalling the artist’s 1971 assertion that Black artists “must make works that use our lives and feelings as their basis for existence.” At once resolutely abstract yet deeply personal, these lyrical, chromatic structures reveal Edwards’ belief in the power of abstraction to alter spaces and transform viewers.

Inviting performative engagement by unclasping the four walls of the box and unfolding them to reveal a complex web of symbols, Brey’s archival boxes from his series "Every Life is a Fire" symbolize the vast unknowable intricacies of the human mind. In "Chinese Purple," five nesting boxes unfurl like a Russian Matryoshka doll, alluding to layers of secrets. Each side of each box is lined with delicate paper bearing ornamental Baroque-inspired patterns, rendered in deep red hues borrowed from antique Chinese lacquered furniture. The centerpiece of the box is a small accordion-style booklet delicately wrapped in a gilded textile fragment from a sari, which rests on a bed of dried rosebuds within a glass cube. Juxtaposing scientific renderings of the human heart, oxidized gold leaf, and citations from Manichean texts, Brey alludes to the inherent tensions between binary concepts like life and death, dreams and nightmares, masculinity and femininity, black and white, and the manmade and organic. Through the appropriation of diverse found materials, Brey also hints at the history of Europe's spice trade and legacies of colonialism. Reflecting on the work’s symbolic potential, Brey states, “The box is our head, the box is our cave, the box is the attic, the box is the memory and the world. The boxes are an attempt to spatially represent… a hermeneutics of the soul to create a topography of the mind.”

Alexander Gray Associates presents its first exhibition of works by Teresa Burga (b.1935). A pioneering figure in Latin American Conceptualism, since the 1960s Burga has made works that encompass drawing, painting, sculpture, and conceptual structures that support the display of analytical data and experimental methodologies. The exhibition features a selection of historic illustrations and recent drawings, as well as never-before realized large-scale sculptures and a new wall drawing, based on schematics Burga created in the 1970s.

Diagnosed in 1987 with HIV, Hugh Steers’ subject matter speaks to his experience of the devastation of the AIDS crisis. Ultimately succumbing to AIDS-related complications at the age of 32, Steers maintained a commitment to figuration throughout his short career. He once described his work as “allegorical realism” created "to draw the viewer in through the lure of a comfortingly recognizable style and then confront him with a subject matter of a challenging nature." At once surreal and political, "Boxes" (1990) presents a seated man wearing a paper bag over his head surrounded by empty, open packages. Grounded in the history of Western art, the billowing drapery that frames the tableau recalls the swagged material of Baroque and Neoclassical portraiture. Meanwhile, Steers' unseeing figure alludes to the willful blindness of the AIDS epidemic, the government's resistance to directly addressing the crisis, and the alienation of the disease's victims.

Valeska Soares creates poetic works that fuse and expand upon the languages of post-minimalism and conceptual art. The installation "Ouroboros" (2014) maps the relationships between time and space. The work’s title refers to the symbolic representation of a serpent swallowing its own tail—a metaphor for wholeness and infinity. Soares replaces this mythological act of consumption with a golden pocket watch (in Portuguese, the word for gold is ouro) that is suspended from the ceiling by a delicate wire. The watch executes an almost imperceptible rotation in space, turning at the speed of one revolution per hour. Deprived of its hour hand, which Soares removed, the clock loses its function of offering a reference to a specific moment in the day. Instead, it attests to the inexorable passing of continuous time.

For more than five decades, Melvin Edwards has created evocative sculptures that juxtapose disparate steel elements to reflect on varied themes—oppression, labor, violence, the African Diaspora, etc.—and pay tribute to historic figures and friends. "Djeri Jef Fatou" belongs to the artist's series of "Discs," which he began to create in Senegal in the early 2000s. Featuring a tangled amalgamation of nails and other industrial components, the work’s reductive welded structure expands on minimalism's formalist legacy. At the same time, its title is a homage to Edwards’ close friend Fatou Ndiaye Sow (1937–2004), a Senegalese poet, teacher, and children’s book author. Furthering this connection to Senegal, "Djeri Jef Fatou" adapts the phrase “jërë jëf” or “thank you” from Wolof, a widely-spoken language in the country. Ultimately, "Djeri Jef Fatou" reveals Edwards’ deep engagement with Africa. Since first traveling to the continent in 1970, the artist has been committed to highlighting its incredible cultural diversity. As he concludes, “In my own generation of artists, and people I encountered there, I realized Africa was going to influence me not in terms of the ‘see something, get something visual’ that will influence your work, as much as a corroboration of generations feeling a similar need to create something new and different.”

Alexander Gray Associates presents an exhibition of ten unrealized projects by multidisciplinary artist Regina Silveira. Emphasizing Silveira’s ongoing formal experimentation and conceptual interventions in architecture, the works on view provide an overview of site-specific installations and public art projects that were never realized in physical space. Regina Silveira: "Unrealized / Não feito" is the Gallery’s fifth solo presentation of Silveira’s work, and celebrates a decade since her first Gallery exhibition in 2009.

Harmony Hammond’s "Bandaged Grid" series (2015-Present) develops out of the artist’s "Near Monochromes," combining an earth-based palette with an expanded vocabulary of found fabrics layered in horizontal rows onto the canvas. The use of found material scraps traces back to Hammond’s work of the 1970s, which was made from the discards of friends and businesses in New York’s garment district. Then as now, Hammond harnesses these materials as a means to disrupt the art historical canon. As she explains, “Found and recycled materials and objects are one way to bring content into the world of abstraction, as they all have histories that accompany them wherever they go.” In "Bandaged Grid #5," grommets demarcate the grid, in both readymade strips and ones that Hammond has added to the canvas. For Hammond, the holes reference bodily orifices, putting these paintings into relationship with the experience of living in a body.

Alexander Gray Associates presented "Count of Three," a survey of abstract painting from the 1960s to the present that takes structure—both formal and metaphysical—as a position to work within and against, opening onto myriad generative possibilities. Bringing together artists situated in an array of art historical, social, and cultural contexts, the exhibition features works by Polly Apfelbaum, Torkwase Dyson, Sam Gilliam, Carrie Moyer, Ulrike Müller, Odili Donald Odita, Betty Parsons, and Jack Tworkov.

Alexander Gray Associates presented "A Necessary Elaboration," an exhibition of new work by Joan Semmel (b.1932), in its fifth exhibition with the artist. In paintings made during the last two years, Semmel continues her investigation of the nude self-portrait, in a series of large-scale canvases featuring the artist’s body as volumetric subject realized through expressive brushwork and brilliant color.

Alexander Gray Associates presented "Cutting Out CONYT," an exhibition of new work by Lorraine O’Grady (b.1934). Featuring a selection of prints from "Cutting Out CONYT" (1977/2017), in O’Grady’s words, the show revealed her ongoing commitment to “establishing the diptych as a ceaseless conversation of difference.”

Alexander Gray Associates presents its first exhibition of work by Frank Bowling OBE, RA (b.1934), "Frank Bowling: Make it New." Born in British Guiana, Bowling maintains studios in London and New York. For over five decades, his practice has been defined by its integration of autobiography and postcolonial geopolitics into abstraction. Featuring a selection of recent work, the presentation celebrates Bowling’s contributions to the field of painting.

Alexander Gray Associates presented its third exhibition of work by Hugh Steers (b.1962—d.1995), "The Nullities of Life." Before his death at 32 from AIDS related complications, Steers created allegorical images that captured the emotional and political tenor of New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Embracing representational painting and figuration at a time when such approaches were deemed unfashionable, his intimate compositions are poignant symbols of life under the specter of AIDS. Featuring a selection of paintings and works on paper, the show highlights Steers’ interest in capturing what he once described as “my ‘nullities of life,’” seemingly insignificant moments rendered extraordinary through luminous color and light and evocative forms.