Jack Shainman Gallery

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present This Land, an exhibition of two kindred bodies of work by Leslie Wayne that express the nature of the American West through perception and memory. In each piece, Wayne considers different ways in which we interpret and imagine geological space, exploring landscape both as a vertical, abstracted force and a horizontal, figurative expanse. Named in homage to Woody Guthrie’s heartland ballad “This Land is Your Land,” Wayne offers a contemporary vision of Manifest Destiny—imbuing her symbolic, and experienced, westward voyages with topographies that are sensorial, memorial, and tectonic.

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present LIE DOGGO, a monumental exhibition of work by Nina Chanel Abney that spans her creative practice, uniting a new series of paintings with collages, site-specific murals, an immersive digital art installation, and the debut of a new body of large scale sculpture. Paying homage to the sophisticated color theories of Matisse, continuing the legacy of cubists, Picasso and Léger, and connecting with the synesthetic sensibilities of Harlem Renaissance greats, Douglas and Lawrence, Abney brings these historical movements into contemporary pertinence.

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present blood compass, a solo exhibition of new work by Diedrick Brackens. In these weavings, the artist maps an imagined place —visualizing the internal mechanisms and symbols that animate his work while removing the anchor of direct narrative. The scenes depicted in each weaving exist out of time, suspended between a distant past and a world to come. The works in this series are set at dusk, twilight, and deep night—hours that become vehicles for ritual and interiority. The silhouetted inhabitants of this in-between realm are archetypes that Brackens once described as ciphers, or “needles through which I slip the threads of biography and myth, and pass through a mesh of history and context.”

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present Born Black, an exhibition of Gordon Parks’s photographs—curated in collaboration with The Gordon Parks Foundation. This presentation is inspired by the 1971 book Gordon Parks: Born Black, A Personal Report on the Decade of Black Revolt 1960-1970, which brought together a collection of essays and photographs by Parks that were originally created for Life magazine. Translating the essential themes of the text into an exhibition, Jack Shainman explains, “We seek to commemorate Parks’s ground-breaking 1971 anthology, and the enduring impact of his photographs and writing today. This exhibition is an act of expansion—presenting both seminal and lesser-known works from his renowned photographic series, offering contemporary meditations on his incisive eye and insightful prose.”

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present Broken Spectre, an immersive video installation by Richard Mosse filmed in the Amazon Basin. Understanding the urgency of sharing Mosse’s seminal piece in the United States, this will be the first exhibition housed in the gallery’s new Tribeca location—situated in a multi-story 20,000 square-foot space in the Clock Tower Building at 46 Lafayette Street—which is slated to complete renovation in the fall of 2024. Opening for a limited preview on the occasion of exhibiting Mosse’s critical work for the first time in New York, this special presentation is an exciting glimpse into the gallery’s greatly anticipated restoration, and a fulfillment of Shainman’s commitment to activate the expansive site to platform the ambitious and prescient work of the artists they represent without delay.

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present Echoes of Circumstance, a group exhibition featuring work by El Anatsui, Lyne Lapointe, and Garnett Puett. Within Anatsui, Lapointe, and Puett’s art exists a cycle of metamorphosis through which local sources, ancestral practices, and biological phenomena are expressed through found objects, biomorphic compositions, and fractal patterns. Composing work that extends across continents, languages, and methods, this presentation considers the creative philosophy of material ecology. As explained by Neri Oxman, material ecology is an approach to design in which “Material is not considered a subordinate attribute of form, but rather its progenitor. Such is the story of form told from the point of view of matter, and it begins, naturally, with form’s predicament.” Considered within the framework of artistic practice, Anatsui, Lapointe, and Puett enumerate how natural methodology can synthesize structures of a built environment and vice versa.

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present Michael Snow: A Life Survey (1955-2020). In a career that defied categorization in medium or genre, Snow’s work embodied originality over novelty, the cerebral over the conceptual, and evolution over conclusion. It is with this expansive vision that A Life Survey is mounted, offering an intricate and dynamic portrait of Snow’s life and work. Born in Toronto in 1928, Snow showed an early affinity for creative experimentation. Throughout his youth, he played piano in local jazz bands and received prizes for his early paintings. This led him to the Ontario College of Art where he studied from 1948 to 1952. When declaring his major from rigidly divided academic departments, he chose Design, comprehending that it was the “common aspect of all disciplines.” Fascinated by pushing the limits on ways of seeing, Snow was influenced most by Modern artists who made work on their own terms, including Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Marcel Duchamp, Willem De Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Yves Klein, and Mark Rothko. In these early years, he described embarking on a “try this, try that” period through which experiences from his professional career, daily life, and jazz improvisations inspired pieces like A to Z, 1956, Drawn Out, 1959, and The Drum Book, 1960.

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present Stressed World, on view at The School through December 3rd, 2022. The exhibition takes its name from the title of Ghanaian-born artist El Anatsui’s large-scale sculpture composed of thousands of folded pieces of discarded aluminum and copper wire. Throwing light on the long shadow of colonialism while also forming a blueprint for an alternative future, Anatsui’s 'Stressed World' (2011) sets the tone for the exhibition, which includes 30 artists working from their own corners of an exhausted planet. Featured artists include: El Anatsui, Shimon Attie, Radcliffe Bailey, Yoan Capote, Nick Cave, Ifeyinwa Joy Chiamonwu, Gehard Demetz, Pierre Dorion, Paterson Ewen, Vibha Galhotra, Barkley L. Hendricks, Hayv Kahraman, Anton Kannemeyer, Lyne Lapointe, Deborah Luster, Tyler Mitchell, Meleko Mokgosi, Adi Nes, Jackie Nickerson, Odili Donald Odita, Gordon Parks, Garnett Puett, Malick Sidibé, Claudette Schreuders, Paul Anthony Smith, Michael Snow, Hank Willis Thomas, Carlos Vega, Andy Warhol, Leslie Wayne, and Carrie Mae Weems

Jack Shainman Gallery is proud to present Meleko Mokgosi: Democratic Intuition at Jack Shainman Gallery | The School. Democratic Intuition (2013-2019) is an eight-chapter project that questions conceptions of democracy in relation to the daily lived experiences of southern Africans. Mokgosi examines the ways in which democracy can be thought of as inscribed in the individual by various institutions and through processes of socialization and intersubjective exchange. As a result, the project reveals the inherent contradiction between one’s supposed individual freedoms and the necessary recognition of and interaction with the other in democracy.

Five years since the opening of The School, Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to present Basquiat x Warhol, an extensive examination of the compelling, albeit complex relationship between two master artists during the final years of their lives. The crux of this exhibition lies in the collaborative paintings and interconnected practices of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. The two artists shared collective creative space in New York City, a city rife with possibility. The series of collaboration paintings, executed from 1984 – 85, sparked conversations between the two artists that are visible on each canvas – a visual language all their own that revitalized Warhol’s engagement with painting.

Carrie Mae Weems, Hank Willis Thomas, Michael Snow, Paul Anthony Smith, Odili Donald Odita, Adi Nes, Kerry James Marshall, Yoan Capote, El Anatsui