Category: Art

In December 1988, artist Ricky Boscarino was on the hunt for real estate. Not just any property would do, though. “It was really my boyhood ambition to built my dream house, where literally all my dreams could come true,” he says in the short documentary “Electric Garden.” Little did he know that over the course of the next four decades, a dilapidated hunting cabin would transform into a veritable way of life.

Luna Parc emerged on a wooded six-acre parcel in northwestern New Jersey and has been in progress continually since 1989. “Family lore is that we were carpenters for many, many generations,” Boscarino says. “My whole life became about making things with metal, wood, glass, fabric, concrete.”

With numerous additions and labyrinthine levels, Luna Parc includes a kind of living museum, where Boscarino adds new work all the time, plus studios devoted to various mediums, living spaces, and an expansive sculpture garden. At 5,000 square feet, the self-described “madcap” artist’s vibrant, elaborately ornamented home evokes a fairytale dwelling or a whimsical, Tim Burton-esque construction.

Boscarino continues to add new details to Luna Parc, whether electrifying a concrete sculpture garden with colored lights or adding new works to the museum. The house occasionally opens to the public during the summer months, and you can learn more and plan your visit on Boscarino’s website. Watch the documentary in full on Vimeo.

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During the 16th and 17th centuries, major developments in colonial expansion, trade, and scientific technology spurred a fervor for studying the natural world. Previously unknown or overlooked species were documented with unprecedented precision, and artists captured countless varieties of flora and fauna in paintings, prints, and encyclopedic volumes.

Marking a first-of-its-kind collaboration between the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Little Beasts: Art, Wonder, and the Natural World pairs nearly 75 prints, drawings, and paintings with around 60 objects from the NMNH collection.

“In major cities like Antwerp, artists such as Joris and Jacob Hoefnagel and Jan van Kessel created highly detailed drawings, prints, and paintings of these insects, animals, and other beestjes, or ‘little beasts’ in Dutch,” says the National Gallery of Art. “Their works inspired generations of artists and naturalists, fueling the burgeoning science of natural history.”

Natural history has been a focus for scholars since ancient times, albeit early commentary was a bit more wide-ranging than its definition today. The largest single work to have survived from the Roman Empire is Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, which consists of 37 books divided into 10 volumes and covers everything from astronomy to zoology and mineralogy to art.

Studying the natural world in ancient and early modern times was predominantly a philosophical pursuit until a discernible change during the Renaissance. By the 16th century, attitudes had shifted. The humanist learning tradition, centered on literature and the arts, began to give way to more advanced explanations for natural objects, describing their types and transformations and grouping them into classes.

Private collections played a fundamental role in founding many natural history archives. The popularity of Wunderkammers, or “rooms of wonder,” transformed a pastime of the wealthy into exercises in scholarly prestige. By the late 17th century, more rigorous and formalized classification systems emerged as the philosophical component waned.

Throughout this time, artists like Albrecht Dürer, Clara Peeters, and Wenceslaus Hollar created works that responded to new discoveries. From biologically accurate renderings of shells and insects to playful compositions that employ animals and plants as decorative motifs, paintings and prints were often the only means by which the public could see newly discovered species.

“Art and science have been closely aligned throughout the 175-year history of the Smithsonian,” says Kirk Johnson, director of the NMNH. “Even today, researchers at the National Museum of Natural History depend on scientific illustrators to bring clarity and understanding to the specimens they study.”

Little Beasts opens on May 18 and continues through November 2 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Find more on the museum’s website.

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In characteristically glistening blue hues, Robert Peterson’s striking portraits invite us into emotionally complex inner worlds.

Peterson centers the Black body in paintings that challenge dominant narratives surrounding Black lives, celebrating beauty, compassion, and resilience. Tender portraits reveal the essential humanity of vulnerability and individuality with an emphasis on themes of empathy and togetherness.

Peterson’s choice of oils, a traditional portrait medium, embeds his work in the continuum of Western painting. However, instead of highly stylized scenes or elaborate ornamentation, his figures are often set against bold, flat backgrounds and they appear half-dressed or in casual clothes, unguarded and relaxed.

In his forthcoming solo exhibition, We Are Forever at albertz benda, Peterson examines familial connections, paying homage to the strength and dedication inherent in the relationships between siblings and parents and their children.

“At the core of this new body of work is a profound sense of intimacy, offering a thoughtful reflection on presence and the enduring significance of his subjects’ stories,” the gallery says.

We Are Forever runs from March 27 to May 3 in New York. Find more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

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From the studio to her childhood bedroom in Columbus, Georgia, to the museum, a new film from Art21 presents a broad portrait of Amy Sherald. The artist is perhaps best known for her depiction of former First Lady Michelle Obama and her signature images of Black Americans rendered in grayscale.

In “Singular Moments,” the Art21 team peers into Sherald’s process and captures the intricacies of creating a work. Reference photos taped to a wall and paint squirted onto white paper plates accompany the artist as she works on her increasingly large-scale canvases.

Sherald frequently paints people she knows, beginning with their faces and eyes before moving on to the rest of their figures. As the title of the film suggests, her focus is on a single moment of beauty. “I think beautiful paintings are important,” she says in the film. “I say figuration is like the soul food of art making. It’s what takes you back home and what you eat when you need comfort, and we all need that at some point.”

The film comes ahead of Sherald’s first solo exhibition at a New York museum, American Sublime, which will present about 50 works from 2007 to today next month at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In addition to a visit to the artist’s parents’ home, filled with grade-school pictures and teenage art projects, viewers also witness the creation of some of her more recent works, particularly those exploring what it means to be an American.

Watch “Singular Moments” above, and be sure to read our conversation with the artist in which she discusses anxiety and finding respite in her work.

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The first known postcard printed as a souvenir can be traced to Vienna in 1871, followed by commemorative cards for famous events like the completion of the Eiffel Tower in 1889 and the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. It wasn’t long before a fashion for picture postcards took the U.S. by storm throughout the first half of the 20th century.

For David Opdyke, the iconic correspondences form the groundwork for an artistic practice examining capitalism, globalization, consumerism, and our fraught and increasingly disconnected relationship with the environment. Occasionally darkly humorous yet steeped in a sense of foreboding, his uncanny scenes suggest what kind of world we might live in if we do nothing to stem the mounting climate crisis.

Opdyke summons idyllic coastlines, national parks, government monuments, wildlife, and civic infrastructure to weave “fractured yet cohesive topographies,” says Cristin Tierney Gallery, which is presenting the artist’s current solo exhibition, Waiting for the Future.

For nearly a decade, Opdyke has invoked the nostalgia of landscape postcards to interrogate the climate emergency within the context of American politics and geographies. “Through these carefully altered compositions, Opdyke merges the past and the future, presenting both urgent and inevitable visions of environmental upheaval,” the gallery says.

The artist often uses antique cards that he purchases on eBay, painting scenes of environmental disasters or discordances between nature and architecture. Alternating between cartoons and life-like portrayals of trees, animals, fires, and structures, his compositions range from single cards to wall-spanning assemblages, his gouache-painted details spreading from frame to frame.

In “Overlook,” for example, giant tentacles destroy bridges, rising sea water threatens cities, and huge fires rage in institutional buildings. A dome encloses a metropolis, a rocket named Mars 2 heads for a new home in the solar system, and an airplane banner advertises “Technology Will Save Us” in a bleak yet not unimaginable reality fueled by techno-utopianism.

In his large-scale “Enough of Nature,” Opdyke transforms natural landscapes into encampment sites for those displaced from their homes, and portions of the overall composition appear to dislodge from the main grid as if floating away.

Caught tenuously between outmoded industrial practices, shifting societal value systems, and a rapidly evolving climate crisis, Opdyke’s pieces point to once-idealized symbols of American progress to stress the dangers of ignoring our own impact on the environment.

Waiting for the Future underscores the precariousness of complacency, a “cautionary tale,” the gallery says, laying bare the fragility of our constructed environment.

The show continues through April 26 in New York City. Find more on the artist’s website.

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“In 2012, I found a piece of material in a rock pool that changed my life,” artist Mandy Barker says. “Mistaking this moving piece of cloth for seaweed started the recovery of synthetic clothing from around the coastline of Britain for the next ten years.”

Barker is known for her photographic practice that takes a deep dive into marine debris. Her work has been featured in publications like National Geographic, The Guardian, VOGUE, and many more. Often collaborating with scientists to raise awareness about plastic pollution in the earth’s oceans, she eloquently highlights its harmful impacts on marine habitats, wildlife, and all of us who depend on the ocean for sustenance.

Forthcoming from GOST Books, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Imperfections surveys the unexpected and out-of-place along British shores. At first glance, each specimen appears like a fragment of a leaf or a scatter of organic material, but upon closer inspection, the subjects of Barker’s images reveal details of unraveled polyester or scraps of nylon tights.

Barker hopes to raise awareness of the damaging effects of fast fashion, synthetic clothing, and the increasing amounts of microfibers in the oceans. The fashion industry is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than all international flights and container ships combined and is also the second-largest consumer of water, requiring about 2,000 gallons of water to produce a single pair of jeans.

Barker’s new book is composed as an homage to the work of trailblazing botanist and photographer Anna Atkins (1799-1871), who is thought to be the first woman to take a photograph and the first person to publish a book containing photographic illustrations. Her 1843 study, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, employed blue photograms to illustrate photosynthetic organisms and seaweeds.

Barker’s work serves as a kind of sibling or sequel to Atkins’ pioneering publication, presented in a similar style with handwritten names in Latin beneath each specimen.

In their updated versions, the titles take Atkins’ scientific names as a starting point and tweak them just slightly to conjure references to clothing or the human body. In the plate titled “Dichloris vestis,” for example, Barker draws on a real type of algae Atkins catalogued, Dichloria viridis, but “vestis” is instead a tongue-in-cheek reference to outerwear, often made of polyester or other synthetic materials. “Conferva tibia,” which portrays frayed tights, employs the Latin word for “leg.”

From John o’ Groats at the northernmost tip of Great Britain to Land’s End at its southernmost, Barker recovered specimens of clothing from more than 120 beaches. Her finds, ranging from parkas to wigs to sports jerseys, were pulled from the sand, tide pools, or directly from the sea. In Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Imperfections, Barker looks to the past to better understand how our actions in the present have both immediate impacts and will shape the future of the climate crisis.

Find your copy on GOST’s online store, where signed editions are also available, and explore more of Barker’s work on her website and Instagram.

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In the late 17th century, during Korea’s Joseon Dynasty, a particularly rotund, plain white porcelain vessel rose to popularity. Nicknamed “moon jars” for their milky glaze and spherical form, the earliest examples were finished in wood-fired kilns to add character to their minimalist surfaces. Treasured and reproduced by skilled artisans throughout the centuries, the classic style continues to influence contemporary artisans.

For Brooklyn-based artist Sung Hwa Kim, the traditional Korean jar serves as a starting point for an ongoing series of paintings invoking decorative vessels as metaphorical containers for the past. In the context of the still-life, he conjures what he refers to as “visual haikus,” poetic evocations of the passing of time, like changing seasons and the transition from day into night.

In Kim’s current solo exhibition, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring at Harper’s, the artist emphasizes quiet, everyday moments in domestic settings that often overlook brick buildings or the iconic Brooklyn Bridge. Some of his compositions are vibrantly monochrome, setting the scene for a vase on top of a table, containing a scene from a historic painting or faraway landscape.

Kim often incorporates spectral, glowing insects (previously) and situates the vessels on sills or near windows. Vases contain landscapes, trees, and animals, while decor on the walls reference works by famous modernists like Vincent van Gogh, René Magritte, and Sanyu.

Inside the pots, the flora appears ghost-like or faded, rendered in fuzzy gray marks, and objects left nearby, like a pencil and notebook or a drinking glass, suggest that someone was recently present but an unspecified time has passed since they left. The jars serve as portals to other times and places just as the windows provide views of another world. “Ultimately, Kim masterfully inhabits the role of guide, making perceptible the delicate threshold between what fades and what endures,” says a gallery statement.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring continues in New York through April 5. See more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

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While Heather Rios’s slices of layer cake look ready to stick a fork into, you may want to think twice. Formed of polymer clay and finished with embroidery, the artist pairs the sweets with a vintage plate—and sometimes a fork—in playful trompe l’oeils.

Enveloped in realistic frosting and decorated with berries, blossoms, and sprinkles, each work evokes pieces you’d be ready to dig into at a birthday or wedding. Rios meticulously embroiders each sponge element, fashioning patterned layers in thread on a hoop before transferring the finished panel to the sculpture.

In addition to freestanding forms, Rios embellishes small paintings with shallow reliefs of cakes on canvas, emphasizing vibrant color and the fluffy texture of the exposed interiors.

Many of Rios’s cakes would be exceedingly difficult to achieve in reality, like detailed floral designs or motifs from blue-and-white porcelain. Lucky for us, we can have our cake and keep it, too. Find more on the artist’s Instagram, and purchase a slice from her Etsy shop.

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Since the 1800s, hitching posts have shaped a history anchored in utility and community. Scattered throughout towns and outside common areas, the sturdy objects offered a secure point to tie down horses, especially during social events or gatherings. San Francisco-based artist Windy Chien reinterprets this functional object in her ongoing Hitching Post series.

Interdependent forms are particularly fascinating to Chien. “If the object around which the hitch is tied were to be removed, the hitch collapses and loses its integrity,” she says. Just as the presence of the knot relies on another element to remain intact, social spaces and gatherings rely on collective presence.

Having received commissions for the projects since 2019, Chien creates unique pieces for a wide range of communal areas, such as airports, offices, houses, and ranches. Cutting wooden supports to various lengths and fastening rope by wrapping and knotting, the flowing and geometric compositions stretch across walls and exterior facades.

Combining motifs from her Circuit Board series with other techniques, Chien recently completed a large installation in a Los Angeles office stairwell comprised of four works, each spanning 20 feet wide in a gradient of six hues. In April, the artist is looking forward to Ruth Asawa’s retrospective at San Francisco MOMA, where she will be showing several works alongside the exhibition. Find more on her website and Instagram.

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When Jose Lerma encountered “Reception of the Grand Condé by Louis XIV” by Jean-Léon Gérôme at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, he found himself drawn to the figures tucked far behind the crowd. Known for his meticulous realism, Gérôme rendered these small characters with minimal brushstrokes, a decision that has influenced Lerma’s work for more than a decade.

Exaggerating the sparse quality of the figures, Lerma (previously) paints portraits in wide swaths of acrylic applied with brooms and industrial tools. The new works retain the contrasts of earlier pieces as well-defined strokes sweep across the burlap to form heavy, impasto ridges.

At Nino Mier Gallery in Brussels, Lerma’s new solo exhibition Bayamonesque presents the culmination of his current style. The title references his upbringing in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, and how we think about resemblance. Painting both real subjects and manufactured characters, the portraits reference those who might otherwise be relegated to the background, stripping down their likeness to only what’s necessary.

Vacillating between figurative and abstract, the compositions are what Lerma refers to as “the summary of a portrait…The abstract painter in me is, above all, drawn to certain people for specific features that can be broken down to their bare minimum as paintable elements: an expressive cowl, a striking nose, a distinctive shape of lips.”

Bayamonesque is on view from March 14 to April 17 in Brussels. Find more from Lerma on Instagram.

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