Ten Exciting Photography Shows in NYC
After the dog days of summer, September brings New York a barrage of excellent gallery shows. Be sure not to miss Lise Sarfati’s new portraits of “anti-heroines” in Hollywood, on view at Yossi Milo Gallery, or Zoe Leonard’s camera obscura installation and recent photographs at Murray Guy. David Zwirner Gallery is hosting James Welling’s photographic meditations on the house and studio spaces of artist Andrew Wyeth, whose paintings and life work have long inspired Welling. Barney Kulok’s black-and-white photographs of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, the last design completed by the late architect Louis I. Kahn, render a poetic take on construction and landscape (and are featured in a new Aperture “First Book” due out in October).
Celebrating the legacy of Gordon Parks, Howard Greenberg Gallery will feature two simultaneous exhibitions. One presents a historic survey of Parks’s photographs, the other a selection of images dedicated to Parks’s homage to Ralph Ellison and Invisible Man, curated by artist Glenn Ligon. Also negotiating past and present, the Walther Collection Project Space will host the first of a three-part exhibition considering the African photographic archive, juxtaposing A.M. Duggan-Cronin’s mid-twentieth-century study of African heritage with Santu Mofokeng’s recent take on the photo album as archive. In a somewhat different vein, Stephen Ferry’s exhibition Violentology, on view at Umbrage Gallery, offers a courageous examination of Colombia’s decades-long civil conflict and humanitarian crisis.
Representing current ideas in photography, Artie Vierkant’s show at Higher Pictures and Kate Steciw’s exhibition at Toomer Labzda Gallery both approach photography through the prisms of color and digital manipulation, presenting their individual interpretations of the relation between art and the internet—with widely differing results. Finally, the Visual Arts Gallery will present Myths and Realities, an exploration of the ever-shifting boundary between reality and illusion that includes sixteen notable alumni of the School of Visual Arts (including Collier Schorr, Justine Kurland, and Noah Kalina) and is curated by Kathy Ryan and Scott Thode.
September’s openings and exhibitions at a glance:
Lise Sarfati: On Hollywood
Yossi Milo Gallery
Sept 6–Oct 13
James Welling: Overflow
David Zwirner
Sept 7–Oct 27
Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive: Santu Mofokeng The Black Photo Album/Look at Me 1890-1950, A.M. Duggan-Cronin The Bantu Tribes of South Africa
The Walther Collection Project Space
Sept 13– Nov 14
Artie Vierkant
Higher Pictures
Sept 13–Nov 3
Gordon Parks: Centennial
Contact: Gordon Parks, Ralph Ellison and “Invisible Man” (curated by Glenn Ligon)
Howard Greenberg Gallery
Sept 14–Oct 27
Kate Steciw: Boundless Hyper
Toomer Labzda Gallery
Sept 13–Oct 28
Barney Kulok: Building
Nicole Klagsbrun
Sept 12–Oct 27
Zoe Leonard
Murray Guy
Sept 15–Oct 27
Myths and Realities [Closed]
Visual Arts Gallery
Through Sept 29
Stephen Ferry: Violentology [Closed]
Umbrage
Through Sept 28
Images: Gordon Parks, Muhammad Ali, Miami, Florida, 1966; Gordon Parks, Contact Sheet from Gordon Parks’s Invisible Man Series, New York, 1952.
