Why go to just one art gallery when you can hit up a whole cluster? We love to binge on several art venues in one go — that’s why we teamed up with VINCE to bring you the Walk of Art. Equipped with a nifty Google map, you can hop between the best galleries, museums, and artist-resource hubs with our customized guides to New York, LA, and Chicago. From the New Museum’s opus of Eastern Bloc nostalgia to titillating, meticulous pop/pulp collages in an outsider-art gallery, check out some of the highlights from the current exhibits on each city’s itinerary.
As a special art bonus on the tour, stop by the VINCE store (also on the Google map print-out) for on opportunity to get a free copy of master photographer Gregory Crewdson’s book In a Lonely Place , as well as a 25% off card for the store.
Pipilotti Rist @ MCA Chicago
There’s the Pipilotti Rist we know and love — frolicking through fluid dual projections, she’s flashing underwater coral, yellow underwear, and a smile, sparkling with distorted sunlight. So “fantastical.” So “libidinous.” Her 1996 piece Sip My Ocean is just one of the various works culled by renowned American artist Joseph Cornell from the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Mr. Cornell has curated the current group exhibit Pandora’s Box , selecting and arranging pieces that influenced his signature surrealist “box” assemblages from six decades of art history.
Click through below to see more top art picks from the Walks of Art.
Ostalgia @ The New Museum
While New York’s beautiful, box-life, multi-tiered New Museum struts its rep as “Manhattan’s only dedicated contemporary art museum,” the current group show, Ostalgia , is themed with a bit of a throwback. The exhibit refers to a very specific “sense of longing and nostalgia for the era before the collapse of the Communist Bloc,” grouping works in all media by 50 artists from 20 countries across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics. This banner by Andrei Monastyrski reads: “I do not complain about anything and I almost like it here, although I have never been here before and know nothing about this place.” Ah, stoic ambivalence.
Elisabeth Fried @ Gallery Brown
Gallery Brown in Los Angeles currently features the fashion, rock ‘n’ roll, and art photography of Elisabeth Fried. Her stylish and sexy-clean compositions come in sleek, sharp, black and white — which does wonders for peacock feathers. Art dealer Dina Brown’s eponymous spot is also the go-to place for specialized art restoration, conservation, and consultation.
Kelli Connell @ Catherine Edelman Gallery
Chicago’s Catherine Edelman Gallery is currently showing Kelli Connell’s Double Life — a series of double-exposure captures of the same woman dating, cavorting, traveling, and intimately interacting with herself, in an open-ended visual treatise on gender. From Hiroshi Watanabe’s master portraiture to Lori Nix’s miniature disasters, this gallery regularly serves up innovative contemporary photography with a twist.
Aspen Mays @ Golden Gallery
One of the newest galleries in New York’s Lower East Side, Chicago import the Golden Gallery has just opened its inaugural show, featuring the conceptual experimentations of Fulbright scholar Aspen Mays — who spent a 365-day residency in Chile’s astronomy stations and abandoned darkrooms, engrossing herself in cosmic knowledge, while rustling through vintage photo paper and chemicals. The results are meticulous, like her silver-gelatin print series depicting the sun from a mid-century international survey of sunspots.
After Ferus
Los Angeles’ After Ferus is a reincarnation of the infamous Ferus Gallery, which exhibited the most cutting-edge postwar artists of Southern California — until occultist and Kenneth Anger collaborator Marjorie “Scarlet Woman” Cameron had her exhibit shut down for lewdness. Lots of history in this hub.
Mary Lou Zelazny @ Carl Hammer Gallery
Chicago’s Carl Hammer Gallery has one of the nation’s richest histories of displaying true outsider art, like Henry Darger’s epic Vivian Girls art manuscripts. The gallery’s favorite, Mary Lou Zelazny, has just returned with brand new, seamless pulp/pop image collages. It’s her most titillating series yet, though don’t expect it to be all sexy boat parties — peeling, mosaic flesh awaits.
Christina Hejtmanek @ Blackston Gallery
NYC’s Blackston Gallery of emerging art is featuring the photographic and video work of Christina Hejtmanek. Using traditional film, the artist captures natural, temporal landscapes with painterly effects, sun streaks, sways, and swirls. Her video study Sky Piece is pure and almost devotional, recording the sky from sunrise to sunset at hourly intervals.
Supersense @ Gallery 825
The Los Angeles Art Association and its Gallery 825’s current show, Supersense, is an “an all-media exploration of tactile fetishism in contemporary art practice.” A show within the show, Jillian Kogan’s American Iconomics: Stars & Stripes explores pop culture and the manias of capitalism and celebrity by remixing flags with the symbology of Cali, commerce, Alice, stars, stripes, and Elvis.
Vlassis Caniaris @ Team Gallery
New York’s Team Gallery roster totes such “swanky” heavyweights as Ryan McGinley and Banks Violette. Currently on view: Greek proto-Arte Povera artist Vlassis Caniaris, whose tableau arrangements of wire and “everyday working-class objects” speak to the plight and social displacement of immigration.