On View

“Jim Shaw: Hope Against Hope” at Simon Lee GalleryThrough January 16, 2021
What the gallery says: “Shaw has never been one to shy away from provocation: the artist boldly imagines Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, and his wife, Melania, descending an escalator into Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell to find a group of traitors, some of them discarded former aides, frozen alongside Satan in a sea of ice. Shaw’s monsters and villains, whether real or fictional, are larger than life; ultimately, these paintings convey a sense of vicissitude that is reflective of the country’s ever-shifting sociopolitical landscape.”
Why it’s worth a look: With less than a week until election day in the United States, Los Angeles-based artist Jim Shaw has conjured a fantastical landscape awash with trolls and antiheroes, many targeted at Donald Trump and his cronies. Shaw is a collector of images from bygone phases of American life, and he disperses them like Easter eggs in his raucous, cutting works, marrying them to more contemporary images.
In works like One Percent for Art, Shaw lampoons the upper crust of society with a Calder-esque sculpture that functions as either a wig rack or a head-skewering pike—or maybe both—while a small gladiator stands at the ready to fight the multi-headed creature, which looks to be an impossible task.
What it looks like:

Installation view, “Jim Shaw: Hope Against Hope” at Simon Lee Gallery, London. Photo: Ben Westoby.

Jim Shaw, One Percent For Art (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee Gallery.

Installation view, “Jim Shaw: Hope Against Hope” at Simon Lee Gallery, London. Photo: Ben Westoby.

Installation view, “Jim Shaw: Hope Against Hope” at Simon Lee Gallery, London. Photo: Ben Westoby.

Installation view, “Jim Shaw: Hope Against Hope” at Simon Lee Gallery, London. Photo: Ben Westoby.

Jim Shaw, Jimmie Olsen Vs The Goddess Of Reason (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee Gallery.

Installation view, “Jim Shaw: Hope Against Hope” at Simon Lee Gallery, London. Photo: Ben Westoby.

Installation view, “Jim Shaw: Hope Against Hope” at Simon Lee Gallery, London. Photo: Ben Westoby.

Jim Shaw, The Master Mason (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee Gallery.

Jim Shaw, Pandora’s Box (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee Gallery.

Installation view, “Jim Shaw: Hope Against Hope” at Simon Lee Gallery, London. Photo: Ben Westoby.

Jim Shaw, Donald and Melania Trump a descending the escalator into the 9th circle of hell reserved for traitors frozen in a sea of ice, (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee Gallery.

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Though many of the artists in “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” a new show open now at MoMA PS1, have been convicted of crimes, only in a few cases do we learn the details. 
“I don’t talk about guilt and innocence, nor do I talk about why people are in prison, unless that’s important for them in terms of how they understand their art-making,” says Nicole R. Fleetwood, who organized the exhibition of works made from within, or about, the US prison system.
For her, the show is about carcerality as a systemic, not an individual, problem. 
“As an abolitionist, if you start playing into the logic of good/bad, innocent/guilty, you start to think about prisons as if they’re about individual decision-making, which is often how we talk about it in a broader normative public,” she says. “Prisons don’t exist because of individual decision-making. They exist as a punitive, harsh way of governing around structural inequality and systemic abuse.”
Larry Cook, The Visiting Room #4 (2019). Courtesy of the artist.

“Marking Time” follows Fleetwood’s recently released book of the same name, published this spring, which lays out what she calls “carceral aesthetics.” 
“I talk about it as a contemporary, robust movement of art-making that takes place across the carceral state—people in prison, in solitary confinement, on parole, or people who grew up in relationship to carcerality and captivity,” she tells Artnet News.
For artists, it’s a question of overcoming the conditions of their confinement. In lieu of an art supply store, makers turn to bedsheets, hair gel, discarded magazines, and other ephemera to make their work. A six-foot by nine-foot cell represents another limitation, as does the need, in many cases, for creations to be hideable or transportable.
Dean Gillispie, Spiz’s Dinette (1998). Courtesy of the artist.

Thinking about the work in the show through the lens of constraint makes it all the more impressive—sometimes astonishingly so.
For his room-filling tapestry, Apokaluptein 16389067 (2010–13), a dreamy scene of biblical proportions, artist Jesse Krimes meticulously transfer-printed images from magazines onto 39 prison-issued bedsheets.
Another artist, Dean Gillispie, has spent 20 years recreating sculptural scenes from his life using pins, popsicle sticks, and other discarded objects. 
Indeed, edenic iconography and the mutability of memory are major themes throughout the show, as is self-portraiture. The prevalence of the latter came as a surprise for Fleetwood when writing the book. It’s perhaps the most common genre of art-making in prison, and skilled portraitists are in high-demand. Inmates—and even prison staff—often commission or trade for a picture of a loved one.
But the art form represents something more than a link to the outside world. 
“It’s a way of refuting what I call the criminal index: mugshots, prison ID cards, all the ways photographic images of imprisoned people are used to render them bad criminals. It claims a much more complex humanity,” Fleetwood says. 
Mark Loughney, Pyrrhic Defeat: A Visual Study of Mass Incarceration (2014–present). Courtesy of the artist.

Pyrrhic Defeat: A Visual Study of Mass Incarceration (2014–present), a sweeping installation of inmate portraits by Mark Loughney, embodies this idea.
The incarcerated artist depicts over 500 of his fellow inmates with remarkable consistency: each portrait is executed in graphite at the same scale. But the pictures never blur into an institutional register, not even when gridded together. The humanity always seeps through.
The most recent portraits in Loughney’s ongoing series find his subjects wearing masks, one of multiple reminders in the show of the pandemic and toll it has taken on the lives of the incarcerated.
Another, more sobering example comes in one of the show’s final galleries, which is filled with paintings and drawings by Ronnie Goodman, who died on the streets of San Francisco in August less than two months before the opening of the exhibition. (“Marking Time” was originally scheduled to open in April.)
Installation view of “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” Courtesy of MoMA PS1. Photo: Matthew Septimus.

Many wondered about the fit of such a show at PS1 because of the institution’s relationship to the Museum of Modern Art, where trustee Larry Fink has been the subject of numerous protests for investing in companies that operate private prisons.
Though PS1 maintains an independent board, the museum has been targeted in demonstrations related to Fink. Last fall, artist Phil Collins withdrew from the museum’s “Theater of Operations” exhibition, while another participant, Michael Rakowitz, demanded that his video in the show be paused in a gesture of protest. 
“I’m here and present for those conversations and to do that work within the community to transform these institutions,” she says. 
“I don’t think any person or entity should be in the business of making money off of punishment and captivity, period,” she adds. “Profiting from captivity and punishment is, to me, beyond unethical. We should be building an economy that does not allow people to make millions or billions of dollars off of other peoples’ suffering.”
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“Artemisia” at the National Gallery, LondonThrough January 24, 2021

What the museum says: “In 17th-century Europe, at a time when women artists were not easily accepted, Artemisia was exceptional. She challenged conventions and defied expectations to become a successful artist and one of the greatest storytellers of her time…
In this first major exhibition of Artemisia’s work in the UK, see her best-known paintings including two versions of her iconic and viscerally violent Judith beheading Holofernes; as well as her self portraits, heroines from history and the Bible, and recently discovered personal letters, seen in the UK for the first time.”
Why it’s worth a look: Artemisia Gentileschi is finally getting her due, after years languishing in the shadows while her male peers took the stage and set a standard for Old Master painters. Now, though, with an onslaught of scientific discoveries, extensive new research, and high-profile auction sales and museum acquisitions, the artist is at long last in the spotlight.
In the National Gallery’s survey, Gentileschi’s tumultuous life may be what draws viewers in—she is best known for her grisly depiction of the biblical story of Judith beheading Holofernes, which some critics have interpreted as a revenge fantasy alluding to her own rape—but her deftness as a portraitist and painter of baroque themes punctuated by strong women is what will keep them there.
What it looks like:

Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith and her Maidservant (ca. 1623-25) © The Detroit Institute of Arts.

Artemisia Gentileschi, Lot and His Daughters (ca. 1636-38). © Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio.

Artemisia Gentileschi, Self Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura) (ca. 1638-9). © Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2019.

Artemisia Gentileschi, Esther before Ahasuereus (ca. 1628-30). © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Artemisia Gentileschi, Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy (ca. 1620-25). © Photo: Dominique Provost Art Photography – Bruges.

Artemsisia Gentileschi, Judith and her Maidservant (ca. 1615-17). © Gabinetto fotografico delle Gallerie degli Uffizi.

Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Beheading Holofernes (ca. 1612-13). © ph. Luciano Romano / Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte 2016.

Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith and her maidservant with the Head of Holofernes (ca. 1608). © Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo / photo Børre Høstland.

Artemisia Gentileschi, Portrait of a Lady Holding a Fan (mid 1620s). © Photo courtesy of the owner.

Artemisia Gentileschi, David and Bathsheba (ca. 1636-7).© Columbus Museum of Art.

Artemisia Gentileschi, Jael and Sisera (1620). © Szépmüvészeti Múzeum / Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.

Artmemisia Gentileschi, Self Portrait as a Lute Player (ca. 1615-17). © Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut.

Installation view, “Artemisia” at the National Gallery.

Installation view, “Artemisia” at the National Gallery.

Installation view, “Artemisia” at the National Gallery.

Installation view, “Artemisia” at the National Gallery.

Artemisia Gentileschi, Susannah and the Elders (1622). © The Burghley House Collection.

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As a child in Mexico, the artist Alejandro Almanza Pereda was obsessed with filmmaker John Carpenter’s cult classic, Escape From New York, in which Manhattan has been transformed into a prison and the hero is in a race against time to save the US president from a ticking time bomb. 
While this premise is a few light years removed from Almanza Pereda’s current life, he felt a kinship with it when he made the radical decision to leave New York (and its outrageous rent) for his native Mexico City. For the artist, New York may not have been a literal prison, as it was depicted in Escape from New York, but it became a figurative one that he describes as “a playground for really privileged people.”
In an exclusive interview filmed as part of Art21’s New York Close Up series, the artist tasks himself with a seemingly impossible mission: to create an entirely new body of work in the three weeks between the time he purchased a one-way ticket for Mexico and the day his plane departed.

Production still from the Art21 “New York Close Up” film “Alejandro Almanza Pereda Escapes from New York.” © Art21, Inc. 2015.

Instead of dwelling on his impending departure, Almanza Pereda channels his frenetic energy into his new project, riffing on Dutch still life paintings by staging similar tableaux that have a twist: the objects are underwater and upside down. The artist gathers knickknacks he accumulated in his Hunter College studio and goes shopping in Chinatown to find more objects. He recounts a lifelong fascination with underwater exploration, Jacques Cousteau, and sea creatures.
Here, on the surface, everything stays put—the gravity,” he tells Art21. “In the water, you can use those levitations to kind of create different sculptures in a way. It’s pretty spectacular.”
In the video, Almanza Pereda goes through a bittersweet tour of Chinatown, which he considers one of the most quintessentially New York neighborhoods, as he prepares his final work and his impending escape from the city.
“I have to say that I think everybody in the world should live in New York at least one or two years to just, kind of, make sense,” he says. “But it’s not the only lifestyle you can have. It’s not the only way of doing things.” Though he is sad to leave New York, the artist isn’t thinking he’ll be in Mexico City forever. “So I might escape from Mexico City, you know? I might go to LA and escape from there. I have to escape all the time.”

Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s series Art in the Twenty-First Century below. The brand new 10th season of the show is available now at Art21.org. 
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This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org.
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A sharp-eyed visitor to “Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle,” an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has identified a long-lost artwork by the pioneering African American Modernist that was hiding in plain sight—just across the park from the museum.
The lost painting, which belongs to Lawrence’s “Struggle: From the History of the American People” series (1954–56), was missing for 60 years, and has now been reunited with its companion works for the exhibition. The panel belongs to two neighbors of the visitor who spotted the work, and was purchased by the couple on the cheap around Christmas 1960, at a charity auction for a music school.
The person who recognized the work had been to the Met exhibition, and suggested the couple reach out to the museum. (The couple that owns the painting are not art collectors and wish to remain anonymous.)
“It is rare to make a discovery of this significance in modern art, and it is thrilling that a local visitor is responsible,” Met director Max Hollein said in a statement.
Jacob Lawrence, Panel 27. . . . for freedom we want and will have, for we have served this cruel land long enuff . . . —A Georgia Slave, 1810, (1956). From Struggle Series, 1954–56. © The Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Randall Griffey and Sylvia Yount, who organized the traveling show’s Met iteration, were only CC’d on emails about the possible find last week, reports the New York Times.
Isabelle Duvernois, the Met’s modern paintings conservator, was promptly dispatched to the couple’s apartment and determined that not only was the painting authentic, it had been well cared-for and was ready to join the exhibition in short order.
Lawrence (1917–2000) painted the 30-panel “Struggle” series during the civil rights movement to highlight the roles of Black people, Native Americans, and women in building the country’s democracy.
Unlike the artist’s nine other series, which are all owned in their entirety by public collections, “Struggle” was purchased by a private collector, William Meyers, after two shows at Charles Alan’s New York gallery failed to attract an institutional buyer. It hasn’t been seen all together since the dealer’s 1958 show.
Jacob Lawrence poses in his Seattle, Washington, studio. Photo by George Rose/Getty Images.

Without a clause in the sales contract requiring the series stay intact, Meyers soon began selling the paintings individually. The current exhibition, which originated in January at the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, is set to travel—in its newly expanded form—to Birmingham, Alabama; Seattle, Washington; and Washington, DC.
There were no existing photographs of the newly rediscovered work, panel 16 in the series, which was known only by its title, here are combustibles in every State, which a spark might set fire to. —Washington, 26 December 1786.
“Since reuniting the ‘Struggle series,’ the absence of panel 16 has been felt acutely. Represented in our galleries as an empty frame, it was a mystery that we were all eager to solve,” Peabody-Essex Museum director Brian Kennedy said in a statement. “We are thrilled to learn of its discovery—one that came about thanks to close looking and careful observation by a museum visitor.”
Jacob Lawrence, Panel 25. I cannot speak sufficiently in praise of the firmness and deliberation with which my whole line received their approach . . . —Andrew Jackson, New Orleans, 1815, (1956.) From Struggle Series, 1954–56. © The Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by Bob Packert/PEM.

The painting depicts Shays’s Rebellion, in which Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays led an uprising of struggling farmers in western Massachusetts in 1786 and ’87. The conflict, a protest against high taxes, is credited with helping to inspire the Founding Fathers to hold the Constitutional Convention.
“Lawrence’s dynamic treatment of the 1786–87 Shays’s Rebellion reinforces the overall theme of the series—that democratic change is possible only through the actions of engaged citizens, an argument as timely today as it was when the artist produced his radical paintings in the mid-1950s,” Griffey and Yount said in a joint statement.
Four paintings from the series remain missing. Another long-lost “Struggle” painting, panel 19, turned up at auction during planning for the current show. Art collector Harvey Ross, who owns half the series, spent $413,000 to buy Tensions on the High Seas at New York’s Swann Auction Galleries in 2018.
“Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, August 29–November 1, 2020. 
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The worsening public health situation in Europe has meant that the FIAC art fair will not be taking place this year as usual in the Grand Palais. While the fair’s cancellation prompted mixed reactions in the Parisian art scene, many are determined to show that the spirit of the art week lives on in the numerous exhibitions opening at the city’s museums and galleries this week.
Gallery night this year is October 22, with spaces staying open to visit until 8 p.m, leaving enough time for art lovers to get home before the city’s 9 p.m. curfew.
Here is our pick of eight shows to see around Paris during this very unusual FIAC week.

Cindy Sherman at Fondation Louis VuittonThrough January 3, 2021

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #602 (2019). Collection Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures, New York © 2020 Cindy Sherman.

Shape-shifting photographer Cindy Sherman is getting the full treatment at Fondation Louis Vuitton, her first show in Paris since 2006. The works on view span the artist’s long career, from the groundbreaking “Untitled Film Stills” to her more recent “Disasters,” “Headshots,” and “Society Portraits.”
Due to the influx of visitors, the Fondation recommends guests come in the morning or after 5 p.m.

“Sarah Sze: Night Into Day” at Fondation CartierOctober 24, 2020–March 7, 2021

Sarah Sze, Centrifuge (2017). Presented at Haus Der Kunst © Sarah Sze Photo © Sarah Sze Studio​.

Sarah Sze is debuting two new works at Fondation Cartier that will reflect upon the architecture of the Jean Nouvel-designed building. Sze’s immersive installations are meditations on technology and the ways images are shared, transferred, and created.
Tickets are available to book online at Fondation Cartier.

“Hélène Delprat: Je déteste mes peintures. I hate my paintings…” at Christophe GaillardThrough November 7, 2020

Hélène Delprat, La guerre élégante (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Christophe Gaillard.

As the show’s title indicates, Delprat’s work is suffused with self deprecation, and yet, the artist says she persists because it’s her nature to keep doing things despite the pain they cause. In this case, it’s to our benefit, as the large-scale installation works combine fictional characters and universal themes in a delightful combination.

“Wu Tsang: visionary company” at Lafayette AnticipationsThrough January 3, 2021
Wu Tsang, production still, “The show is over” (2020), photo by Diana Pfammatter. Produced by Schauspielhaus Zürich, co-commissioned by Lafayette Foundation. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin.

For the US artist’s first exhibition in France, Wu Tsang is presenting an immersive show including recent and past film, performance, and sculpture work, centered around the artist’s 2020 work The show is over, a multi-layered opera about liberation and alienation in which dancers perform to the rhythm of the African American poet and academic Fred Moten’s text Come on, get it!
Visitors do not need to book a ticket but may have to wait if the gallery is busy.

“Oscar Murillo: News” at David ZwirnerThrough December 19
Oscar Murillo, manifestation (2019-2020). ©Oscar Murillo Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.

Oscar Murillo is showing paintings made while he was in quarantine in Colombia in the spring and summer of 2020. Part of his ongoing “manifestation” series, the works are the largest and most frenetic of the series to date, reflecting the heightened state of global anxiety during the present moment.
Appointments are encouraged but not required and can be booked online.

“Yesn’t” at Galerie SultanaThrough October 31 More