Opens May 18, 2023

Independent New York

Independent New York is one of my favorite ways to see a wild and wonderfully curated mix of contemporary art, lots of it, known and unknown, in one place. It’s back this year on May 11 for four days at Spring Studios in Tribeca, with 120 artists and 74 galleries chosen from around the world. Twenty New York artists will have their debuts here. Founded by Elizabeth Dee fourteen years ago, Independent New York offers up a cornucopia of themes that include: gender as a social construct, a return to childhood, post-figuration and magical realism, and career reassessments and rediscoveries. 

May 11-14, 2023

Maiden Voyage at Clearing

After a dozen years in Brooklyn, Clearing, one of the most influential young galleries that put Bushwick on the art scene, is moving to Manhattan, in a three-story building on the Bowery across the street from the New Museum. All grown up, Clearing is opening on April 26 with Maiden Voyage, a group show of every artist in its stable. Known for identifying and nurturing such emerging talents like Harold Ancart, Calvin Marcus, Korakrit Arunanondchai, this is a gallery to continue to watch.

April 26, 2023 – May 21, 2023

Bob Thompson

Bob Thompson gets a double header: Agony & Ecstasy at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery and So Let Us All Be Citizens at 52 Walker. Thompson’s life was cut tragically short by a heroin overdose at the age of 28 after gallbladder surgery, but in the eight years he painted, he managed to make about a thousand paintings and drawings—figurative, often reinterpreting works of the Old Masters, put through the mix master of his imagination using fauvist-like colors. Five large paintings from 1963, an important year in Thompson’s oeuvre that summed up the two years of his travels in Europe, along with ten other paintings in addition to works on paper, and archival photographs and sketchbooks, are in the Rosenfeld show. At 52 Walker, Thompson’s jazz-influenced style will be on view. His particular use of color, line, and figuration contrasts with the prevailing abstraction of his time. 

Bob Thompson: Agony & Ecstasy at  at Rosenfeld Gallery, April 1 – May 26, 2023; Bob Thompson: So let us all be citizens at 52 Walker, April 21 – July 08, 2023; 

Ellsworth Kelly at Glenstone

Ellsworth Kelly would be 100 this year and Glenstone, Mitch and Emily Rales’ idyllic museum in Potomac, Maryland, is celebrating him and his career with one of the biggest retrospectives he’s ever had. Ellsworth Kelly at 100 will show nearly 70 works—paintings, sculptures, drawings, collages, and photographs—across his seven-decade life as an artist, from the 1950s to the 2010s, confirming his deep contributions to the language of abstraction. His dedication and ever-playful probing of shape, line, color, and space will be on full display. Yellow Curve (1990), Kelly’s monumental floor painting covering about 1000 square feet will be exhibited for the first time in thirty years. After nearly a year at Glenstone, the party will continue: first stop Paris at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, next, Doha at the Fire Station. 

May 4, 2023 to March of 2024

Uman at Nicola Vassell Gallery

Uman’s show I Want Everything at Nicola Vassell Gallery is a romp through this self-trained, multidisciplinary artist’s very painterly practice over the past decade. Uman was born in Somalia, grew up in Kenya, spent her teenage years in Denmark, her twenties in New York City, and now lives in upstate New York. She brings all this and more to the lexicon of mythical beings and geometrical symbols that mingle on her canvases. Uman is an artist who has many stories to tell and this show presents a new chapter. 

May 4 to June 17

Finding freedom in highlighting the nature of gender expectations, La Jolla artist Christiana Updegraff is showcasing a collection of three-dimensional works at an exhibit in Solana Beach.

The show, called “Tether,” also features works by Rancho Peñasquitos artist Alexandra Carter. It opened April 8 at Oolong Gallery and continues through Friday, May 5.

The exhibit focuses on the ways in which the artists — both of them mothers — feel bound to their children, partners and others’ expectations.

To flesh out the theme, Updegraff employs many materials in her projects, using industrial supplies such as cement or wood and “a lot of domestic objects that are deconstructed [and] items that have a certain gender affiliation or expectation,” she said.

Christiana Updegraff’s “Dangle, Tangle, Drop” is one of the works in the exhibit “Tether.”

(Christiana Updegraff)

Updegraff’s works include string, textiles and fabrics designed to bring focus to the body and elicit “a visceral response in the viewer,” she said.

Her creations in the exhibit explore the isolation and unmooring Updegraff felt after she and her husband, video editor and La Jolla native Tucker Bass, moved to La Jolla from Los Angeles in August 2020 with their newborn and 2-year-old.

The family moved to be closer to Bass’ parents, and while that has been a boon, the restrictions early in the COVID-19 pandemic meant isolation for Updegraff.

But she was able to create in her art studio in the garage in close proximity to her children, all the while probing the concepts of loss and caretaking.

“The minutiae of caretaking is ever-present in my work,” Updegraff said, “particularly during this time of staying at home and having to provide for these two little people and their needs all day and then not being able to leave and come back. … It’s literally like dishes and cleaning and giving of myself to these other two people.”

“There’s such a loss of community for parents in general,” she said, but the pandemic quarantines compounded her feelings. “The loss of myself … was really difficult for me because there was no other community. There was nothing to turn to.”

Updegraff, who earned a master’s degree in fine arts from San Diego State University in 2011 and creates art while teaching full time at Long Beach City College and SDSU, also explores “gender constructs and how society places expectations on men or women … and how those differences shape our experience in the world.”

Christiana Updegraff’s “1005” is another of her creations on view at Oolong Gallery in Solana Beach through May 5.

(Christiana Updegraff)

As a mother, Updegraff said she sometimes feels pulled to conform to expectations of gender that compel her to be a caretaker while also pursuing her career.

Updegraff was raised in Kentucky and says she was confronted by Southern society’s differing expectations for her and her brother.

“I felt that very acutely growing up, so I’ve really tried my hardest to dispel those notions of gender constructs and fight against those,” she said.

Updegraff also references fertility in her works, as well as “how people present themselves to the exterior world,” she said.

The idea that one must maintain “an air of perfection … is particularly pervasive in today’s culture when dealing with women,” Updegraff said. “You can [try to] check all the boxes that you’re supposed to check. I think we all bravely try to fulfill [that], but it’s unattainable.”

That notion is exemplified in many of the works in “Tether,” she said.

“It’s amplifying that not everything has to be OK,” she said. “Some of us are coming unglued and pushing against the idea of being perfect.”

Oolong Gallery is at 349 N. Hwy. 101, Solana Beach. For more information, visit oolongallery.com.