Rico Gatson

The Armory Show opened to the public yesterday at Pier 92 & 94 in New York.

Robustly chromatic, visually potent, at times compositionally labyrinthine and physically imposing, Rico Gatson’s mixed-media paintings, sculptures and collage-centric drawings are always, thanks in part to their carefully honed economy of forms and means, declarative, assertive and indelible—and unmistakably, unwaveringly his. On levels aesthetic and conceptual alike, Gatson does not imbue, but rather inundates his works with definitive, invariable force, executing them with just enough colorful vibrancy, linear keenness and mystical curiosity as to allow his viewers to almost—yet only almost, and this is crucial—miss or overlook their certainly important, equally cogent, subtly layered, variably strident socio-political content.

Rico Gatson’s commanding paintings at Samson pulse with geometric abstraction, but they’re not all exclusively abstract. He builds some around archival images related to African-American history, and color-codes his bold patterns with sociopolitical meaning: black and white, or the red, green, and black associated with African nationalism, punched up with yellow. Colors beam out, but the black is roughly textured, sometimes tough, sometimes shiny: It pulls us in.

The 2016 edition of the Moving Image fair, the fifth in New York City, is returning to the Waterfront New York Tunnel, a cavernous space that once held a notorious nightclub and is now best known as an easy way to get from 11th Avenue to the Hudson River waterfront.

10 Opening Exhibitions to Watch

Robin Pogrebin's initial NY Times article, imputing "diminished stature" to the Brooklyn Museum, provoked considerable backlash from the museum profession.

We are pleased to announce We’ve All Got Issues: Video Art from the APT Collection the first ever online, selling exhibition of video art featuring 16 videos by an international roster of member artists from Artist Pension Trust® (APT). The show is hosted by MutualArt.com and will be up for a period of two weeks from May 29 to June 12, 2014. All works will be shown in their full-length versions and made available for purchase through the website.

Robin Pogrebin's initial NY Times article, imputing "diminished stature" to the Brooklyn Museum, provoked considerable backlash from the museum profession.

Though it resides in a prime example of traditional museum architecture — a Beaux-Arts building designed in 1893 by McKim, Mead & White

We all had our eyes on a dig at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico for the last few months, which doesn't explain why, deep in the wonderful new exhibition

Among the many fine American drawings on view at the Brooklyn Museum is this one by John Singleton Copley. Image courtesy the Brooklyn Museum.

In the echo chamber that is the New York art world, where one voice can give the illusion of being many, the crusading cry of late

Rico Gatson's mid-career retrospective at Exit Art wrestles beautifully with issues of racial identity and intolerance.

What's most often challenging about video art is the time that it takes. More often than not, gallery go-ers will stop in front of a screen