This week, art gets personal, political, architectural, and a little weird. There’s a conversation with a rising fiber-art star whose work was one of the hits of the Armory Show, Arthur Jafa taking over two floors of the New Museum, and the artistic marriage of Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock getting a long-overdue rethink at The Met. Plus, Noguchi’s unrealized vision for Lever House and a chance to peek inside an artist’s Jersey City studio. In other words, plenty to see beyond the white cube.
Kandy G. Lopez’s Taking up Space explores visibility, identity, and belonging through vibrant portraits of people from the artist’s own life. Lopez uses bold color and layered textiles to reflect the complexity and hybridity of diasporic identity. Her subjects are real people she has encountered, portrayed with dignity, personality, cultural memory, and plenty of swag, rather than as symbolic figures. Her booth was a hit at The Armory Show last week, and Vogue has dubbed her "the Barkley L. Hendricks of fiber art.”
ArtNews describes Arthur Jafa’s two-floor takeover of the expanded New Museum with I Am Tony as “a horror show for the ages.” A sweeping look at nearly 40 years of work exploring Black life, culture, music, and America’s complicated history of violence and representation, the show mixes new works alongside paintings, film and video installations, sculpture, and photography. Named for jazz drummer Tony Williams, the exhibition traces Jafa’s evolution into one of contemporary art’s most powerful visual storytellers.
Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue
Opens October 4
Before they were art-world royalty, Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock were two ambitious young artists making their way through 1940s New York. They met in 1941, married in 1945, and eventually decamped to Springs, Long Island, where art, marriage, and plenty of creative tension became intertwined. Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous puts the couple on equal billing, taking another look at the Pollock we think we know while making a strong case for Krasner as the restless, risk-taking artist she was.
With more than 120 works, the show tracks both artists from their early experiments to their mature work, revealing just how differently they approached the business of blowing up American painting. Yes, Pollock’s legendary drip paintings are here. But Krasner brings her own fireworks, with gutsy color, abstraction, collage, and found imagery, and the exhibition takes its subtitle from one of her paintings. It’s the first major New York exhibition in more than 20 years to tell their stories side by side, and it makes for a pretty fascinating artistic marriage.
Isamu Noguchi at Lever House
390 Park Avenue
Visiting Hours (Lobby). Monday–Friday: 7 am–8 pm, Saturday: 8 am–1 pm, Sunday: Closed
Through August 31, 2027
When Lever House landed on Park Avenue in 1952, its glass curtain wall was a radical change from the stone-and-masonry office towers that came before it. Its courtyard was supposed to be equally forward-thinking. Architect Gordon Bunshaft invited Isamu Noguchi to imagine a place where sculpture, water, stone, and greenery would become part of the architecture itself.
Noguchi came back with two wildly ambitious ideas, both influenced by the spare beauty of Japanese gardens. One envisioned a marble expanse and reflecting pool punctuated by three abstract granite figures. The other went bigger, weaving in plants, water, sculptural forms, and a playful reference to Brancusi.
Neither was built, but the project sparked a long creative relationship between Bunshaft and Noguchi and helped shape Noguchi’s enduring fascination with sculpture that you could experience as landscape, not simply look at from across a room. In the present day, Lever House is an individual New York City Landmark, and visitors are invited to revisit Bunshaft and Noguchi's collaboration through related sculptures, models, drawings, and other architectural ideas.
157B 1st St, studio #420, Jersey City, NJ
October 3: 12pm-9pm
October 4: 12pm-6pm
Highlighted in Hyperallergic, Art in Odd Places festival participant Entung Liu will open her studio this weekend to visitors who missed out on "Weaving You," her work in last week's festival that took place in spite of the nor'easter. She announced on Instagram, “I will share this project during the JCAST open studio event at @arts14c this week. Looking forward to meeting you!"
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Contributing Writer
Michelle Sinclair Colman
Michelle writes children's books and also writes articles about architecture, design and real estate. Those two passions came together in Michelle's first children's book, "Urban Babies Wear Black." Michelle has a Master's degree in Sociology from the University of Minnesota and a Master's degree in the Cities Program from the London School of Economics.
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