Featured Artist

Installation of Miyoko Ito: Three Works. Photography credit: Dario Lasagni. All images courtesy American Art Catalogues.

Bruce Nauman’s Manipulating a Fluorescent Tube (1969), black and white video with sound, courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York; Kentaro Kawabata at Nonaka-Hill. Courtesy of Kentaro Kawabata and Nonaka-Hill, Los Angeles.

Artist Carmen Winant’s The Last Safe Abortion, published by SPBH Editions and MACK, focuses on the nearly fifty-year period in which abortion was legal in the United States (1973–2022). Winant draws from over a dozen personal, organisational, and institutional archives from across the Midwest, in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, Kentucky, North Dakota, and Ohio. The book presents a selection of photographs from these archives, emphasizing the care and community-focused work around abortion workers, along with a text by the artist.

Graciela Iturbide: White Fence features notable Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide’s images of the Chicano community in Boyle Heights. The title refers to the historical street gang known as White Fence that has held established territory in Boyle Heights since 1900. The publication includes two volumes with photographs Iturbide took in 1986 on assignment for the magazine A Day in the Life of America and culminating in a reunion in 2019.

Graciela Iturbide was born in 1942 in Mexico City. Her photographic documentation of Indigenous tribes of Mexico resulted in the publication of her book Juchitán de las Mujeres in 1989. Between 1980 and 2000, Iturbide continued to gain international recognition and was invited to work in various places, including Cuba, East Germany, India, Madagascar, Hungary, France and the United States.

Anchor in the Landscape brings together Adam Broomberg and Rafael Gonzalez portraits of Palestinian olive trees in the Occupied Territories of Palestine. Published by MACK, the affecting photography book centers the olive tree as a totem of Palestinian identity, culture, and resistance. Each portrait bears witness to the presence and resilience of the Palestinian people and their relationship with the land.

Terra Incógnita is an exhibition of new paintings by Raul Guerrero on view in New York at David Kordansky Gallery. For over four decades, Guerrero has made work informed by his experiences navigating Southern California and northern Mexico as an American of Mexican ancestry paired with an abiding engagement in global art historical movements like Surrealism. Guerrero’s work emerges from an interest in examining Southern California’s connection to the continent at large, taking the form of visual and object-based references commonly found in the region. 

The exhibition runs until June 8.

Raul Guerrero has been the subject of solo exhibitions at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2021); Ortuzar Projects, New York (2018); Air de Paris (project space), Angeles (2021); Ortuzar Projects, New York (2018); Air de Paris (project space), (2001, 2007, and 2013); CUE Art Foundation, New York (2010); Long Beach Museum of Art, California (1977); Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (1989); and San Francisco Art Institute, California (1977). Guerrero was included in the California Biennial 2022: Pacific Gold at the Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California (2022–2023), and was the recipient of an NEA Photography Fellowship (1979) and the San Diego Art Prize (2006). Guerrero lives and works in San Diego.

Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within is a major touring retrospective and monograph centered on the life and work of artist Toshiko Takaezu (1922–2011). Opening first at The Noguchi Museum, the exhibition is the first nationally touring retrospective of Takaezu’s work in twenty years.

Of Okinawan heritage and born in Hawai‘i, Toshiko Takaezu was a groundbreaking twentieth-century abstract artist most celebrated  for her prolific output of expressively glazed “closed form” ceramic sculptures that ranged in scale from palm-sized works to immersive sculptural environments.

Featuring approximately 200 objects from public and private collections across the country, Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within will present a comprehensive portrait of Takaezu’s life and work. This chronological retrospective will chart the development of Takaezu’s hybrid practice over seven decades, documenting her early student work in Hawai‘i and at the Cranbrook Academy through her years teaching at the Cleveland Institute of Art and later at Princeton University. To represent this evolution, the show will present a series of installations loosely inspired by ones that Takaezu created in her own lifetime: from a set table of functional wares from the early 1950s to an immer-sive constellation of monumental ceramic forms from the late 1990s to early 2000s.

The exhibition runs until July 28, 2024

NOURISHMENT is Sanaa Gateja’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles at Karma. The show precedes Gateja’s inclusion in the Venice Biennale’s Ugandan Pavilion, curated by Acaye Kerunen. Gateja builds intricate assemblages from thousands of hand-rolled paper beads sewn onto bark cloth.

Gateja’s work and practice is inspired by the blacksmiths, potters, and basket weavers he grew up admiring. He joined Uganda’s Ministry of Culture and Community Development shortly after graduating secondary school. In 1972, he opened Sanaa Gallery in Kenya and specialized in the sale of traditional Kenyan crafts, especially beadwork. Later on, he studied interior design and jewelry-making in Osaka, Florence, and London. It was not until John Cass College of Art (now London College of Art and Design) in London that he first encountered paper beads which now populate his artworks. In 1990, he returned to Uganda, bringing the techniques with him and teaching them to locals, who in turn assemble the beads that become the basis of Gateja’s works. In the years since, a whole economy has sprung up around the production of paper beads in the country and beyond. The works in NOURISHMENT contend with this cycle of mutual influence and support.

The exhibition runs until May 18.

Shining Lights: Black Women Photographers in 1980s–90s Britain is the first critical anthology to bring together the groundbreaking work of Black women photographers active in the UK during the 1980s and 1990s. The anthology is published by MACK and edited by renowned artist Joy Gregory alongside art historian Taous Dahmani.

Amongst the fifty-seven photographers included are Maxine Walker, Ingrid Pollard, Claudette Holmes, Mohini Chandra, Carole Wright, Sutapa Biswas, Maud Sulter, Brenda Agard, Anita McKenzie, Mitra Tabrizian, Poulomi Desai, Virginia Nimarkoh, Nudrat Afza, Merle Van den Bosch, and Eileen Perrier.

The innovative and diverse work created during this period spanned documentary and conceptual practices, including the experimental use of photomontage, self-portraiture, staged imagery, and photography in dialogue with other media. Shining Lights includes new writings by pioneers of the period, including Pratibha Parmar, Roshini Kempadoo, and Symrath Patti, alongside a foreword by Sonia Boyce.

Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography brings together the celebrated writing of Annie Ernaux with photographs from Maison Européenne de la Photographie’s collection by photographers selected by writer and curator Lou Stoppard. The book is the product of an exhibition following Stoppard’s residency on using the photography from the MEP collection for new research.

The book includes texts from Ernaux’s book Exteriors (Journal du dehors), 1993: a record of moments in trains, shops and streets around Cergy-Pontoise between 1985 and 1992. The photography in the book features work from the second half of the 20th century throughout the globe.