The Six Best is a monthly column where contributor and writer of The Rose Period, Rose Florence Anderson, gives an edit of the most happening shows in NYC. Each edition covers the shows worth seeing and the special, unusual, and little-known stories behind them – written for the curious (not the credentialed). There’s no inside art jargon here.
This column is sponsored by Showrunner, the most comprehensive guide to art in NY & LA, and Elephant Magazine, a global art publication specializing in artist-led coverage. See the full list of exhibitions on Showrunner.
Come July and a rumour starts to whisper itself around the art world – the gallerists have closed up shop & left for the Vineyard, Europe, somewhere lush with a lawn – and there’s no good art to see. Perhaps this is a narrative that works well for those who like giving up or lack imagination – but not for all of us who know where to look.
I’m Rose, the author of The Rose Period – a newsletter for the art obsessed. As always, we’re looking at art through a lens of the unexpected stories you need to know – and especially the art figures who have been overlooked (and wrongly so!). Ready?! Here’s what to see in July.
Firelei Báez at Hauser & Wirth (through 7/31)
Báez (b. 1981) grew up in a little market town between the Dominican Republic and Haiti – now she paints from her studio in Red Hook. She’s known for building a wild world out of Caribbean folklore, Afrodiasporic cosmologies, science fiction, and botany (she ended up on my list of magical artists for a reason).
Enter the white cube at Hauser & Wirth and the first thing you’ll notice: she doesn’t paint on blank canvas. Báez paints over history – colonial-era maps, library pages, architectural blueprints, all pulled from museum and archive collections. Her subjects are layered on top, as if they’re escaping the page & rewriting their story entirely.
Which of course is the point – power is the thing she keeps coming back to: who got to draw the map, and who gets to paint over it now.
The IYKYK: One piece in the show, River Mirror, is built from 111 actual book pages fused into a single sprawling image. Look for the spiraling symbols – those symbols are actually two river goddesses merged into one: Atabey, from Taíno tradition, and Oshun, from Yoruba tradition – both tied to fertility and transformation. Báez said this is the one piece that unlocks the whole show.
Carol Rama at Hauser & Wirth (through 7/31)
If you don’t know Carol Rama (1918–2015) yet, buckle up because you’re about to. She’s the Italian rule-breaker who flew under the radar for decades and is only now being recognized as one of the most original artists of the 20th century. Go girl!
The backstory: life came at Carol Rama fast. Her father’s bicycle factory went bankrupt, and she was a teenager when her mother was institutionalized; her father died by suicide a decade later. Rama painted through it all.
Her work was so ahead of its time – she was painting things almost nobody else would touch: female sexuality, nudity, prosthetic limbs, wheelchairs, bodily fluids, desire. In 1945, police shut down her first solo exhibition for obscenity (ok cool!).
Not here, though! This exhibition brings together paintings, sculpture, textiles, and her wonderfully weird assemblages out of found materials.
The IYKYK: Keep an eye out for the car inner tubes – they pop up again and again (a nod to her father’s bicycle and rubber business). Don’t forget to say hi to The Mad Cow, made out of a U.S. mail bag. Rama was really good at making art from whatever was around her.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, “Many A Moonlit Caveat” at Jack Shainman (through 7/31)
What I love most about Lynette Yiadom-Boakye? Every person she paints is imaginary. They’re not portraits of friends, models, or people from photographs – they come entirely from her memory and imagination.
She once said she wants to resist biography, so her figures never have a fixed story or identity. They’re whoever you imagine them to be. Isn’t that kind of lovely?
My favorite painting in the show: Shining Honeycreeper. A man in a jester’s costume overlooking a night sky that could be bursting with fireworks – or maybe the Northern Lights. One second he looks lonely, almost vulnerable. The next he feels powerful, omniscient. That’s the magic of Yiadom-Boakye: her figures never settle into a singular identity.
This show spans both of Jack Shainman’s Chelsea locations, so make sure you pencil in two stops.
The IYKYK: The exhibition title, Many A Moonlit Caveat, comes from Yiadom-Boakye’s own writing. She’s a prolific writer as well as a painter – brava!
David Byrne/Saul Steinberg, “Influence and Affinity” at Pace (through 8/1)
David Byrne isn’t just Talking Heads frontman David Byrne (though he is that too). He’s also been a visual artist for as long as he’s been David Byrne-ing – working across ink, photography, installations, and textiles.
In this show, he’s paired with Saul Steinberg – the New Yorker cartoonist-philosopher who turned life into razor-sharp drawings (you think they’re jokes until the wisdom hits).
Steinberg died in 1999. Byrne is very much alive and, per the wall text, a little nervous about the whole thing – he’s said he hopes Steinberg doesn’t mind, wherever he is!
The pairing clicks as you walk in. Byrne’s Dance of the Spheres next to Steinberg’s Dancing Couple. Byrne’s embroidered fraternity banners (like a slightly absurd “Covid Dream Goddess”) are a perfect pairing with Steinberg’s faux diploma. Both artists take official things – certificates, social conventions, family photos – and poke holes in it.
I love both artists for having work that doesn’t take itself too seriously – but the closer you look, the sharper the wit gets. Byrne and Steinberg never met. The show argues they didn’t need to.
P.S. my friend Sarah interviewed David for Art Basel for the opening and he arrived to his own show by bike, of course.
The IYKYK: Stop at the banners. Byrne’s taken the old signage of lodges – Masons, Odd Fellows, Elks – and ran it through his brain. Hand-embroidered, a little off-kilter, vintage trim. The show is their debut.
Fairfield Porter, “What Everyone Knows” at the Art Students League (through 8/18)
People often ask what famous artist I’d want hanging in my home. My answer usually stumps: a Fairfield Porter landscape. Sure, I could go glitzy – a Klimt, maybe – but Porter is the crème de la crème to me. Muted colors. Serene seascapes. Lush greens that never overpower. The fact that most people have no idea who he is makes me love him more.
This show puts you in a room with 35 of Fairfield’s best – his dreamiest landscapes, still lifes, and portraits.
An East Coast intellect, Porter (1907–1975) spent his career painting the people and places right around him. Sunlight rooms. Dappled trees. Windswept coastlines. He also worked as a critic – so he spent a lot of time defending Abstract Expressionism, which was dominant at the time (at the same time, he refused to paint like it!).
This is the first large-scale Porter show in New York in twenty-five years – debuting at the school where he actually studied, back in 1928. The show puts his work in conversation with the people around him – his instructor Thomas Hart Benton, his classmate Jackson Pollock, and friends like Jane Freilicher, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery.
Ashbery once called Porter “perhaps the major American artist of this century.” And yet he is still wildly unrecognized. Consider this your chance to get ahead of that.
The IYKYK: Let’s talk venue. The Art Students League is one of those IYKYK names in American art history. To me, the name always (unfairly) sounded like a night class flyer on a bulletin board, not the academy that trained half of American art. Jackson Pollock. Georgia O’Keeffe. Mark Rothko. Fairfield Porter, of course. Their exhibits are so underrated, and they deserve to feel just as cool and sexy as an afternoon at the Met.
“Making Space: American Women Artists and the Century of Change” at Lincoln Glenn (through 8/22)
A group show never seems to get the recognition it deserves – I admit, I’m not as drawn to them as I am to a singular name. But pay no attention to any biases you have – this one is GOOD.
Lincoln Glenn’s third annual summer show is dedicated entirely to women artists who shaped major movements of the last century. Names like Mercedes Matter, Louise Nevelson, Lois Dodd and Jane Freilicher.
There are some new artists I just discovered, too: Lynda Benglis, Lee Bontecou, Ida Kohlmeyer. If last month’s column left you with a list of names to rabbit-hole (Mary Abbott! Adaline Kent!), consider this the sequel.
The IYKYK: This is the gallery’s third year running this exact show (as a Midwesterner with a big family, I can’t help but LOVE a good tradition). Worth watching what they build it into by year five.
