Ars Longa, Vita Brevis (Art is Long, Life is Short)
A traditional mandala constructed by Buddhist monks out of sand nears completion at the Coral Gables Museum in Coral Gables, Florida, on December 14, 2024.
This work of ephemeral art took several monks five days to complete. Then, just hours after this photo was taken, the entire mandala was intentionally swept away.
On behalf of Charting Transcendence, I would like to thank all of my readers, clients, colleagues, and friends for their tremendous support during the company’s first full calendar year in operation.
The year 2024 finished strongly, with a number of important sales as well as additional investment, permitting an expansion in scope of activity as well as a more comprehensive marketing approach in 2025.
Charting Transcendence will continue to be based in Miami with frequent visits to New York City and other major art cities.
Tours are still available and scheduled for various cities over the coming months, but these will likely become invitation-only by the end of the year.
For those subscribed to this fortnightly newsletter, you can be assured of fascinating art and cultural content in 2025. Charting Transcendence is my gift to the world, as well as a work in progress. Your comments and feedback are always highly appreciated.
Twelve Months of Art Highlights: Charting Transcendence Looks Back at 2024
It’s not really possible to summarize the content, volume and intensity of all the art that Charting Transcendence took in all across North America in 2024.
Nevertheless, I’d like to offer a carefully curated selection of meaningful and important art by both established as well as emerging artists, representing the diverse and compelling spectrum of art that impacted me and Charting Transcendence in meaningful ways.
JANUARY (New York): an unforgettable studio visit with tapestry artist Noel W. Anderson (b. 1981) reveals a complex understanding of the power of the image, the thread, and Black labor to innovate within a traditional European fine art form. Noel celebrated his best year yet with his inclusion in Korea’s prestigious Gwanju Biennial and is looking forward to a solo show at Harper’s Gallery in New York in 2025.
FEBRUARY (Los Angeles): Probably the best all-around museum show I saw this year, Paul Pfeiffer’s (b. 1966) 25-year retrospective, Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom, insightfully captured America’s obsession with sports by isolating the fanatic, fetishistic aura around sports and athletes. One of the most impressive pieces it included was Vitruvian Figure, a model of a stadium built for one million spectators.
MARCH (San Francisco): A deep dive of Bay Area museum and galleries afforded the opportunity for a close-up look at incredibly complex and detailed cartographic drawings by Lordy Rodriguez b. 1976). As is typically the case in Lordy’s work, this map of an imaginary continent swaps signifiers by making a blank landmass out of a combination of countries’ borders — specifically the top ten countries contributing to marine plastic waste. The lines, reminiscent of fishing line, spread out from the landmass’s edges in all directions like tiny tentacles from a sea-monster.
APRIL (Dallas): This painting by Rosson Crow (b. 1982), shown by New York’s Miles McEnery Gallery, made a big impression at the 2024 Dallas Art Fair for capturing a fictionalized image of the Dallas Trade Mart at the exact moment of JFK’s death on November 22, 1963, as it was preparing to host the President for a speech. Its cloying and saccharine colors reminiscent of a birthday party frozen in time perfectly channel the nature of the effect of modern psychological trauma.
MAY (New York): This year’s Whitney Biennial in New York was one of the top museum shows of the year, providing a comprehensive if politically-oriented survey of American contemporary art. One of the most surprising sculptures by Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio (b. 1990), made out of tree resin, unexpectedly collapsed a few weeks after the show opened, echoing other sentiments expressed in the show about the nature of American society and democracy in a presidential election year.
JUNE (Orlando): Njeri Kinuthia (b. 1998), who arrived in Florida from Kenya just over 3 years ago, won critical acclaim this summer at the Orlando Museum of Art’s Florida Prize in Contemporary Art. An emerging artist whose work is personal, powerful, and fits within compelling contemporary art narratives, Njeri’s work includes innovative use of textile and explores the artist’s journey to finding acceptance as a queer person from a conservative religious society. Her work is available for purchase in 2025 through Charting Transcendence.
JULY (Iowa City, Iowa): A studio visit with a family of artists, the Lasanskys, whose late Argentine-born patriarch Mauricio Lasansky (1914-2012), noted for his series of drawings addressing the horrors of the Holocaust (now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington) introduced highly complex intaglio printmaking techniques to American artists when he first arrived in New York for a Guggenheim Fellowship in the 1940s. These two life-size, enormous and difficult-to-execute prints of samurai warriors from around 1970 required the use of multiple plates — and is a magnificent work of art for sale from the Lasansky studio.
AUGUST (Minneapolis): Emerging artist Tia Keobounpheng (b. 1977), who explores her family’s Saami and Finnish identity through geometrically abstract pencil and threadwork, completed and installed a major commission for the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. Coloring in its eight 5’ x 5” panels took Tia six months of assiduously scribbling pencils with frequent rest to prevent her from ruining her hand. While on a studio visit to her home in Minneapolis, Charting Transcendence sold this colored pencil on wood piece from the same series, Foundation, to Texas collectors.
SEPTEMBER (New York): A pleasant surprise during New York’s Armory week right after Labor Day was this graphite on linen drawing Sure Footing (2024) by Kylee Snow, shown at the New York Academy of Art. The medium is both unusual and soft, and anyway, who doesn’t love unicorns? As a recipient of the 2023-2024 Chubb Fellowship, Kylee’s work was shown at Chubb’s VIP Lounge at Art Basel Miami Beach in December.
OCTOBER (Chicago): Over Chicago Exhibition Weekend, West Town’s Monique Meloche Gallery showed several innovative punched wool on cashmere artworks by Cheryl Pope (b. 1980). Fiber-based artworks, especially by women artists, are trending as substitutes for paintings these days.
NOVEMBER (New York): Is it “good” art or just a banana duct-taped to the wall? This piece of conceptual art, Comedian (2019) by the art world’s most notorious trickster, Maurizio Cattelan (b, 1960) certainly got press in the weeks leading up to its auction at Sotheby’s on November 20, ultimately selling for $6.2 million.
DECEMBER (Miami): This year’s edition of Art Basel Miami Beach was the busiest, most complicated yet for Charting Transcendence, making it particularly meaningful that this photograph of Miami by Anastasia Samoylova (b. 1984), Florida’s most celebrated contemporary photographer who currently has a solo show at the Met, sold to a client.
