The Magic and Aura Guiding Charting Transcendence
Who doesn’t love unicorns, especially when depicted in the unusual, soft medium of graphite-on-linen? This piece by Kylee Snow, Sure Footing (2024), was a delightful find at the New York Academy of Art’s 2024 Chubb Fellows Exhibition in Tribeca, New York City, during September’s Armory Week.
As your advisor and guide, I’m proud to lead you through a deeper exploration of all sorts of beautiful and meaningful facets of human creation.
Continuously on the hunt for moments of wonder and awe, I am a lifelong explorer and passionate romantic who has quietly cultivated an exquisite taste for valuable, important, and profoundly meaningful art.
Charting Transcendence is what I call the ability I’ve cultivated to navigate a vast, complex, and often confusing landscape of information, affect, stories and stimuli. Helping you to learn to do the same is how I share my gift with the world.
The week following Labor Day marks the contemporary art world’s “back-to-school” week in New York City, packed with gallery openings and fairs.
As I continue to travel around the country from my burgeoning base of connections here in Miami, I’m delighted to share a few impressions from the art world’s recent “back-to-school” fall frenzy of fairs and fun exhibitions.
Back to Basics as the Contemporary Art World Goes “Back to School”
The first week of September, concurrent with other major events such as the US Open tennis tournament and Fashion Week, is one of the best times to visit New York City for art, culture, and a tremendous “back-to-school” energy at gallery openings and fairs.
For me, an erstwhile New Yorker, graduate of Sotheby’s Institute of Art, and now frequent flight-hopper from Miami, it was both delightful and familiar to be back in my element of conscious exploration and discovery.
This year’s Armory Week was satisfying, although not extraordinarily spectacular by comparison, given recent whisperings of a slow down in the art market (some tension around the upcoming election apparently has some galleries and collectors holding their breath until November.)
One of Minneapolis’s top galleries, Bockley Gallery, which champions the work of contemporary Native American artists, presented three contemporary totems, left to right, by Jim Denomie (1955-2022), Dyani White Hawk (b. 1976), and George Morrison (1919-2000), at the 2024 Armory Show in New York last week (photo credit: Bockley Gallery via Instagram).
Even so, the thought occurred to me, while meandering down the crowded streets of Chelsea and Tribeca last weekend, how bizarre an exercise it is for most people to go about looking for the “best” art (i.e. that speaks most deeply to them) among the dozens and dozens of galleries imbued with the aura of a late summer’s evening in one of the most magnificent and stimulating cities in the world.
No wonder it is that the art world comes off to so many as a rarified and mysterious domain. Simply people-watching on the corner made me, a seasoned professional art advisor, ponder why in the hell most of this art is even worth the time and effort it takes to leave home to see it?
How would anyone know what to look for… or how to find great art? Perhaps one could try to follow herds of eclectically dressed gallery-goers… many could probably sense the “hype” created around much of the art, something I was acutely aware of even as I was mapping out my own conceptual diagrams of what I believed could prove important for present and future clients.
I will assert that my love language as an art advisor and guide is providing this window into how my mind works and how I categorize and contextualize both the wealth and cacophony of the spectacle of contemporary art.
This is what I share with you — and that’s why I run this business, Charting Transcendence, with all my heart and soul.
NYC Armory Week Highlights
Ay-O (b. 1931) is a Japanese artist originally associated with the experimental Fluxus movement of the 1960s. He later went on to embrace a bright color pallet, becoming known as “Rainbow Man” for multicolored paintings such as Olympic Skiing (1992) presented by Tokyo’s Whitestone Gallery at the Armory Show.
Anastasia Samoylova (b. 1984) garnered critical acclaim from critics for her recent work shown by Berlin’s Wentrup Gallery at the Armory Show. Her show Floridas, co-curated with the photography of 20th century master photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975), opens in October at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Long Story Short Gallery’s outpost on Henry Street towards the east end of New York’s Chinatown neighborhood features stunning abstract landscape works by Liane Chu (b. 1997).
This geometrically abstract drawing by Pavel Tchelitchew (1897-1958), well known for a variety of proto-psychedelic figurative work that is in the collection of the Whitney Museum, was on sale for $5000 at a booth at Independent 20th Century, held at the Battery Maritine Building in lower Manhattan.
Miles McEnery Gallery in Chelsea just opened a show of recent works by African-American artist Rico Gatson (b. 1966) that channel the spirit of Op art with seductive geometric abstraction, which is very much a la mode at present.
Currently a highlight on Chelsea’s gallery circuit are Hilary Pecis’s (b. 1979) paintings at David Kordansky Gallery, remarkable for their intimacy of detail in both interior and exterior scenes of Los Angeles homes. Her style holds broad appeal along the lines of work by Henri Matisse (1869-1954) or Jonas Wood (b. 1977).
A popular figurative painter on the New York scene for some years now, Robin Francesca Williams (b. 1984) delightfully depicts the sensuous face of an iconic scene from late 20th century cinematic lore with this small portrait of Meg Ryan’s character in When Harry Met Sally (1989).
Dyani White Hawk’s work was a standout at the 2024 Armory Show. A recipient of the highly prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant”, White Hawk’s geometric mosaics and sculptures have wowed visitors to the Whitney Museum and will be the focus of a mid-career survey at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center in 2025.
Tamara Kostianovsky (b. 1974) is an Israeli-born Argentine-American artist, recently celebrated with a solo show at the Baker Museum in Naples, Florida, who makes figurative sculptures from discarded clothes, many of which are culled from her own wardrobe or that of family members. This piece resembling a tree trunk is part of her Nature Made Flesh series, presented by Slag Gallery at the Armory Show.
FORMah is a young, Lower East Side gallery whose recent programming has impressed me, showing highly textured, abstract accretive acrylic paintings by Karin Waskiewicz at Volta New York Art Fair during Armory Week.
My Favorite Fall NYC Fair is a Spring(board) for Break(out) Artists
Keep in mind that not all “good” art costs tens of thousands of dollars. Much can be found at very reasonable prices, with your hard-earned cash going directly to support working artists, bypassing the substantial mark-up of established galleries.
For over a decade, SPRING | BREAK Art Show has promoted well-curated, competitive, and cutting-edge artists, many of whom are on the verge of “breaking out” towards greater recognition through a “springboard” to critical acclaim. It is keenly watched by critics and curators hoping to spot rising starts in the art world, a few of whom inevitably go on to greater fame.
Hence comes the name of this most fascinating assembly of 100+ artists’ booths in a vacant office space of a Tribeca skyscraper, held each September. (The fair’s Los Angeles edition, now moving towards its sixth iteration, is held concurrently with Frieze Week in February in a former munitions warehouse in Culver City.)
SPRING | BREAK’s offerings caught my eye with quality and affordable artworks, providing an outstanding point of departure for my clients who are just beginning their collecting journeys.
Full disclosure: I barely missed getting off the waitlist for this year’s fair, which I applied to curate a show of Maria Dimanshtein’s text-and-image wall sculptures. I had previously curated a show of Maria’s work in New York City in 2018, and she also designed the corporate logo along with an accompanying original artwork.
Nevertheless, SPRING | BREAK was my favorite fair of the week, a must for anyone on the lookout for raw creative talent.
Benny Or is a multidisciplinary artist I’ve been friendly with since the late 2010s. His breakout show featured work depicting classical Chinese yoke back chairs, representing his family’s history of immigration, trauma, and resilience in modern China.
Many of SPRING | BREAK’s artworks are humorous, commenting on facets of contemporary life. This text and image painting, Big Secret, by Eric Mistretta, comedically mimics the design of generic medication branding.
Jody MacDonald is an unusually creative fiber artist who fashions humorous sculptures and installations with whimsical hand-sewn dolls of all breeds, like this (pun intended) Gorilla Girl, catching the eye of New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz at SPRING | BREAK.
Peter Gynd specializes in semi-abstract landscapes painted with large and varying brushstrokes. His work comes highly recommended for newer collectors based on its affordability and mastery of liminal abstraction. His work has already been curated at several iterations of SPRING | BREAK Art Show.
