Visiting the world of Meret Oppenheim is a little like confronting Object, her famed fur teacup—the viewer is tempted to imagine what’s underneath. It’s just an ordinary teacup, isn’t it—but is it?  Such layers and layers of surprises await. The current retrospective at MOMA has unearthed through nearly 200 paintings, sculptures, assemblages, reliefs, jewelry designs, works on paper, and collages to reflect a marvelously fluid mind.

Moments Spent with Others is an invitation to Dawes’ personal stories wrapped in digital visualizations. Over the recent pandemic, as human interaction became scarce and precious, we grew accustomed to detaching ourselves from others. Dawes embraces these moments by recreating them into datasets, algorithms, and data visualizations by incorporating memories that are personal to the artist but are also universally enjoyed.

Celebrities such as Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. and Marcus Garvey found their way easily enough into his studio, but most of his work was of the straightforward commercial studio variety—weddings and funerals (including portraits of the dead for the grieving families), teams, clubs, shopgirls, and that burgeoning class that wanted to show off its finery. Props, costumes, and other background paraphernalia became the norm. 

Death as a theme has a place in the artist’s obsessions. Later paintings depict skeletons as part of the imagery with a lightheartedness that makes one think the artist at 91 has come to terms with the issue of mortality. One work places the skeleton over an original silhouette of the artist from his own shadow. Another earlier and more somber image is based on a 1965 war photograph by Larry Burrows with Marine corporal James Farley crumpled in grief over the death of a comrade. 

This group exhibition -- 'From Dusk 'Til Dawn' -- at the Brentwood Arts Exchange features artists whose diverse disciplines center around aesthetic and conceptual themes of personal journey, from pain to promise. Participating artists include: Gayle Friedman, Emily Fussner, Tim McLoraine, and Alex Porter.

Johnston’s songs have been covered by several hundred artists, including David Bowie and Tom Waits. The late Kurt Cobain mused that Daniel Johnston is the best songwriter in America. In 2006, his life was documented in the award-winning film, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, and his painted illustrations were exhibited in the Whitney biennial. Johnston had a lifetime battle with mental illness, and medication prescribed for this condition damaged his liver requiring multiple hospitalizations. He died from a heart attack in his sleep before the morning of September 11, 2019.

DOSSHAUS is an art collective founded in 2011 and the current nom de guerre of David Connelly. Created in response to a society saturated with social-media-generated images in which reality itself seems all the more relative, DOSSAHAUS uses recycled cardboard, paper, and acrylic to create its own highly idealized universe. This cardboard world is at once separate from and a product of modern culture. DOSSHAUS have taken part in more than 20 group art exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York and Miami.

A three-dimensional sensibility is at work at the Guggenheim’s first ever artist-curated exhibition, Artistic License: Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection.  The first dimension is the initial shock of the viewer confronting the artworks; the second is the awareness as you move from one selection to the next, that there’s another mind, the curator’s, at work.  The third dimension as you move through the six levels of the rotunda, is the merging of the viewer’s take along with the curator’s own into a rich, sometimes disorienting, dizzying impression.

Drawing from his everyday experiences, Chase examines the relationship between space and gender as social constructs; the ways in which gender identity is affected by our immediate environment and the dominant societal norms that exist within that space. For “Sheets,” Chase delves further into this idea of gender performativity, using spatial obscurity as a means of protecting his autobiographical subjects from the trappings of ethno-cultural stereotypes and societal expectations.