Michael Bühler-Rose

During the pandemic, some of us started baking sourdough or cleaning out our closets (I fall into the latter, while my spouse tried the first), but artist Michael Bühler-Rose took up marquetry, and these four works at New Discretions at Situations (why are gallery names getting worse?) are wondrous examples of what he calls the “collapse [of] my inner life … growing up in both the Hare Krishna movement and the punk/hardcore music scenes.”
Inspired by the 15th-century Gubbio Studiolo on display at the Met Museum, his large “Bühler-Rose Studiolo Summer ’24 (FDR & Grand St.) 1–4” (2024) uses 40 different types of wood, including ebony, purple heart, jackfruit (light and dark), champa (four kinds), maddi, silver oak, and rosewood. It offers us a scene from his Manhattan studio, with its stacks of art books, boxes of vinyl, and items that suggest his life and interests, but in a manner that turns the everyday into a decorative feast. The gallery has done a particularly good job at placing the art on a wall that allows the outdoor light to enter the space in a manner that corresponds to the light source in the work itself. Only three panels are on display, as the fourth is yet to arrive from Mysore, South India, where the artist works with artisans who normally make religious objects for Hindu temples. The overall effect of the wood inlay artworks is very contemporary while consciously feeling rooted in a multicultural and multitemporal art history, which gives them an added sense of authority.

Darrel Ellis and Miguel Ferrando

Exhibitions that pair artist friends don’t always offer much beyond the novelty of the friendship, but in this standout show, already impressive works by Ellis and Ferrando — who met while attending the High School of Fashion Industries in New York — become even richer in each others’ company. The artists’ aesthetics and subjects are distinct — Ellis worked mostly in black and white and reflected the world around him while Ferrando’s brightly colored pieces often evoke history painting — and, to its credit, the gallery doesn’t strain to make connections aside from some portraits the two made of one another. Instead, the works complement each other, the delicate, fluid lines and soft washes of gray in Ellis’s pieces giving way to the quivering outlines and translucent color in Ferrando’s. In this way, the art is an analogue to the friendship itself, as two visions that are different but aligned. Both artists died of AIDS-related complications within a few years of each other in the 1990s, adding a mournful dimension to the show, but it shouldn’t overshadow the delight that these artists seemed to take in creating and togetherness.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

This is a must-see show that feels like a small glimpse into the future. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is always on the cutting edge of art and tech, but here his “Transparency Display” (2024), in particular, which he developed with his own “pixel glass” technology, plays with the viewer’s experience in the gallery as it reveals and conceals in real time, offering us temporary relief from the opacity of a triptych of glass walls. Another piece, “Shadow Tuner” (2024), was first developed as a public artwork in Abu Dhabi, but this smaller version still links to thousands of geo-located radio stations that respond to the viewers’ spatial relationship to the globe. The classic, much earlier work “Standards and Double Standards, Subsculpture 3” (2004) is a single fastened belt hanging in a roped-off gallery that gives the impression of following your movements. The belt, which hangs at roughly waist height, evokes a patriarchal figure through this symbolic object of authority and foreshadows the artist’s long-running interest in technology and power, and how viewers may have agency in determining their relationship to both.

My guess is we’ll be seeing a version of “Transparency Display” in buildings everywhere in a few years, so I hope he’s got his patent.

Byzantine Bembé

Before you continue reading this, put your headphones on and get this playlist going, curated by Manny Vega himself to soundtrack his melodious, vibrant exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York. Ben E. King’s “Spanish Harlem” and the voices of Celia Cruz and Tito Puente will also reverberate as you admire Vega’s carefully crafted mosaics, prints, and works on paper in this intimate, satisfying show. Starting in the 1980s, the Nuyorican artist (a New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent) was deeply inspired by the Afro-Brazilian spiritual practices of Candomblé; this influence is an anchor of his visual lexicon, along with religious art, female figures, the neighborhood of El Barrio, and, of course, music. One special gem on view is a watercolor of the Yoruba spirit Changó, on loan from Associate Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who is said to display the piece in her chambers.