Broken Heaven
Opening Tuesday, May 14 at 7 Franklin Place, 6 pm to 10 pm. One night only.
Art exhibitions featuring people who are formerly or currently incarcerated have been fairly common, but it would be unproductive to shoehorn them into a category. After all, no one goes about remarking about how there are too many art exhibitions featuring people who live in houses. If you’ve yet to go to an art show that draws from the profound and traumatic experience of incarceration on creators, or even if you have, head to Tribeca tonight for a show by the formerly incarcerated artist Pingo, who will be showing his work to the public for one night before a stint at this year’s Art Basel Miami. Pingo’s work is abstract and textural, recalling Jackson Pollock and utilizing shocks of colorful paint to convey a landscape of emotion. Not only that, but the exhibition will also include ice sculptures.
Red Summer
Opening Wednesday, May 15 at Foley Gallery, 6 pm to 8 pm. On view through June 23.
Art can be an escape, but it can also be a vessel to inspire new and nuanced mindsets about painful or disturbing events. Foley Gallery’s latest offering sets its focus on Red Summer, a term referring to race riots in America during the year 1919 that resulted in a disproportionate amount of black individuals dying, usually at the hands of white people. A century later, artist Casey Ruble looked back at what was being shown at the National Portrait Gallery that same year, and found quite a lot of white faces. She then took those 47 pieces of art from the Gallery’s 1919 collection and recreated them using ink on paper, replicating everything about the pieces of art—except the portrait’s subject.
In the Bedroom
Opening Thursday, May 16 at Jack Shainman Gallery, 6 pm to 8 pm. On view through June 22.
Sex and everyday household activities are two very intimate and strange things. We all partake in them in some way or another, but can have very different interpretations of what is normal, good, or helpful. This curious spectrum comes to light in South African artist Claudette Schreuders’s newest solo show at Chelsea’s Jack Shainman Gallery, aptly titled In the Bedroom. Schreuders draws from a multitude of sources, including a 1970s pamphlet entitled Love Positions for Married Couples, African art history, and how the actions of public figures have impacted South African domestic life. The result is an array of doll-like sculptures that parse through all of the odd, shameful, boring, poignant activities we might do within the private confines of our homes.