A new conversation series
A new conversation series
Galerie Lelong & Co. is pleased to present a new conversation series, "Dialogues." Exploring topics related to our artists' areas of research, including sociopolitical issues and community engagement; "Dialogues" encourages an exchange with artists, curators, and thought leaders that is open to an active audience.
This series builds on the momentum of our past programs, "Galerie Lelong Conversations" and our past podcast episodes. "Conversations" had began during the pandemic's lockdown—intimate discussions between our artists and Mary Sabbatino, Vice President/Partner—that invited an international audience into our homes and studios for a behind-the-scenes look into our artists' practices.
Galerie Lelong & Co., New York is pleased to present a conversation held on occasion of Chris Watts's solo exhibition Integration, on view in the gallery from April 4 to May 4, 2024.
Join the artist in conversation with Corinne Erni, Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Chief Curator of Art and Education and Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Parrish Art Museum, as they discuss Watts's practice and the new works on view. The exhibition presents four of the artist’s ongoing series, highlighting Watts’s practice of creating spaces for introspection, remembrance, and meditation through his use of abstraction, transparency, and subtle subversions of art historical conventions. Referencing the concept of integration as it relates to psychedelic therapies, Watts investigates how the Afro-Indigenous cosmologies of these undefinable yet universal spaces can be internalized to better understand the physical world.
Galerie Lelong & Co., New York is pleased to present a conversation held on occasion of the late artist Sarah Grilo's first solo exhibition with the gallery, The New York Years, 1962–70, curated by Karen Grimson.
Join curator Karen Grimson in conversation with Mateo Fernández-Muro, grandson of the artist and executor of the Estate of Sarah Grilo, and Phong H. Bui, Co-Founder and Publisher/Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Rail, Rail Editions, River Rail and Rail Curatorial Projects, as they reflect on the visual practice and legacy of Sarah Grilo. The conversation will be held on Saturday, March 9th at 3pm in the gallery.
Galerie Lelong & Co., New York is pleased to present a conversation held on occasion of Tariku Shiferaw's solo exhibition Marking Oneself in Dark Places, on view in the gallery from September 7 to October 21, 2023.
Join the artist in conversation with Larry Ossei-Mensah, curator and cultural critic, as they discuss Shiferaw's practice and the works on view, including new paintings and an installation. The exhibition presents works from two of the artist’s ongoing series, One of These Black Boys and Mata Semay, in which Shiferaw engages his practice of cultural space-making through a confrontation of exclusionary Eurocentric systems of epistemic erasure. Shiferaw’s latest series, Mata Semay, Amharic for “night skies,” proposes a new mythology that imagines how the night sky would exist if diasporic cultural contributions were considered in the global consciousness.
Galerie Lelong & Co., New York is pleased to present a conversation held on occasion of Samuel Levi Jones's solo exhibition, Conscious Intuition, on view in the gallery from May 11 to June 17, 2023 (Opening reception on Thursday, May 11, 2023, 6:00pm – 8:00pm). The conversation will be followed by a brunch reception with the artist.
Join the artist in conversation with Danny Dunson, Director of Curatorial Services and Community Partnerships for The DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center, as they discuss Jones's practice and the works on view, including Jones's first major sculptural installation and new paintings and sculptures.
We are pleased to hold a conversation between Key Jo Lee and Enuma Okoro on occasion of our solo exhibition Ficre Ghebreyesus: I Believe We Are Lost (March 30 – May 6, 2023).
We are pleased to hold a conversation between Samm Kunce and Catherine Morris on occasion of our solo exhibition Nancy Spero: Woman as Protagonist (February 23 – March 25, 2023), coinciding with Women's History Month.
We are pleased to present a virtual conversation with Anne Higonnet and Tausif Noor in conjunction with our online viewing room Ficre Ghebreyesus: Horizons. The online presentation commemorates the artist's inclusion in the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani which closes this month, as well as our recent publication of the catalogue Ficre Ghebreyesus: Gate to the Blue.
We were pleased to present a conversation held on occasion of Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum's first solo exhibition in New York, I have withheld much more than I have written. The artist was in conversation with Tao Leigh Goffe as they discuss Sunstrum's practice and new works on view, including a large installation and a suite of paintings.
This summer, three New York-based galleries have invited galleries from other locales to present their artists' works in these spaces, enabling exposure to a new audience independent of an art fair. Hear from gallery leadership as they discuss the genesis and reception of their collaborations, positing how future joint endeavors might grow.
In an unprecedented collaboration, Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, has invited Luis De Jesus Los Angeles and Welancora Gallery (Brooklyn, New York) to present works by their artists in a group show. Open Doors presents a multi-generational group of abstractionists with works on paper, painting and sculpture, by Carl E. Hazlewood, Helen Evans Ramsaran, Chris Watts (represented by Welancora Gallery), and June Edmonds (represented by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles). This panel was moderated by Daonne Huff.
We were pleased to hold an exhibition walkthrough of Alfredo Jaar's solo exhibition THE TEMPTATION TO EXIST, with the artist and Carlos Basualdo, the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Galerie Lelong & Co., New York is pleased to present a conversation held on occasion of Andy Goldsworthy's solo exhibition Red Flags, on view in the gallery from March 31 to May 7, 2022.
Join the artist in conversation with Brett Littman, director of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum and curator of Frieze Sculpture 2020 as they discuss the birth and development of Red Flags (2020). From Goldsworthy’s initial visit to Rockefeller Center in 2019 to involving volunteers all over the U.S. in the collection of red earth, by the time the flags were installed for Frieze Sculpture they had accrued additional layers—becoming “bound up with the pandemic, lockdown, division and unrest,” as Goldsworthy says. The transformation of the weathered flags and their recontextualization within the gallery space, on view once more in New York City, invite viewers to a new mode of reflection.
Galerie Lelong & Co., New York is pleased to present a conversation held on occasion of Michelle Stuart's solo exhibition The Imprints of Time: 1969-2021, on view in the gallery from February 24 to March 26, 2022.
Join the artist in conversation with Alexis Lowry, curator at the Dia Art Foundation as they discuss Michelle Stuart's five-decade long practice. The exhibition presents a survey from the late 1960s to the present, including works on paper, sculpture, and photography that highlight the site-specificity of Stuart's practice as well as the indexical nature of her works.
Galerie Lelong & Co., New York is pleased to present a conversation held on occasion of the late artist Etel Adnan's solo exhibition "Discovery of Immediacy," on view across the New York and Paris galleries (through February 19 in New York).
Join art critics and curators Carla Chammas, Dawn Chan, and Jina Khayyer in a lively discussion moderated by Mary Sabbatino, Vice President/Partner at Galerie Lelong, as they reflect on the visual art practice of Etel Adnan, from the vibrant abstract landscapes she became known for to the intimate black and white paintings in her last series "Discovery of Immediacy."
Galerie Lelong & Co., New York is pleased to present a conversation between the artist Jaume Plensa and art critic Carol Kino held on occasion of the artist's solo exhibition NEST. They discussed Plensa's longstanding oeuvre that encompasses both intimate and monumental scales, including the artist's latest public works Water's Soul and Utopia.
Galerie Lelong artist, Kate Shepherd, and master printer, Luther Davis, have collaborated together since 1997, yielding several print projects each year. On view in New Prints and Editions at Galerie Lelong are News and Corita’s Sister, works in the format of "protest posters" which were started in 2007 when Shepherd wanted the printing process itself to dictate infinite color interactions. Using a set of screens that she repositions between successive layers of ink, Shepherd structures compositions that suggest layered space. The earliest protest posters were monochromatic, and later series incorporated a variety of brilliant hues. Davis’s current printmaking studio is part of the new Powerhouse Arts soon to open in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Join a conversation with artists Adebunmi Gbadebo, Samuel Levi Jones, and Tariku Shiferaw moderated by critic Seph Rodney on the embedding of social and political concerns within formal abstraction.
Gbadebo, Jones, and Shiferaw belong to a new generation of Black artists who are pushing the language of abstraction while retaining their cultural specificity; a movement that Rodney identified in a 2017 essay for Hyperallergic. Coming of age in a period when the consciousness of racial violence had reached a national scale, these artists address injustices toward minorities in their practices, charging their abstractions with a message for social change.
Held on occasion of Mildred Thompson's solo exhibition Throughlines, Assemblages and Works on Paper from the 1960s to the 1990s (February 18 – March 27, 2021), Melissa Messina was in conversation with Valerie Cassel Oliver, the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA). They discussed the contextualization of Thompson’s work in the groundbreaking 2017 exhibition Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, Thompson's abstract practice in relation to contemporaries such as Howardena Pindell and Mary Lovelace O’Neal, and the placement of her Wood Picture in the forthcoming exhibition The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture and the Sonic Impulse scheduled to open May 22, 2021 at the VMFA.
In conjunction with our presentation in Art Basel OVR: Pioneers (March 24 – March 27, 2021), where the works of four groundbreaking women artists, Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneemann, Nancy Spero, and Mildred Thompson are situated in conversation, Mary Sabbatino, Galerie Lelong's Vice President and Partner, moderated a discussion with Philip Spero Golub, the son of Leon Golub and Nancy Spero and the Manager of their estate; Alvin Hall, Board Member of the Carolee Schneemann Foundation; Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, niece and Associate Administrator for the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection; and Melissa Messina, Curator of the Mildred Thompson Estate.
Under the leadership of Mary Sabbatino since 1991, Galerie Lelong, New York, has represented the estates of prominent contemporary artists. Working closely with the estates' managers, who are often the descendants and close relatives of the artists, numerous archival, research, and conservation projects have been undertaken to preserve and share their legacies. In our current digital landscape, these efforts have expanded to include platforms such as websites, social media, and Online Viewing Rooms (OVR). In these artists' oeuvres spanning decades with works in multiple media, how are bodies of work prioritized and presented to an increasingly online and global audience?
Melissa Messina, Curator of the Mildred Thompson Estate, moderated a discussion with A'Driane Nieves, founder of Tessera Arts Collective and Abstractions Magazine, and Lauren Jackson Harris and Daricia Mia DeMarr, founders of Black Women in Visual Art (BWVA). Participants discussed their respective arts organizations that serve and promote Black female art professionals on a variety of platforms. They also discussed their interest in the work of Mildred Thompson, their recent collaborative T-shirt initiative highlighting Thompson among six intergenerational Black female abstract artists—Alma Thomas, Shinique Smith, Julie Mehretu, Howardena Pindell and Mary Lovelace O’Neal—and the need for new scholarship and cultural initiatives for their art work.
Alfredo Jaar and Koyo Kouoh, Executive Director and Chief Curator at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) were in conversation on occasion of his solo exhibition at the museum, Alfredo Jaar: The Rwanda Project, on view November 19, 2020 – May 23, 2021. In August 1994, in the aftermath of the genocide, Alfredo Jaar visited Rwanda and conducted investigations and photojournalistic field research over six years, creating a total of twenty-five works. For the artist, these were "exercises in representation," serving as a critique to the world’s criminal indifference and a lack of global visibility of the atrocities in Rwanda.
We were pleased to hold a conversation and virtual toast with Elizabeth Alexander and Jason Moran to celebrate the opening of Ficre Ghebreyesus: Gate to the Blue, the late artist's first solo exhibition in New York City and his first with the gallery.
Joining us from his studio in Brooklyn, New York, viewers got to see a preview of the artist's newest projects; including the materials and processes he is currently engaging with. Drew and Sabbatino also discussed his first outdoor installation, City in the Grass, which was commissioned by Madison Square Park Conservancy in 2019. At the time of the talk, the work was on view at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, and later travelled to the Mississippi Museum of Art.
On Tuesday, July 29, 2020, the artist Kate Shepherd and Mary Sabbatino discussed selected works from the past two decades as well as the artist's show entitled Surveillance.
The second in "Galerie Lelong Conversations," they charted Shepherd's journey over the last two decades; from her delicate line work to the current body of work that establishes a spatial discourse across the panel, the viewer, and the gallery space. Known for her richly colored paintings built with layers of monochromatic enamel, Shepherd here charts new territory in her decades-long exploration of perspectival space. Chief among Shepherd’s concerns in these works is their relationship to their environs; the various reflective surfaces establish a spatial discourse across the panel, the viewer, and the gallery space.
From Jaume Plensa's studio in Barcelona, Spain, we held a virtual conversation between the artist between the artist and Mary Sabbatino, Vice President and Partner at Galerie Lelong & Co.
This conversation was held on occasion of "Jaume Plensa: April is the cruelest month" (June 12 – July 10, 2020). The online exhibition presented eight new drawings from the "STILL" series by the artist, created during his month of confinement at home in April 2020.
As in many of Plensa’s works, language is incorporated into the imagery. He used words like anxiety, fear, and love, calling attention to the various psychological states people experienced during the months of confinement. The title, "STILL," resonates on many levels: it connotes a period of waiting, the gathering of energy, a state of silence and quietness. In the contemplation of these drawings, we see a world both intimate and expansive, expressive of shared human experience during a time when the world was “still.”
From 2018 to 2019, Galerie Lelong & Co. presented the podcast series, “Viewpoints” to start conversations with the artists, curators, and thought leaders who inspire us at the gallery. Averaging 15 to 30 minutes in length, the episodes included discussions with artists from the gallery’s roster, behind-the-scenes details on new exhibitions, and conversations related to the past, present, and future of Galerie Lelong & Co. and its artists.
Click here to listen on SoundCloud.
"San Francisco-based collector Pamela Joyner, together with her husband Fred Giuffrida, has amassed what has been called the most important collection of African American art in private hands," says Mary Sabbatino, Vice President/Partner at Galerie Lelong & Co. The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection includes several works by Samuel Levi Jones, who "unmakes and remakes objects to question their moral and ethical implications," Sabbatino says.
Recorded in Chicago during the week of EXPO Chicago 2019, Jones and Joyner's conversation centers on the formation of their fruitful artist-collector relationship and the background of Jones's pulping and repurposing of authoritative textbooks, plus their shared interest in deconstructing the cultural and political systems at work in society.
"When I make the work, I deconstruct it, thinking about how the system should be deconstructed and remade, rather than doing the same thing and continuing to expect a new result," Jones says.
When Jones admits his perspective could be seen in a pessimistic light, Joyner disagrees: "I don't think of you as a pessimistic person at all. I think of you as something like a sponge: You absorb the environment, and then you do the best of what the best artists do...You reframe important questions in a way that we might have a prospect for coming to better and clearer answers."
Click here to listen on SoundCloud.
“In this episode of the 'Viewpoints' podcast, we'll hear from artist Leonardo Drew and curator Larry Ossei-Mensah, two link-minded voices in contemporary art," says Mary Sabbatino, Vice President/Partner at Galerie Lelong & Co. "Drew is a Brooklyn-based sculptor known for transforming and assembling varied material in an attempt, as he says, to make chaos legible."
Their in-depth conversation touches on Drew's ever-changing art practice, his growing up in the P.T. Barnum apartments, and the connection Drew found with an older generation of artists including Jack Whitten and Joe Overstreet. Larry Ossei-Mensah, the Susanne Feld Hilberry Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), examines Drew's current solo exhibition at Galerie Lelong in New York as well as his first public-art project, a monumental work now on view in Madison Square Park.
Michelle Stuart x Hans Ulrich Obrist
May 10, 2019
Click here to listen in SoundCloud.
“In this episode of the 'Viewpoints' podcast, we'll hear a conversation between artist Michelle Stuart and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, two friends who share an interest in nature, memory and extinction," says Mary Sabbatino, Vice President/Partner at Galerie Lelong & Co. "They spoke on an early morning in April at Stuart’s studio in New York, joined throughout by her bull terrier, Luna."
Their in-depth conversation surveys Stuart's beginnings in art—including her experiences in Mexico with Diego Rivera—as well as her early feminist works, earthworks and later photography and sculpture, as seen in "Flight of Time," Stuart's recent solo exhibition at Galerie Lelong & Co. in New York.
Petah Coyne x Mary Sabbatino
October 18, 2018
Click here to listen in SoundCloud.
Galerie Lelong & Co. is pleased to announce its new podcast series, “Viewpoints, with Galerie Lelong & Co.” The premiere episode features a conversation between artist Petah Coyne and Mary Sabbatino, Vice President/Partner at Galerie Lelong & Co. Their far-ranging conversation covers Coyne’s use of color, her literary inspirations, and her place in the pantheon of female artists, including her solo exhibition Having Gone I Will Return, which is currently on view at Galerie Lelong & Co. in New York.