Orange and Green
2013
Gesso, flashe and paper collage on paper

Red and Violet
2015
Gesso, flashe and paper collage on paper

Donald Baechler (b. 1956, Hartford, Connecticut) is an American artist. He attended the Maryland Institute College of Art from 1974–1977, and the Cooper Union from 1977–1978. Baechler's source material draws broadly on classical art history, the New York School, contemporary art, folk art, outsider art, pop culture and childhood. Baechler's creative process begins amidst a vast collection of popular images and objects, the archives of years of photographing, looking and gathering. His paintings are condensed versions of that cumulative process, built in fragments and layers to create what he calls an "illusion of history." The artist cites Cy Twombly and Giotto as his primary influences.

Field V
2020
Polyurethane resin, raw Virginia cotton, housedresses, dye-sublimation printed t-shirts, t-shirts, altered housedresses, gold powder, carbon fiber

the lagoon
2022
Polyurethane resin, raw Virginia cotton, altered housedresses, altered t-shirts and Sharpie transfer

Beasley is known for sculpture that incorporates found materials–especially clothing–and casting materials like resin and foam. While these materials cure or set into their final state, Beasley works them with his body, a process that points to his interest in sculpture that traces of the artist's body while retaining a bodily, fleshy quality of its own. Many of his sculptures also contain audio equipment or are used in sound-based installations or performances.

For Beasley, cotton is not just a material, it is a theme that touches on politics, social relationships, and of course, economics and reparations. “It all just unfolds and is laid out,” he says. At his show at the Whitney, Beasley constructed a series of sculptural works, comprised of various materials, that he calls “slabs.” He says: “They become ways of telling stories.” In his works, Beasley takes control over not just a material, but the systemic repression of Black people and artists, to construct something new.

“Being a Black person in this current state, that’s what you’re encouraged to do—is to move on. Like, ‘Ok, there’s been time. There’s been space,’ right? It’s a false narrative. But it also is one that you feel the pressure from.”

Coated Drawings Series (#68, 69, 76, 138)
2006
Black and white photographs on aluminum panels with enamel

John Beech (b. 1964) is an artist best known for his work using found objects. Many of his pieces use objects that others overlook, including trash cans, dumpsters, and floor mats. Beech often takes black and white photographs of the items he finds and attempts to reflect their natural beauty. He grew up in a small town in England, but his family moved to the United States during his teen years. He entered the University of California as an architecture major. The University of California awarded him the Maybelle Toombs Award for Practice of Art in 1985, which allowed him to then move on to study art.

By the time he finished his BA in 1986, Beech became passionate about painting and sculpting.

Project for #1 Times Square
2003
Lithograph, silkscreen and collage

Christo was born on June 13, 1935 in Gabrovo, Bulgaria. He left Bulgaria in 1956, first to Prague, Czechoslovakia, and then escaped to Vienna, Austria, in 1957, then moved to Geneva, Switzerland. In 1958, Christo went to Paris, where he met Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, who became his wife and life partner in the creation of monumental environmental works of art. Jeanne-Claude passed away on November 18, 2009. Christo died on May 31, 2020 at his home in New York City, where he lived for 56 years.

Reknot
1983
Hand forged steel, in two parts

Working in the tradition of David Smith and Alexander Calder, Abstract sculptor Mark di Suvero (b. 1933) builds colorful and monumental outdoor sculptures. His works incorporate steel, wood, railroad ties, scrap metal, moving or swinging parts, and, most characteristically, industrial I-beams. Using a masterful welding technique to work on all of his sculptures himself, di Suvero integrates found objects and cast-off industrial materials into bold, expressive compositions. His practice is seen by many as a close approximation of the Abstract Expressionist concerns with material, gesture, and form typically found in painting.

Untitled
1991–1997
Archival inkjet prints

Taking inspiration from Walker Evans, one of his mentors at Yale, Hendricks documented his America, rarely going out in public without a camera around his neck. Through his lens, Hendricks captured his immediate environment, framing moments of humor, beauty, and individual style in often playful compositions. Demonstrating his distinct visual sensibility, the work also shows a deep interest in the creative potential of the medium.

A series of television screens, a recurring theme that fascinated Hendricks throughout his practice, documents vignettes of popular culture, news, and public figures such as Anita Hill and Ronald Reagan. The images serve as a record of the American media landscape and Hendricks’ own surroundings; a large number were taken at the Dutch Tavern, a local establishment in New London, Connecticut, over the years. Covering a broad range of subject matter, the series demonstrates Hendricks’ keen eye for American life during the birth of media oversaturation and the shape of visual culture in its wake.

God Painting (Summer Days)
2023
Oil on linen
72 x 60 x 1.625 in

Rashid Johnson (b. 1977, Chicago) is an artist who works in a wide range of everyday materials, including wax, wood, steel, brass, shea butter, ceramic tile and found objects such as books, records, VHS tapes, live plants and CB radios. Johnson first received critical attention at the young age of 24 when he was included in a Thelma Golden curated exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem. His work has since been exhibited around the world and is held in collections of many leading art museums. He is known for combining various science with black history so that his materials, which are formally independent, are augmented by their relation to black history.

Urah
Paintings on wood
24 x 18 x 2 in

Tobi Kahn is a painter and sculptor whose art has been shown in over 70 solo museum exhibitions. Works by Kahn are in major museum collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NYC; the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, TX; The Phillips Collection, DC; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; Yale University Art Gallery, CT; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; and The Jewish Museum, NYC. His traveling museum exhibitions include Tobi Kahn: Metamorphoses; Avoda: Objects of the Spirit; Microcosmos; Tobi Kahn: Sky & Water; and Tobi Kahn: Sacred Spaces for the 21st Century.

Teacup
2020
Charcoal and red pencil on paper
20.625 x 27.625 x 1.5625 in

Still Life
2020
Charcoal and red pencil on paper
20.625 x 27.625 x 1.5625 in

William Kentridge was born in 1955 in Johannesburg, South Africa where he currently lives and works. Often drawing from socio-political conditions in post-apartheid South Africa, William Kentridge’s work takes on a form that is expressionist in nature. For Kentridge, the process of recording history is constructed from reconfigured fragments to arrive at a provisional understanding of the past—this act of recording, dismembering and reordering crosses over into an essential activity of the studio. His work spans a diverse range of artistic media such as drawing, performance, film, printmaking, sculpture and painting. Kentridge has also directed a number of acclaimed operas and theatrical productions.

Selection from the Analogue Portfolio
1999–2006
12 dye transfer prints

New York-based artist Zoe Leonard balances rigorous conceptualism with a distinctly personal vision in her work, which merges photography, sculpture, and installation. By employing strategies of repetition, shifting perspectives, and a multitude of printing processes, Leonard’s practice probes the politics of representation and display. Leonard explores themes such as gender and sexuality, loss and mourning, migration, displacement, and the urban landscape. Her photography specifically invites us to contemplate the role that the medium plays in constructing history, and to consider the roots of contemporary photographic culture. More than its focus on any particular subject, however, Leonard’s work encourages the viewer to reconsider the act of looking itself, drawing attention to observation as a complex, ongoing process.

Election Blood Red Moon Day
2022–2023
Acrylic and collage on wood
47.75 x 47.75 x 1.5 in

McEneaney works as both an artist and community activist in Philadelphia. Working primarily in egg tempera, her paintings are characterized by their autobiographical content, detailed brushwork, and brilliant color. Having her hand in every step of the work, she mixes her paint from egg yolk and powdered pigment, while making her gesso from powdered limestone and rabbit-skin glue. McEneaney's intimate subject matter focuses on daily scenes from her home, studio, travels, and neighborhood. Her work is in numerous public collections including the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, and the Mills College Art Museum.

The Evening is The Beginning of The Night (Diptych)
2022
Acrylic on linen canvas
39.375 x 86.625 x 1.625 in

Jiab is a contemporary figurative artist. Her work is concerned with identity, and the revelations that can be revealed through rigorous observation. Identity is at the heart of every person. As it manifests as a persona it becomes - defined by the history of our own five basic senses. Our identity is dictated to us from the moment we are born. But as we grow up, identity is what we actually ‘choose’ to be . Jiab is interested in those small details, and is keen to document within her paintings the individual identities of the people she meets, the places she lives and the souvenirs of moments in time.

Ground Rules
1997
Intaglio from several plates

Robert Rauschenberg’s art has always been one of thoughtful inclusion. Working in a wide range of subjects, styles, materials, and techniques, Rauschenberg has been called a forerunner of essentially every postwar movement since Abstract Expressionism. He remained, however, independent of any particular affiliation. At the time that he began making art in the late 1940s and early 1950s, his belief that “painting relates to both art and life” presented a direct challenge to the prevalent modernist aesthetic.

The celebrated Combines, begun in the mid-1950s, brought real-world images and objects into the realm of abstract painting and countered sanctioned divisions between painting and sculpture. These works established the artist’s ongoing dialogue between mediums, between the handmade and the readymade, and between the gestural brushstroke and the mechanically reproduced image. Rauschenberg’s lifelong commitment to collaboration—with performers, printmakers, engineers, writers, artists, and artisans from around the world—is a further manifestation of his expansive artistic philosophy.

This text is adapted from an essay written by Julia Blaut, “Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective,” @Guggenheim (Fall 1997).

Atmosphere II
1974
Oil on linen

Warren Rohrer (1927–1995) was born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and became one of Philadelphia’s leading abstract painters in the late 20th century. Coming from a Lancaster Mennonite upbringing, he strayed from conventional professional paths of becoming a farmer or minister when he began to pursue art and art education. Rohrer quickly embedded himself in the national contemporary art scene and would go on to teach for 25 years at the Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts).

Home of Musya Vainshteyn, Nemirov, Ukraine, October 16, 2023
2013
Chromogenic color print

Shnuriv Lys, Ukraine, October 16, 2013
2013
Chromogenic color print

Shnuriv Lys, Kyivska Province, Ukraine, October 16, 2013
2013
Chromogenic color print

Dylove, Ukraine, October 13, 2013
2013
Chromogenic color print

Tomashpol, Ukraine, July 25, 2012
2012
Chromogenic color print

Berdichev, Ukraine, July 29, 2012
2012
Chromogenic color print

One of the most significant photographers of our time, Stephen Shore (American, b. 1947) has often been considered alongside other artists who rose to prominence in the 1970s by capturing the mundane aspects of American popular culture in straightforward, unglamorous images. But Shore has worked with many forms of photography, switching from cheap automatic cameras to large-format cameras in the 1970s, pioneering the use of color before returning to black and white in the 1990s, and in the 2000s taking up the opportunities of digital photography, digital printing, and social media.

Young Hoboken Sisters (Hoboken, NJ)
1972
Archival pigment print

Outside Payphone (New York, NY)
1973
Archival pigment print

Two Pals (Hoboken, NJ)
1972
Archival pigment print

Harlem-based, Detroit-born, Ming Smith attended the famous Howard University, Washington, DC. Ming Smith first became a photographer when she was given a camera, and was the first female member to join Kamoinge, a collective of black photographers in New York in the 1960s, working to document black life. Smith would go on to be the first black woman photographer to be included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art.

Smith’s photography focused on black-and-white street photography, a format that she described as ‘you have to catch a moment that would never ever return again, and do it justice.’ Smith has often described her work as ‘celebrating the struggle, the survival and to find grace in it.’ Many of Smith’s subjects were well-known black cultural figures from Nina Simone, Grace Jones and Alice Coltrane: all from her neighbourhood. Smith has cited music as being a big influence in her work, specifically the genres of jazz and the blues. She has likened her work to the blues, saying, ‘in the art of photography, I’m dealing with light, I’m dealing with all these elements, getting that precise moment. Getting the feeling — to put it simply, these pieces are like the blues.’

3rd Avenue at 85th Street, New York / Upper East
1978
Gelatin silver print

99th Street at 1st Avenue, New York / Harlem
1978
Gelatin silver print

Hudson Street at Dominick Street, New York / Tribeca
1978
Gelatin silver print

27th Street at Borden Avenue, New York / Queens
1978
Gelatin silver print

Thomas Struth was born 1954 in Geldern, Germany and currently lives and works in Berlin. He is best known for his genre-defying photographs, though he began originally with painting before he enrolled at the Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf in 1973. Struth has developed his individual photographic practice, often penetrating places of the human imagination in order to scrutinize the landscape of invention, technology, and beyond. Celebrated for his diverse body of work—Unconscious Places, Familienleben (Family Life), Museum Photographs, New Pictures from Paradise and Nature & Politics—Struth continues to advance his vocabulary with each new series, while maintaining the same principles core to his practice.

Boy in the White Shirt (after Keita)
2023
UV and Screen Printed Retroreflective Vinyl mounted on Dibond
40 x 30 in.

Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY as a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad including the International Center of Photography, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Musée du quai Branly, Hong Kong Arts Centre and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art.

Van Heusen (Ronald Reagan)
1985
Silkscreen

Andy Warhol created Van Heusen (Ronald Reagan) as one of the ten artworks from his Ads Complete Portfolio, published in 1985. In the series, Warhol reimagines popular advertisements and propaganda media, showcasing his vivid, ironic, and iconic-sensitive imagination. Van Heusen captures the image of former President Ronald Reagan during his pre-presidential days as an actor and an ambassador for various commercial brands. The screenprint exudes a 3D comic illustration effect, presenting Reagan’s cheerful countenance against a dystopian backdrop, creating a visually captivating and intense composition.