Women Around Town, April 2025
Here are some of the exhibitions that have caught my eye for the coming month. Enjoy!
I was able to visit the Getty Center last week and want to recommend two outstanding exhibits. The first is Gustav Caillebotte: Painting Men. A most interesting impressionist artist. The exhibit includes some of his most outstanding work including Floor Scrapers and Paris Street: Rainy Day. Thru 5/25/25.
The second exhibition is on the lower level of the west pavilion in the photography section, María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold. Here is the Getty’s description: “Cuban-born María Magdalena Campos-Pons makes vivid photographs, watercolors, installations, and performances that trace the cultural and personal impacts of migration and memory. Her works reflect global histories of labor as they affected her family through enslavement, indenture, and motherhood, emphasizing resilience and respect for her Nigerian and Chinese ancestors. This survey of 35 years of artmaking and activism highlights the interconnectedness between people and their environments, offering an expansive, incisive, and sensorial experience.” My impression of her work is just WOW! Thru May 4, 2025.
IN THE GALLERIES
Jeffrey Deitch Gallery’s current exhibit is Nina Chanel Abney: Winging It. This exhibit features vibrant, large scale paintings, works on paper, sculptures, and an immersive installation. “Known for her vibrant use of color and layered narratives, Abney delves into the improvisational ways in which people navigate life’s uncertainties—through religion, astrology, social media affirmations, and even the ubiquitous, yet often dismissed, aesthetic of aspirational decor.” Thru April 26, 2025.
Honor Fraser presents Sarah Cain: Tell the Poets. Cain’s striking compositions cross dimensions, rainbowing across doors and walls, canvases and currency with a gestural index—the intuitive records of an artist tied to the shifting rhythm of our precarious present. Thru April 19, 2025.
Rachel Jones: Dark-Pivot is the current exhibition at Regen Projects. “The exhibition’s new paintings pose fundamental questions about how the body–and traces of its movement–is comprehended differently when pushed beyond its figurative or abstract limits. Powerfully wielding negative space alongside color palettes and motifs drawn from cartoons, Jones recalibrates the psychic motor that drives our perception of bodily forms and traditional landscape painting, carving out new terrains between the real and the imaginary. Dark-Pivot continues Jones’s use of the mouth motif, for which she is well known. In her paintings, mouths are a cipher for the body and its psychological interior, grasping at the elusive or opaque qualities of one’s innermost thoughts and emotions. ” (RP) April 5 — May 10, 2025.
Laura Karetzy: Liar, Liar is on view at Luis de Jesus Gallery. Karetzty’s approach is hybrid of oil painting, clay sculpture, woodcut, and sgraffito, her compositions carve paint into relief surfaces, apply ceramic glazes to render illusionistic space, and push the boundaries of the rectangular canvas to challenge traditional narrative structures. April 19 – May 31, 2025.
IN THE MUSEUMS
There is currently an interesting exhibition at the Getty Research Center titled What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999. It is actually a pop-up reading room surveys a global history of photobooks by women photographers from the Getty Library. As part of an international series showcasing the 10×10 Photobooks’ catalog What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999, it offers an inclusive revision and remapping of the photobook canon. It is complemented by notable photobooks by Southern California women artists after 2000. April 8 thru May 11, 2025.
Another unique exhibit is at the U.C.L.A. Hammer museum. Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal is inspired by the life and legacy of jazz musician, devotional leader, and mother Alice Coltrane (b. 1937, Detroit). The exhibition presents works by contemporary American artists paired with ephemera from Coltrane’s personal archive. Featuring a range of mediums including video, installation, performance, and sculpture together with Coltrane’s archival hand-written correspondence, unreleased audio recordings, and rarely seen video footage. Thru May 4, 2025.
