The installation of renowned English artist Francis Cape’s piece Waterline (2006) in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, featured seventeen framed photographs hung above a wainscot of ochre-painted paneling. The photographs were taken in New Orleans on November 6th, 2005, two months after Hurricane Katrina, in the towns of Gentilly and St. Roch in central New Orleans. Cape…

It feels as though magic is afoot in Cameron Gainer’s Luna del Mar (2012) or at least a heavy reliance on cinematic trickery such as careful lighting and extensive post-production. We see a single screen awash in blue and black, constantly in motion. At one moment a figure twists, turns, and writhes in a body…

Diana Cooper didn’t know what to include in the Surviving Sandy show when she was invited. She was busy, in the midst of several other shows, and skeptical, even nervous to revisit such a sensitive area. For Cooper was greatly affected by Hurricane Sandy. She lost countless works, years of early efforts (done in college…

Alex Katz’s three works in Surviving Sandy are painted images of bodies of water. During the show they occupied the large back wall of the first floor, the installation itself therefore an invitation to compare the paintings to each other and consider their roles in a group. Beyond the immediate, obvious similarity that there’s water…

Daniel Turner’s studio in Brooklyn lies alongside the Newtown creek, one of the nation’s most polluted bodies of water, and a new U.S. Superfund site when Turner moved there in 2010. He had been working mostly outdoors, in rural Virginia, before returning to New York for a studio residency downtown. As a reaction to the…

I have always seen the background, or the space behind whatever I’m painting in the foreground, as a piece of history. 1 -Alexis Rockman It is well known that as an urban New York City kid Alexis Rockman followed his anthropologist mother through the halls of the famed Museum of Natural History where his gaze…

Since the landmark, monumental work 100–Foot–Long Piece (1969), which can be seen as the painter’s compilation of pictorial vocabulary—one that in alphabetical order is always ready to be realized by his generative experiments with materials and techniques—Joe Zucker has been deemed not only a master of grid-based painting, but a fearless explorer of materials of…