Robert Mann Gallery in Photofairs Shanghai 2017

PHOTOFAIRS Shanghai 2017 is Most International Fair to Date

By Nicholas Forrest

PHOTOFAIRS Shanghai returns for its fourth edition in 2017 from September 8-10 at the Shanghai Exhibition Center with a lineup of 50 galleries and institutions from 16 countries and 28 cities. Widely recognized as Asia Pacific’s most authoritative platform on contemporary photography, PHOTOFAIRS Shanghai is a key driver of China’s maturing photography market.

This year’s edition of PHOTOFAIRS Shanghai welcomes a number of new galleries, including Tasveer (Bangalore), who will present Karen Knorr, Longmen Projects (Taipei, Hong Kong & Shanghai) showing Daniel Lee Postaer, as well as Robert Mann Gallery (New York), showcasing artists including Richard Misrach, Jeff Brouws, and Paulette Tavormina.

Click here to continue reading.

I Scream, You Scream in New York Magazine's The Cut

This New Exhibition Will Satisfy Your Summer Sweet Tooth

By Sarah Nechamkin

As the sweaty days of mid-summer approach, the allure of an ice-cream cone becomes ever more tempting. The bells that signal the Mister Softee truck parked on the curb instantly evoke nostalgia for those longing to escape the air-conditioned office and enjoy the simple pleasure of a cold cone. If you can’t, though, at least escape to Robert Mann Gallery, where the newly opened exhibition “I Scream You Scream” promises to satisfy at least some of your cravings.

Click here to continue reading.

NY Times Features Swale by Mary Mattingly

A Forest Floats on the Bronx River, With Free Produce

By Alexandra S. Levine

In a South Bronx forest, the ground sways as visitors collect blueberries, onions and wild carrots. The plants bob up and down as guests gather oregano or basil to add to their next meal. The floating forest on the Bronx River has one main purpose: to engage New Yorkers in a conversation about the benefits of shared, public food by offering crops to pick and eat.

“Not everyone has a garden, or access to earth, and it’s expensive. So how do we work together to get around that?” said Marisa Prefer, who manages the public programs for Swale, the floating forest project by the artist Mary Mattingly that started a year ago.

The artist transformed a 130-foot barge, once used for hauling sand to construction sites, into a public food forest with free edible and medicinal treasures. Last week, the floating green space moved from Pier 6 in Brooklyn Bridge Park to Concrete Plant Park in the South Bronx, one of the largest food deserts in the country, where healthy, fresh options are hard to come by, and on Friday afternoon it opened to the public.

Click here to continue reading.

Review: Julie Blackmon

Art Review: Photographer Julie Blackmon's Memories of Home 

By Meg Brazill
June 28, 2017

A mother's back is turned to her three small children while she searches deep in a car trunk for something out of view. Behind her, one of her children spins around a loading zone sign, while her baby brother picks at cracks in the sidewalk outside a boarded-up building, and their toddler sister clutches a purse as she crosses the street alone. The scene is ominous yet strangely carefree — if trouble is on the horizon, it hasn't happened yet.

Julie Blackmon's photographs, including "Loading Zone," suggest a delicate balance between freedom and responsibility, chaos and order. They provide a glimpse into the artist's world and, sometimes, right into her backyard.

Ten of Blackmon's large-scale color photographs from her most recent series, "Homegrown," are on exhibit in "Julie Blackmon: The Everyday Fantastic" at the Hood Downtown gallery in Hanover, N.H.

Click here to continue reading.

Photo District News Photographer Interviews: Cig Harvey

Cig Harvey: Through Mother's Eyes

By Brienne Walsh

Cig Harvey didn’t know that her new series was about the serious car crash she survived in August 2015 until she showed the photographs to a friend. “He said, ‘The accident is literally all over these,” she recalls. Harvey was psychologically scarred, but rarely ever talked about it. “We’re often the last ones to know what our work is about,” she muses. The fact that the series was born of trauma was no surprise to Harvey, however. “Whenever something massive happens in my life, I make pictures as a way to respond to it,” she says. “I’m the most productive when something derails me, or I don’t understand, or [something] floors me. It could be an amazing thing or it could be a terrible thing. I use art as a way to slow the world down and better understand it.”

Click here to continue reading.

Susan Rankaitis Reviewed in Photograph Magazine

Susan Rankaitis: Grey Matters at Robert Mann Gallery, New York

By Lyle Rexer

When I first saw Susan Rankaitis’s work almost 20 years ago, I felt like I was entering the Cave of Altamira. I had never seen anything so chemical, so metallic, and the shimmering surfaces of those giant prints were like looking into the material origin of photography.  But if Rankaitis was obsessed with origins, she was also channeling the future, the brave new world of technological imagining that gave birth to photography in one era and to brain scans and gene sequencing in another – but also equally to weapons of mass destruction. For a 1990s installation, she even wrapped her abstractions around a recycled missile nosecone. Conceptual ambitions aside, her surface investigations were also a form of painting by other means, well in advance of today’s Mariah Robertson and Matthew Brandt.  She was exploring the textures, colors, translucency, and transcription of light made possible by analogue photographic materials.

Click here to continue reading.

Mike Mandel in Collector Daily

Mike Mandel: Good 70s @Robert Mann

By Loring Knoblauch / In Galleries / June 14, 2017

JTF (just the facts): A total of 84 black and white and color photographs, variously framed and matted, and hung against white walls in the main gallery space and the smaller side room. (Installation shots below.)

The show incudes works from the following series/projects, with the number of works on view, their processes, dates, and editions (as appropriate) as background:

• Evidence (made with Larry Sultan): 13 gelatin silver prints, each 8×10, 1977
• People in Cars: 20 vintage gelatin silver prints mounted to a 30×40 board, 1970-1973
• Boardwalk Minus Forty: 23 gelatin silver prints, each 8×10, and 4 archival pigment prints, each 9×11 (in editions of 6), 1974
• Myself: Timed Exposures: 21 vintage gelatin silver prints, each roughly 6×8, 1971
• Motels: 3 archival pigment prints, each 16×24, in editions of 6, 1974
• Baseball – Photographer Trading Cards: compete set of 135 cards (in vitrine), 1975
• Don Drowty The Famous: 13:54 min. video, in edition of 6, 1971

A retrospective exhibition of the artist’s work is currently (5/20/17-8/20/17) on view at SFMOMA (here). A boxed set monograph of these bodies of work was published in 2015 by J&L Books (here).

Click here to continue reading. 

Jennifer Williams Hosts Open Studios

QCA ArtHotel @ Z Hotel

OPEN STUDIOS:
Friday, June 16th 4-8PM
Sat. June 17th 1-5PM
Friday, June 23rd 4-8PM (Artist talk at7PM)
Sat. June 24th 1-5PM
Sun. June 25th 1-5PM (exhibition open)

Z Hotel:
11-01 43rd Ave
Long Island City

Check out her work at NYFA:

NYFA’s newest exhibition, Informality, will be on view in NYFA Gallery starting Thursday, May 4, through September 1, that showcase works by 2016 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship Finalists. 
Click here for more information.

NYFA Gallery: 
20 Jay Street
DUMBO

Julie Blackmon at The Hood Museum of Art

Art Notes: Photographs Balance Childhood Innocence and Darker Narrative Possibilities

By EmmaJean Holley And Nicola Smith
Valley News Staff Writers

The filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, best known for his psychological thrillers, felt it was important to distinguish between the suspenseful and the merely surprising.

Surprise, he said, is when a bomb goes off without the audience knowing it’s coming: “Prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene of no special consequence.” Suspense, on the other hand, is when “the bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there.”

But the photographer Julie Blackmon, whose exhibit on the theme of “The Everyday Fantastic” opens at the Hood Downtown on Friday, complicates Hitchcock’s black-and-white conception of these narrative devices. Not only does Blackmon’s work create suspense in scenes that Hitchcock might write off as “absolutely ordinary,” but this suspense also hinges on the element of surprise that the great filmmaker seemed to hold in disdain. The seemingly mundane props in Blackmon’s scenes — houses, storefronts, children’s toys — are of “no special consequence,” until, unexpectedly, they are.

In other words, her photographs depict such apparent ordinariness that to realize they are suspenseful comes as a surprise.

Click here to continue reading.

Mike Mandel: Good 70s Reviewed in Artforum

Mike Mandel

ROBERT MANN GALLERY
525 West 26th Street, Floor 2
May 11–June 30

By Juliana Halpert

The shared blunders of Richard Nixon and our current leader are obvious, but there’s one stark difference between the two presidents: Nixon, who loved classical music and reportedly wanted to throw liberals a bone during the Vietnam War, demonstrated strong support for the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1971, its budget was doubled. By the end of the decade, the number of working artists in the country had increased by 81 percent.

“Good ’70s” is a fitting name, then, for this exhibition of Mike Mandel’s work, all from projects made over the course of that decade. It was a productive period for the artist—the recipient of several NEA fellowships—and his images reflect the protean identity of photography at the time. At a glance, the twenty-one black-and-white snapshots of barbershops, airports, shop fronts, and other public spaces appear commonplace—until you spot Mandel himself, lurking in the periphery or grinning goofily next to his subjects. Are they self-portraits? Sure. But they lack the genre’s forced introspection, and they cheekily eschew street photography’s air of detachment as well.

Click here to continue reading.