In the past few years, Tribeca has seen a resurgence as New York galleries depart districts like Chelsea and the Lower East Side for new digs, making this neighborhood one of the go-to spots for art in the city. A heady brew of art enterprises has formed as a result: relatively young art spaces now exist side-by-side with Tribeca veterans like Postmasters Gallery and apexart, and edgy shows by artists on the rise can be found just blocks from ones by more established talent.
With the exception of David Zwirner, which runs a space called 52 Walker under the leadership of dealer Ebony L. Haynes, most of the world’s biggest galleries haven’t set up shop in Tribeca yet. That means that, at most galleries in this neighborhood, the average viewer will come into contact mostly with artists they don’t yet know, and surprises abound.
To help sort through the multitude of gallery shows in Tribeca right now, below is a guide to five of the best ones.
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Nora Turato at 52 Walker
Image Credit: Courtesy 52 Walker, New York No artist dominated New York this spring quite like Nora Turato, an Amsterdam-based artist whose work makes use of text and speech in all its many forms. At the Museum of Modern Art this past March, she debuted a new performance where, for around 25 minutes, she walked around a pallet loaded with taped-up boxes and intoned about protein snacks, Albert Einstein’s brain, and a host of seemingly unrelated topics. (Imagine the world’s weirdest TEDx talk, and you may be able to conjure the hypnotic effects of Turato’s performance art.) Now, at the David Zwirner–affiliated 52 Walker, she’s having her first-ever New York gallery show, and the results live up to the hype.
No, Turato is not here in the gallery to perform, which is a bit of a disappointment, but she’s showing a series of new text paintings that mirror her unusual line delivery, which involves the speeding up and slowing down of certain phrases. Throughout, there are references to uneven power relations. The show’s titular work, govern me harder (2022), for example, spells out its name with a gigantic “h” and “er,” as if to elucidate an otherwise unforeseen gender dynamic inherent in the phrase. Allusions to Carly Simon lyrics and the film Barton Fink (1991) can be spotted in other works. Printed on steel, these painting are slick and glossy, and look a bit like advertising for products no one would actually want. Never one to let her viewers off easy, Turato doesn’t explain what any of her statements actually mean, not that she has to—they intrigue because they are so hard to parse.
On view through July 1, at 52 Walker, 52 Walker Street.
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Judith Linhares at P.P.O.W
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and P.P.O.W Long before the current wave of figuration, there was a 1978 show called “‘Bad’ Painting” at the New Museum that showcased a group of painters whose work defied “good” aesthetics. Judith Linhares, an alumna of that show, has remained committed to creating work that is unpleasing to the eye, due to its garish stripes of warm color. If you call the work ugly, you may actually be paying it a compliment. Her latest show at P.P.O.W, filled as it is with misshapen bodies and gauchely hued landscapes, continues in that vein.
The imagery on show ranges from the cute to the downright weird: Walk Against the Wind (2021) is dominated by a zebra-like horse who, for some reason, towers over a shirtless woman raising her skirt in something akin to a curtsey. Even when what’s portrayed feels familiar, as it does in Linhares’s nudes, a weirdness bubbles beneath the surface. Suitor (2022) features a man in his birthday suit who hoists up a naked woman using just one hand. The pose seems acrobatic, even tinged with erotic potential, but Linhares leaves the scene unresolved and ambiguous. Now in her 80s, Linhares is still at the top of her game.
On view through May 27, at P.P.O.W, 392 Broadway.
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'Wonder Women' at Jeffrey Deitch
Image Credit: Photo Genevieve Hanson/Courtesy the artist and Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, New York Kathy Huang, the curator of this show of work by 30 Asian American women and nonbinary artists, has positioned figurative painting as a mode that can lead to profound self-reflection during a time of violence. Her ambitions are vast, and the gambit mostly pays off. Overall, this show is thankfully devoid of the market stars that dominate the conversation about figurative painting, and Huang’s exhibition is bound to add some new stars to the mix.
One might be Nadia Waheed, whose Transmigration: Water Watchers (2022) features two nude women carrying a glowing figure over an ocean set before an urban skyline. Another might be Lily Wong, whose painting Cusp (2022) features red and blue figures that may or may not be mirror images of one another. Alongside them are numerous portraits, many of which are memorable for the piercing gazes their subjects direct at each other and the viewer. Maia Cruz Palileo, Amanda Ba, Jiab Prachakul, and Catalina Ouyang are the makers of some of the finest ones. Coursing throughout these paintings is a heady blend of past, present, and future that melds reality and fantasy.
On view through June 25, at Jeffrey Deitch, 18 Wooster Street.
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Sky Hopinka at Broadway
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and Broadway In the past five years, Sky Hopinka’s films have sprung up seemingly everywhere within art museums—an unlikely achievement for an artist whose works lean heavily on experimental techniques that can be tough, even for cinephiles. (One of his video installations currently occupies an entire gallery at the Museum of Modern Art.) There’s good reason for Hopinka’s rise: his meditative films about the relationship between Indigenous histories and landscapes are positively entrancing, and his newest show at Broadway stands as proof.
For Hopinka, who is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño people, language informs not only who we are but what we remember. “We were at a loss for language except what we could speak. and we spoke and spake our way right out of this place,” reads a subtitle in Hopinka’s knockout film Kicking the Clouds (2022). Dense with shots of the part of Washington State that his family calls home, the film features his mother’s recollections of learning the Pechanga language from his grandmother. The forests and watery expanses seen here are aligned with the words Hopinka’s grandmother wanted her child to remember by way of voiceover. Landscape and language are linked once again in a series of hand-scratched photographs in which poetic phrases tumble over rocks and wind through ferns, as though they were elements of nature themselves.
On view through June 4, at Broadway, 373 Broadway.
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Paulo Nazareth at Mendes Wood DM
Image Credit: Courtesy Mendes Wood DM The São Paulo–based Mendes Wood DM is the latest gallery to set up shop in Tribeca, and it has inaugurated its new space in style, with a survey of nearly two decades of work by Paulo Nazareth, a standout in the current National Gallery of Art iteration of the widely praised exhibition “Afro-Atlantic Histories.” Nazareth’s work is strong stuff, so viewers should come prepared: it often deals head-on with the still-lingering impact of the slave trade on Black communities in the Americas. Even though Nazareth explicitly invokes violence only a few times here, the racist horrors of centuries past continue to haunt the present as seen in the videos, sculptures, and performance documentation on view.
More often than not, Nazareth subjects his own body to extreme circumstances evocative of ones that enslaved people once faced, situating himself within a long lineage of painful performance art that extends from Marina Abramović to Pope.L. In his 2011 series “For Sale,” Nazareth attaches a skull to his face—a reference to the muzzles placed on enslaved people to keep them from eating dirt in an attempt to die by suicide. But the making of these works was nowhere near as intense as that of the 2009–11 series “Notícias de América” (News from America), which involved lengthy trek, by foot and by bus, from Brazil to the United States in which Nazareth did not wash his bare feet as they touched the ground. In one striking photograph from that series featuring his dirty feet near a U.S. flag, evidence of those hard passages is on full display. His toenails are chipped, and his heels are caked in dust. The flag, however, remains pristine, seemingly unscathed as Nazareth as stepped beside it.
On view through June 10, at Mendes Wood DM, 47 Walker Street.
Correction 5/18/22, 5:55 p.m.: A previous version of this article misstated the first name of an artist in “Wonder Women.” It is Catalina Ouyang, not Catherine Ouyang.