The July Cherry Basket is ripe and ready for picking! This monthly series shares noteworthy art exhibitions across New York, Los Angeles, London, and Paris with an emphasis on Black artists. I hope you find something sweet! ❤️ 🍒
New York
- What: Organized by community organization Black Girl Fight Club (BGFC), Midsummers Dream of Me features three artists whose work propels us into a kaleidoscope-colored dreamscape.
- Who: Traci Johnson, Kiki Joyce, Chloe Malay
- Where: Vacation Forever (154 East Broadway | New York, NY)
- When: July 12 – August 9
- What: The Imaginary Made Real commemorates the centennial anniversary of the Surrealist movement, showcasing work that embraces visionary, spiritual and psychological perspectives. Featuring 31 international contemporary artists, the exhibition reimagines surrealism with fresh eyes. Featured in the show are pieces across painting, sculpture, photography, ceramics, assemblage and more, with each inviting viewers to explore the depths of the surreal.
- Who: Vera Girivi, Elisabetta Zangrandi, David Onri Anderson, Sarah Lee, Leyla Runzi Cui, Charles Hascoët, Valerie Hegarty, Nir Hod, Katinka Huang, Oda Jaune, Nianxin Li, Rosa Loy, Donna Moylan, GaHee Park, Erik Parker, David Alekhuogie, Alex Anderson, Hoda Kashiha, Yasue Maetake, Tony Matelli, Melissa Rios, Rhonda Wall, David Baskin, Saint Clair Cemin, Amie Dicke, Thomas Lerooy, Larissa De Jesús Negrón, Bony Ramirez, Yevgeniya Baras, Luiza Gottschalk, and Karla Knight.
- Where: Berry Campbell (524 West 26th Street | New York, NY)
- When: June 27 – August 16
Diamond Stingily: Orgasms Happened Here
- What: Featuring new work from artist Diamond Stingily, Orgasms Happened Here navigates fictive, biographical, and autobiographical narratives that recontextualize everyday objects. Inspired by her childhood memories, Stingily focuses on thresholds within domestic spaces, such as closets, locked doors, stained-glass windows and ready-made gate sculptures, as she explores themes of privacy, transition, curiosity, and transgression. Portal-like closets appear throughout the gallery, inviting us to enter other worlds. Each interior is designed thematically and infused with remnants of the artist’s memories and emotions.
- Who: Diamond Stingily
- Where: 52 Walker (52 Walker St | New York, NY)
- When: June 21 – September 14
Lyle Ashton Harris: Our first and last love
- What: An exploration of identity and self-portraiture throughout artist Lyle Ashton Harris’s work over the last 35 years, Lyle Ashton Harris: Our first and last love highlights photographs and installations from the artist’s various series. Centered in the exhibition are Harris’ Shadow Works—photographic prints within geometric frames of stretched Ghanaian funerary textiles, combined with personal elements. These works expand upon themes of otherness and belonging, the self-presentation of Black and queer individuals, tenderness and vulnerability, legacy, and violence. The exhibition provides a deeper understanding of the social and political dialogues that have defined the artist’s layered practice over the years.
- Who: Lyle Ashton Harris
- Where: Queens Museum (New York City Building, Flushing Meadows Corona Park | Queens, NY)
- When: May 19 – September 22
Los Angeles
- What: Pace Gallery’s first solo presentation of Gordon Parks’s photography will feature nearly 40 of the photographer’s works spanning from the 1940s to the mid-1980s. Organized in partnership with The Gordon Parks Foundation and Curatorial Director Kimberly Drew, the exhibition chronicles Parks’s approach to storytelling and image making, featuring intimate portraits of his subjects’ interior lives and private spaces.
- Who: Gordon Parks
- Where: Pace Gallery (1201 South La Brea Avenue | Los Angeles)
- When: July 12 – August 30
London
- What: Developed as a winning proposal for the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, artist Dominique White’s latest exhibition, Deadweight, features four large-scale sculptural works that delve into themes of rebellion and transformation. Continuing her interest in creating new worlds for ‘Blackness’ and her fascination with the sea, the metal sculptures in Deadweight are evocative of anchors, ship hulls, mammal carcasses, and skeletons. These pieces have been immersed in the Mediterranean Sea to explore the transformative effect of water on material objects. The exhibition fuses key concepts explored throughout White’s practice – Afrofuturism, Afro-pessimism, and Hydrarchy – envisioning an Afro future divorced from capitalist and colonial influences.
- Who: Dominique White
- Where: Whitechapel Gallery (77-82 Whitechapel High St | London, E1 7QX)
- When: July 2 – September 15
- What: Meditations on Love presents an archive of photobooks, novels, and nonfiction works that invite us to reflect on how love is represented, preserved, and remembered. Love is shown through a global lens, spanning regions from Palestine to Switzerland, Argentina, and Taiwan, prompting us to explore its complex and varying iterations. The exhibition is formatted as a reading room, featuring books that share stories of resilience, community, friendship, subversion, identity, and queerness.
- Who: Tami Aftab, Ollie Adegboye, Deana Lawson, Ewen Spencer, and more
- Where: The Photographers’ Gallery (16-18 Ramillies Street| London, W1F 7LW)
- When: June 14 – September 22
Paris
- What: Diving into artist Ilana Savdie’s fascination with performance in response to structures of power, Ectopia includes new paintings and works on paper. Accompanying the artist’s first solo show in France is a commissioned essay by writer and academic Dr. Moran Sheleg, which connects Savdie’s paintings to the exaggerated performance of wrestling—“they share the intense lighting, the recurrent cast of characters or types, the sequence of gestures both pre-planned and spontaneous.” The artist’s spontaneity and distinct style create a show that is both visually and mentally entrancing.
- Who: Ilana Savdie
- Where: White Cube Paris (10 Avenue Matignon | Paris, 75008)
- When: May 31 – July 27
- What: A Gift of a Lifetime presents oil and acrylic works by artist Ekene Stanley Emecheta that capture the human essence and provoke individual introspection. With figures painted in white, the artist invites us to reflect on the universality of the soul and disregard the conventions of skin color.
- Who: Ekene Stanley Emecheta
- Where: 193 Gallery (21 & 24 Rue Béranger | Paris, 75003)
- When: May 11 – August 24