NEW YORK, NY.- Arts+Leisure is presenting @SomeHighTiide, an exhibition of recent work by Julia Rooney. The exhibition will run from January 16th through February 21st, 2021.

Comprising a series of two by two-inch paintings, Julia Rooney’s exhibition @SomeHighTide queries our intimate relationships with our smartphones and their attendant social networks, with particular regard to the ways such platforms shape our habits of visual consumption and comprehension.

International collage artist Michael Anderson is presently enjoying a solo show, the first in four years, at Arts & Leisure gallery on New York City’s Upper East Side. Armageddon Yacht is an exhibition of sixteen recent works, all featuring Anderson’s unique and inimitable style. Whereas most collage artists make use of magazines, Michael uses exclusively street posters gathered from around the world, which allows for work on a much greater scale than is typically associated with collage. His pictures are at once unmistakable and visceral, sweeping, playful and ironic.

ou are invited to attend the celebration to launch Equal Means Equal's campaign for Equal Rights, a movement in support of the Equal Rights Amendment this Tuesday May 21st 7-10pm, at The Edition Hotel in Times Square (701 7th Ave, New York, NY 10036).
We have teamed up with Artsy for an online art benefit and are asking attendees to bid on artwork to fund the fight for Equality. Artists include Will Cotton, Marc Quinn, Tracey Emin, and myself. Here is the link for the online auction: https://www.artsy.net/auction/equal-means-equal-benefit-auction-2019
RSVP is essential and if you are bringing someone please let me know their name as the door will be intensely strict.

"Artpace Spring Artist-in-Residence Exhibition" by Neil Fauerso

Schenck’s bright, comically grotesque portrayals of artists, comedians and lounge singers at work look for the links between creativity and self-destructive acts.

by Elyssa Goodman

artist cecilia salama explores digital loneliness through butterflies and gymnastics

Cecilia Salama is presenting solo exhibition The Butterfly Reprise at New York’s Arts + Leisure

Freight+Volume, Arts+Leisure and the Bowery Poetry Club will host the closing reception and book launch of Samuel Jablon's exhibition, Life is Fine. Bob Holman will host a poetry reading featuring Yuko Otomo, Steve Dalachinsky, Raphael Rubinstein, Vincent Katz, Todd Colby and Jeffrey Grunthaner. Jablon's Poet Sculpture will be the platform the performers engage with. 

This event is free and open to the public. 

Image: Life is Fine, Freight+Volume (97 Allen Street). On view through May 15th, 2016.

The poet James Schuyler once described the tidal influence that the New York art world had on the poetry he and his friends were writing as “floods of paint in whose crashing surf we all scramble.” In Life is Fine, running concurrently at Freight + Volume on the Lower East Side and Arts + Leisure in Harlem, Samuel Jablon impressed me as an artist who is making Schuyler’s imagery literal.

Today’s show: “Samuel Jablon: Life is Fine” is on view at Freight + Volume in New York, as well as the Lower East Side gallery’s project space Arts + Leisure in the Carnegie Hill neighborhood of Manhattan, through Sunday, May 15. The solo exhibition presents new works by the Brooklyn-based artist.

NEW YORK, NY.- Freight+Volume and Arts+Leisure present Life is Fine, an exhibition of new paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Samuel Jablon. This marks Jablon’s second exhibition at Freight+Volume and his first at Arts+Leisure. 

Opening: “Samuel Jablon: Life is Fine” at Freight+Volume
Brooklyn-based artist Samuel Jablon, best known for his text paintings, opens two exhibitions of new energetic canvases chock full of abstracted language at the downtown Freight+Volume space on Saturday evening and its uptown Arts+Leisure locale on Sunday. The artist uses acrylic paint, bits of broken glass, mirrors and tiles to repeat and layer letters and language.
Freight+Volume, 97 Allen Street, New York, 6-9 p.m.

By RASHAWN GRIFFIN

I met Samuel when I was critiquing as a visiting artist at Brooklyn College, and he was in a graduate school. People said terrible things like “stop making word paintings” and “you don’t want to be a word painter,” and I was like “I don’t know, that sounds crazy, these are great.” Luckily he didn’t listen to them (and probably not me either) and kept his chatty paintings going.

By ED WINSTEAD

In the back of Samuel Jablon's Bushwick, Brooklyn studio is a bright red leather couch with a pile of books stacked in front—collections from poets like Yuko Otomo, Bill Berkson, and Alice Notley. As it turns out, poetry is as much a part of Jablon's practice as paint, exemplified by the artist's freshly smeared fingerprints in purple, orange, and brown on the book covers. The 29-year-old Jablon certainly looks the part of a Brooklyn painter-poet. Bespectacled, unshaven, and a little tired, he's in the thick of it on the night I visit him, putting the finishing touches on a two-gallery show in New York at Arts + Leisure and Freight + Volume set to open this month. "The last show was really exciting," he says. That was in 2014. It was his first in New York, and shot through with euphoria, as breakouts tend to be. "With this show, though, it's not just about making fun, beautiful paintings. It's ‘What do you want to say?' "

By Adam Henry

Guest contributor Adam Henry / Painter-poet Sam Jablon is poised to open a double show in April occupying both Freight + Volume’s downtown gallery and their experimental uptown space called Arts + Leisure. I first met Sam at a group discussion on painting’s possibilities at the home of Saul Ostrow. We quickly exchanged studio visits and have an ongoing dialog about text, language, and the interesting complications that occur when they are used in painting. Most text that we encounter on a daily basis is hyper designed. Through the process of painting Jablon works to challenge these conventions; his work has a rawness that seems anti-designed. The paintings are slow reads in our fast paced world- this is both rare and appealing. I often find learning how painters think is as interesting as what they think. I was curious about Sam’s decisions, process, and his work’s history. We conducted this interview as he prepared for his upcoming exhibition “Life is Fine.” 

Interviewed by Sheryl Oppenheim, Tess Bilhartz discusses her Influences and concepts for her work. 

by Seph Rodney

Harlem presents a unique quandary for the art gallery field in New York. It has a storied past as the nexus of a flourishing black arts movement in the early 20th century, however, since then it has largely been left aside in the cyclical migration of artists and galleries to new territories whose economies are transformed to support and drive the burgeoning systems of artistic production, distribution, sales, and promotion. This is more or less the stories of Chelsea, the Lower East Side, and Bushwick, Brooklyn. The question is whether Harlem can or will follow that same trajectory.

What we call "I" is just a swinging door, which moves when we inhale and when we exhale. --Shunryu Suzuki

House Cat, a collection of recent work by Jennifer Sullivan offers an eclectic collection of paintings, works on paper, and a new video, in which the artist makes a conscious effort to move away from direct appropriation which has often been a jumping off point in her process and delve more fully into her own unique voice. Yet there is a continuity as well, in her orientation towards expressing an emotional vulnerability, psychological states always in flux, and a promiscuity in form and subject matter. Her work is always a process of searching to uncover a larger meaning within the realities of her daily life and to operate from an improvisational “beginner’s mind” of many possibilities.

By Alison Martin 

The Arts + Leisure project space in East Harlem is currently presenting a collection of recent work by Jennifer Sullivan for an exhibition titled House Cat. For this show, Sullivan offers several vibrant and eclectic paintings, collages, and other installations.

By Michael Anthony Farley and Corinna Kirsch

Jennifer Sullivan: House Cat
There will be kooky, pink cat paintings and broken piggy banks that look like chopped-off, manicured fingernails above a cat flap on a wooden door. For those who appreciate a bountiful, rhythmic application of color and materials—and, of course, for the cat lurvers.

By Jillian Steinhauer

In artist Sophia Narrett‘s current solo show at Arts+Leisure, two women meet on the set of The Bachelor and swiftly fall in love — with each other. They run off to have an affair in a bucolic garden, surrounded by lounging naked women, couples and threesomes having sex, and, strangely, Kendrick Lamar. But something goes wrong. Something involving guns. The pair splits, and in the end we are left stranded with our uncertainty in a harsh, wintry cityscape accented by a deep, bloody red. (The show’s title: This Meant Nothing.)

By Katherine Brooks

“I was a contestant on The Bachelor. When I arrived at the mansion I was numb and depressed. The first night I didn’t shower or brush my hair. I think I was wearing sweatpants.”

So begins a description for a series of embroidered paintings on view in artist Sophia Narrett’s new show, which introduces us to an intriguing love story initiated on, yes, the set of the uber-popular reality show “The Bachelor.” But there’s a catch.

By ALLIE BISWAS

The artist talks about the process of making her embroideries, why she uses pop culture for source material and why narrative is so important to her

by Liz Von Klemperer

Sophia Narrett transforms thread and wool, materials usually reserved for practical uses such as mending clothing, into scenes reminiscent of Victorian age paintings.  These narrative based pieces feature bodies in various stages of movement, often dancing or lunging. These scenes seem peaceful and agrarian until closer inspection.  At second glance the pieces become incongruous, as unclothed figures are sprawled and crumpled among figures that are fully clothed in formal, prim Victorian attire.  This juxtaposition of formality with carnality produces an eerie effect.  It is as though the viewer has walked in on a scene from Midsummer Night’s Dream but is not aware of the plot of this famous Shakespeare play.

by Alison Martin

The Arts + Leisure project space in East Harlem is currently presenting a collection of work by Sophia Narrett for a show titled This Meant Nothing.

For her first solo show in New York City, Narrett offers four embroidered paintings that revolve around themes of longing for love and sexuality as well as longing for more material things such as luxury, fashion, and beauty. These four works of art tell a story based on Narrett’s real-life experiences and the relationship between Lauren Morelli, the writer of the Netflix original series Orange is the New Black, and Samira Wiley, an actress on the show.

by Audra Lamber

Desire is a potent force in Narrett’s threaded creations on display at Arts + Leisure for her solo show, This Meant Nothing, on view through June 28. Figures woven into colorfully detailed scenes pursue and evade one another, while vignettes of lustful and decadent acts are interspersed throughout the picture plane. The undone threads hanging from the images belie a sense of incompleteness and unfulfilled longing. It’s surprising how these tactile and coarsely depicted images can create a striking affect: somehow through the flatness of the fabric the situations adopt an unnerving hyper-reality.

by Kat Herriman

Artist Sophia Narrett likes to tell stories with a needle and thread. Her impressively embroidered canvases, saturated with pop culture references, are a testament to her self-taught skills but also express her cheeky perspective on celebrity and collective fantasies. Almost comic-like in their narration, Narrett’s latest works are her most intricate to date. Before her upcoming solo show at Arts + Leisure, the young artist offered us a preview.

Phrogz is the musical collaboration between Jennifer Coates and David Humphrey with Coates on voice, violin and ukulele, and Humphrey on bass and saxophone. The two will perform original compositions in various instrumental combinations. 

This performance is in accompaniment to the ongoing exhibition 'Plush Onus' on view until May 24th.

by Paul D'Agostino

With a mix of unwavering candor and airs of utter silence—save for the spare audibilities of bodies merging with and within one another—Susan Silas photographs coital acts both as they are, on a most personal level, and as they change, indeed mature over time. Pamela Butler, blending notes of rambunctious humor with frank socio-political commentary across a full range of media, emphasizes the complicated virtues of certain aspects of gender identities while underscoring, at the same time, their inherent absurdities. Ventiko employs multiplied selves, fleshy sprawls and the atmospheric mystique of baroque lighting to create dramatic, at times diabolically operatic photographic tableaux of erotically charged pilings of carnality lost somewhere in the rich draperies of atemporal art histories. Rebecca Goyette, in her videos, sculptures and audience-inclusive performances, eschews subtleties and comfort zones altogether in favor of riotously rite-like send-ups of amorous relations in which merely blatant erotica—at times featuring lobsters—becomes the costumed revelry of sexed-up chaotica.

By Bridget Gleeson 

The title of the latest show by Cristina de Miguel—“Extraños en la noche intercambiando miradas” (“Strangers in the night exchanging glances”)—hints at what to expect from the youthful Spanish artist in her new collection. De Miguel’s work is exuberant and spontaneous, infused with a playful sense of humor, unbound by conventional standards or expectations. She works on impulse, and to great acclaim: her well-received solo show at Freight + Volume over the summer garnered her another show at the gallery’s edgy Arts+Leisure project space in East Harlem, New York.

by Rebecca Morgan

I enjoyed watching it happen from a safe
distance, and found it even more exhilarating to be present and in the thick of it all. The general atmosphere across the fairs and social scenes throughout
the week was congenial and bright, celebratory and effervescent. The
most fruitful aspect of the fairs for me was meeting the many
artists, gallerists, and curators I had not encountered before in New York
or elsewhere, and knew only via the Internet. And I was able to see firsthand work which
I had only seen images of online or merely heard about.

Exhibiting at Untitled
Miami Beach On South Beach at 12th 
Booth C08
 

“Shelf Paintings,” an exhibit of new work by one of our favorite painters, Katherine Bradford. These are colorful object paintings that employ dimensionality with a shelf projecting out at the bottom, with other structural elements arrayed in them.

The Arts and Leisure project space in East Harlem is currently presenting a collection of works by Katherine Bradford for the exhibition Shelf Paintings. For this show, Bradford offers several paintings made from materials such as acrylics, cardboard, wood, clay, and paper mache. With this particular series of paintings, she integrates the styles of artists Philip Guston, Howard Hodgkin, and Malcolm Morley and she nicely blends hot and cool colors together. In one piece called Phoenix, Bradford captures the warmth of the sunshine by using colors that such as pink which smoothly turns to orange which then turns to yellow. The light shines upon a curved structure resembling a mountain with several multi-colored round objects, including one pink one sitting on top of a cylinder.

"Abelow knows how to draw, he knows how to  make us laugh, and he even knows how to blog. His simply tasteful blog, aptly named ArtBlogArtBlog, is a great way to learn about new artists and a easy place to get lost scrolling through backlogged images. His work is just as addictive with a refreshing sense of humor reminding us that art and the Internet are not necessarily mutually exclusive."