The FLAG Art Foundation

04/10/2025

“[…]Her flight made her beautiful. 𝘡𝘦𝘱𝘩𝘺𝘳𝘴 stirred her 𝘨𝘢𝘳𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘴. The 𝘸𝘪𝘯𝘥 caressed her 𝘩𝘢𝘪𝘳. He is 𝘨𝘳𝘦𝘺𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥. He is 𝘮𝘢𝘥 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦. He 𝘳𝘶𝘴𝘩𝘦𝘴. She 𝘧𝘭𝘦𝘦𝘴. He 𝘨𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘴. He 𝘧𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘸𝘴 and 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘮𝘪𝘵𝘴 𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘯𝘰 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘵. Spent, she cries out to her father (useless) and her mother (better). She offers up her 𝘣𝘰𝘥𝘺 and her 𝘣𝘦𝘢𝘶𝘵𝘺. No prison worse than his desire. Anything to be free. (Fathers have a way of misunderstanding what mothers do not.)

We are close to her now. (She lets us wants us to see to know.) 𝘉𝘢𝘳𝘬 crawls down her arms her torso her thighs like gauntlets like armor like silk. (She suffers in triplicate.) 𝘉𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘴 sprout from her fingers. (She twists and writhes and spirals.) She sees him, she 𝘴𝘦𝘦𝘴 𝘩𝘪𝘮. She looks at us. Her hair becomes as 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘴.

(So literal, father. So correct and yet so perfectly utterly wrong.)

Rooted, she takes her first and final breath.”
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An excerpt from author Carmen Maria Machado’s essay on Jesse Mockrin's triptych “A story told this many times becomes the forest,” 2025, part of the artist’s Spotlight presentation at The FLAG Art Foundation, on view through May 17, 2025
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Installation view of “Spotlight: Jesse Mockrin” at The FLAG Art Foundation, 2025. Photography by Steven Probert

01/08/2025

“Darrell: Is the temple of intimacy ever private? A temple is a public space.

Trent: Somehow, we are wasting good suffering. What do I mean by that? Darrell, how can we live?—In a home. A home that works, a home that is tender in a minimal voice, a home that is home and the recreation of home, where we cross a line we want to cross, the blur of me and not me where we cook my mother’s stew, f**k, clean our bodies, watch TV and sleep. The fortress of our q***r soul. Where the fridge fills and the trash empties. Where we endure what we can’t survive and what we choose to suffer. This is home, sweet musty sheets. This is home: fabric, wood, gas, lath and plaster, bricks, concrete, stainless steel, paper, glass and clay.”

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An excerpt from poet and writer Robert Glück’s essay on Louis Fratino’s painting “The pure and the impure,” 2024, part of the artist’s Spotlight presentation at the The FLAG Art Foundation. On view through February 8, 2025

Installation view of “Spotlight: Louis Fratino” at The FLAG Art Foundation, 2025. Photography by Steven Probert.

10/25/2024

“[…] on view is [Lubaina] Himid’s installation “Aunties” (2023): 64 long, thin wooden planks meant to evoke East African memorial totems. They are both an art historical citation and a commemorative gesture to women close to Himid who have passed away. Each plank was cobbled together from wood reclaimed from pianos, church pews, frames and floorboards. Himid dresses them up with ribbons, paint — new flair to go along with the poignant markings of their rich past lives.”

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Read Zoë Hopkins’s review of “Lubaina Himid: Make Do and Mend” in The New York Times at The FLAG Art Foundation, on view through February 8, 2025. Himid is the recipient of the 2024 Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize, co-organized with the The Contemporary Austin


Image: Installation view of “Lubaina Himid: Make Do and Mend” at The FLAG Art Foundation, 2024. Photography by Steven Probert.

This week in Newly Reviewed, Travis Diehl covers Samuel Hindolo’s bohemian atmospheres, Kristin Walsh’s shiny engines and Janiva Ellis’s cataclysm and pop.

10/04/2024

“[…] The denial and doom that flooded the summer of 2024 couldn’t have been better timed for ‘The Swimmer,’ a group exhibition at The FLAG Art Foundation that closed this past August. Curated by the institution’s director, Jonathan Rider, the show pulled together seventy-two works by thirty-one artists in a variety of media that could almost be read like an advent calendar for [John] Cheever’s story.

Some works recalled the text’s sunny, gin-soaked oblivion with a splash of chlorine. The first floor of the gallery focused more on the tale’s mise-en-scène, imbuing placid views of empty pools by artists such as D**e Blair, Amy Park, Alessandro Raho, Ed Ruscha, and Cynthia Talmadge with a humid sense of privilege and loneliness. Nearby, what appeared to be an abstract undulating turquoise sculpture by Martin Boyce, ‘Forgotten Seas,’ 2010, was actually an arrangement of rusting steel public-pool benches—an assemblage that literally upended any trace of summer nostalgia.”
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Read 's full review in Artforum of the group exhibition “The Swimmer,” recently on view at The FLAG Art Foundation:

The denial and doom that flooded the summer of 2024 couldn’t have been better timed for “The Swimmer,” a group exhibition at the FLAG Art Foundation that closed this past August.

09/28/2024

“Lubaina Himid: Make Do and Mend” is on view at the FLAG Art Foundation through February 8, 2025.

09/27/2024

“[...]’Making art is about making decisions,’ she [Lubaina Himid] says. One brushstroke at a time, she has decided to keep going, to keep making art that explores the virtually impossible—be it solving global challenges or embodying the complexity of the auntie figure with bits of salvaged wood. Her work has a quiet force to it, the kind that spurs not only contemplation, but optimism. Maybe the answers to our questions are there for us, her art suggests, if we just listen.”
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Read ’s full article in Vogue on ’s solo exhibition "Make Do and Mend," on view at The FLAG Art Foundation through February 8, 2025:

“Lubaina Himid: Make Do and Mend” is on view at the FLAG Art Foundation through February 8, 2025.

08/09/2024

"The absolute stand-out — which is reason enough to visit the show — is by the late Tony Feher. A floor-to-ceiling mosaic of spidery blue painter’s tape, Feher’s piece resembles the cracked underwater view from a submarine at the bottom of the ocean. The effect is beautiful and doom-laden, like a stained glass window offering up the exact opposite of salvation."
-Harry Tafoya, Paper Magazine
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Read 's full review of The FLAG Art Foundation's current group exhibition “The Swimmer” in Paper Magazine: https://www.papermag.com/nyc-gallery-reviews-july

"The Swimmer," curated by Jonathan Rider, closes today, Fri. Aug. 9, 5 PM, at . For more information on the exhibition, please visit https://www.flagartfoundation.org/theswimmer

07/10/2024

“[…] The strivings of [Paul] Thek, [Katherine] Bradford and others—artworks that deal with escape—get quite literally swallowed up by the show’s main draw: a work by Tony Feher. A ready-made minimalist who worked in trash, Feher died in 2016 and reinstallations of his work have been rare since. FLAG’s floor-to-ceiling window has been coated in the intricate tessellations of blue painter’s tape (10 rolls’ worth) that he designed in 2015. They fragment and ripple out to the margins, soaking you—and the nearby artworks—in an invigorating glow of cobalt. You feel like a spider on a quivering surface.

Or a broken windshield. The thrall of “The Swimmer” is its subtle descent into mania. Mounting social cues from neighbors suggest something has gone terribly wrong in our hero’s recent past, but what? Where, come to think of it, is his wife? A wobbly timeline—autumn leaves, sudden cold—deepen the sense of Neddy losing his grasp—and force us to seek breadcrumbs of clarity.”
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Read ’s full review of The FLAG Art Foundation's current group exhibition “The Swimmer” (on view through August 9, 2024) in The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/04/arts/design/the-swimmer-john-cheever-nyc-gallery.html

For more information on the exhibition, please visit https://www.flagartfoundation.org/theswimmer

In New York’s art show of the summer, paint and prose meet in “The Swimmer,” a psychoanalysis of John Cheever’s suburban nightmare of 1964.

05/17/2024

“[…] Mwesiga paints his figures in grayscale, rather than shades of brown, giving the works an almost filmic quality, as though they were hand-colored black-and-white images (In an essay accompanying the exhibition, scholar Darla Migan notes that the choice of grayscale hints back to the work of Kerry James Marshall). Blues, meanwhile, hold obvious significance—there are big skies, pools, lakes, and even clothing in various shades of the hue. The palette is reminiscent of Magritte’s skies, but the color also imparts a sense of perpetual stillness to the work. It’s neither dusk nor dawn, though silvers of the moon often appear in the skies. One can imagine the sound of the wind rustling the leaves in a forest or water lapping—but this tranquility also builds suspense.”
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Read 's full review of ’s resent solo exhibition and first US retrospective at The FLAG Art Foundation in artnet:

We spoke with Ugandan artist Ian Mwesiga about his metaphysical paintings recently on view at Flag Art Foundation in New York.

05/03/2024

Ian Mwesiga’s “Basketball Player IV,” 2022, part of “Beyond the Edge of the World,” the artist’s first United States solo exhibition, closing tomorrow, Saturday, May 4, 5 PM, at The FLAG Art Foundation

05/02/2024

Bernadette Despujols’s “Cují de jardin”, 2024, part of the artist’s solo exhibition “Exquisite Cuerpo,” on view Rachel Uffner Gallery through June 29, 2024
For more information, visit: https://bit.ly/3xYr1NT

04/27/2024

“In Graham Little’s uncanny world–currently on show at The FLAG Art Foundation in New York–reality is almost imperceptibly skewed and figures, presiding over tea tables or posing for portraits, are almost familiar. The Scottish artist riffs on the rich worlds that populated late 20th-century advertising and 1960s fashion photography for his impeccably designed rooms, in which gorgeously clothed people self-consciously reside…”
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Read 's full review of ’s current solo exhibition and first US retrospective at The FLAG Art Foundation (on view through May 4, 2024) in Wallpaper* magazine:

Scottish artist Graham Little presents his first US retrospective at The FLAG Art Foundation in New York

04/05/2024

"[...]The rhyming images here reveal as much about viewers’ interpretive inclinations as they do about [Graham] Little’s expressive tendencies. To read these pictures in terms of imitation or homage is to suppose that history is being consumed in service of the present. Thinking of their visual patterns as the surfacing of shared impulses allows us to recognize images not as commodities but as co-conspirators in the construction of our emotional worlds."
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Check out 's full review of 's solo exhibition at The FLAG Art Foundation (on view through May 4, 2024) in The Brooklyn Rail:

The figures in Graham Little’s works on paper—sixteen of which are spread across four rooms at the FLAG Art Foundation—all appear to be posing in service of an external gaze, even those who are engrossed in reading, stretching, and pouring tea.

03/20/2024

“[Graham] Little’s virtuosic talents are on display across 18 works on paper at The FLAG Art Foundation, the London-based artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in the US. He is known for his depictions of glamorous women, often absorbed in tasks or reverie, adrift in sumptuous interiors. Each of these labour-intensive images takes months to finish, and the artist’s earnest immersion is legible in their passages of rich, persuasive description and dreamlike atmospheres…”
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Check out ’s full review of ’s solo exhibition at The FLAG Art Foundation (on view through May 4, 2024) in Frieze:

A concise and subtle exhibition of drawings and gouaches at FLAG Art Foundation, New York, offers a melancholic meditation on beauty, glamour and artifice