Mitch Baird, Twilight on the Docks, oil on linen, 8 x 12"

Celebrating Nature

Established in 1986, Plein Air Painters of America is one of the original societies of outdoor painters. PAPA is a membership organization of 35 artists who celebrate the tradition of painting the landscape directly from life, while providing members and others the opportunity to expand their knowledge through shared experience, extraordinary workshops and public exhibitions.

During their annual membership gathering in Santa Barbara, California, the group will hold the Plein Air Painters of America Exhibition celebrating the diversity and beauty of the American outdoors. The event takes place at Waterhouse Gallery with an opening reception on Saturday, September 28, from 4 to 7 p.m. The show will run through October 17.

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Enrique Martínez Celaya at work in his Culver City, California, studio.

Enrique Martínez Celaya Solo Show

New works by Enrique Martínez Celaya will be showcased at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles. The first solo exhibition in the city for Martínez Celaya in four years includes new paintings and large-scale works that will span all three of the gallery’s exhibition spaces. An author and former physicist, Martínez Celaya works in a range of mediums including oil, wax, tar, mirrors, dirt, steel, silk and bronze to create his emotional and conceptual paintings, sculptures and photographs. His works touch on universal questions about life and human experience, as well as loss, memory, failure and examining one’s place in a complex and chaotic world.

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Betye Saar, Sketchbook, 1998, 5 x 3". Collection of Betye Saar, courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, © Betye Saar. Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA.

Call and Response

The first exhibition to examine the relationship between Betye Saar’s sketchbooks—which she has kept since the late 1960s—and her finished works, Betye Saar: Call and Response features approximately 40 objects covering the span of her career. Ruminating on ideas and specific found objects in her possession, Saar’s works address spirituality, gender and race. In her sketchbooks, the artist lays out quick visuals for works, jotting down ideas about materials and potential titles for finished pieces. The exhibition will be on view September 22 to April 5, 2020.

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Angela Fraleigh, The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell, oil and metal leaf on canvas, 90 x 60". Courtesy the artist.

Sound the Deep Waters

An upcoming exhibition at the Delaware Art Museum, Angela Fraleigh: Sound the Deep Waters, was inspired by the institution’s Pre-Raphaelite and American illustration collections. The commission from Angela Fraleigh presents a modern look at gender and identity through the filter of historical narrative art. The contemporary oil and mixed media painter’s rich works of realistic figures set against abstract backgrounds are populated by women freed from the social constructs of their time. The collection of works deconstructs the circumstances in which female characters have been shunned throughout narrative history—including the despised witches of popular fairy tales—instead empowering them to occupy their own utopian landscapes. Through her blending of realism and abstraction, Fraleigh creates an environment where dreams mix with reality.

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Artist Shantell Martin with one of her black-and-white drawings. Shantell Martin © 2017, photo by Anton and Irene.

Words and Lines

Shantell Martin: Words and Lines, an interactive multimedia installation at the Denver Art Museum, features the signature black-and-white drawings of New York-based contemporary artist Shantell Martin. The show includes an interactive wall with triangular boxes that rotate, an animated video projection and a third section focused solely on her drawings. The exhibition opens September 27 and runs through January 31, 2021.

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Tom Birkner, Some Town Somewhere, oil on canvas, 30 x 40". © 2019 Gerald Peters Gallery.

Roadside America

El Paso, Texas-based artist Tom Birkner presents a continuation of his paintings depicting the domain of roadside America in an exhibition at Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Works in Birkner’s show follow a trail of remote and overlooked locales with seemingly desolate scenes that are everywhere and nowhere—on the highway, and off the grid—exploring moments lost in the flow of driving and passing through on the way to somewhere else. The artist’s style, both realistic and abstract at times, possesses a certain sense of mystique. His works show the edges of civilization in ways that feel both familiar and unknown. Running until September 21, this is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and will include more than a dozen new works. —

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