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Redemption can be jubilant, as the current resonant solo show devoted to Charlotte Park (1918-2010) at Berry Campbell gallery in Chelsea proves. After decades in the shadow of her husband, James Brooks, Park steps forward from the Abstract Expressionist chorus and unleashes her singular strong voice, hitting all the top notes of color, gesture and scale with confident power. 

In the Hamptons of the 1950s and ’60s, there were two significant pairs of artists working in Abstract Expressionism. The two couples were also friends. One set you know: Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. The other you might not: James Brooks (1906–1992) and Charlotte Park (1918–2010).

Brooks and Park were both artists when they met in Washington, D.C., during World War II. They moved to New York together in 1945 and forged a fast friendship with Pollock and Krasner, renting studio space from them in the city and eventually following their lead to resettle on Long Island. “These artists were forging a new aesthetic,” Helen Harrison of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center has said, “and only they understood what they were doing, so there was this sense of camaraderie.”

The exhibition, titled “Women of Abstract Expressionism”, has been organized by DAM’s curator of modern art Gwen Chanzit and consists of 51 paintings by 12 groundbreaking women artists who contributed to Abstract Expressionism; the large-scale, imageless painting style that firmly put New York City on the avant-garde art map in the 1940s and 50s. The artists in the exhibition include Mary Abbott, Jay DeFeo, Perle Fine, Helen Frankenthaler, Sonia Gechtoff, Judith Godwin, Grace Hartigan, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Deborah Remington and Ethel Schwabacher.

“Noah Becker Presents… Something” is a New Yorker’s show. As children of glam, gold, glitter and garbage, much of the 26 artworks dance at the shiny-dusty feet of Andy Warhol, the city’s veritable king of things. These could easily turn trite as riffs on the classics of Pop and abstraction, mixed media and montage; however, curator Noah Becker has thoughtfully gathered the artists by their more subtle connections of something or another.

Looking back to Miami Art Week (which took place the first week of December), one would have thought the perpetual rainstorms would have dampened the spirits of attendees. However, practically every art gallery that I spoke with said the inclement weather had absolutely no effect on the reported record sales.

The overwhelming majority of artworks on view in Something are paintings. The works evoke illusory and imaginative revisions of reality, manifesting curator Noah Becker’s vision to highlight playful ambiguity in contemporary art trends. Becker explains about the title, Something: “It’s a bit Warholian to use a word like that as a starting point…for an epic group show. Words are pop art due to words being universal symbols. The idea of things being universal and understood instantly…how does one express it in their art?”

Noah Becker—artist, curator and founder of Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art(full disclosure, I also write for the publication)—takes on the role as the first guest curator at Berry Campbell with a show of 20 international artists exploring enigmatic narratives in their paintings, sculptures and works on paper. Michael Anderson contributes the massive 2009 collage Blue Abstract, which is assembled from street posters gleaned from New York, Los Angeles, Rome and Mexico City. Marc Dennis presents a witty, realistic painting of a young woman looking at Gustave Courbet’s controversial canvas Origin of the World from the vantage point of the woman’s long hair obscuring Mr. Courbet’s subject’s genitals and pubic hair. Meanwhile, Nir Hod’s painting of the word “Fame” on an oxidized chrome canvas looks tarnished, as if to express that celebrity just might be a passing thing.
Berry Campbell, 530 West 24 Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

Are you ready for some strong color? Go west, young paintaholic, to Chelsea for the two most ecstatically chromatic shows in New York. Both feature artists using acrylic (nothing gives the bounce of hue, value and chroma like it) who were bold-faced names by the 1970s: Larry Poons at Danese/Corey, and Syd Solomon at Berry Campbell. Syd Solomon was a fixture on the Hamptons scene beginning in the glory days when giants roamed the beaches, including his friends Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Alfonso Ossorio. It was Syd Solomon who hosted the first artists vs. writers softball game in 1966.

The 49th Parallel too often functions like an invisible sound barrier: few Canadian artists have been able to become well-known in the U.S. But the splendid Saskatchewan painter William Perehudoff has been posthumously making himself into one of those happy few—first, two years ago, and second, now.

Berry Campbell, a Manhattan gallery with an affinity for gifted but sometimes overlooked South Fork artists, plans to give James Brooks center stage in its Art Miami booth. Brooks will be accompanied by contemporaries such as Charlotte Park (his wife), Alfonso Ossorio, Perle Fine, and Syd Solomon. Artists from younger generations — Dan Christensen, Susan Vecsey, Eric Dever, and Mike Solomon — will be shown at Berry Campbell as well.