Rounding up the best gallery exhibitions across the United States each month, Galerie crossed from New York City to California to discover the top solo shows for November. From Stephen Towns’s paintings and quilts of Black Americans laboring for the greater good at De Buck Gallery and Susumu Kamijo’s two-venue exhibition of paintings of abstracted poodles at Venus Over Manhattan and Jack Hanley Gallery in New York to Linder’s feminist photomontages at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles and Julie Buffalohead’s paintings and drawings of dreamlike scenes from the imaginative mind of a Native American at Jessica Silverman in San Francisco, these are the not-to-be-missed shows this month.
Linder at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles
A British artist best known for her photomontages, performances, and radical feminism, Linder studied graphic design at Manchester Polytechnic in the 1970s and got her first break when she designed the cover art for the Buzzcocks first single, Orgasm Addict. A photo montage depicting a muscular female nude with an iron for a head, the punk piece put her in the history books, but it would take some years before she established an art world presence. She formed a band, Ludus in ’78 and was later a muse to Morrissey, who had acknowledged her band’s influence on The Smiths.
Exhibiting her art since the early 2000s, Linder had a solo show at MoMA PS1 in ’07 and a retrospective exhibition at Kettle Yard at the University of Cambridge in ’20. For her second solo show at the gallery, titled Sex-Pol, Linder goes back to her roots with a series of photomontages of naked women overlaid with domestic objects in her Art and Industry series. Employing a punk cut-and-paste aesthetic, the maverick artist photobombs the found black-and-white images with such stylish accessories as a pair of scissors, a tea set and a console radio. Presented alongside two other bodies of work, including photomontages related to works she made for David O. Russell’s film, Amsterdam, her art takes us back in time to examine some of the same issues we face today.
Through December 17.