As a child, the Queens-born photographer Dawoud Bey marveled at the vibrancy of midcentury Harlem, where his parents had met and many of their friends and family members still lived. “Driving through the crowded streets, I was amazed by what appeared to be the many people on vacation,” he has written. “It seemed to me that no matter what the day, everyday was Saturday in Harlem.” In 1975, equipped with a camera, he began paying weekly visits to the neighborhood, walking the streets and capturing pictures. This approach—on the ground, studied, empathetic—led to his first series of photographs, “Harlem, USA,” and would inform his practice in the ensuing decades of his career; much of his work feels grounded in the unmediated intimacy of these early street portraits. Bey’s Harlem photographs and a bounty of other pieces from his near half century at work are on display in “An American Project” (up at the Whitney Museum of American Art through October 3), his first retrospective in twenty-five years. A selection of images from the show appears below.

Dawoud Bey, Martina and Rhonda, 1993, six dye diffusion transfer prints (Polaroid), overall: 48 × 60″. Whitney Museum of American Art, gift of Eric Ceputis and David W. Williams. © Dawoud Bey.

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As is the case with far too many artists, the multitalented Frank Walter (1926–2009) did not receive his due during his lifetime. By all accounts a polymath—his second cousin recalls that “as a child, he’d sit us down under a fruit tree, and while he’s typing on one subject matter, he’s lecturing us on other matter”—Walter spent much of his life in relative solitude on Antigua, with his ideas and memories to keep him company as he painted, drew, wrote, sculpted, captured photographs, made sound recordings, and fashioned toys. He brimmed with a restless creativity; he left behind some five thousand paintings, two thousand photographs, fifty thousand pages of writing across various genres, and much more. A new exhibition featuring a fraction of this work will open at David Zwirner’s London gallery on April 15. A selection of images from the show appears below.

Frank Walter, LANDSCAPE Untitled (Airplanes over boats in harbor), n.d. © Courtesy Kenneth M. Milton Fine Arts. Image courtesy of Kenneth M. Milton Fine Arts and David Zwirner.

Frank Walter, Untitled (Watermelon), n.d. © Courtesy Kenneth M. Milton Fine Arts. Image courtesy Kenneth M. Milton Fine Arts and David Zwirner.

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Lee Krasner, one of the most phenomenally gifted painters of the twentieth century, often would create through destruction. She had a habit of stripping previous works for materials—fractions of forgotten sketches, swaths of unused paper, scraps of canvas from her own paintings as well as those of her husband, Jackson Pollock—that she would then reconstitute as elements of her masterful, distinctive collages. A new show devoted to her endeavors in this mode, “Lee Krasner: Collage Paintings 1938–1981,” will be on view at Kasmin Gallery through April 24. A selection of images from the exhibition appears below.

Lee Krasner, Stretched Yellow, 1955, oil with paper on canvas, 82 1/2 x 57 3/4″. © 2021 Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Collection of Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum of California State University, Long Beach. Gift of the Gordon F. Hampton Foundation, through Wesley G. Hampton, Roger K. Hampton, and Katharine H. Shenk. Courtesy of Kasmin Gallery.

Lee Krasner, The Farthest Point, 1981, oil and paper collage on canvas, 56 3/4 x 37 1/4″. © 2021 Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Kasmin Gallery.

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Julie Mehretu frequently has been hailed as an heir to Jackson Pollock. But where many of Pollock’s paintings seem divorced from real-world antecedents, Mehretu blends abstraction and representation in open response to current events: the Arab Spring, deadly wildfires on the West Coast of the United States, the burning of Rohingya villages in Myanmar, the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Some of her paintings and works on paper look like warped views of cities from above; others resemble blueprints for another world. Always, though, amid the layers and layers of symbols, shapes, vectors, and lines, one can see Mehretu’s architectural precision and control. An exhibition showcasing more than twenty years of her work will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art on March 25 and run through August 8. A selection of images from the show appears below.

Julie Mehretu, Black City, 2007, ink and acrylic on canvas, 120 x 192″. Pinault Collection, Paris, France. © Julie Mehretu.

Julie Mehretu, Untitled 2, 1999, ink and polymer on canvas mounted to board, 59 3/4 × 71 3/4″. Private collection, courtesy of White Cube. © Julie Mehretu.

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In Paul Anthony Smith’s Untitled (Dead Yard), a figure stands with arms outstretched in the midst of a haze of ghostly breeze-blocks. The physical appears to commune with the spiritual; unreality encroaches on the real. It’s a startling effect, one that persists throughout Smith’s second solo show with Jack Shainman Gallery, “Tradewinds” (on view through April 3). Using a needled wooden tool, Smith painstakingly works over his photographic prints, puncturing the surface and chipping away at the ink. Each stipple, each architectural flourish laces the images with the fabric of memory. This is not reality; this is the world in recollection, the white noise of time and distance always threatening to drown out the past. A selection of images from “Tradewinds” appears below.

Paul Anthony Smith, Breeze off yu soul, 2020–2021, unique picotage with spray paint on inkjet print, mounted on museum board and Sintra, 40 x 54″. © Paul Anthony Smith. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Paul Anthony Smith, Dog an Duppy Drink Rum, 2020–2021, unique picotage, spray paint, and acrylic paint on inkjet print, mounted on museum board and Sintra, 72 x 104″. © Paul Anthony Smith. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

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In 1963, with the civil rights movement in full swing, a group of New York City–based Black photographers began meeting regularly to talk shop, listen to jazz, discuss politics, critique one another’s work, and bond over the power of their shared medium. Thus, the Kamoinge Workshop was born, a collective whose members pursued wildly varying aesthetic interests but held a mutual commitment to photography’s value as art. “Working Together,” an exhibition featuring work by fourteen key members of the Kamoinge Workshop, will be on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through March 28. A selection of images from the show appears below.

Anthony Barboza, Kamoinge Members, 1973, gelatin silver print, 9 3/4 x 10″. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Jack E. Chachkes Endowed Purchase Fund 2020.55. © Anthony Barboza.

Adger Cowans, Footsteps, 1960, gelatin silver print, 8 1/4 × 13 1/4″. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Aldine S. Hartman Endowment Fund, 2018.201. © Adger Cowans.

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