NOEL W ANDERSON: BLACK EXCELLENCE; JENNIE JIEUN LEE; CHENLU HOU and CHAIRA NO; MARTHA FRIEDMAN, MIKA TAGA, and ALINA TENSER.
NOEL W ANDERSON: BLACK EXCELLENCE at the University Art Museum, Albany, NY, through April 3, ‘26.
Installation view, Noel W Anderson: Black Excellence, University Art Museum, University at Albany, 2025, Photo: Olympia Shannon
This comprehensive survey of works by the Kentucky-born, New York-based artist, Noel W Anderson: Black Excellence, features large-scale photo-based textile pieces, ceiling hung sculptural tapestries, a mural-scale video projection and several vitrines filled with archival material from the artist’s studio. Cumulatively, the works create a rather seductive and enthralling environment within the elegant spaces of this two-story museum designed in 1962 by Edward Durell Stone. Thematically, the exhibition starkly addresses the Black experience in America through an exploration of mass media images of prominent athletes and performers, from the pages of Ebony magazine to recent TV news sources. Images of figures like Paul Robeson, James Brown and LeBron James often appear in the work. Anderson (b. 1981) examines the ways images of these stars are manipulated and controlled, and with a judicious use of archival police images, he suggests ways that the pursuit of excellence among Black Americans is routinely contested. A mesmerizing video produced in collaboration with filmmaker Solomon Bennett, Echoes of the New World, centers on the legendary musical conductor Dean Dixon and further explores the challenges to the pursuit of excellence for the Black community.
Noel W Anderson, Magic, Deep in Thought, 2023–25, picked and stretched cotton tapestry with photo objects and laser-cut basketball leather; Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
For many works, Anderson uses cotton Jacquard tapestries embedded with photo-based images that he has digitally manipulated. He recollects how as a child his father would ask him to adjust the two-pronged antennae on the family TV and the distorted images that would ensue. Many of his works resemble these analog disfigurements. In some cases, as in the stunning Magic Deep in Thought (2023-25), Anderson distresses the surfaces with steel brushes to create an almost fur-like effect. His hanging tapestries, including We Give ‘Em Reverend Brown (2023), suspended from the atrium ceiling, stained in gorgeous tones of indigo and purple, appear as odes to the late abstractionist Sam Gilliam. In Anderson’s work, however, an image of James Brown singing into a microphone lends the tapestry some added dramatic tension. This unforgettable museum survey, co-curated by the museum’s Robert R. Shane and Corrina Ripps Schaming, coincides with a solo show of the artist’s recent works at Harper’s Gallery in New York City (through March 21). —David Ebony
JENNIE JIEUN LEE; CHENLU HOU AND CHAIRA NO at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Conn., through May 25, ’26.
Jennie Jieun Lee: Luteal Elements and Grooves (installation view), The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, January 25 to May 25, 2026. Courtesy of the artist, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, and Cooper Cole Gallery, Toronto. Photo: Olympia Shannon.
In her solo presentation, Luteal Elements and Grooves, Korean-born, upstate New York-based artist Jennie Jieun Lee highlights recent ceramic works, many of them incorporated into four large sculptures made from abandoned kilns of various ages and sizes. These are strikingly displayed against a sumptuous Poly-Silk curtain of the artist’s design, Slow Cool, 15 min hold (2025), with pools of color based on experimental glazes for ceramics. Lee regards the kiln as a kind of social hub, a gathering place for artists[; the idea is clearly expressed in Figures (2025), in which miniature ceramic figures are affixed to the antique kiln. Another highlight of the show, Marie (2022), a sculptural installation in a side gallery, recreates the tomb of Marie Catherine Laaveau (1801-1881), known as the “Voodoo Queen of New Orleans,” which the artist visited in 1994. Lee’s eerie, seven-foot-tall sarcophagus ostensibly contains all the magic and mystery requisite for a Voodoo Queen.
Chenlu Hou and Chiara No: What the Hands Remember to Hear (installation view), The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, January 25 to May 25, 2026. Chenlu Hou: Courtesy of the artist and Kristen Lorello, NY. Chiara No: Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Olympia Shannon.
Chenlu Hou and Chiara No have collaborated in a two-person exhibition titled What the Hands Remember to Hear. The Chinese-born, Rhode Island-based Hou’s elegant and colorful freestanding ceramic sculptures allude to Chinese folklore and ritual vessels from Buddhist and Taoist temples. The forms of No’s playful and engaging stoneware bells are based on skirt-shaped terracotta figures from ancient Boeotia. The Florida-born, Vermont-based artist includes in each sculpture dangling legs that serve as clappers, each with a distinct sound. Together, these artists have created an evocative sequence of objects and images that invite viewers imaginations to run wild. —David Ebony
MARTHA FRIEDMAN, MIKA TAGA, and ALINA TENSER at September Gallery, Kinderhook, N.Y., through April 12, ‘26.
Installation view, Mika Taga, September Gallery; Photo: Pierre Le Hors.
September Gallery presents three distinct solo shows, but the artists—Martha Friedman, Mika Taga and Alina Tenser—are united by an adventurous spirit of experimentation with materials and/or forms. Friedman uses rubber, glass, cement and steel in novel combinations that reference the body and bodily processes. One of the most striking works here, Finger Tip (2025) features a large cement “finger” and a glass “cup” that might suggest Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling painting of Adam reaching out to God. It is the kind of tongue-in-cheek humor that permeates many of the Detroit-born artist’s works on view.
Martha Friedman, Finger Tip, 2025, September Gallery, Photo: Pierre Le Hors.
Mika Taga creates refined sculptures in wood, typically elegantly carved and sometimes burned into spare shapes that recall works of tribal art or early modernist sculptures by Arp, Brancusi or Barbara Hepworth. Often the works are made of two or more simple, but carefully carved and joined elements, as in Walnut Embrace (2024), with two interlocking curving wood elements. The most imposing work by the California-born artist, Four Walls (2026), made of salvaged hemlock barn beams, resembles an ancient tribal ritual object, with carved and burned passages of the four elements suggesting some esoteric, sacred purpose.
Installation view, Alina Tensor, showing Walk in CIrcles with Sharp Corners (2023), video projection, and sculpture Circuit Meander (2025), September Gallery; Photo Pierre Le Hors.
Works by Ukrainian-born artist Alina Tenser correspond to the esthetics of Minimalism, but with a decidedly feminist, post-modern twist. She presents two of her Sleeved Meander works in concrete and steel, with colorful, translucent, removable coverings, as well as a video, Walk in Circles with Sharp Corners (2023). These pieces correspond to a squat, quasi-kinetic floor-mounted circular sculpture Circuit Meander (2025) made with expanded metal and roller ball casters. All of Tenser’s works relate in some way to her interest in dance and performance. While the formal concerns and materials may vary, all three artists here allude to the human body and a highly personal, physical relationship to communal space. —David Ebony