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      What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in July

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      This week in Newly Reviewed, Yinka Elujoba covers Elmer Guevara’s subtle paintings, James Casebere’s reimagined architecture and John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres’s busts of Bronx residents.ChinatownElmer GuevaraThrough Aug. 3. Lyles & King, 19 Henry Street, Manhattan; 646-484-5478, lylesandking.com.Elmer Guevara’s “Hoova’ Park Stroll,” 2023, in “Recess,” his first solo exhibition in New York.via Elmer Guevara and Lyles & KingA man in an umbrella hat reaches down to a boy by a basketball court. Both wear “Bryant” jerseys. The neighborhood seems peaceful on a sunny day but at their feet are names and a chalk outline of a human body.This scene, from Elmer Guevara’s “Hoova’ Park Stroll,” embodies the sentiments of “Recess,” his first solo exhibition in New York.In the 1980s, Guevara’s parents escaped to the United States from the brutal civil warin El Salvador. Full of visual cues from his early years in South Central Los Angeles, where he was born and still lives, the show is the artist’s reckoning with his childhood. In fact, the two figures in “Hoova’ Park Stroll” are his self-portraits at different ages.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      June Leaf, Artist Who Explored the Female Form, Dies at 94

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      Womanly power was a recurring theme of her work, expressed in idiosyncratic sculpture and paintings that did not align with prevailing trends.June Leaf, a painter and sculptor whose exploration of the female form, by turns whimsical, graceful or ominous, paved the way for later generations of feminist artists, died Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 94. The cause was gastric cancer, said Andrea Glimcher, her agent at the Hyphen management firm and a friend.Ms. Leaf worked for much of her long career outside the mainstream. Idiosyncratic and intuitive, she developed a unique blend of expressionism and primitivism, allied with a childlike sense of play. Her varied output included toylike kinetic sculptures, frantic ink drawings with a nervous, tensile line, satirical social scenes, and macabre skeletons painted on canvas or tin.Womanly power was a recurring theme, expressed early on in goddess-like figures with hugely distended hips and breasts and women with batlike wings or gyroscope torsos, and later in a powerful series of metal heads reminiscent of tribal sculpture.At no point did the work align with prevailing trends in contemporary art, and for much of her life Ms. Leaf was overshadowed by her husband, the photographer Robert Frank, whom she married in 1975. She nevertheless commanded a devoted audience attuned to her unique frequency, as well as the admiration of a small group of critics and curators.Reviewing her first solo New York show in 1968, Hilton Kramer of The New York Times called her work “remarkably forceful and robust — the product of an earthy imagination with a striking talent for projecting images that are at once ferocious and macabre, satirical and touching.” He added, “She is that rare thing in painting today: a poet with a taste and a talent for complex images.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Cover Art for ‘Harry Potter’ Sold at Auction for $1.92 Million

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      The watercolor was painted in 1996 by a recent art school graduate from Britain who was working at a bookstore. He was paid $650.The original cover art for the first edition of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” sold for $1.92 million at auction on Wednesday, becoming the most expensive item related to the series, decades after its illustrator was paid a commission of just $650.The watercolor painting, which depicts the young wizard Harry going to Hogwarts from Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross station, was part of the private library of an American book collector and surgeon, Dr. Rodney P. Swantko, whose other rare items were auctioned at Sotheby’s in New York this week.The year before the novel came out in 1997, its publisher, Bloomsbury, hired a 23-year-old from England who had just graduated from art school to design the book jacket, the auction house said. The artist, Thomas Taylor, would go on to establish the world’s conception of Harry Potter, with his iconic round glasses and lightning bolt scar.“It’s kind of staggering, really,” he said about the sale of his painting in an interview on Thursday. “It’s exciting to see it fought over.”Mr. Taylor was working at a children’s bookstore when he submitted sample drawings of wizards and dragons for the publisher in London to review, he said in a 2022 podcast interview. When he was selected, he said, “I was over the moon.”The cover was Mr. Taylor’s first professional assignment. And, at the time, “J.K. Rowling was as unknown as I was,” he wrote in his blog, referring to the novel’s British author.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Wells College Students Kissed Minerva’s Feet for Luck. Now She’s Missing Her Head.

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      A replica of the Athena Giustiniani that greeted students at Wells College for more than 150 years was accidentally decapitated in the scramble to close the institution forever.A marble statue of the Roman goddess of wisdom that presided over Wells College for 156 years, surviving both a devastating fire in 1888 and an attempted kidnapping in 1975, was embraced by students as a symbol of resilience for generations.Until Minerva was decapitated by a backhoe.The statue was accidentally damaged during a hasty move this month after the college, nestled against one of the Finger Lakes in central New York, said financial challenges would make the spring semester its last.At a college where students have long kissed Minerva’s feet for good luck and referred to “her” as a fellow student, the beheading is an unavoidable metaphor for the angst surrounding the institution’s sudden closure.Wells was a women’s college for the bulk of its history, and many alumni cherish how the godly representative of wisdom and war, embodied in a woman, looked over the campus on Cayuga Lake for generations.“I lost my mother a couple years ago,” said Caolan MacMahon, who graduated from Wells in 1985. “This is almost harder.”Workers moving the statue on June 12 strapped Minerva to a furniture dolly before hanging the statue horizontally from a backhoe’s bucket with moving straps. Too heavy for the supports, her head snapped off.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ben Vautier, Artist Whose Specialty Was Provocation, Dies at 88

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      A core member of the anti-art movement Fluxus, he died by suicide hours after the death of his wife of 60 years.Ben Vautier, a French artist and agitator who often worked under the moniker Ben, and who as a core member of the anti-art collective Fluxus blurred the boundaries of high and low, art and life, while adhering to the credo “Everything is art,” died on June 5 at his home in Nice, France. He was 88.He died by suicide shortly after his wife, Annie Vautier, a performance artist he married in 1964, died of a stroke, his children, Eva and Francois, posted on social media. “Unwilling and unable to live without her,” they wrote, “Ben killed himself a few hours later at their home.”Theirs was an intense, if tangled, relationship. “We called her “Sainte-Annie,” Mascha Sosno, a friend, was quoted as saying in a recent article on the France Info website.“It was difficult to live with him,” she added. “They argued all the time, but in fact they adored each other, and he was inseparable from Annie, too.”Forever looking to provoke, Mr. Vautier found a kindred spirit in 1962 when he met George Maciunas, who spearheaded the avant-garde Fluxus movement of the 1960s, which included Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik and other artists, and which drew from the iconoclastic Dada movement of the early 20th century.Fluxus, as articulated in Mr. Maciunas’s 1963 manifesto, was intended as a revolution, a call to comrades to “promote living art, anti-art, promote non-art reality,” while purging the world of “dead art, imitation, artificial art.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Overlooked No More: Lorenza Böttner, Transgender Artist Who Found Beauty in Disability

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      Böttner, whose specialty was self-portraiture, celebrated her armless body in paintings she created with her mouth and feet while dancing in public.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.It was the weekend of the gay pride parade in New York City in 1984 when Denise Katz heard her doorbell ring. Surprised, she opened her door and was greeted by Lorenza Böttner, a transgender artist, who was wearing a wedding gown that she had customized to fit her armless body.“I’m here for the party!” Böttner said in her hybrid German-Chilean accent. Though Böttner had buzzed the wrong apartment, Katz invited her in anyway. “From that moment on, we didn’t part,” she said.That Katz worked in an art supply store and Böttner was a prolific artist was pure coincidence.Böttner in 1983. After she lost her arms in a childhood accident, her mother encouraged her to create art with her mouth and her feet.via Leslie-Lohman Museum of ArtThroughout her lifetime, Böttner created a multidisciplinary body of work with her feet and mouth that included painting, drawing, photography, dance and performance art. She made hundreds of paintings in Europe and America, dancing in public across large canvases while creating impressionistic brushstrokes with her footprints. In New York, she performed in front of St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, and Katz, who would become her roommate, provided her with large pieces of paper and other supplies.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      John Wilmerding, Who Helped Give American Art an Identity, Dies at 86

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      American paintings were largely overlooked and undervalued until he came along. A scholar, curator and collector, he oversaw important exhibitions over the last 50 years.John Wilmerding, a towering figure in American art whose eclectic career as a scholar, museum curator and collector was instrumental in elevating the cultural significance and market value of painters such as Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins and Fitz Henry Lane, died on June 6 in Manhattan. He was 86.His brother, James Wilmerding, said the cause of death, at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, was complications of congestive heart failure.When Mr. Wilmerding began teaching in the 1960s, American art was underappreciated, if not totally unknown. There were virtually no university survey courses in the subject, textbooks or major exhibitions.“American art just didn’t hold the same sort of attention and respect that European art did, and certainly the art of the Renaissance or the old masters,” said Justin Wolff, chairman of the art history department at the University of Maine and a former student of Mr. Wilmerding’s. “It was behind culturally. It didn’t really have an identity.”Mr. Wilmerding helped give it one.Mr. Wilmerding’s book “American Masterpieces” (2019) is a collection of his columns on art for The Wall Street Journal. He published 19 other books. David R. GodineHe published more than 20 books, including “American Masterpieces: Singular Expressions of National Genius” (2019), a collection of his columns on art in The Wall Street Journal.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Qatar Aims to Increase its Influence in the Realms of Art and Film

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      The Art for Tomorrow conference in Venice provides an opportunity for the Middle East at large to change how it’s portrayed.The future of art is very much the theme of “Your Ghosts Are Mine: Expanded Cinema, Amplified Voices,” a film and video installation that coincides with this year’s Venice Biennale. Organized by Qatar Museums and featuring some 40 artists from the region, it speaks to the emergence of the Middle East as a force in various art forms, not to mention a force in changing the narrative on how the region is portrayed in film and art.The future is on the mind of Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the chairwoman of Qatar Museums and the Doha Film Institute. Al Mayassa sees this year’s Art for Tomorrow conference in Venice, convened by the Democracy & Culture Foundation, with panels moderated by New York Times journalists, as a chance to improve the profile of artists from her home country of Qatar and beyond. Among the events at the conference is a tour of the installation at the ACP Palazzo Franchetti, a Biennale venue.The installation “Your Ghosts Are Mine: Expanded Cinema, Amplified Voices” includes excerpts from movies and videos in 10 galleries in the palazzo from more than 40 artists from around the world.David Levene/Qatar Museums“In Qatar, we’ve been working for years to support the work of filmmakers and video artists from the Arab world and others from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia,” Al Mayassa said in a recent interview. “This exhibition continues our work of bringing their ideas from the margins of the international conversation to the center.”The installation, which runs through Nov. 24, also plays into the Biennale’s theme of “Foreigners Everywhere” with excerpts from movies and videos in 10 galleries in the palazzo from more than 40 artists from around the world. Each gallery has a theme, ranging from deserts as cradles of civilization and places of rebirth to borders as the lines between both free and forbidden places.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More