CLOSE, not too close is an exhibition of new work by British artist Rose Wylie at David Zwirner in Los Angeles. Marking the artist’s debut solo exhibition in Los Angeles, the show features a group of large-scale paintings as well as related drawings, the presentation includes works that variously feature Wylie’s home and garden, media she’s consumed, and other elements drawn from her daily life and surroundings.

Wylie has become known for her uniquely recognizable, colorful, and exuberant compositions that at first glance appear aesthetically simplistic, not seeming to align with any discernible style or movement, but on closer inspection are revealed to be wittily observed and subtly sophisticated meditations on the nature of visual representation itself. The artist has long been interested in exploring perspectival and compositional strategies other than—and along with—traditional Renaissance perspective, frequently making numerous iterations of a given motif as a means of advancing her formal investigation. Working in both single- and multi-panel formats, she regularly juxtaposes apparently disparate imagery, creating visual rhymes and resonances that coalesce into a unified composition.

Rose Wylie (b. 1934) studied at Folkestone and Dover School of Art, Kent, England, and the Royal College of Art, London, from which she graduated in 1981. The artist’s first solo exhibition took place in 1985 at the Trinity Arts Centre, in Kent. In recent years, she has had solo presentations at venues including the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, University of the Arts, Philadelphia (2012); Jerwood Gallery, Hastings, England (2012); Tate Britain, London (2013); Haugar kunstmuseum, Tønsberg, Norway (2013); Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, Germany (2014); Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2015); Space K, Seoul (2016); Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, Wales (2016); Turner Contemporary, Margate, England (2016); Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London (2017); Plymouth Arts Centre and The Gallery at Plymouth College of Art, England (an exhibition that traveled to Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange in Cornwall, England); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain (2018); and The Gallery at Windsor, Vero Beach, Florida (2020).

Cinema of Sensations: The Never-Ending Screen of Val del Omar presents the work of Spanish mid-20th-century artist, filmmaker, and inventor José Val del Omar (1904–1982) at the Museum of Moving Image in New York. The show is the first major U.S. exhibition devoted to the artist’s multisensory work and runs until October 1, 2023.

Disrupting the conventional relationship between the viewer and the screen, the works in this exhibition foreground historical and contemporary experimental technologies, creating aesthetically rich environments that engage the body and mind. Cinema of Sensations is organized by guest curator Almudena Escobar López with curatorial advisor and Director of the Val del Omar Archive Piluca Baquero, and Gonzalo Sáenz de Buruaga, President of the Val del Omar Archive as consultant.

Noguchi Subscapes is a survey of Isamu Noguchi’s particular interest in the unseen and hidden: invisible forces, subterranean structures and their makers, spatial metaphors for the unknown, and the inner recesses of the self. This series of installations of around forty sculptures and designs, mostly drawn from the Museum’s collection and incorporating photographs from the artist’s archive, occupies nearly the entire second floor.

One section of the exhibition is dedicated to archival images and objects from Noguchi’s set design for George Balanchine and Igor Stravinsky’s Orpheus. The set design, like the exhibition, offers Noguchi’s exploration of unseen surfaces, but more focused on life and death and the artists’ conceptualization of the Greek hero Orpheus’s artistic vision as a form of blindness. In his notes on Orpheus, Noguchi writes of a silk curtain presenting a passage of life whereas death is seen when the artist’s mask (of blindness) is taken off.

The 12th edition of BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia features a global selection of films and robust accompanying programming. The 2023 film festival features a total of 93 films, many of which engage with climate justice, queer stories and narratives on migration and displacement. A few of the selections from the festival are included below.

Accidental Athlete (2023) is a short film directed by Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold. The film includes a monologue by Paulette Jones Morant on being one of the first Black woman scholastic athletes at the University of Virginia. The film was most recently shown at BlackStar Film Festival 2023 in Philadelphia.

Kevin Jerome Everson (b.1965, Mansfield, Ohio) Professor of Art at the University of Virginia, Everson is the recipient of the Guggenheim; Berlin Prize; Heinz Award in Art and Humanities; Alpert Award for Film/Video and the Rome Prize. His art practice encompasses printmaking, photography, sculpture and film – 12 features and over 200 shorts to date – including 11 Black Fire collaborations with UVA colleague Claudrena N. Harold. His work has been the subject of mid-career retrospectives and solo exhibitions at Tate Modern/Film, Halle fur Kunst Steiermark,  Harvard Film Archive, Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Pompidou, Andrew Kreps Gallery, Modern and Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul and featured at the 2008, 2012 and 2017 Whitney Biennial, the 2013 Sharjah Biennial and the 2018 Carnegie International.

Claudrena N. Harold is Professor of African American and African Studies and History at the University of Virginia. She is the author of When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras (University of Illinois Press, 2020); New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South (2016); The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South, 1918-1942 (2007). Her collaboration with UVA colleague Kevin Jerome Everson on a series of Black Fire films includes 11 shorts that reflect a “deep interest in the interiority of Black life, particularly those formal and informal spaces where African Americans communed, hobnobbed, prayed, loved, quarreled, reconciled, and moved on.”

Foragers (2022) is directed by Jumana Manna. The film moves between documentary and fiction to depict the dramas between the Israeli Nature Protection Authority and Palestinian foragers. With a wry sense of humor, the film captures the inherited love, resilience and knowledge of these traditions, over an eminently political backdrop.

Jumana Manna is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her work explores how power is articulated, focusing on the body, land and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Jumana was raised in Jerusalem and lives in Berlin.