IT’S NOT EASY to find the right moniker for Fereydoun Ave. Cumbersome hyphenates like artist-designer-gallerist seem reductive as labels for a métier that is more than the sum of its parts. Ave’s own artwork, marked by a theatrical sensibility, spans media (painting, collage, assemblage). He has produced stage sets, costumes, domestic interiors, and furniture, in addition to making frequent forays into graphic design. He has founded commercial galleries and experimental spaces. In his hometown of Tehran, he has a reputation for generosity, mentorship, and community-building and is also valued as the rare artist to have returned to live and work in Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. “I’m a bridge, darling,” he told me recently.
Tony Cokes consumes media with a singular zeal. The video works which he has become known for incorporate text from a dizzyingly wide range of sources—speeches, books, newspapers, archives, Twitter feeds. Unfolding on the screen against bright, changing monochromatic backgrounds, flashes of text are overlaid with songs from an equally impressive range of musical genres and tones, drawn from Cokes’s wide and deep knowledge of music history.
This fall, the Currier Museum of Art premieres a new site-specific commission by New York–based artist Saya Woolfalk; showcases large-scale work by the Ugandan master Sanaa Gateja; and reinterprets the museum’s collection.