A Painter’s Last Works Resurface in New York

Welcome to The Curator, a newsletter companion to The Grand Tourist with Dan Rubinstein podcast. Sign up to get added to the list. Have news to share? Reach us at hello@thegrandtourist.net.

New York, “Garnets on the Boulder: Jay DeFeo Paintings of the 1980s” (Opens Oct. 30)
In 1982, 16 years after completing her eight-year masterpiece The Rose, American artist Jay DeFeo returned to oil paint with renewed fervor. By then a tenured professor at Mills College and with regular gallery representation, she had entered more settled years of her career. The gestural paintings she produced before her early death in 1989 at 60 reflect a culmination of a fearlessly experimental career and a more distinctly personal vision that moves beyond her earlier ties to San Francisco’s Beat scene. A selection of works from this seven-year period is on view here. paulacoopergallery.com

Denver, “The Honest Eye: Camille Pissarro” (Until Feb. 8) 
Born in 1830 in what was then the Danish West Indies, Camille Pissarro spent most of his life in Paris, resisting the artifice that dominated academic painting. Instead, he pursued light and uninhibited landscapes. In 1873, he helped organize a collective of 15 painters who rejected the Salon’s authority, a group that would become the core of the Impressionist movement. As its eldest member, the 43-year-old was seen as a mentor by the younger Claude Monet and Edgar Degas. This retrospective gathers 80 landscapes, cityscapes, still lifes, and portraits once considered scandalous for their brushwork and insistence on the everyday. denverartmuseum.org

London, “Val Lee: The Presence of Solitude” (Until Jan. 11)
The concept of a “non-place” was conceived by French anthropologist Marc Augé to define settings like airports, subway stations, and malls in which one is anonymous. For emerging Taiwanese filmmaker Val Lee, these spaces give her a feeling of solitude that becomes fertile ground for her work. “For someone who values uniqueness, to dissolve into pure ordinariness can be its own quiet form of beauty,” she explains. Valley in the Minibus (2024), on view here, follows several strangers traveling together through winding landscapes, alone but together. southbankcentre.co.uk

Cambridge, “American Artist: To Acorn” (Until March 15, 2026)
The latest project by American Artist (who legally changed their name in 2013) is inspired by the archives and writing of author Octavia E. Butler. In particular, her 1993 novel Parable of the Sower, set in an American society of the near-future, undone by corporate greed, climate change, and an authoritarian president. Over four years, American Artist reconstructed fragments of Butler’s archives and probed the truth in her prophetic vision in sculpture, video, and installation, a selection of which are on view here. listart.mit.edu

New York, “John Marin: Communing with the Colossal” (Until Dec. 12)
“Of American early modernist painters, John Marin is one of the most esteemed, but he is not among the most memorable,” wrote The New York Times in 1998. “That may be partly because he specialized in the relatively modest medium of watercolor.” Born in New Jersey in 1870, Marin mastered pure abstraction during his travels throughout Europe and became one of America’s most acclaimed painters in his lifetime, influencing generations to come. This exhibition marks his first major retrospective since The Whitney’s 1971 show, nearly twenty years after his death, and brings together 40 oils, watercolors, prints, and drawings of forgotten brilliance. schoelkopfgallery.com