Press
What the…? Jerry Kearns at Studio Artego
May 18, 2022 By D. Dominick Lombardi
The exhibition’s title, What The…?, may refer to the artist’s constant state of concern and bewilderment regarding the way the world seems to be unraveling and regressing, especially here at home.
Vector Interview Podcast Ep. 5 + Bonus Video
June 1, 2021 By Peter Gregorio
Peter Gregorio of Vector Productions just uploaded our interview in a new episode of Vector Interview Podcast - Ep.5 Jerry Kearns on the occasion of my current solo show - "BLAM!!!" at Frosch & Co Gallery in New York City, which is up until June 6th, 2021
Check it out on here.
Below: bonus video footage of Jerry in the studio, by Peter Gregorio
JERRY KEARNS’ BLAM!!! AT FROSCH & CO
May 5, 2021 By Robert C. Morgan
Although Jerry Kearns began as a sculptor on the west coast many years ago, his career abruptly changed upon coming to New York in the early seventies. Since then, he has been a devoted painter for the major part of his highly recognized career. His paintings are like none others; that is, like none others I have seen.
5 Must-See New York Art Exhibitions At Mike Weiss Gallery, PACE, Park Avenue Armory And More
July 26, 2016 - Meg Busacca, Fashion Times
Mike Weiss Gallery's Summer 2016 Group Show featured in Fashion Times' "5 Must-See New York Art Exhibitions".
Cheat Sheet: Summer Group Shows (and what curators are writing about them)
July 19, 2016 - Sharon Butler, Two Coats of Paint
Mike Weiss Gallery's 'School's Out' was featured in Two Coats of Paint's top summer group shows.
School's Out Summer Exhibition at Mike Weiss Gallery
July 7, 2016 - Gail Worley, The Worley Gig
"School’s out bitches, and the Mike Weiss Gallery has a new group exhibition that captures summer’s sense of freedom – of playfully breaking from the ordinary and letting the imagination run wild. The show, which is, fittingly, also called School’s Out, includes works by gallery favorites like Deborah Brown, Thrush Holmes, Jerry Kearns, and Liao Yibai. "
School's Out Listed in Artnet News' 'Must See Summer Group Shows'
June 30, 2016 - Eileen Kinsella, Artnet News
"We all remember that distinctly joyful feeling from childhood each June, when the school doors opened and we had the summer to be free. Mike Weiss Gallery invites us to relive it with “School’s Out!” The summer group exhibition features wildly colorful works by Deborah Brown, Thrush Holmes, Jerry Kearns, and Liao Yibai."
SCHOOL’S OUT! @ MIKE WEISS GALLERY – NYC – JUN 23 – AUG 6
June 13, 2016 - KAILYN GOMEZ
Mike Weiss Gallery will present a group exhibition called School's Out that encapsulates the whimsical and youthful freedom of a juvenile summer. The exhibition will be most of the summer, from June 23rd to August 6th, and will include works by Deborah Brown, Thrush Holmes, and Jerry Kearns.
Jerry Kearns to be featured in Kent Fine Art's upcoming show, ‘Witness'
February 3, 2016 - Mike Weiss Gallery
Jerry Kearns’ montage on acetate piece, Madonna and Child, 1986 will be on view in Kent Fine Art's upcoming show, Witness. The show opens February 4 and runs through March 26, 2016.
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 6, 2016 from 4–6pm.
Jerry Kearns Receives Grant from Two Trees
January 14, 2016 - Alanna Martinez, Observer
"Nine Artists and one nonprofit arts organization are the lucky recipients of subsidy grants for below-market workspaces in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn [...] "
Making Waves at Art Silicon Valley/San Francisco
October 5, 2015 - Bruce Helander
Kearns' acrylic composition depicts what could be considered a cinematic jump-cut of disparate cowboy and western subjects who ride white horses, point revolvers and rescue damsels in distress. The background image might have been appropriated from an outpost on the Grand Canyon, but the banners are unabashedly Lichtenstein with a little Warhol thrown in for good measure. The artist's "psychological pop" paintings portray a multi-dimensional quantum universe. These works are packed with contradictions and intrigue, vintage cinema and comic books, and playful circumstances, and often are tied together in a single anxious moment.
Jerry Kearns 'Give and Take' Exhibition opens September 10th at Modernism San Francisco
September 8, 2015 - Mike Weiss Gallery
Jerry Kearns' Give and Take opens September 10th at Modernsim Gallery in San Francisco and runs through October 24th, 2015.
Nora York at Joe's Pub
August 5, 2015
Missed the Nora York at Joe's Pub preformance? Watch it here now!
First Nighter: The Nora York-Jerry Kearns Double-Barreled Love Fest, a John Partrick Shanley Revival
July 31, 2015 - David Finkle - Huffington Post
The event is unique, at least as far as my brain wracking is taking me. It's the joint cabaret (alt-cabaret?)/gallery enterprise called Diva's Song, produced by gallery owner Mike Weiss.
Jerry Kearns - Armchair Traveller: Cartoon Network
July 29, 2015 - The Armchair Traveller
Jerry Kearns and Nora York, Diva's Song, 2015. On view at Mike Weiss Gallery in New York through August 22.
Nora York will Perform 'Diva's Song' at Joe's Pub Wednesday, July 29th at 7 PM
July 21, 2015 - Mike Weiss Gallery
Nora York will perform Diva's Song at Joe's Pub at The Public Theater on Wednesday, July 29th at 7 PM. This is a ticketed event. To purchase tickets, please click here.
Joe's Pub at The Public Theater
425 Lafayette Street
New York, NY 10003
Box Office: 212 967 7555 (10am-7pm daily)
Art That's Made Not to Last, including Jerry Kearns and Nora York's Diva's Song
July 9, 2015 - Randy Kennedy, The New York Times
"In an era when art is toppling gold and joining high-end real estate as a preferred instrument for storing wealth, ephemeral works tend to flummox the system. A piece that burns bright for a few weeks or months and then exists only in memory, or photographs?"
Duo Creates 'Diva's Song'
July 2, 2015 - Randy Kennedy, The New York Times
"When a couple lives in, around and through art, what happens when the life of one of the partners is threatened?
For the painter Jerry Kearns and the performer Nora York, who met in the art world and have been married since 1998, the answer was obvious: Put their heads together like Mickey and Judy and do a show."
Jerry Kearns featured in UMCA's exhibition 'Lyric Visions'
April 23, 2015 - John Stapleton, Amherst Bulletin
Jerry Kearns' work will be featured in Lyric Visions exhibition at UMass Amhert's University Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition will be on view through May 3, 2015.
Six Works by Jerry Kearns Added to SFMoMA's Permanent Collection
April 2, 2015 - Mike Weiss Gallery
Mike Weiss Gallery is excited to announce that six works by Jerry Kearns, including his 1988 piece Angel Heart (right) have been added to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection.
Jerry Kearns mentioned in "A Call For Change, Artists Respond"
February 13, 2015 - Jillian Steinhauer, Hyperallergic
"Smack Mellon’s statement for Respond discusses using the gallery to 'channel our outrage into actions that can facilitate systemic change.' That outrage is the dominant emotion in the imposing gallery space, from the salon-style wall of 90-plus artworks that’s bookended, in its top corners, with images of a snarling dog (Jerry Kearns) [...] to the massive Black Lives Matter' banner draped across the opposing wall."
Jerry Kearns to be featured in Satellite Contemporary's Upcoming Show, 'Heroes'
February 5, 2015 - Mike Weiss Gallery
Jerry Kearns' acrylic wall mural piece, Clint, will be featured in Satellite Contemporary's upcoming show in Las Vegas, Heroes. The show opens February 14 and runs through March 13.
Jerry Kearns mentioned in 'Raging at Racism, From Streets to Galleries'
January 23, 2015 - Holland Cotter, The New York Times
"Much of the work is installed salon-style, six pieces deep, in the gallery’s two-story-high front space. And it ranges across generations, from a 1985 painting of a salivating police dog in South Africa by Jerry Kearns [...] to entries by young artists like Faith Briggs, Elliott Brown and Maya Mackrandilal, who are showing in New York for the first time."
Jerry Kearns to be featured in RESPOND exhibition at Smack Mellon
January 15, 2015 - Mike Weiss Gallery
Jerry Kearns' Constructive Engagement will be featured in Smack Mellon's upcoming exhibition RESPOND. The exhibition will open this Saturday, January 17, 5-8pm and will be on view through February 22, 2015.
Year Out, Yearn In: Janusian Thoughts on NYC Art, 2014-2015, featuring Jerry Kearns
December 31, 2014 - Paul D'Agostino, The L Magazine
"This issue’s release date falls on the very last day of 2014, making it slightly tardy for best-of-year listings and a bit premature for previews related to spring. We decided to both seize and celebrate this junctural moment—collaboratively and in Janus-like fashion, looking backwards and forwards at once—by asking a group of artists, writers and curators to weigh in on their favorite exhibitions and other arts-related occurrences from the year that is now concluding, and to make a few notes or predictions for the new year that is now commencing."
Exhibition Review: Jerry Kearns
November 12, 2014 - Richard Vine, Art in America
"It’s hard to say what struck one most forcefully about this show of five wall paintings and eight new canvases. Was it jerry Kearns’s over-the-top verbal humor, infusing the exhibition title 'RRRGGHH!,' the 'KNOCK, KNOCK' repeatedly inscribed in bright letters on the door and the purple 'SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!' that snaked along an interior wall (as though one were literally walking into a classic Tom Wolfe text)? [...] Whatever the answer – and the best one would include all these elements – the show was certainly a confirmation of the power and legitimacy of viewing pleasure."
Contemporary Art’s Body Language, featuring Jerry Kearns
September 30, 2014 - John Seed, Hyperallergic
"In the meantime, media imagery — including the pop surrealism of comics and animation — continues to seep into the imaginations of contemporary artists. 'Day into night, birth to death, we are flooded with images,' writes artist Jerry Kearns in his artist methodology. 'Cartoon or photo, print or telecast, each type and form carries a great deal of information about the culture that created it. Standing in the flow, I work as an editor.'"
Jerry Kearns: Full-Metal Chaos and Graphic Fury
August 16, 2014 - Peter Plagens, The Wall Street Journal
"The paintings by Mr. Kearns (b.1943) are compositionally complex and technically impressive—a mixture of flat, bright comic-book color with black, brushy outlines and preprinted photographic imagery. In addition to eight new canvases, there are five "wall murals" (action-comic vignettes that can be resized according to a collector's available wall space) in Mr. Kearns's first New York exhibition since 2006. They all make the show a crackling, supergraphics experience."
"Jerry Kearns: RRRGGHH!!!"
August 15, 2014 - Anne Prentnieks, Artforum
"Kearns compels us to interrogate the ethics undergirding societal values using the age-old carrot-and-stick strategy: on one hand deploying subtle overlapping of culturally charged imagery that rewards deeper analysis, and on the other hand leveling us with the punch of cartoonlike murals that blast aggressive afterimages into viewers’ minds."
Jerry Kearns: ‘Rrrgghh!!!’
August 14, 2014 - Holland Cotter, The New York Times
"Mr. Kearns’s work has grown subtler and more unanswering over the years, and, at the same time, it has gained in finish-fetish finesse. In the past, it was possible to extract partisan topical messages; now it is not. What we get instead is a vision of chaos as a cosmic condition, action-packed and executed with weird, chilling, machine-tooled precision."
RRRGGGHHH!!! Jerry Kearns at Mike Weiss
July 23, 2014 - Robert C. Morgan, Whitehot Magazine
"Kearns is not into graffiti. Not kitsch, and too elegant for Pop. Even as he employs Pop subject matter and signage, he has always shown classical tendencies. This has been in his stall from the beginning, even as a sculptor, or later, as “a political artist.” Even as he has tried to conceal his quiver of arrows wrought from Mount Parnassus, the precision in Kearns' work cannot be discounted."
Jerry Kearns, "RRRGGHH!!!"
July 11, 2014 - Howard Halle, Time Out
"You can’t call it Pop Art, as the term seems too limiting; to quote one of the many written sound effects surging across his images, it’s more like Blam! Art. His latest show mashes together Westerns and film noir with a generous helping of the Rapture. In many of the scenes, Jesus, portrayed as a gunslinger wearing a crown of thorns, shoots it out with the Devil and his minions, like the Second Coming at the O.K. Corral."
RRRGGHH!!! Jerry Kearns' first solo exhibition with Mike Weiss Gallery on view in New York
July 4, 2014 - Art Daily
“This image is my effort to show you how it felt to be alive in the time and place I was.”
-Jerry Kearns
Buhmann on Art. Jerry Kearns: RRRGGHH!!!
July 3, 2014 - Stephanie Buhmann, The Villager Newspaper
"Each hero embodies at least one of the more influential archetypes in culture, such as Jesus (see a work entitled “BAM BAM”) or a hybrid of The Joker and the American Cowboy (see “AGGGKK!”). But Kearns is not interested in romanticizing culture. In fact, as someone who came to prominence in the 1980s with politically minded Psychological Pop Art Paintings, he understands his works as a sign of warning, pointing out that in our time, nature has been virtually replaced by mediated information — and that we risk becoming corporate avatars."
RRRGGHH!!! By Jerry Kearns at Mike Weiss Gallery
July 2, 2014 - Daniel Gauss, Arte Fuse
"Kearns’ work is so engaging it speaks for itself. [...] Kearns seems to be poking fun at our tendency to visualize the process of human development in violent terms, regardless of the fact that this is so counter-productive. Even within the Christian tradition, built on the self-destructive ethical behavior of a pacifistic Nazarene whistle-blower, we still love watching the bad guy get his cahoonas shot off."
The Lookout: Jerry Kearns
July 2, 2014 - Art in America
"Pop art lives! Veteran artist Jerry Kearns, once active in the 1980-86 advocacy group Political Art Documentation and Distribution (PAD/D), here presents eight new figurative paintings and five murals, all drawing on vernacular sources (comic books, movies, pulp fiction, TV) and the conventions of hero-villain mythology to make wry social and psychological observations."
Jerry Kearns: RRRGGHH!!!
June 26, 2014 - NYC-ARTS
RRRGGHHH!!! restages the elemental conflict between hero and villain in the template tradition of this type of narrative, good versus evil, begun over 2000 years ago with The Book of Revelations and continued in different iterations today. The paintings present a layered dreamscape inhabited by a recurring cast of characters that have their roots in both the artist’s personal and our public histories.
Jerry Kearns: ArtRx NYC
June 24, 2014 - Jillian Steinhauer, Hyperallergic
"This week marks the first solo exhibition of Jerry Kearns’s work since 2006. A member of the art collective PAD/D and a frequent collaborator with writer Lucy Lippard, Kearns is best known for his “psychological pop” paintings. RRRGGHHH!!! will feature eight monumental canvases and five murals painted within Mike Weiss Gallery."
Art: Jerry Kearns. RRRGGHH!!!
June 17, 2014 - Sanja Govedarica, Wall Street International
“I attempt to reflect possibilities and other notions about reality when I structure a painting. I want to encode contemporary beliefs about our experience. Like the discovery of perspective defined the Renaissance, collage and its relation to relativity have defined our vision.”
-Jerry Kearns
Jerry Kearns, RRRGGHHH!!!
June 16, 2014 - Nora York, Clocktower Radio
In this conversation with musical illustrations, Kearns discusses his summer 2014 exhibition RRRGGHHH!!!
The Last Look: Jerry Kearns
June 2, 2014 - Carlo McCormick, PAPER Magazine
"As one of the most astute political artists of our time, Jerry Kearns has been calling out society on its cultural bullshit for decades now in about the only way we can ever see the truth: through the vulgar dishonesty of pure visual seduction."
Art in the 1980's: The Forgotten History of PAD/D, featuring Jerry Kearns
April 19, 2014 - Tiernan Morgan, Hyperallergic
"Kearns’s keen pragmatism earned him the moniker ‘the Cultural Commissar’ among other members, who viewed Lippard and Kearns as PAD/D’s guardian figures. But despite their parental status, neither Lippard nor Kearns staked any claim to leadership. PAD/D was strictly nonhierarchical. Barbara Moore, an art historian who along with Smith would later organize and donate the group’s archive to MoMA, admired PAD/D’s pragmatism [...] “This is not what I want for political art, this sitting around … parsing with words in this intellectual way. I was a person of experience. PAD/D engaged me. I immediately saw it as an organization which was committed to action. They went out and marched,” Moore said."
Interview: Jerry Kearns
April 17, 2012 - Tiernan Morgan, The Bam Bam Blog
"Over time, once isolated images morph or collage in our consciousness and form a kind of gestalt. In building the composite, we construct ways of seeing and interpreting reality. In paintings, I suggest that possibility by overlapping and morphing imagery. I collage so the viewer can see different notions of an idea at the same time. Collage is a visual 'theory of relavitity.'"