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NYC Art Shows- “Don’t Forget To Call Your Mother” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Conceptual Art, Digital Art, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film

Sep 132024

Sadie Barnette, “Photo Bar”, 2022 (left) and Annette Messager “My Vows (Mes Voeux)”,1990, 106 gelatin silver prints, bound between glass and cardboard, black tape, twine and acrylic push pins (right)

The group exhibition Don’t Forget to Call Your Mother, currently at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, presents a variety of photography work from the museum’s collection. The artists explore new ways to take the medium further while exploring a wide range of subjects, often with a focus on capturing the past.

From the museum-

At a time when photographs are primarily shared and saved digitally, many artists are returning to the physicality of snapshots in an album or pictures in an archive as a source of inspiration. Drawing its title, Don’t Forget to Call Your Mother, from a photograph by Italian provocateur Maurizio Cattelan, the exhibition consists of works in The Met collection from the 1970s to today that reflect upon the complicated feelings of nostalgia and sentimentality that these objects conjure, while underlining the power of the found object.

Among the featured artists is Sadie Barnette, for whom photographs provide a portal to illuminate the forgotten history of the first Black-owned gay bar in San Francisco and her own father’s life as her 2022 work Photo Bar powerfully illustrates. Like Barnette, many of the artists in the exhibition seek to fortify the legacy of family histories, to emphasize the importance of intergenerational relationships, and to consider the ways in which knowledge and respect for the past can inform our current moment. Some artists such as Sophie Calle and Larry Sultan explore their own narratives to reveal the construction of desire, while others including Taryn Simon and Hank Willis Thomas examine histories that have shaped cultural and political dialogue. For some, including Darrel Ellis who utilized family pictures to negotiate the trauma of police violence, the personal is political. Deploying various strategies, these artists consider how a collection of images—like a talisman or an altarpiece—build relationships across time and can transform our understanding of the present.

Larry Sultan “Untitled Film Stills”, 1989, Chromogenic prints

Larry Sultan’s work stood out, as did the museum’s caption (below) that included quotes from the artist.

“It was as if my parents had projected their dreams onto film emulsion. I was in my mid-thirties and longing for the intimacy, security, and comfort that I associated with home. But whose home? Which version of the family?”
-Larry Sultan, 1992

In the late 1980s Sultan rephotographed and enlarged single frames from 8mm films his parents made during family vacations three decades earlier.

The artist later explained the genesis of the work:

“I can remember when I first conceived of this project. It was 1982 and I was in Los Angeles visiting my parents. One night, instead of renting a videotape, we pulled out a box of home movies that none of us had seen in years. Sitting in the living room, we watched thirty years of folktales-epic celebrations of the family. They were remarkable, more like a record of hopes and fantasies than of actual events.”

This exhibition closes 9/15/24. The museum’s website also includes images of all of works included.

Weekend Watch- Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “After Life”

Art, Artists, Conceptual Art, Films, Video and Film

Sep 082024

What if you could only take one memory with you for eternity-what would you choose? This is the question at the heart of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 1998 film, After Life.

The beautiful and touching film follows several recently deceased people as they arrive at a processing center to be interviewed, choose a memory, and then have it recreated for them before they move on. The film also combines scripted interviews with actors with those of real people reminiscing about their lives.

Weekend Watch- “Persona”

Art, Artists, Films, Video and Film

Aug 262024

Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, from 1966, explores the relationship between an actress who has become mute, played by Liv Ullman, and the nurse who is in charge of her care played by Bibi Andersson. The pair travel to a cottage on the beach where their personalities begin to conflict and blend.

The unsettling film contains several experimental elements, as well as images that are outside of the main narrative, that provide more questions than answers.

Weekend Watch- “Le Samourai”

Artists, Films, Video and Film

Aug 182024

Famous French actor Alain Delon passed away on Sunday, 8/18.

The stills above are from his film Le Samourai from 1967, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. The beautifully shot film follows a mostly silent Delon as an assassin trying to discover who is trying to kill him. It also stars his then wife Nathalie Delon.

Weekend Watch- Robert Altman’s “3 Women”

Art, Artists, Films, Video and Film

Aug 122024

After hearing the sad news of Shelley Duvall’s passing, I decided to watch a few films from her filmography and started with 3 Women, released in 1977. Based on a dream writer/director Robert Altman had, the film follows Duvall and Sissy Spacek as their lives and identities intertwine in the California desert. Later a third woman played by Janice Rule, becomes more important in the pair’s world.

Using reflections, water, mirrors, mirrored actions, and twins, Altman creates a mysterious space for these women to inhabit. Adding to the unsettling energy of the film are a series of murals created by artist Bodhi Wind (Charles Kuklis).

It’s definitely worth a watch, with an ambiguous ending that has been subject to many interpretations.

Flashback- The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Illustration, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Pennsylvania Art Shows, Photographers / Photography, Pittsburgh, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film

Aug 092024

It was Andy Warhol’s birthday this past Tuesday, August 6th, so today seemed like a good time to post some images taken at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Warhol was a prolific artist and the museum does an excellent job at presenting both his body of work, and the essence of what made him such a unique presence in the world.

Below are a few selections from what was on view in February of 2024.

Warhol made several film works including Screen Tests, his series of portraits in which the subjects attempted to remain still for around three minutes. The results were then played back in slow motion. Many well known names participated.

The museum has a room dedicated to their recreation of his delightful installation Silver Clouds.

From the museum about this work-

“I don’t paint anymore, I gave it up about a year ago and just do movies now. I could do two things at the same time but movies are more exciting. Painting was just a phase I went through. But I’m doing some floating sculpture now: silver rectangles that I blow up and that float.”
—Andy Warhol, 1966

In April 1966 Warhol opened his light and music extravaganza the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI), a complete sensorial experience of light, music, and film at the Dom, a large dance hall in the East Village in New York City. Running concurrently with the EPI was Warhol’s bold and unconventional exhibition at the prestigious Leo Castelli Gallery that comprised two artworks: the Silver Clouds and Cow Wallpaper.

Constructed from metalized plastic film and filled with helium, the floating clouds were produced in collaboration with Billy Klüver, an engineer known for his work with artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Yvonne Rainer, and John Cage. Warhol originally asked Klüver to create floating light bulbs; an unusual shape that proved infeasible.

Klüver showed Warhol a sample of the silver material and his reaction to the plastic sparked a new direction, “Let’s make clouds.” They experimented with cumulus shapes, but the puffed rectangle was the most successful and most buoyant. The end result was w hat Warhol was looking for from the beginning— “paintings that could float.” Silver Clouds, like the EPI with its flashing lights and overlapping films, was an explosion of objects in space and presented an immersive, bodily experience for the viewer.

Warhol was always experimenting with new ideas and processes. Pictured above is Oxidation, 1978, and a closer look at the canvas. It is part of Altered States, an exhibition of this body of work and its creation.

Below the museum explains Warhol’s process, and how the paintings were altered both during past exhibitions, and again when the museum lost power and climate control.

Andy Warhol’s Oxidation paintings represent the artist’s radical approach to Abstract Expressionism, a movement popularized by painters like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko after World War II, and a style Warhol didn’t experiment with until late in his career. Between 1977 and 1978, however, when Warhol began testing the corrosive effects of oxidation by mixing copper paint and urine, the beautifully iridescent canvases were a critical breakthrough at a time when his standing in the art world had taken a hit. The Oxidation series, along with abstract works like the Rorschachs and Shadows, allowed Warhol to reinvent himself yet again.

To create the Oxidation works, Warhol and his assistants mixed dry metallic powder in water before adding acrylic medium as the binder.

Canvases were spread out on the studio floor and coated in copper paint. Warhol’s assistants or Factory visitors were then invited to urinate on the canvases while the paint was still wet. As the urine acid oxidized the metal in the copper paint, a range of unpredictable patterns emerged.

Before Warhol’s death in 1987, the Oxidation paintings were exhibited only three times, including the Paris Art Fair FIAC at the Grand Palais, where the artist first noticed the volatility of the works. “When I showed them in Paris, the hot lights made them melt again,” he said.

“It’s very weird.. they never stopped dripping.” More than 45 years later, unpredictability remains a hallmark of the series. In June of 2020, after a power outage disabled the museum’s climate control for several days, staff conservators noticed changes similar to what Warhol observed in Paris. New drips appeared on the surface of Oxidation (1978), shown here, and the areas of corrosion changed color.

This presentation seeks to answer a deceptively simple question:

What happened? Museum conservators, with help from colleagues in the field and scientists, have been hard at work finding answers. The examination and analysis of the Oxidation paintings in the museum’s collection will contribute to proper stewardship, preservation, and treatment of the nearly 100 other works worldwide.

Several of the paintings on view are in his signature style, including his portraits of famous (and less famous) people, and in one room, different skulls in various colors.

From the museum-

Warhol’s Skull paintings have often been considered memento mori, recalling the centuries-long tradition of art that reminds us of our mortality. Memento mori, from Latin, translates roughly to “remember that you are mortal” or “remember you will die.” Warhol’s own near-death experience happened in 1968, when troubled writer Valerie Solanas shot Warhol in the abdomen after claiming the artist had lost a script she had written. After reportedly being declared dead upon arrival at the hospital, Warhol’s life was saved during five hours of surgery. After nearly two months, he was released from the hospital but required further surgeries over the following years.

On one of the floors is The Archives Study Center. There, behind glass, are some of Warhol’s Time Capsules- boxes he filled with a wide variety of items, sealed and put into storage.

On the same floor is the Great Dane pictured above, Champion Ador Tipp Topp (“Cecil”), who Warhol bought at an antique store after being told the dog had belonged to Cecil B. De Mille. The dog remained in Warhol’s office until his death.

A little more detail from the museum-

This mounted Great Dane, called Cecil by Warhol and his associates, was once a champion show dog. Born in Germany in 1921, original name was Ador Tipp Topp. Owned by Charles Ludwig, a top breeder, Cecil was sold to Gerdus H. Wynkoop of Long Island who entered the dog in several shows earning him the title of Champion by 1924, and Best of Breed at the Westminster Kennel Club.

After his death in 1930, Cecil’s remains were sent to Yale University in Connecticut, where they were mounted and displayed with 11 other breeds in what was known colloquially as “the dog hall of fame” at the Peabody Museum. However, by 1945, the canine display was removed to storage and forgotten.

In 1964 Scott Elliot, a Yale drama student, went to the Museum to find birds for a new play. He found the birds and also bought all 12 dog mounts for $10 each. When Elliot had to move a few months later, many of the mounts were left with a friend who put them in rented storage, which went unpaid and the contents were dispersed.

Warhol came across the display in an antique shop on 3rd Avenue several years later. He was told that the dog had belonged to film director Cecil B. DeMille. Warhol bought the story and the Great Dane for $300. Cecil found his final home at Andy’s office, where he was kept until Andy’s death in 1986.

Cecil’s current appearance differs from his championship form. His coat was originally black and white but exposure to sunlight has faded it to brown. Over the years, it sustained damage to the ears; they were repaired in April 1994 in anticipation of the opening of the Warhol Museum, to reflect the style of current breeds.

This is just a brief selection of what was on view. The museum collection also includes his early commercial paintings, some of his collaborations, television work, and more.

One of the great things about Andy Warhol is that no matter how much you know, there are always new things to learn. Even more than thirty years after his death, he remains as relevant as ever.

Aug 072024

Lotus L. Kang, “In Cascades”, 2023-2024

Lotus L. Kang, “In Cascades”, 2023-2024

The Whitney Biennial ‘s 2024 edition, Even Better Than The Real Thing, presents a large group of artists, working in different mediums, with many pieces directly dealing with social and political issues. The show does have a certain heaviness to it, but with all of the issues currently happening in the world it would be impossible for that not to be reflected in the artwork.

From the museum-

The eighty-first edition of the Whitney Biennial—the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States—features seventy-one artists and collectives grappling with many of today’s most pressing issues. This Biennial is like being inside a “dissonant chorus,” as participating artist Ligia Lewis described it, a provocative yet intimate experience of distinct and disparate voices that collectively probe the cracks and fissures of the unfolding moment.

The exhibition’s subtitle, Even Better Than the Real Thing, acknowledges that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is complicating our understanding of what is real, and rhetoric around gender and authenticity is being used politically and legally to perpetuate transphobia and restrict bodily autonomy. These developments are part of a long history of deeming people of marginalized race, gender, and ability as subhuman—less than real. In making this exhibition, we committed to amplifying the voices of artists who are confronting these legacies, and to providing a space where difficult ideas can be engaged and considered.

This Biennial is a gathering of artists who explore the permeability of the relationships between mind and body, the fluidity of identity, and the growing precariousness of the natural and constructed worlds around us. Whether through subversive humor, expressive abstraction, or non-Western forms of cosmological thinking, to name but a few of their methods, these artists demonstrate that there are pathways to be found, strategies of coping and healing to be discovered, and ways to come together even in a fractured time.

There’s a lot of great work to see. Below are just a few selections and some documentation from the museum.

For Lotus L. Kang’s In Cascades, (pictured above), the artist has hung sheets of photographic film from steel joists suspended from the ceiling that are gradually changed by the light inside the gallery. She refers to the exposure process as “tanning” and, like our skin, the film is changing over time with its environment. On the floor are little sculptures, as well as a a suitcase, all suggesting movement and change.

Kiyan Williams eye-catching outdoor installation Ruins of Empire II or The Earth Swallows the Master’s House, has the White House is sinking into the ground with an upside down American flag at the top.

Kiyan Williams, “Ruins of Empire II or The Earth Swallows the Master’s House”

Maja Ruznic, “The Past Awaiting the Future/Arrival of Drummers”, 2023

The description of Maja Ruznic‘s painting from the museum-

Ruznic has said that The Past Awaiting the Present/Arrival of Drummers “looks at how multiple things can be true at the same time: birth, violence, pain, suffering, joy, and music.” She has described the horizontal format of the painting as inherently linear, implying a past, present, and future. The movements suggested by the figures’ feet—some in profile and others pointed toward the viewer—collapse these temporalities into a single symbolic image.

Mary Lovelace O’Neal, “Twelve Thirty-Four “(From the “Doctor Alcocer’s Corsets for Horses” series), 2023, Acrylic and oil pastel on canvas

From the museum about Mary Lovelace O’Neal–

Mary Lovelace O’Neal began the series that included Blue Whale aka #12 (from the Whales Fucking series), after two whales caught her imagination as she walked on a beach near San Francisco. “And watching them, I thought, imagine the tons and tons of water they must displace when they’re fucking!” It is this sense of excitement and desire on a grand scale, the energy of the light in their spray, that she worked to capture in paint—more than the image of the whale itself.

Such a dynamic, independent, sometimes slightly outrageous point of view has driven Lovelace O’Neal throughout her sixty-year career, which has unfolded alongside heated debates about what painting should or should not do and prescriptive views of Black artists and abstraction. While Lovelace O’Neal was deeply involved with the civil rights movement on a political level, she resisted calls to make representational paintings that would illustrate or inspire the struggle, insisting that forging her own path in abstraction—as she does in each of the paintings on view here—was equally relevant to Black life.

Isaac Julien’s immersive video installation was really absorbing. The sculptures added an extra dimension to what was on screen.

From the museum-

Unfolding across five screens, Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die) reflects on the life and thought of Alain Locke (1885–1954), philosopher, educator, and cultural critic of the Harlem Renaissance (played by André Holland) who urged members of the African diaspora to embrace African art in order to reclaim their cultural heritage. The installation includes sculptures by Richmond Barthé (1901–1989) and Matthew Angelo Harrison (b. 1985), opening up a conversation about Black artists’ legacies that extends across modern history. Julien has described the work as a form of “poetic restitution,” speaking to the ways museums have collected African art. The artist refines this critique by creating a visual and sonic meditation as a “diasporic dream-space.”

In the work, Locke contemplates the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford—where he was the first Black Rhodes Scholar—and the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia, founded by one of Locke’s interlocutors, Albert C. Barnes (1872–1951), played by Danny Huston. Barnes also debates a skeptical Locke on his heritage, a sequence that distills many of the questions that the installation raises: Who gets to define Black modernism? Who has the authority to speak? How do men negotiate power, or queer desire?

Cannupa Hanska Luger “Uŋziwoslal Wašičuta (from the series Future Ancestral Technologies)”, 2021

From the museum-

Cannupa Hanska Luger proposes: “This installation is not inverted . . . our current world is upside down.” For the artist, upending our grounding in time and space makes way for imagined futures free of colonialism and capitalism, where broader Indigenous knowledge can thrive. The work here, Uŋziwoslal Wašičuta (a Lakota phrase meaning “the fat-taker’s world is upside down”), celebrates Native technologies by using the shape of a tipi—a word that the artist has also turned into an acronym, standing for Transportable Intergenerational Protection Infrastructure (TIPI). Luger looks at the complex structure as an example of the innovations created by his ancestors of the Northern Plains tribes. Luger’s materials, such as deadstock fabric, found objects, and clay, reflect the artist’s commitment to sustainability and reuse.

One of Suzanne Jackson’s works

Work by Suzanne Jackson

From the museum about all of the unique creations by Suzanne Jackson–

Suzanne Jackson made these suspended paintings without canvas, slowly building up many layers of acrylic, detritus, gel medium, and objects from the natural world, including seeds from her garden in Savannah, Georgia. Jackson has been experimenting with acrylic paint since the 1960s. “It’s painting another way,” she explains. “I don’t call it collage because it’s not another material. It’s all paint—acrylic on acrylic. And it’s suspended: paint suspended in space. . . . The paint becomes an armature for itself.” This “armature” is not fixed, however; Jackson thinks of the paintings as living things and is very open to the fact that they are malleable and will reshape. The layered paint seems to have a kind of agency and an ability to change independently. Looking at its iridescent quality up close creates an afterimage—a lasting mental image that continues even when a viewer has shifted their gaze away.

Two of Eamon Ore-Giron’s paintings from “Talking Shit”, Mineral paint and vinyl paint on canvas

From the museum-

These three paintings are part of Eamon Ore-Giron’s Talking Shit series, in which he reimagines deities from ancient Peruvian and Mexican cultures. Reflecting on a famous sculpture of the Aztec goddess Coatlicue, the poet Octavio Paz (1914–1998) traced an evolution from “goddess to demon, from demon to monster, and from monster to masterpiece.” This line of thinking resonated with Ore-Giron, who recognized that symbolic figures are continuously reimagined as cultures shift and collective and personal identities are redefined. The series title Talking Shit reflects the artist’s desire to explore this idea and a living ancestral past in ways that are open, informal, and personal.

In these works, Ore-Giron focuses on Andean folklore. He has pictured Amaru, a powerful, protean creature related to water and the underworld, as a zigzagging abstracted dragon. To depict the mythological rainbow made by the creation god Viracocha, Ore-Giron represented the celestial phenomenon as a double-headed snake moving through the sky.

Section of B. Ingrid Olson’s installation

Section of B. Ingrid Olson’s installation

From the museum about B. Ingrid Olson’s photographic and sculptural installation-

This installation intermixes two series, Dura Pictures and Indexes. Each work in the Dura Pictures series presents one photographic image physically embedded within another, what the artist describes as placing a “moment in time within a different moment in time, just like memory does of the past in the present.” The photographs were made in the artist’s studio and record B. Ingrid Olson’s own performative interactions with handmade props and assorted materials, such as mirrors or printed matter set within constrictive ad hoc spaces. The images alternate between showing a first-person vantage point with a torso or toes breaking into the picture plane, and offering a mirrored reflection of the artist, often only partially seen.

Proto Coda, Index is a single artwork with thirty constituent parts—each is a replica of one of the thirty reliefs made by the artist between 2016 to 2022. With concave interior surfaces and irregular hanging heights, the forms each suggest a container for a specific body part, like a piece of armor or a casting mold. The reliefs mark the entire length of the wall, serving as placeholders for an absent body, both fractured and multiplied.

Ser Serpas, “taken through back entrances . . . “, 2024

Ser Serpas’ large sculptural installation, assembled from found objects, grew more interesting when seen at different angles.

From the museum-

Describing sculptures like those included in this exhibition, Ser Serpas has said that “the act of making is a choreographed performance, of which the assemblage is the aftermath.” The performance begins in a city—in this case, New York, and specifically Brooklyn—with the artist collecting discarded objects that speak to her through their color, the ways they have become worn or torn, and their structural openness to being combined. Then she works with the objects’ orifices, odd junctures, and gravity to combine them into provisional sculptures. This process yields a feeling of potential energy just at the moment before an object’s collapse. The resulting sculptures become a kind of dual portrait: first of the city as seen through its cycles of consumption and decay, and then of the artist herself through the expressive choices she has made.

It’s often difficult to see many of the videos that are part of the exhibition due to time constraints. This year the museum partnered with MUBI and you can watch eight of the films for free on their site for a limited time.

On Sunday 8/11/24, the last day of the exhibition, the museum will be free all day with events that include making creature collages with Eamon Ore-Giron (whose work is pictured above).

NYC Art Shows- “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Drawing, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Video and Film

Jul 242024

Laura Wheeler Waring, “Girl with Pomegranate”, ca. 1940, oil on canvas

Winold Reiss, “Langston Hughes”, 1925, Pastel on illustration board

Winold Reiss, “Alain Leroy Locke”, 1925, Pastel on illustration board

The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism at The Metropolitan Museum of Art showcases some of the outstanding work created during this time period. The exhibition also provides some background on the artists, their peers in the art world, and their community.

From the museum-

The Harlem Renaissance emerged in the 1920s as one of the era’s most vibrant modes of artistic expression. The first African American-led movement of international modern art, it evolved over the next two decades into a transformative moment during which Black artists developed radically new modes of self-expression. They portrayed all aspects of the modern city life that took shape during the early decades of the Great Migration, when millions of African Americans left the segregated rural South in search of freedom and opportunity in Harlem and other expanding Black communities nationwide.

This exhibition explores how artists associated with the “New Negro” movement-as the Harlem Renaissance was originally known, after influential writings by the philosopher Alain Locke and others-visualized the modern Black subject. It reveals the extensive connections between these artists and the period’s preeminent writers, performers, and civic leaders. At the same time, it reconstructs cross-cultural affinities and exchanges among the New Negro artists and their modernist peers in Europe and across the Atlantic world, often established during international travel and expatriation.

This complex, multilayered story unfolds through portraits, scenes of city life, and powerful evocations of Black history and cultural philosophy. Highlights include seldom-seen works from historically Black colleges and universities and culturally specific collections. Across its broad sweep, opening with founding ideas and concluding with activist imagery made on the cusp of the civil rights era, it establishes the critical role of the Harlem Renaissance in the history of art as well as the period’s enduring cultural legacy.

Horace Pippin, “Self Portrait”, 1944, Oil on canvas, adhered to cardboard; and “The Artist’s Wife”, 1936, Oil on linen

The caption for the above paintings reads-

Contemporary artist Kerry James Marshall has described Pippin’s self-portrait as a “monumental statement of self-confidence.” In this small painting, tightly cropped at bust length, Pippin gazes confidently at the viewer, his firmly drawn likeness reflecting a well-disciplined hand. Pippin portrayed his wife, Jennie Ora Fetherstone Wade Giles, at three times the scale of his own image, but he unified the two paintings by using a similar palette. Jennie’s blue dress is echoed in the background of his portrait, while the background of her portrait is picked up in the artist’s tie and button-down shirt.

The portraits in the exhibition are not the only standouts. Below are a few more selections.

Suzanna Ogunjami, “Full Blown Magnolia”, 1935, oil on burlap

William H. Johnson, “Flowers”, 1939-40, oil on plywood

Aaron Douglas, “The Creation”, 1935, Oil on masonite

Aaron Douglas, “Aspiration”, 1936, Oil on masonite

From the museum about artist Aaron Douglas–

A core objective of the Harlem Renaissance was to portray the history and cultural philosophy that gave shape to a specifically African American identity and worldview. The artist Aaron Douglas, whose monumental murals earned him acclaim as the period’s foremost history painter, was also respected for his masterful use of biblical allegory to convey aspirations for freedom, equality, and opportunity.

Douglas first developed his signature silhouette figural compositions-derived in part from Cubism, Egyptian tomb reliefs, and American popular culture-for book and magazine cover illustrations in the late 1920s. He later elaborated this distinctive style in large-scale works for public projects and institutional commissions nationwide as well as at Fisk University in Nashville, where he established the art department and taught for thirty-eight years. Both Douglas and the sculptor Augusta Savage, founder of a Harlem community art school, created art inspired by the work of the author and composer James Weldon Johnson.

Laura Wheeler Waring, “Mother and Daughter”, 1927, Oil on canvas board

About Laura Wheeler Waring’s painting Mother and Daughter from the museum-

Mother and Daughter is perhaps the most direct engagement by a prominent Black artist of this era with the controversial topic of racially mixed families; its very existence was a disruption of the silence on the subject within certain segments of society. Waring experimented with some of the modernist pictorial devices favored by Alain Locke in her portrayal of a Black mother and her white-presenting daughter, rendering them not as specific individuals but as generic types emblematic of the omnipresence of racially mixed families. Flattening their near-identical facial features in profile, Waring established the true subject of the painting via the title and through the work’s most prominent element: the divergent skin tones that point to the subjects’ radically different paths through a social life defined by color lines.

Beauford Delaney, “Dark Rapture (James Baldwin)”, 1941, Oil on masonite

Finally, this portrait of James Baldwin by Beauford Delaney was also a highlight.

From the museum about the work-

Delaney met the writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin in 1940. Finding common ground on multiple fronts-intellectual, social, and artistic-the two gay men began a friendship that would last thirty-eight years. Dark Rapture, the first of Delaney’s several portrayals of Baldwin, presents the author in a thickly painted, expressive tonal study of reds, browns, and blues against a brightly hued landscape. Both introspective and joyous, Dark Rapture stands as a visual manifestation of queer camaraderie, identity, and the search for belonging in the modern world.

This exhibition closes 7/28/24.

NYC Art Shows- Joshua Charow at Westwood Gallery

Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Collage, Conceptual Art, Drawing, Fiber Arts, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film

Jul 092024

“Jeff Way In His Tribeca Loft”, 2023; “Turtle Owl Death Mask”,2018 and “Egyptian Violet Gorilla Mask”, 2017

Kimiko Fujimura “Party-3 (Party at Peter’s), 1990, and “Kimiko Fujimura in her Chinatown Loft”, 2023

For his current exhibition, Loft Law, on view at Westwood Gallery, documentary photographer and filmmaker Joshua Charow photographed artists living and working in the remaining spaces still protected by Loft Law in NYC. The well-crafted portraits offer a chance to see how the artists have made these spaces home over the years.

The gallery has also included artwork by eleven of the artists featured in the photos- Carmen Cicero, Loretta Dunkelman, Betsy Kaufman, Kimiko Fujimura, Joseph Marioni, Carolyn Oberst, Marsha Pels, Gilda Pervin, Steve Silver, Mike Sullivan, and Jeff Way.

From the gallery-

In 1982, Article 7-C of the Multiple Dwelling Law, also known as the Loft Law, was passed in New York City. The law gave protection and rent stabilization to people living illegally in manufacturing and commercially zoned lofts. Hidden behind this legislation were thousands of artists who needed a live/work environment at an affordable rent. These artists protected by the Loft Law changed the trajectory of New York’s cultural landscape.

Three years ago, Charow found a map of the remaining buildings with Loft Law protection. He rang hundreds of doorbells to find and photograph over 75 Loft Law tenants across the city to document the last of these incredible spaces and the creative individuals who made them home. Charow’s interest in the Loft Law and the vanishing history of New York stemmed from his early teenage years when he became immersed in a subculture called ‘Urban Exploring,’ the practice of illegally climbing skyscrapers, bridges, and abandoned subway stations. One of the rooftops he visited was an old factory building in South Williamsburg, where a tenant explained to Charow about the building’s remaining tenants under Loft Law protection.

The photos are a living visual document of the expansive spaces: old flophouses on the Bowery, garment factories in Tribeca and SoHo, glass factories in Greenpoint, and even a former ice cream factory in DUMBO. From the 19th to the 20th century, many buildings in NYC, including SoHo, were manufacturing centers for items from sewing machines to textiles to printing houses. The massive light-filled loft spaces with high ceilings were left empty when these businesses vacated in the mid-1900s and moved to other areas outside of New York City. The industrial-zoned lofts were not legal to live in, as they did not meet the building requirements for residential use, and oftentimes were completely raw spaces without a kitchen, shower, plumbing, or even heat. However, artists were attracted to these large spaces where they could work and create at any hour of the day. At the end of the 1970s, loft living started gaining attention in the media and the wealthy started to become attracted to this lifestyle. Soon landlords began to evict the artist tenants in favor of a wealthier clientele. A group of artists formed the Lower Manhattan Loft Tenants and spent years lobbying in Albany to gain legal protections and rent stabilization. At the time the Loft Law was first passed, there were tens of thousands of artists living in lofts across the city. Today, only a few hundred artists protected under the original 1982 Loft Law remain. This exhibition marks one of the first documentary insights into this vanishing history.

The majority of Charow’s images depict painters, sculptors, photographers, musicians, and filmmakers captured amidst their industrial loft spaces. Notable portraits include experimental music and film artists Phillip (Phill) Niblock (1933-2024) and Katherine Liberovskaya (b. 1961); Phill was instrumental in the avant-garde music and film scene from the 1960s to the present. Visuals artists include 97-year-old abstract and figurative expressionist Carmen Cicero (b. 1926), who has works in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum; Kimiko Fujimura (b. 1932), who in 1965 was selected as “Japan’s Top 5 Female Painters in Contemporary Art” by Geijutsu-Shincho, a Japanese monthly art magazine; minimalist painter Loretta Dunkelman (b. 1937), a co-founder of the all-female artists cooperative A.I.R. Gallery; and Gilda Pervin (b. 1933), whose studio occupies the top floor of a 1790s Quaker building linked to the Underground Railroad and happens to be the old studio space of famed sculptor Eva Hesse, who worked there from 1965-70. Also included is Chuck DeLaney, co-founder of the Lower Manhattan Loft Tenants, an early activist group that was responsible for the lobbying and passing of the Loft Law.

This exhibition closes on 7/13/24.

NYC Art Shows- Joan Jonas at MoMA

Jul 052024

Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning, at the Museum of Modern Art, showcases the artist’s long and varied career. The exhibition includes her videos as well as props, sculptures, paintings and drawings. It’s a celebration of her collaborations (including Volcano Saga with actress Tilda Swinton), performances, installations, and her use of play to create all of these inventive works.

From the museum-

“I didn’t see a major difference between a poem, a sculpture, a film, or a dance,” Joan Jonas has said. For more than five decades, Jonas’s multidisciplinary work has bridged and redefined boundaries between performance, video, drawing, sculpture, and installation. The most comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s work in the United States, Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning traces the full breadth of her career, from works that explore the encounter between performance and technology to recent installations about ecology and the landscape.

Jonas began her decades-long career in New York’s vibrant Downtown art scene of the 1960s and ’70s, where she was one of the first artists to work in performance and video. Drawing influence from literature, Noh and Kabuki theater, and art history, her early experimental works probed how a given element—be it distance, mirrors, the camera, or even wind—could transform one’s perception.

Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning presents drawings, photographs, notebooks, oral histories, film screenings, performances, and a selection of the artist’s installations. Jonas continues to produce her most urgent work through immersive multimedia installations that address climate change and kinship between species. “Despite my interest in history,” she has said, “my work always takes place in the present.”

The museum’s website has several videos of her work online, as well as an interview with the Jonas in her NYC loft (seen below).