NYC Art Shows- Isaac Julien at the Museum of Modern Art

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Films, New York Art Shows, Video and Film
Sep 202024
 

Isaac Julien’s video installations use multiple images on different sized screens to tell complicated stories. For Lessons of the Hour, currently on view at MoMA, he is telling the story of American abolitionist Frederick Douglass. The work presents this history in a thought-provoking way that is also visually stunning.

From the museum-

In Lessons of the Hour (2019), Sir Isaac Julien presents an immersive portrait of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who obtained freedom from chattel slavery in 1838 and became one of the most important orators, writers, and statespersons of the 19th century. Across the 10 screens of this video installation, a nonlinear narrative melds Douglass’s life and work with excerpts from several of his speeches, literary works, and personal correspondence. The most photographed American of his era, Douglass understood that portraiture could challenge racist tropes and advance the freedom and civil rights of Black Americans and subjugated people around the world.

For the first time, historical objects directly related to Lessons of the Hour will be on view alongside the work. They include albumen silver print portraits of Douglass, pamphlets of his speeches, first editions of his memoirs, a facsimile of a rare manuscript laying out his ideas about photography, and a specially designed wallpaper composed of period newspaper clippings, broadsides, magazine illustrations, and scrapbook pages. These objects reveal how Douglass’s image and words circulated in the transatlantic, 19th-century world, and also bear out Julien’s insight in Lessons of the Hour: that Douglass’s ideas about citizenship, democracy, and human dignity remain timeless.

This exhibition closes 9/28/24

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.

Flashback- NYC Art Shows- Susan Bee at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Brooklyn, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Sep 132024
 

The paintings above are from Susan Bee’s 2023 exhibition Apocalypses, Fables, and Reveries, at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn.

From the gallery about this exhibition-

The exhibition centers on paintings depicting figures—particularly women—engaged in battle with demons, dragons, and other beasts, inspired by medieval mythology.

Twelfth-century illuminated manuscripts and hagiography serve as Bee’s primary source materials. Seven of these paintings playfully reinterpret imagery of multi-headed monsters taunting religious populaces in apocalyptic scenarios. Others show Saint Martha taming the fearsome dragon the Tarasque, and Saint Margaret praying beside the dead dragon whose belly she managed to escape from after being swallowed whole. In earlier eras, these figures were seen as icons of devotion. But in Bee’s treatment, they transmogrify into prescient myth: their stories presage the end-time fears and social injustices that plague our more secular times.

The medieval-inspired paintings are augmented by canvases offering a different vision of how we might engage with nature and fantastical “others.” These paintings feature witches and birds flying alongside one another across the daytime sky, as well as trees whose limbs culminate in eyes, hands, and other appendages. They imagine landscapes where friends might meet, or where humans and animals might find themselves in unexpected affinity.

As in her past paintings, Bee uses a mixture of linear and eccentric shapes, building up layers of oil and enamel in intensely vivid color. Blending familiar gestures with the unexpected, these works ask us to confront our present while paying homage to the past. The syncretic blend of the remembered and remade turns monumentality on its head.

Her current solo exhibition Susan Bee: Eye of the Storm, Selected Works, 1981-2023 is on view at Provincetown Art Association and Museum until 11/17/2024.

Weekend Watch- “The First Monday in May”

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Fashion, Films, New York Art Shows
Sep 012024
 

Trailer- “The First Monday in May”

The 2016 documentary The First Monday in May, follows chief curator of The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Andrew Bolton as he prepares the 2015 exhibition China: Through the Looking Glass.  The film also follows Anna Wintour as she prepares for the Met Gala party that accompanies the exhibition. Bolton’s work on the show with director Wong Kar Wai, as well as the negotiations and logistics behind creating it are fascinating.

The film is full of celebrities and fashion designers including Karl Lagerfeld, Jean Paul Gaultier, and John Galliano.

The Costume Institute’s latest exhibition, also curated by Andrew Bolton,  Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion, closes on 9/2.

Throwback- NYC Art Shows- Whitney Biennial 2017- Raúl de Nieves

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Conceptual Art, Fashion, Fiber Arts, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture
Aug 292024
 

“Somos Monstros 2”, 2016

The work above was part of Raúl de Nieves’ large installation created for the 2017 Whitney Biennial.

From the museum about his work-

For his site-specific work for the 2017 Biennial, Raúl de Nieves covered six floor-to-ceiling windows with eighteen “stained-glass” panels he made using paper, wood, glue, tape, beads, and acetate sheets. The windows create a vivid backdrop for de Nieves’s elaborately beaded sculptures, some of which are based on shoes (but are adorned to the point of abstraction), while others take the form of figures draped in heavy costumes worn by the artist in his performances.

In all of his work, de Nieves treats modest materials with meticulous attention, turning the mundane into the fantastical—with metamorphosis a common theme. The windows depict a world in which death and waste are omnipresent, often symbolized by a fly. Unlike many Western spiritual traditions, however, de Nieves presents death as a metaphor for the possibility of spectacular transformation and rebirth in an unpredictable and turbulent world.

Fashion magazine W interviewed the artist about the work- here.

Throwback- Florida Art Shows- Naeem Khan at Tampa Museum of Art

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Fashion, Fiber Arts, Florida Art Shows, Installation Art, Sculptors / Sculpture, Tampa
Aug 292024
 

 

Last year Tampa Museum of Art installed work by fashion designer Naeem Khan, including the two pieces above,  Floating Flowers Fuchsia and Gold and Floating Flowers Pink and Silver.

From the museum about the work-

As part of its ongoing exhibition series exploring the intersection of art and fashion, the Tampa Museum of Art presents a series of paintings by globally renowned fashion designer Naeem Khan. Khan works independently, as well collaboratively with artist Stanley Casselman as the collective KACE, to create large-scale works inspired by his ongoing exploration of flora, light, and color. Five monumental works, comprised of paint and sequins represent Khan’s inaugural museum exhibition.

The Khan Family, steeped in the tradition of fashion and textiles for over 100 years, is renowned for their atelier in Mumbai and their luxurious couture worn by luminaries and India’s royalty. Khan arrived in New York at the age of 17, travelling to the United States with his father. A business appointment with Halston changed the course of his life as the famed designer decided on the spot that Khan would be his protégé. With Halston as his mentor, Khan became immersed in Manhattan’s art and social circles. From the atelier to Studio 54 and Andy Warhol’s Factory, Khan emerged as a designer at a pivotal moment in the 1970s where the lines between art, fashion, music, film, and celebrity were often blurred, further signifying New York City as the epicenter of creativity.

While working with Halston, Khan met Andy Warhol who frequently collaborated with Halston on his projects. Khan participated in their collaborations by drawing the flowers for their designs, specifically poppies. Warhol, like Halston, took Khan under his wing and once told the young designer, “You shouldn’t hold your pencil that way. Let me show you how to draw.” Flowers, inspired by his work and friendship with Warhol as well as the flora in his home country of India, anchor Khan’s visual language.
In 2020, painter Stanley Casselman introduced himself to Khan at one of his fashion shows and was immediately struck by the beauty and power of the designer’s work. Casselman observed that Khan’s designs could be translated into painting. Conversations lead to collaboration and today the two artists work both individually and together under the name KACE. Works, such as Jardin Chrome and Jardin d’Or, feature Khan’s elaborate sequined blooms in concert with Casselman’s gestural paint strokes. The compositions reveal the signature elements of each artists’ practice. Here, Khan’s ornate craftsmanship and Casselman’s abstract mark making unite in dazzling effect.

Khan’s solo works, Floating Flowers Pink and Silver and Floating Flowers Fuchsia and Gold, nod to his familial history with fabric, color, composition, and texture while pushing the boundaries of contemporary painting. Each flower is comprised of hundreds of sequins and beads. Delicately sewn onto silkscreen material, Khan suspends the panels one over the other, creating a sculptural quality to the paintings. Fabricated in a range of petal formations and size, Khan’s blossoms both capture and reflect light. As if suspended in space, the flowers come to life, symbolizing Khan’s creative past and his burgeoning artistic future.

NYC Art Shows- “Sleeping Beauties: Awakening Fashion” at The Met

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Fashion, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture
Aug 282024
 

Bea Szenfeld, “Ammonite”, spring/summer 2014, White paper, white polyester thread, and white plastic pearls

“Undercover” (Japanese, founded 1990) Jun Takahashi, Dress, spring/summer 2024, White silk satin trimmed with pink rayon plain-weave roses and pink synthetic pleated organza and overlaid with white nylon tulle embroidered with black plastic sequins and crystal, bugle, and seed beads in the forms of spiders and trimmed with white silk satin

Gucci, Alessandro Michele, Cape, autumn/winter 2017-18, Seafoam silk satin embroidered with polychrome plastic sequins, plastic pearls, clear glass crystals, black glass bugle beads, and bronze glass seed beads in the pattern of a dove, a cloud and flowers

Pictured above are just a few of the many stunning works on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art for the exhibition, Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion. In addition to the over 200 garments and accessories, the museum has added an additional sensory experience that includes scents that influenced the designers of certain time periods.

Curator Andrew Bolton discusses the show with Artnet here.

From the museum-

When an item of clothing enters The Costume Institute’s collection, its status is irrevocably changed. What was once a vital part of a person’s lived experience becomes a lifeless work of art that can no longer be worn, heard, touched, or smelled. Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion endeavors to resuscitate garments from the collection by reactivating their sensory qualities and reengaging
our sensorial perceptions. With its cross-sensory offerings, the exhibition aims to extend the interpretation of fashion within museums from the merely visual to the multisensory and participatory, encouraging personal connections.

The galleries unfold as a series of case studies united by the theme of nature. Motifs such as flowers and foliage, birds and insects, and fish and shells are organized into three groupings: earth, air, and water, respectively. In many ways, nature serves as the ultimate metaphor for fashion—its rebirth, renewal, and cyclicity as well as its transience, ephemerality, and evanescence. The latter qualities are evident in the “sleeping beauties,” garments that are self- destructing due to inherent weaknesses and the inevitable passage of time, which ground several of the case studies.

Sleep is an essential salve for a garment’s well-being and survival, but as in life, it requires a suspension of the senses that equivocates between life and death. The exhibition is a reminder that the featured fashions— despite being destined for an eternal slumber safely within the museum’s walls—do not forget their sensory histories. Indeed, these histories are embedded within the very fibers of their being, and simply require reactivation through the mind and body, heart and soul of those willing to dream and imagine.

Mary Katranzou’s “Digitalis” evening dress, spring/summer 2018, White synthetic faille digitally printed with lilies, daisies, dahlias, peonies, petunias, amaryllises, chrysanthemums, and foxgloves, embroidered with polychrome sequins, seed beads, bugle beads, and cannetille, and pieced with white neoprene trimmed with gray scuba knit and digitally printed with black lilies, daisies, dahlias, peonies, petunias, amaryllises, and chrysanthemums

About the dress above from the museum-

Mary Katrantzou‘s evening dress combines several elements of the three painted silk gowns opposite. Stylistically, the bold scale, color palette, and arrangement of the floral motifs resemble the 1740s robe à la frangaise, while the techniques of outlining the pattern in black and embroidering the flowers and leaves with beads recall the 1780g robe à l’anglaise and the 1870s Mme Martin Decalf gown, respectively. Katrantzou’s design inspiration, however, is decidedly contemporary: the children’s activity paint by number, which involves filling in numbered sections of a picture outlined in black with corresponding colored pigments.

Conner Ives, “Couture Girl” dress, autumn/winter 2021-22, White deadstock silk organza embroidered with polychrome deadstock plastic seed beads and polychrome recycled polyethylene terephthalate sequins of daisies, peonies, dahlias, and sunflowers

About the dress above-

Nature and artifice coalesce in Conner Ives’s “Couture Girl” dress from the designer’s 2020 graduate collection “The American Dream,” which was inspired by the women with whom he grew up in Bedford, New York. The garment’s bulblike shape parodies the pneumatic silhouettes of mid-twentieth-century fashion. The dress took five months to complete and is a testament to Ives’s commitment to sustainable practices: the silk organza is deadstock fabric donated by Carolina Herrera’s creative director, Wes Gordon, and the paillettes – made from recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET) – were designed and produced in collaboration with Rachel Olowes of the Sustainable Sequin Company. Ives embroidered the more than ten thousand sequins by hand, basing the six shapes on his four favorite flowers – daisies, peonies, dahlias, and sunflowers.

The museum also included these rose-inspired garments.

Dolce & Gabbana, Domenico Dolce, Stefano Gabbana, Dress, 2024 Alta Moda, Red silk satin

Valentino, Pierpaolo Piccioli, Jacket, autumn/winter 2022-23 haute couture, Red silk taffeta appliqued with self-fabric roses

This exhibition closes 9/2/24.

NYC Art Shows- LaToya Ruby Frazier at the Museum of Modern Art

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Photographers / Photography
Aug 212024
 

Marilyn Moore, UAW Local 1112, Women’s Committee and Retiree Executive Board, with her General Motors company retirement gold ring on her index finger, (Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co., Lear Seating Corp., 32 years in at GM Lordstown Complex, assembly plant, van plant, metal fab, trim shop), Youngstown, OH, 2019 from “The Last Cruze” 2019

Frances Turnage, UAW Local 1112, Women’s Committee, holding her 10, 15, and 20 years of service General Motors company anniversary gold bracelets in her dining room, (34 years in at GM Lordstown Complex, paint shop) Youngstown, OH, 2019  from “The Last Cruze” 2019

LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity, currently on view at MoMA, presents several of the photographer’s bodies of work. Documenting her family, her town, and the hardworking people of several communities- she is telling the important stories of people whose lives are often overlooked.

From the museum about the exhibition-

“For this reason, it is incumbent upon me to resist—one photograph at a time, one photo essay at a time, one body of work at a time, one book at a time, one workers’ monument at a time—historical erasure and historical amnesia,” says artist-activist LaToya Ruby Frazier. Born in 1982 in the steel manufacturing town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, Frazier has used photography, text, moving images, and performance to revive and preserve forgotten stories of labor, gender, and race in the postindustrial era. LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity surveys the full range of the artist’s practice, highlighting her role as a social advocate and connector of the cultural and working classes in the 21st century.

For this exhibition, Frazier has reimagined her diverse bodies of work as a sequence of original installations that she calls “monuments for workers’ thoughts,” which address the harmful effects of industrialization and deindustrialization, the healthcare inequities facing Black working-class communities in the Rust Belt, the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and the impact of the closure of a General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio. Monuments of Solidarity celebrates the expressions of creativity, mutual support, and intergenerational collaboration that persist in light of these denials of fundamental labor, human, and civil rights. As a form of Black feminist world-building, these nontraditional “monuments” demand recognition of the crucial role that women and people of color have played and continue to play in histories of labor and the working class.

“The Last Cruze” display

About The Last Cruze from the museum-

“A monument to the working-class people in this country,” as Frazier has characterized it, The Last Cruze was created in solidarity with the United Auto Workers Locals 1112 and 1714 in Lordstown, Ohio. In 2018 General Motors decided to cease North American production of the Chevrolet Cruze, leading to the “unallocation” and shuttering of the Lordstown assembly plant. Collaborating with Locals 1112 and 1714 members, Frazier made photographs that documented union-led efforts to prevent the closure.

Here more than sixty portraits of white, Black, and Latinx workers as well as images of factory labor are paired with printed excerpts from interviews Frazier conducted. These photographs and texts are displayed on a massive cadmium-red structure that resembles both an assembly line and cathedral buttressing. Framed by walls painted in two blue hues to match General Motors’ logo colors, a film featuring photographs by autoworker and photographer Kasey King follows the very last Cruze coming off the assembly line and the employees whose livelihoods depended on the plant.

“Self-Portrait with Shea and Her Daughter Zion in the Bedroom Mirror, Newton, Mississippi”, from the series “Flint Is Family, Part II”. 2017

“John Frazier, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Andrew Carnegie”, 2010

This exhibition closes 9/7/24.

Flashback- Los Angeles Art Shows- Haim Steinbach at Tanya Bonakdar

 Architecture, Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, California Art Shows, Conceptual Art, Los Angeles Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Quotes, Sculptors / Sculpture, Writers
Aug 162024
 

What does a wall of color make you feel? Does that change if it exists in a gallery? What about the specific color? And if you add text?

These are some of the questions that arise when viewing Haim Steinbach’s mypoemisfinishedandIhaven’tmentionedorangeyet, 2019. The work was part of his 2019 exhibition Appear to Use at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Los Angeles.

From the press release-

Holding a wall of the back gallery is an expansive wall painting consisting of the color orange along with the line—mypoemisfinishedandIhaven’tmentionedorangeyet—from the poem “Why I Am Not a Painter” by Frank O’Hara. Here, Steinbach challenges our perception of architecture in the relationship between language, color and cultural structures, encompassing the core themes of the exhibition.

Here is the Frank O’Hara poem being referenced-

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

And below is Michael Goldberg’s Sardines.

Michael Goldberg, “Sardines”, 1955, oil and adhesive tape on canvas, image via Smithsonian American Art Museum

Throwback- NYC Art Shows- Terence Gower’s “El Muro Rojo (Barragán)” from Galerie Lelong’s “Color Effects”

 Architecture, Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Conceptual Art, Installation Art, New York Art Shows, Photographers / Photography
Aug 152024
 

The images above are of Terence Gower’s El Muro Rojo (Barragán), 2005, from the group exhibition Color Effects at Galerie Lelong in NYC last year.

From the artist’s website about the work-

A large black and white photograph of the roof patio of the Casa Barragán is mounted on an enormous red wall. The photograph is a copy of Armando Salas Portugal’s famous 1953 photograph (this time commissioned from architectural photographer Jorge del Olmo), and shows a corner of Luis Barragán’s roof patio with its famous coloured walls reduced to grey tones. The work separates a tonal and planar understanding of the architecture from the “emotional” encounter with colour that Barragán aspired to.

From his statement about his practice-

I work on a number of bodies of work at once, each developed over several years. In the past decade my work has focused on a critical re-reading of the modern movement and its utopian bent. A desire to reexamine the notion of progress—a term corrupted by the excesses of technological modernism—has fueled my research on the post-war period and has led to a search for models from the past that might still be relevant today.

Below is the Armando Salas Portugal color photograph referenced by Gower’s work.

Armando Salas Portugal, “Barragán House”, Mexico City, 1948. View of the roof terrace in the late 1960s. Image via Barragan Foundation

Armando Salas Portugal is known for his photographs of the Mexican countryside and the architecture of the city. He captured the work of several famous architects, in addition to Luis Barragán’s projects.

From Wikipedia about the influence of modernism on Barragán and his concept of “emotional architecture“-

Barragán visited Le Corbusier and became influenced by European modernism. The buildings he produced in the years after his return to Mexico show the typical clean lines of the Modernist movement. Nonetheless, according to Andrés Casillas (who worked with Barragán), he eventually became entirely convinced that the house should not be “a machine for living.” Opposed to functionalism, Barragán strove for an “emotional architecture” claiming that “any work of architecture which does not express serenity is a mistake.” Barragán used raw materials such as stone or wood. He combined them with an original and dramatic use of light, both natural and artificial; his preference for hidden light sources gives his interiors a particularly subtle and lyrical atmosphere.

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