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art reviews from around new york

For just twelve months, in a more optimistic decade, nations came together in a spirit of peace, understanding, and mass entertainment. It was the 1964 World’s Fair, and it left in its wake the New York City pavilion, today the Queens Museum.

Now the museum is once again suitable for children, with a place to add their own drawing at the end of a long brush. Thanks to Cas Holman, the paper, with a bump in the middle, doubles as a sliding pond. Childhood memories continue, along with the optimism, with Cameron A. Granger, Catalina Schliebener Muñoz, and Nsenga Knight. Together, they remember the divisions that a world’s fair must overcome. So through September 22 does Lyle Ashton Harris. His Shadow Works pick up where he left off at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2011—and I refer you to my review then for more.

I came as a child to the World’s Fair for the rides, and I would not have settled for a slide. Still, grown-ups get to draw and to slide, too. They can also appreciate the curved wall outside the museum’s scale model of New York. As ever, the side facing out serves as a ground for large-scale work, and Caroline Kent makes the most of it. As I reported before, she mixes painted shapes with relief elements against black through December 29. They play gently but firmly with the flatness of the wall.

Not everyone looks back fondly to the fair. Barely a year ago, Charisse Pearlina Weston saw its raid on Flushing Meadow Park as coming at the expense of its neighbors and the Queens Museum as forever tainted. Perhaps, but a black community has long since given way not to state and corporate interests, but to Latin Americans and Mets fans. And the museum does its best to respond to the diversity with its artists in residence. This year’s crop does come in peace. For them all, art is a family affair as well as a global one, through January 19.

For Cameron A. Granger, it is downright childish. Remember when “I come in peace” was a stock line in approaching space aliens? A 2022 Studio Museum artist in residence, Granger sees a tool for the “liberation for black communities” in video games. I might believe it had I not seen too many gamers buried in their cell phones on the subway out. I might believe it, too, if a nook dedicated to a half-forgotten black magician had a few tricks up its sleeve.

Catalina Schliebener Muño gives her Buenos Vecinos, or “good neighbors,” a politically correct history. She also throws a party, although her painted birthday gift comes in plain brown paper. She has blob-like sculpture to brighten the affair in red and a mural featuring Donald Duck and Goofy. They serve, she swears, America’s global interests, if only for children. A second mural has a row of cartoon birds, in profile and of increasing height. Could it be her take on a much-derided image—the passage from apes on all fours to men?

Nsenga Knight mixes memories with a welcome to all. Is this a tough time to speak of peace, with the right wing in Israel and supporters of Hamas out to wipe out their enemies? Knight notes that the United Nations met in this very building when it settled on states for both sides. A 2017 Drawing Center artist in residence, she recreates settings in which she has lived, including a table set for a meal and cushions for eating while seated, Islamic style, on the floor. Both lie past glass patio doors looking out and looking in. Painted paper floats overhead as paragliders and parachutes.

Knight calls herself an Afro-Caribbean American Muslim. She cannot speak for both sides in a bitter war, and she does not pretend otherwise. She could easily have denounced the UN and its resolutions. She might see bitter echoes of Palestinian refugees in community displacement for the World’s Fair. Instead, she takes the UN’s motto, “Peace Through Understanding,” as her own. Art takes understanding, too.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Ask an artist about what went into a work, and you may hear quite a story about myths and memories. You will have your own stories at that—of what you have experienced, seen in the art you love, heard from your parents, and read. And curators attuned to matters of gender and culture eat it up.

Ask again, though, about what the artist had in mind, and you may hear something far more modest. I just want to make art, some might say, to see its color and the light. The seven artists in “Overflow, Afterglow” get to have it both ways, the stories and the light, and the Jewish Museum wants it all. It sees, as the show’s subtitle has it, “Chromatic Figuration,” through September 15, and it sees a trend. With two artists in their mid-twenties and just one much past forty, it hopes to lead the way to the future. But will the afterglow fade all too quickly, and is the overflow a bit much?

Chromatic figuration may sound more like color charts and color wheels than an afterglow. It may not, in fact, sound much like figuration. Yet the wall between abstraction and representation has been crumbling for years now, as geometry has given way to excess. With “Overflow, Afterglow,” regular shapes are nowhere in sight, but everything else is, and the break with Minimalism’s white cube begins with the installation. Each artist gets a bay of angled walls, each at a different angle and painted a different color. Together, they fill a single room, with sightlines from one to next.

Figuration, too, can be elusive, although Rosha Yaghmai insists that sheer color is figurative. Portraits by Sasha Gordon look conventional enough, but notably short of joy or affection. Others may tell stories, but the stories are hard to hear. Sara Issakharian includes hands, snakes, charioteers, and an eastern goddess in mortal combat, but who knows who is winning this war? Austin Martin White throws in a “hypothetical” African sculpture, but his heart is in chaos. Sula Bermúdez-Silverman promises a take on colonialism, but it never extends beyond work with actual rubber and sugar.

Color itself enters in different ways. It comes brushed on wildly, layered on beeswax, and squeezed through a nylon mesh. It can have what the museum calls “supernatural color” or the paleness of skin tones. It comes shining from resin and uranium glass. It all but bleeds out of a silicon trans figure by Chella Man, with the scars of multiple operations in its crotch. It lies nude on its back, ready for more.

The artists do share strategies. Ilana Savdie imagines narratives of hunters and their prey, while Gordon’s women train their rifles on a bird, the only thing separating or connecting them. Issakharian has her scenes of combat and celebration, White his Bacchanalia. Rosha Yaghmai paints on cotton and organza, creating moiré patterns, much like White’s nylon mesh. These are Yaghmai’s “afterimages,” and they appear and vanish before one’s eyes. The curators, Liz Munsell and Leon Levy, see “uncanny luminescence” everywhere, and at last they get it.

Not all the artists are Jewish, and those that are come with hyphens, like Issakharian, an Iranian Jewish immigrant, and Man, Jewish Chinese. For Bermúdez-Silverman, a hyphenated name and her dollhouse alike speak of home. They suit a time of pride in shifting identities. They are also new to New York museums (although one has showed with an upscale dealer and museum veteran, Jeffrey Deitch), but are they the future? They occupy the same exhibition space as “New York: 1962–1964” in 2022, which looked back to a time when the Jewish Museum introduced an entire generation, from Pop Art to formalism. Can it happen again?

The artists, the museum argues, “take on and take in the oversaturation of our contemporary moment,” but do they merely succumb to it? When “color is flexible and amorphous,” can it stand for anything at all? To think back to 1962, more than one critic looked at the dizzying designs of Bridget Riley and saw a movement. It must have seemed the next big thing, where in retrospect it was the field of play for little more than a singular talent. Could “chromatic figuration,” with all its failed narratives and optical activity, be the Op Art of today? It could be just as passing and a lot tackier.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Everything for Frank Walter was a throwaway—and everything a discovery of who and where he was. At his death in 2009, the black artist left thousands of paintings and drawings on top of hundreds of hours of tapes.

That is just for starters. His two thousand photographs run mostly to Polaroids, because what could come more quickly, with no chance for second thoughts? A stack of paper, a single manuscript, reaches easily to one’s waist. Who would dare to turn its pages even if one could touch? Who would dare, too, to call it a memoir, a fiction, or a lecture on art? And still he sought, as the show’s title puts it, “To Capture a Soul.”

To be sure, there is hardly a soul in sight at the Drawing Center, through September 15. An African woman in pencil may not count as a portrait, no more than a young Fidel Castro nearby on the wall. They are emblems of something more lasting than a lifetime, much like his carved wood after African sculpture. If they are also suspiciously generic, he could live with that. Like all of nature, they respond to him—and, together with a recent report on another freewheeling black artist, Della Wells, it is the subject of a longer review in my latest upload. Does that make him an outsider artist, and what about Wells?

For so undisciplined an artist, Walter stuck to a task long after another would have moved on. He could well have been high-functioning autistic in his embrace of ritual, his refusal to hide anything, and his absence of confession. If there is a self-portrait anywhere in his work, apart from the body of work itself, it lies in an otherwise anonymous man up a tree. Yet he left his native Antigua in 1953, still in his twenties, to find the other half of his heritage, and he remained in Europe until 1961. Another artist might have spent those years in museums, to claim their tradition as his own, or immersed himself in white, African, and Caribbean communities for their humanity and culture. Walter headed for the library.

Or rather he headed for libraries, that marvel of English cities, because he could do nothing singly. And there he turned out one family tree after another. Naturally they are dense to the point of illegible, their words covering entire sheets. Who can say what sprang from library research, what from a remembered oral history, and what from an active imagination? They have a curious echo in drawings of actual trees, their leaves a splatter of red and black akin to an explosion. This artist’s god does and does not lie in the details.

Back home, he pursued the same uncanny mix of the obvious and unexpected. Maybe you know Antigua for sunlight and white sand. Walter sees rippling water in a dark wood, even as it emerges into the light. The sun rests on a mountain peak, like the product of a volcano. Animals are sketchier (and awfully cute), but they tend to one another when they are not looking at him. A cow jumps over a fence, if not the moon.

If they border on nursery rhymes, Walter wrote music, too, in typically sloppy but mostly accurate notation. Anything can go into the mix, and anything can as a ground for oil—including photocopies, disks of auto insulation, backs of unsold Polaroids, and boxes of film. The curator, Claire Gilman, arranges things roughly by subject, because she has no choice. Work from nearly sixty years is almost entirely undated. It may not be consistently great either, but he never have cared for greatness. He wanted only to see himself as part of a larger world.

If Walter leaves things a bit sketchy, Josh Smith embraces the charge. “This is how it is,” he writes—and it has to be, because it finds completion in what is yet to come. “It refers forward,” he claims of his work, but for once it also looks back, and he conceives his show in the Center’s back room as an homage to Walter, as “Life Drawing.” Is this real life? Since his debut in the 2009 New Museum “Generational,” Smith has become an art-world favorite for what another group show called “everyday abstraction.” Here, though, he tends to leaves, fish, birds, and palms as well.

If Walter makes art his fever dream and culture his library, Smith has appeared in a show of “The Feverish Library” as well, and he still piles it on. I have dismissed him more than once as slapdash, glib, and cheesy. There is no doubting, though, his facility and charm. Even the Grim Reaper looks anything but grim. Can he make Walters self-conscious childishness look downright grown-up? Maybe, he seems to say, there are limits to adulthood.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

“Ich bin Ich,” and of course she was, but Paula Modersohn-Becker had her doubts. The Neue Galerie takes the title of her retrospective, through September 9, from a letter to Rainer Maria Rilke, and it rings true for today.

I, a woman, am myself and no one else, she wrote, a boast for many a woman artist now—but who am I? She had just left her husband, Otto, restless for answers. She could not go back to the younger artist she had left behind, but what was the way ahead? She had every right to ask, and she died at just thirty-one, on the brink of a new art form for a new century. Together with a recent report on Käthe Kollwitz and German Expressionism, it is also the subject of a longer and fuller review, in my latest upload.

How did German Expressionism arise in the first place? In her painfully brief career, Modersohn-Becker offers a snapshot of a crucial moment. She died of complications from childbirth (an embolism) in 1907, the very year of the museum’s most prized work, the woman in gold by Gustav Klimt. Almost its entire collection lay ahead. She had joined Worpswede, an artist colony not too far from her family home in Bremen, and studied in Berlin, with classical training in drawing from life. In repeated trips to Paris, she took in the latest exhibitions, but even more so the Louvre.

She admired Fauvism, but Henri Matisse and André Derain had returned from their summer by the sea barely a year before. Pablo Picasso was still a newcomer to Paris in Montmartre. Modersohn-Becker did not live to see World War I, which did so much to shape Max Beckmann, or the postwar decadence, turmoil and experiment that Hitler denounced as “degenerate art.” Everything for her was figure painting, even when it includes still life, and she was determined to make it modern. She left her own version of Klimt’s standing woman, with a similarly patterned backdrop, but she made it hers twice over, without the gold. It shows her and her alone, naked and pregnant.

She was painting affection, but with a frankness born of detachment and reserve. She paints herself repeatedly, in one case with a blank face. That self-portrait could be unfinished, but, hey, you never know. Often she holds up a flower, like a shield, because she deserves no less but can afford little more. She paints a mother and child, fleshy and caring, but neither friend, nor family, nor herself. She did reunite with Otto and give birth to a daughter, but the show’s only portrait of him, years earlier, brings him so close to the picture plane that his limbs become fragments.

Still, it an act of love, take it or leave it. At the very least, it is an act of respect from one artist to another. A room for work from just before 1890 accords peasants and workers that same respect. It also shows the discipline of classical drawing, in charcoal with bare accents of color, and what she had soon to give up. Her early subjects have distinct personalities, but modernizing for her soon meant something else again. From that point on, faces let on only discomfort at having to pose.

She begins taking things apart while building up flesh and paint to match. She also turns to children, they, too, cautiously holding flowers. She treasures those accents of color, which increasingly give a painting its focus. Still, she never fully gets over her muter early work. She may have liked Fauvism, but she prized Paul Gauguin more. She uses patches of brown much like his for shadows, to structure a figure and a painting.

In so short a career, it is hard to speak of artistic development, although Modersohn-Becker left behind more than seven hundred paintings and a thousand drawings. The show spans barely a decade, with no examples of her earliest work back in Bremen. (That work does allow the color clashes of Post-Impressionism.) She never did become the pioneering artist confident in her Ich and I. It does, though, leave her on the brink of something to come. Could that something be German Expressionism?

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

From the very start, LaToya Ruby Frazier stepped outside the New York art scene. As a young artist, she returned to her family home in the Rust Belt. She photographed herself as one of three generations of women, as she puts it, “unified by illness” but the illness extends poignantly to race, gender, and poverty in America—and it is the subject of a longer review in my latest upload.

For Frazier, the decline of the Rust Belt can only be a family affair. Born in Braddock, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh, where Andrew Carnegie opened his first steel mill, she knows the people it employed, the jobs lost, and the desolation it brought to water, land, and air. Her mother had life-saving surgery at Braddock Hospital and still shows its scars. Her grandmother spent her failing days there, looking ever so smaller than her pathetic hospital bed. Frazier photographed both encounters with life and death for The Notion of Family, at the Brooklyn Museum in 2013, the series that occupied the first fourteen years of her adult life. And she still calls Braddock home.

Yet her notion of family has changed. More than ten years later, it extends to an entire city seen from above, where family and loss are only implicit but no less real. It extends, too, to other places where workers fight for their jobs and their very lives. She wants to give every loss a face and every face a voice, and photography itself has given way to photo essays, with personal accounts twice over, in images and text. She calls her midcareer retrospective “Monuments of Solidarity,” and it ends with words alone, at MoMA through September 7. Could, though, monuments overwhelm the artistry and solidarity the individual?

When White Columns presented “Monuments for the USA” some years ago, one had to expect an uneasy mix of patriotism and irony, and the group show delivered both. LaToya Ruby Frazier is interested in neither one. She accommodates many narratives and takes everything seriously. What begins as the story of black women “united in our illnesses” becomes first a town’s sickness and then a wider family. Auto workers in Ohio in 2019 include men and women, black and white, and their testimonies as well. Just past the exhibition’s exit, Frazier sings “Solidarity Forever,” the union anthem, to her own accompaniment on guitar.

This is not just about her. When Frazier began, family placed her among three generations, and their resilience stopped well short of boasting. In photos alongside her mother, they seem to share one set of eyes and lips. Yet shadows divide them, and her grandmother’s refuse, including a Pall Mall carton, litters the carpet. She was not yet thirty when she appeared among the emerging artists of “Greater New York” in 2010 and, as the family’s youngest, still coming to be. She returned in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and with “The Notion of Family” in Brooklyn, and I leave a fuller account of how much it moved me to the longer version of this review, with my report back then.

Still, things looked different from the moment she looked out and up. She could see the hospital, closed in 2010, in ruins and the view from a helicopter of a polluted river. She could see the town’s welcoming sign sponsored by a pest-control company and ads for Levis that took blue jeans and Braddock as the real America. If, as the ads read, “everybody’s work is equally important,” where are the black and women’s faces? A video in collaboration with Liz Magic Laser asks just that. It was time to head elsewhere.

In Flint Is Family, ending in 2020, families cling to their uncertain supplies of fresh water, and a mother and child leave for Mississippi. They might have needed the health-care workers in More Than Conquerors, which adds the last missing elements, photo essays. Workers pose for a picture and supply plenty of words, more than anyone is likely to read. Mounted on large steel frames, they become an installation. The health-care workers, in Baltimore, speak of inequality in opportunity for them and access to care for others. The auto workers in Ohio lament the last Chevy Cruze and what it means for them. They identify so much with their work that a worker crawls under the very last car to record its serial number.

The workers resist to the last, through their union, and Frazier shares their desperate optimism. She lays out the frames from Ohio in one long row, painted an industrial red, like an auto body run wild. “It is incumbent upon me to resist,” she says, “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.” It is getting harder, though, and the show ends with A Pilgrimage to Dolores Huerta, a migrant labor camp. The artist’s geography has left family and steel far behind. If you sense a collision in priorities between environmental degradation and job loss, Frazier is testifying to needs, not to a policy agenda.

The words of others are also her answer to the weight of the monumental. True, she is less and less vulnerable and closer and closer to a lecture, but “all I’m doing,” she says, “is showing up as a vessel.” On the Making of Steel in 2017 collaborated in its photography as well. Sandra Gould Ford, a steel worker who was losing her own job, takes up the camera. The curators, Roxana Marcoci wth Caitlin Ryan and Antoinette D. Roberts, give it an oval room under changing red light, to simulate the night sky that still overlooks it all. The overflow of words and the accompanying portraits, little more than selfies, are deadening nonetheless. Frazier has come a long way from the poignancy of the young photographer’s art, her stories, her family, and her illness.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Not all the artists in “Asian-American Abstraction” are Asian-American, but no matter. Who can tell the difference anyway?

Think I’m joking? The gallery, Hollis Taggart, asks just that. Wall text roughly midway through poses the question, and not even a checklist of works stops to answer. Take as long as you like with a challenging summer group show, through September 7. It is not the only summer group show to take American abstraction overseas and back, and I work this together with a recent report on “Americans in Paris” as a longer review and my latest upload.

Nearly fifty artists, past and present, fill both floors of the gallery for “Asian-American Abstraction” and who are they anyway? They show the influence of East Asian tradition, but also Abstract Expressionism—and there, too, you may have trouble untangling the threads. Don Ahn, for one, works with an eye to calligraphy, but with ink spatters as well. He may have you marveling at the sheer control of Chinese “Companions in Solitude” before him and, in a very different way, drip painting from Jackson Pollock. And then a second work adds a glowing yellow that not even Pollock could know. Ming Wang has her own descending black brush, but also an accordion book of pages twice “letter” size, to accommodate so much more.

Influence here runs every which way—all the more so in a room that includes Abstract Expressionists, too. It also bears text with that stubborn question. Franz Kline has his seeming calligraphy, but then so does Robert Rauschenberg in characters of his own invention. Black for Sheila Isham spirals down a red canvas as Song of the Palace, while Michael West is Drunk with Turpentine. Vivian Springford, like West (surprise!) a long-neglected woman artist, applies acrylic stains in near concentric circles. You may think of Georgia O’Keeffe or Morris Louis, but she had her first solo show in Tokyo, and she credits the influence of Walasse Ting, from Shanghai on his way to America.

If those artists looked to Chinese art, Chinese Americans had their versions of modern art as well. Ivy Wu brings almost Pop Art colors and well-defined geometry to her calligraphy, while Oonju Chan paints on open fields out of Joan Mitchell. Think, then, that you really cannot know the difference? Think again. Just to describe them is to see them as individuals. Those without a signature style can get lost along the way.

Abstract Expressionists relied heavily on their signature, like Kline’s monumental characters. Adolph Gottlieb has one of his characteristic explosions, of one symbol atop another. Sam Francis has his splotches of red, yellow, and black. They are easy enough to recognize even in relatively small works on paper. Chinese Americans, by comparison, can be more intricate or more fluid. You may pass that test after all.

Nor does it really come down to Asia and America. Postwar American artists had many influences and many that they influenced. Were they formal or gestural? Were they the heirs to Cubism, Surrealism, or something else again? Where they as American as the Hudson River School, which they admired as well? More and more, too, curators are looking beyond Abstract Expressionist New York to a global movement. Asians, say, had their share starting around 1954, in Gutai.

The question still matters, and it sets this show apart. It asks one to look beyond major works and heavy hitters. It asks, too, to well-known artists as infinitely changeable. Who would have thought of Rauschenberg as an abstract painter? He rejected all that, right? You might have to read his indecipherable letters to find out.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.