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art reviews from around new york

Nobody goes to see art there anymore. It’s too crowded. New Yorkers know the routine by now, even those among us who cannot aspire to its privileges.

I am still agonizing over the fate of East Village art from the 1980s, Williamsburg, Bushwick, and Dumbo. Thirty years after Soho galleries left for West Chelsea, I am still trying to know what to make of it. It has not kept David Zwirner from hiding to the unwary in Tribeca as simply 52 Walker.

Many galleries welcome in September with the fall art fairs, meaning mostly two things at once and two expenses. They have to do so, just to be seen. They bring with them as much as they can of the past as well. That, too, to be seen. Jordan Nassar indulges in both tiling and weaving with an eye to Byzantium, at James Cohan through October 4. I could complain, but it is nothing if not suitably traditional. When Tribeca, too, is reverential like this, you know art has gained in confidence or lost in courage.

More subtly, Tribeca has taken over the first half of a downtown gallery guide and then some. It took all of this and then some to maintain and to expand the guide after its creator died and galleries hit the road once more. A Lower East Side guide could not last on its own. But now the downtown guide has relegated the Lower East Side to its smaller, second half. Could that be why, as if to moderate the trend, shows in the guide look awfully familiar? Or could art just be settling in?

Hank Willis Thomas is acting less as a “New Black Heavy” than a heavyweight African American, at Jack Shainman through November 1, and I work this together with an earlier report this year on Jack Whitten at MoMA as a longer review and my latest upload. You may remember Thomas from a wave of artists sixteen years ago, but now his gallery has taken over an entire building of note further downtown—a weighty stone bearer of official wisdom and corruption barely a block from City Hall. Visitors take an elevator or a grand stair just to see it, feeling only the privilege of art’s inner sanctums. As for the artist, true New Yorkers can take that in stride. He, in turn, privileges them. Both by now deserve it.

Everything for Thomas is a smart twist on race, class, and history, and it may be hard to believe that his latest show is entirely recent and new. Just do let it knock you off your stride too easily or too hard. As the show’s title says, “I Am Many”—or, as a canvas has it, in white block letters, EVERYTHING. He does not quite paint everything at once of course. Starting at the entrance desk, his familiar imagery of hands sets the stage sculptural black and white. Will one nurture or betray the other?

Some work brings faces, messages, or something more elusive. Are these sculptures dangerous devices or sources of power? Other work, a stripe or a maze, present a color-field painting. It may or may not pull him back from race to supposed universals in the wake of Frank Stella and Jasper Johns, territorial boundaries and a mitred maze. Perhaps identity itself for a black male is a maze. Like the building, it pulls him into history.

I had a chance to recover a special New York, but would it come to me? Has Thomas sought safe ground in which any race can appear? Like Walt Whitman, does he contain multitudes? Does any proper artist? A flag hangs at rest in one photo, as in an old-fashioned classroom. A neon sign blinks between LOVE RULES and OVER RULES. It could still be trying to define what the choice means to Trump’s America.

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

Paul Gardère is still trying to determine his heritage. Black and white, slave and free, Haitian and American—he takes it all personally and as part of his art. He layers on images and materials, as paint and assembly. He sees it all his by rights as a student of European art and the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. Is he still part of the picture? It gives more than one meaning to a show called “Second Nature,” at Magenta Plains through October 25.

Gardère has two of the gallery’s three floor, something of a rarity. This is the kind of artist still trying to cover it all and still looking for himself. With this much color and this much realism, it should not be difficult, and he starts a long time ago. A president calling to make America great again had better think again before. The artist may fairly think that he was there all along before a poor excuse for realism took over TV. He is also more part of the landscape, which plunges into depth and soaks up the light.

Just when you thought a landscape is fully observed along with the people in it, it leaps into depth and out of scale. You may recognize it as the art of museums, with nods to both sides of the oceans—in the Baroque and the Hudson River School. A French speaker can expect to evoke French drawing, and he cites Claude Lorrain and Paul Gauguin alike as influences, continuing into Post-Impressionism. If it seems exaggerated in earth, sea, and sky, Trump himself can hardly claim so much. Just how natural is it anyway? Just how painfully unnatural was the sugar trade and slavery?

But are they paintings or scrapbooks? Just what you felt sure he had taken a new leap into collectibles, he embeds rows of photos, sometimes with the illusion of picture frames. Zach Bruder has the third floor for more twists and turns constrained objects and twisted life. You may rightly have your suspicions. Is it right to imagine a heritage this way? What if it is a heritage in slavery?

I have my doubts. It could just be the artist’s way insisting that his history belongs to him. Just when it seemed certain that Gardère had switched entirely to photography, the painted surface becomes crustier than ever. As much as a third of a canvas may run to substance, glitter, and bright red. And then the protagonist in another painting, a boy, stands full height in another landscape still. Can he ever claim it as his own?

He cannot be so easy to identify, half slave or half free. The continent does not belong firmly to the viewer, the artist, or him. Other figures, like skaters in a classic Dutch landscape, remain colorless in which a title identifies as Exotic Garden but within little growing in the snow. A schematic black woman stands naked in what might be spring. They still cannot say for sure who owns the land and when it will be great again. I am not suggesting anytime soon.

For Remy Jungerman, diversity has a deeper history than the art scene often allows. He finds in Suriname not just personal or family tradition, but also a source for abstract painting and a space between anthropology and art. I admired his work enough, though, I reviewed it as recently as 2021, at Fridman on the Bowery. Rather than start over, allow me to fill it out only slightly here and in that past review, in light of his latest work, the substance of Modernism, and the rivers that connect his life, through October 12, as a longer review and my latest upload.

Why make abstract art? One might divide painters into the material and the spiritual by their answer. Some love the material presence of the stretcher, canvas, and paint, and they want to make it inescapable for you as well. Others set aside representation and narrative for something beyond words. You might have thought you knew which to call Remy Jungerman when his 2021 show continued into the basement for a film titled Visiting Deities. Barnett Newman called a painting Vir Heroicus Sublimus, or man the sublime hero—but who needs earthly heroes, especially men, when you can live among the gods?

Think again. Jungerman could be the ultimate materialist, layering on a hard white surface of Kaolin clay and incising into it. The cuts reveal another layer still, of colored fabric. But then the filmmaker kept his beliefs to himself, too. Bonno Thoden van Velzen was still a graduate student in 1962, when he left the Netherlands for Suriname. He asked how religion for its native peoples could define or bridge their differences.

Jungerman takes his turn as an anthropologist, too. He calls a work Agida, after a drum used among the Maroons in Suriname in their music and rituals (like agita without the heartburn). He calls another as well as new new work Obeah, which encompasses justice, healing, and an entire way of life. The paintings could well be artifacts, with their parallel slits as ancient mappings or alphabets. Wall sculpture in painted wood acts as shelves for ceramics and goodness knows what else. They are the material presence of other lives.

In descending to view the film in 2021 one might have been on a dig. (The 2025 show includes a new film as well, in the backroom. It sets out on rivers.) Jungerman’s interest, though, is neither scholarly nor abstract. Born in Suriname, he has Maroon ancestry on his mother’s side. When he moved to the Netherlands to study art, he was reversing a typical history of colonialism, Latin American art, black Caribbean art, and the Afro-Caribbean diaspora.

He was recovering his roots, too, as a Dutch artist and a modernist, drawn, he explains, by three rivers—the Cotitca in Suriname, the Amstel, and the Hudson. The relief sculpture has the primary colors and rhythms of Piet Mondrian—and nothing is more important to the younger artist than rhythm. He calls the show “Brilliant Corners,” after an album by Thelonius Monk, the jazz pianist with a singularly jagged touch, and the cryptic alphabets may also suggest musical notation. No wonder Jungerman likes nothing about the Maroons more than its drumming. No wonder, too, that the fabric looks suspiciously like standard-issue plaid. So much for ancient spirits.

They look so standard issue that one could dismiss his themes as a conventional bow to politics and diversity. One might never know of them without the titles. Still, they are personal concerns, and anyway the paintings look just fine without them. Without the reference points, in fact, they might look more daring still—a rejoinder to the current fashion for blurring the lines between abstraction and representation. When it comes down to it, the division between the material and the spiritual is overrated. For both, the point of abstract art is to set aside routine stories in order to make you see.

Just this year I got to learn more about color-field painting and its continued vitality from a book by Pat Lipsky, an artist. As a postscript, those days may soon be gone, but Shara Hughes and Dana Smith, two younger painters, are still gestural, abstract, and exhilarating. It becomes up to the viewer to take the first step to permanence or illusion. A barrel of dots becomes a rehash of Pointillism while still shining brightly. Is it still fall abstraction or mere tourism? It can still claim the glow and the deception.

Is it still worth arguing over abstraction, Lipsky’s dear friend Clement Greenberg, and his legacy. Dare I call it academic? If I had to dismiss anything as academic these days, it would be the term academic painting. Surely by now art is passed that point. Surely one no longer need make excuses for simply painting. And surely these days it finds its justification less in scholarship than in the market.

Art has indeed had a time which everyone has to graduate from just the right program, not all that long ago, in fact. They have not even had to be all that good at it. Am I kidding? You may still ask to see my resumé. You never know, after all, who might be on it and why. They can only have more authority than I.

Yes, too many at the turn at the end really did have century had the right degrees, first at Cal Arts, then at Yale. The first was dismissive of what still passed as art, the second suitably ambivalent. (What would be the Ivy League be without ambivalence? I should know after Princeton.) Either group could be studying older technique, give or take the irony. Then again, either group could be joking. Hey, you never know.

In two ways at once, modern and twenty-first, an epic period of rebellion was gone. Some take too much pleasure in who they are to suit Trump fans. Others take too much pleasure in art. Abstraction has survived a long time now by trying to find a form, with conceptualism and formalism built right in. Now it is trying to find older artists who pursued it all along. Does it matter if they look halfway alike?

Maybe not always. Two artists open the fall year without hard geometry, and they make themselves at home in galleries with space for more. Hughes goes with the flow, at David Kordansky through October 11 as well. Her paints bleed into one another, for an added richness of color and contrasting color fields. Their colors come together as one. What counts as illusion is left to you.

Smith transforms fields of paint and shadow into contrasting fields, in what she calls “Ink Moon,” at Hollis Taggart through October 11 as well. She leaves, though, more devoted to the eye, breaking into a marching bands or uncertain fate. It could almost be abstraction. Contrasting colors may themselves arise from fields of light alone. You may hardly know for certain what has left you firm or dizzy. Such is fate.

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

To wrap up from last time, Ben Shahn has fallen out of favor regardless—and not just because art moved on to abstraction. Nor is it that he refused the past century.

That sketch of existentialists approaches the stark, jumbled planes and predominant reddish blue of Analytic Cubism. It just happens to take until the 1950s to appear. There is no getting around that posters are meant as propaganda. That great opening painting of Sacco and Vanzetti looks like a poster.

For one thing, he was out of step with the dominant media of his time. He disliked oil paint for its high gloss. He preferred tempera, from the Renaissance, with its soft matte colors, and he treated the thickness of gouache on an equal part with the transparency of watercolor. Just as much, he seems content with what he sees. You may be surprised at how much his painting of a handball court sticks to the photograph. In the two opening series, family members stand around facing stiffly front as in a selfie.

Of course, being told what to believe, even by someone rebelling against what others tell you to believe, can be cumulatively fatiguing. But Shahn runs the opposite danger. In his deep human sympathies and limited means, he risks not presenting a judgment. Everyone shares much the same grim look. Is that a way to convey the torment of J. Robert Oppenheimer after the bomb? Does it find humanity in the worst and guilt in everyone? Maybe, but I am not so sure.

In part, it reflects no more than Shahn’s moral sophistication and the moral complexity of his time. Like the rest of America, he had to adjust from the evils of war to the fight against evil and back again, and no one did it better. In part, though, he was just not that clear. He poses President Truman on a piano, carrying on with Thomas E. Dewey, his 1948 opponent, at the piano. Boys in power will be boys. But then Shahn thinks better of it and shifts to the Republicans alone.

What does he think of the Supreme Court? In the course of civil rights, he wanted to celebrate Brown v. Board of Education by picturing the justices. And so he does, seated side by side on the bench. They have the same blankness as the family of anarchists so long before, and they share much the same classical edifice as The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti. Detachment and ambiguity are extraordinary virtues, and Shahn had them. I could not help wondering, though, whether he had fallen into them through his limitations as an artist and his need to be serious, start to finish.

He leaves an impression all the same. His show becomes a testament to others and a newsreel of his century. It is hard to resist jumping back and forth to see it afresh. In a show whose last section is “Spiritualism and Identity,” what then has finally changed? Think of all his work as defining his identity and politics as his spiritualism. Think of his circles as expanding outward from Brooklyn to the world.

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

To pick up from last time, everything about Ben Shahn was serious, least of all The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti. No sooner had he completed that series, with twenty-three paintings, but he began another, of an Irish American labor leader convicted of a fatal bombing.

The first painting has entered the Whitney Museum and reached a wide audience. One might never know that he lived nearly forty more years. During that time, he was never close enough to Modernism. He was still making what postwar abstract art dismissed as “illustration.” Now the Jewish Museum calls for a reconsideration, as “On Nonconformity,” through October 23.

Maybe his refusal of modernity derives from his exposure to the brutality of a century. Maybe, too, it derives from the fate of an Eastern European Jew. Born in 1898 in present-day Lithuania, Ben Shahn came to New York with his family as a small child and settled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn long before its brief home to contemporary art. He had already endured plenty, but it seemed if anything to have him always looking for a home and promptly claiming it. As an adult he roamed all over with a camera, from parades, to Greenwich Village, and all the way to Alabama. He converts a photo of a handball game into a small painting that will feel like home to many a New York kid.

He returns to Judaism late in life, to set forth Ecclesiastes, the miracles of the Haggadah, or simply his appreciation of Moses Maimonides, the medieval Jewish scholar. Shahn has a gift for pairing text and imagery, pressing on one another without getting in each other’s way. It gives his retrospective a warm, handmade conclusion. He might be the artist always celebrating with a holiday or hallelujah. And maybe now I can see him that way. It might be better, though, to see him as out to reclaim art as highly serious.

Shahn kept up with his times in terms of battles to fight, but also who was fighting. He creates a frontispiece for E. E. Cummings, the poet and contributes to Edward Steichen for The Family of Man. He creates posters with iconic steel workers. A bit over half way through, in a section for cold-war anxiety, he sketches men in watercolor as The Existentialists. It looks back to a time when art, politics, and philosophy inspired one another. Think more recently of Postmodernism and deconstruction.

Existentialism has taken its licks over the years, and so has Shahn, though he still has hardly vanished. Keeping up with his times could not have been easy, for he lived in interesting times. And there he was, following every step of the way—from anarchism to the New Deal, the labor movement, world war, the Cold War, and postwar anxiety (with existentialists), and civil rights. He travels to India for Gandhi for tribute and South Africa with block type for breaking reports. He likes posters not just because they might make a difference, but also to press close to the picture plane. When he returns to Jewish subjects, you may wonder what he had left to celebrate.

The curators, Laura Katzman with Stephen Brown, never need to choose between a chronological and a thematic arrangement. With news like this, they can have both. But if there is one constant, it is people—from the handball court on Houston Street to apartheid. The existentialists are standing figures, because they are exposing themselves and taking a stand. Shahn traces the Civil Rights movement through faces, most often of victims. If it is all too serious, it is your choice to look away—and I wrap up next time with Ben Shahn’s status today.

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