. . . And a Mule

John Haber
in New York City

The Shed: Open Call 2023

The Queens Museum: Nine Artists

Crown Heights lives in the shadow of present-day gentrification, its former glory, poverty, and art. The Brooklyn Museum stands just blocks away. But who knew that, well before, it was the first free black community in the United States?

An artist remembers, and a video looks to this past Juneteenth, when, in celebration, skywriting traced its borders. Their five hundred acres look still more evocative in prints. One could mistake their white arc against the blue of the sky for abstract painting. Sandy Williams IV calls his installation, more modestly, 40 Acres, and it also includes a display case for the broken promises of Reconstruction—not to mention General Sherman's promise to freed slaves of forty acres and a mule. A lot of voices are talking, all at once—part of the cacophony in the 2023 "Open Call" at the Shed and, collectively, four shows with a concern for diversity in Queens. For all their pleasures, they could have one longing for the clarity and quiet of open sky.

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 with four successors to those first four shows, along with the optimism, and so do the divisions that a world's fair must overcome. So, too, does Lyle Ashton Harris, whose Shadow Works pick up in Queens where he left off at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2011—and I refer you to my review then for more.

The clamor from within

An open call should mean other voices, and the clamor of this one is welcome. Amid the ghastly luxury of Hudson Yards, it brings almost exclusively people of color, roughly half of them women. The Shed is finally learning how to use its cavernous spaces for art. It does not always have exhibitions rather than performance, apart from the art fairs, with their endless partitions and limitless display of cash. Here it sets out all but one work in a single wide-open floor, well lit and without boundaries, so that the artists really do speak to one another. Sill, as with Sandy Williams, a more confusing clamor arises from within.

Sometimes it arises from the demands on the artist, in trying to find herself. When Cathy Linh Che looks to Vietnam, she sees her parents after the fall of Saigon. Many refugees ended up in camps, where, improbable as it sounds, Francis Ford Coppola hired them as extras for Apocalypse Now. Che's video, in conjunction with Christopher Radcliff, has three channels for three sources—her parents, the movie, and a documentary recreation. The sources and channels almost never line up, adding to the din. Still, family voices speak directly to you.

More often, the clamor arises from the demands of history. Minne Atairu places a bronze figurine, after West African art, on a mound of red soil with more red circles around it. The bronze refers to the looting of antiquity by British colonists, the circles to ones that surrounded an entire community, Benin, in present-day Nigeria. Yet Atairu relies on 3D printing, and the work stands poignantly on its own. So much for history. The show has long labels for each artist, and you will need them, but you may also wish that you could throw them away.

With Atairu, the labels deepen the work. That is not always the case. One hardly needs to know more when Bryan Fernandez paints Dominican refugees at home in Massachusetts, with spacious interiors and wide streets. Now if only immigrant life were always so sunny. One hardly wants more when Jake Brush runs on about his obsession with a pet-store owner on TV. A little goes a long way.

At times the demands feel more like a homework assignment than art. Lizania Cruz supplies a weighty one at that, about American plans to invade Spanish territory in the Caribbean, with Frederick Douglass the commission's assistant secretary. A chandelier topped with orchids hangs close to the floor for Jeffrey Meris. Now if only I believed that its flowers stood for bullets and its lights for fireworks after the killing of George Floyd. An open wood frame with suggestive additions could pass for a dome by Buckminster Fuller shorn of its top. I shall just have to accept that Armando Guadalupe Cortés replicates an arena for cockfighting and masculinity in Mexico.

As so often, some of the best art leaves one uncertain how to take it, with or without words. I may never know for sure how a box of black leather, a wall of white fabric, and an empty coat rack for Calli Roche relate to death, ecdysis (or a casting off), and "the birth of the self." I shall, though, remember a figure emerging from or sinking into the blackness. I could never have known that Luis A. Gutierrez reproduces a worker's strike and a corporate massacre at United Fruit nearly one hundred years ago. After all, the screenprints bathed in paint attest to forgetting. And yet the three rows of unstretched canvas will catch anyone's eye from anywhere in the room.

Cold and light

The Queens Museum will always have its building and its memories—the New York City pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair, with the marvelous scale model of the city inside. Yet it would be only a pale reminder of past glories without art. On a cold winter's day in midweek, the fair's Unisphere right out front had no one to appreciate it, and water did not run in the pool beneath. The tennis center from the U.S. Open stood towering and empty just a glance away, and the walk to the subway through Flushing Meadow Park felt lonely and bleak. Grand Central Parkway running past the museum's entrance seemed to cut it off once and for all from the Latin American neighbors that it so often celebrates in its art, but bundle up. With four shows, the museum welcomes emerging artists and keeps things light.

There are worse things than art, especially in a museum, and these four seemed determined to stay optimistic. That is not exactly a compliment, but it beats the winter blues. The curved wall facing the exhibition space always has its charms. Who would not want a new mural on that scale every few months? Still, most often, one can easily ignore it on the way to the model city, with its spare curves in black and white. Not this time.

Caroline Kent announces her modesty along with her ambitions in its title, A short play about watching shadows move across the room. Still, those shadows are colorful, and they almost dance. They are also in high relief, carrying them into the space of the museum, and Kent claims to draw on floor plans for the site as well. I could not see a design, but its lightness against a black background does come as a relief. It also segues easily into more art that takes off from the wall.

sonia louise davis is anything but confrontational, much like her title, to reverberate tenderly. And she means "reverberate" seriously. She considers her free-form sculpture musical instruments, her "soundings." The rest leaves the center of the room empty, as sound must, while engaging sight and touch. It includes slim curved neon lights in primary colors and paintings of densely packed black and colored threads. They seem less the fashionable painting in fabric than abstract art in the process of taking shape.

What could be more welcoming and, to me, less welcome than dog imagery? Drawings by Emilie L. Gossiaux depict several dogs dancing amid flowers, but she has a decent excuse. This is, after all, a museum in a park, and the dogs are her guide dog, London. Wall pieces run to trees in epoxy and paint, with leaves but no branches, while versions of London on its hind legs circle a maypole littered with artificial flowers. The fifteen-foot pole, she explains, takes off from her cane as vision impaired at three times its size. Put that down to round-off error rather than an eight-foot-tall artist—and to the pleasure of the dance.

A bartender is in the business of welcoming, but Aki Sasamoto (who has appeared both in "Greater New York" at MoMA PS1 and a Whitney Biennial) has a more urgent purpose, too, in Point Reflection. On video, paring and assembling her ingredients, she could be tending bar or delivering a science lecture, and the soundtrack tells of tornados. Her title sounds serious, too—a reference to point symmetry, or elements at opposite ends of a line drawn through a point. In practice, though, she is symmetry breaking, with snail shells scuttling across tables and whisky tumblers blown about fishbowls, both thanks to air. Large metal pipes, roughly the height of adults and children, could stand for museum infrastructure or museum visitors. Think of all four exhibitions as less the confluence of meteorology and choreography than relief from the cold winter air.

Peace, art, and understanding

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 Kent makes the most of it. She still mixes painted shapes with relief elements against black. 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.

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.

jhaber@haberarts.com

"Open Call 2023" ran at The Shed through January 21, 2024. sonia louise davis, Emilie L. Gossiaux, and Aki Sasamoto ran at the Queens Museum through April 7, Lyle Ashton Harris through September 22, and Caroline Kent through December 29. Cas Holman, Cameron A. Granger, Catalina Schliebener Muñoz, and Nsenga Knight ran in Queens through January 19, 2025. Related reviews take up "Open Call 2021" and the pointless extravagance of Hudson Yards.