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A Place to Call Home
John Haberin New York City
Julie Becker, Devin Kenny, and MOOD
Nicole Awai and Ebony G. Patterson
Think struggling artists have it bad? They could be looking for just a corner or a corner of a room in East LA. They could black women be in a cypress swamp, in prison, or in Harlem asking for self-respect while tangling with the police.
They could, in short, be Julie Becker, Devin Kenny, or the 2019 artists in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. All are on display at MoMA PS1, the last as "MOOD." They were all just looking for a place to call home, but one had to build it herself, and she never made it out alive. Two women artists born in the Caribbean raise some of the same dangers. Nicole Awai and Ebony G. Patterson find lusher vegetation, but also plenty lurking in the grass. 
Has that brought them any closer to home?
To rent or to rest
When an artist accompanies a Disney animation with text from Vladimir Nabakov, you know that she has a restless imagination. You know, too, that she has some wild mood swings, especially when her video shows a sunlit forest and the narrator reads from a novel named Despair. When Julie Becker cites as influences Stephen King and Eloise at the Plaza, she must wonder whether to flee in terror or to wander at will. And yet all she ever wanted was a place to call home. She ended up creating her own home, right in the gallery, but it was never enough. Still, she threw everything she had into it and invites visitors to explore it along with her.
Born in 1972, Becker made it to CalArts, but she never left her fear of homelessness behind. Any young artist knows the feeling, but she grew up in East LA, and at times she seemed to relish the squalor. She feared it all the same. Color photographs close in on familiar objects out of an artist's studio, not just out of affection, but also to keep the surrounding chaos at bay. Other photos stick to empty corners, distinct in their ugly interiors but one starker than the next. She might be punishing you as a child by making you stand there.
She could not let go of anything, and she called the ongoing project that includes much of her work Whole. Maybe she was reassuring herself that her psyche was not altogether in pieces. Not everything was worth collecting at that. The show includes sketches and cardboard boxes equally ready for the trash or the homeless. If Becker needed workspace even as artists go, the show's title spells out the consequence: "I Must Create a Master Piece to Pay the Rent."
She had her "master piece" at that, completed in 1996 as Researchers, Residents, A Place to Rest. Welcome home, researchers and residents, but Becker retains the right to offer or withhold the welcome. The installation opens with a sofa and reception table, topped by a fishtank without fish. You can choose the room's purpose from your needs while you are waiting thanks to signs scattered about—identifying its occupant as a concierge, a real-estate agent, or a psychiatrist. Next come rooms within a room of scale models, cigarette butts, and cheap reading lamps. A last enclave has seedy brown armchairs, a coffee maker, and no end of file folders for the artist's no end of self-imposed tasks.
The exhibition includes other models littered with whatever comes to hand. The photographs can only stand out. Still, the retrospective has its own architecture. Becker makes an intriguing contrast to Devin Kenny just down the hall, with "rootkits rootwork." As his title suggests, he cannot decide whether to seek out his roots or to watch out for an attack on his digital privacy. Together, home-grown magic and a viral infiltration serve as metaphors for gentrification, displacement, and diaspora.
Kenny's array is messier still, including real-estate signs, video games, and whatever crawled through his mind that afternoon. He converts a steel drum into a backyard grill, should he ever have a backyard—as threatening as a steel tanning bed for Nari Ward. He could learn something from Becker's humor, focus, and anxiety. Alas, she might have learned something, too, from his offering of a tight jacket for suicide prevention. She never found in life that final resting place. She killed herself in 2016.
Three lives
A 2019 Whitney Biennial consumed with youth and cultural identity had me longing for the Studio Museum in Harlem. Who better to give voice not just to African American life, but to African American lives, in the plural? And who better to give emerging artists the due and proper care, as the year's artists in residence? Would others lose that chance while it closes for yet another museum expansion? Thankfully, Harlem still has room for the program, while the end-of-term exhibition has fallen to MoMA PS1, as "MOOD." It slips into second-floor galleries more like artist studios than museum displays at that, as will "This Longing Vessel" in 2020.
Its three artists seem right at home. Last time out, one of the Studio Museum artists in residence, Julia Phillips from "We Go as They," graduated to MoMA PS1 just in time for summer. Now each has a one- or two-room space to herself, rather than sharing the Studio Museum mezzanine. And each uses that space not so much for a body of work as for a collective portrait of a place in time, each with a palpable pressure to survive. Where past participants have showcased contrasting styles and media, these showcase ways of life where community is hard to come by. Then they come together in a fourth space to see if one can still tell them apart.
Few will look for community to the swamps of Florida, and Allison Janae Hamilton translates its palm fronds into shards of metal that one had better not touch. Horse hair dripping with resin seem no less inhuman. In photographs, well-dressed little girls seem merely posed and out of place—all the more so as the camera moves and their image becomes a blur. Still, the cypress trees look lush, and the metal glints. So do vegetation and reflected light in a cascading video. Hamilton's swamp is immersive, and it could swallow up or offer comfort to black lives or you.
Prison must seem a bitter parody of community, all the more so in a black America demanding prison reform (a subject for Jamaal Peterman and "Marking Time" at MoMA PS1). Tschabalala Self speaks instead of the "prison complex," in which prisoners must eke out small advantages. She works with found objects and assemblage, like one-shot liquor bottles in a rotating display and ramen packages staked on concrete bricks. Blue plastic chairs and tables represent the site of exchange and communication under state control. She has twisted them into a circle, set vertically, as a central point for surveillance from all sides. Its shape may also refer to all-seeing eye of the state, or panopticon, for Michel Foucault after Jeremy Bentham, only set on edge.
Sable Elyse Smith describes a truly vibrant community, now as in the jazz age for James van der Zee and Roy DeCarava. Like Titus Kaphar and Mickalene Thomas, she constructs her community one bulky person at a time, in portraits. Flattened and decorative, making good use of the texture of painted flesh, painted bricks, or real rags in collage, they still have an individual flair. Smith also includes a cop with his neck twisted to fit into the picture plane, while paintings in the style of posters aimed at children bear exhortations to "make the world a better place." How far their tensions can elicit feelings deeper than pride remains to be seen.
They do come together at the end, at the risk of eliding the differences. Hamilton, after all, thinks of her shards as abstracted shop signs, while Smith has had a parody of the Hollywood sign on the High Line and a black Ferris wheel constructed from prison furniture in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. Still, they represent alternatives to stereotypical black communities. In the case of a swamp or prison, they represent people ripped apart from communities. One can head just down the hall for East LA and homelessness in the hands of Becker and Kenny. Then one can return for emerging artists finding their place as well.
Unweeded gardens
If you caught Nicole Awai on the Lower East Side and Ebony G. Patterson in Chelsea, you may have already booked a tropical vacation. Don't say they didn't warn you. Don't say, too, that they do not offer a thought-provoking alternative, a tropical vacation within the gallery, where one can hardly overlook that it is all a lie. It is visually enticing all the same, not to mention fluid in its sense of place. As Awai says with her exhibition title, she is "Envisioning the Liquid Land." Now just what land is that?
For Awai, it surely begins with her birthplace, Trinidad, and for Patterson with Kingston, Jamaica. Both can count themselves as part of a Caribbean diaspora, with a specifically racial and gendered identity. They share imagery as well, and both also appear in "Figuring the Floral" at Wave Hill. Patterson's wall reliefs look like plants, the kind that human artifice has woven into a trellis. They include dense vegetation, frogs, snakes, and often eyes. They also include colored paper, ribbons, cheap jewelry, and artificial butterflies.
Awai runs to mixed media, too, with surprises along the way. What look at first like ornate picture frames from ever so long ago have a shapeless assist from black nail polish. Works on paper have ample white space, although in one case also incorporating sculpture. Two female figures on the floor implore women in two dimensions above who may not be all that different from them. Both pairs are near mirror images. Women here can boast of their independence and multiplicity, but they then must bear responsibility.
In place of white space, Patterson has the airiness of the trellis. Up close, though, the four works become more three dimensional and encompassing—like the mix of feminism and land art in Agnes Denes. In her show's title, she asks one ". . . to dig between the cuts, beneath the leaves, below the soil. . . ." Yet digging deep has its perils. She found inspiration in a "poisonous garden" in England, and she sees herself as "trapping the viewer in untamable life." Like Hamlet, she sees her native or adopted land as "an unweeded garden that grows to seed." As that great spirit continues, "Things rank and gross in nature possess it merely."
Both artists can also claim a place in red-state America. Patterson's project began with a commission for the Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas, while Awai works in Texas as well as Brooklyn. If Patterson can then claim to be cosmopolitan, it leaves her that much more rooted in Caribbean art and the earth. And if Awai has more explicit reference points in America's racial divisions, it shows in more than just her lips. One work shows a statue with broad wings, as if taking flight. It could recall the debates over removing monuments to the Confederacy.
She returns often to houses on unstable land, like a crumbling consensus—much as a sculpted shed by Rachelle Dang, in the gallery's back room, traps dead leaves with cracked ceramic sandbags beside them. It may not make sense, though, to push their art too far, no more than to make them cheerleaders for a tropical vacation. Awai's imagery grows with acquaintance and comes with playful color coding on the side, but it may still not quite add up. Patterson, in her turn, overstates the dangers. You would hesitate to eat what grows in most gardens, nominally toxic or not. Now just whose land is yours?
Julie Becker and "MOOD" ran at MoMA PS1 through September 2, 2019, Nicole Awai at Lesley Heller through December 21, and Ebony G. Patterson at Hales through December 20.