haberarts.com
art reviews from around new york

Official notice: you can become an outsider artist without ever venturing outside. Plenty of artists have, but not Anthony Dominguez on the cold streets of New York. Only now is he receiving a less chilly reception not so very far from where he once lived, at Andrew Edlin through April 6.

Outsider artists have often been insiders in everything but their art. Many have worked diligently within a community, like the Gee’s Bend quilters, and folk art in portraits has become an emblem of early American art. Yet a step outside the art world was never enough for Dominguez. He took to the streets for over twenty years until his death in 2014, and his art does nothing to disguise the costs. For him, even a cat begs to cat-sit for pay. Baby, it’s cold outside.

Some outsider artists have been trapped inside with their madness, in an institution or in their head. And there is no getting away from the madness of his decision. Others artists have grown up in an artistic family, in his case with a commercial artist for a father, or dropped out after a few courses in art and headed for New York. Not everyone, though, abandoned an East Village apartment at the very depth of East Village malaise and the very peak of East Village art. Dominguez had to be ingenious just to survive, making art from whatever scraps he could find. Not surprisingly, he never made it to his mid-fifties.

Not that he cared all that much about the label outsider art, and he had one dealer and then another. Without them, his work could not have survived, although both galleries passed away as quickly as he. Yet he valued nothing so much as freedom, and nothing less than homelessness would do. One can see it in the show’s very first work, where Lady Liberty in jail comforts a fellow prisoner. “What are you in for?” “Breathing.”

It is the closest Dominguez comes to hectoring. Uncle Sam and a cop with a dollar sign for a head parade right by, while others behind bars are either catching what sleep they can or dropping like flies. Once back on the street, though, his bitterness melts away. A comfortable jogger is just part of the pageantry, along with a man rich enough to toss a bill into one trash can, waste paper into another. In time, he found religion, but giant insects appear more often than a savior. Text within paintings accepts everything he saw, like one that gives the show its title, “Kindness Cruelty Continuum.”

The gallery pairs it with a second show for writing found on the subways, in fake ads, doctored posters, and handwritten rants. Are they witty, tedious, or hateful? All of the above, and Kenneth Goldsmith, who collected them along with Harley Spiller, gives them a name from his poetry, “Are You Free on Saturday from 4–7 PM?” The words look suspiciously like an invitation to his opening, with tabs at bottom for your RSVP. Like Dominguez, Goldsmith would welcome anyone who can make it before 7. I just hate to think whether they would shut up.

Those scraps of raw prose underscore the sophistication of white on black for Dominguez. He brings totemic patterns to large works, in his paint’s chalk-like line on black, and a delicate texture to decals pricked with bleach. He also brings color and the look of traditional samplers to songs after teaching himself to write music. Even the street scenes stop short of cartoons, although one might as well call them a graphic novel. Yet he would still rather be alone. As one lyric begins, “Company loves misery.”

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

A chill wind blows through the art of Charisse Pearlina Weston, but a powerful one. All three of this year’s artists in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem feel the chill in their own lives, and all three look for shelter from the storm.

Jeffrey Meris goes so far as to include body casts of himself and his mother, because attachments matter, and so does the search for identity. Devin N. Morris paints an ordinary black kid on an ordinary city street, mounted above a chest of drawers. He even mounts a door right on the wall. Welcome home.

For all that, they know displacement, even as their art has found a home, through April 8. For the fifth year, MoMA PS1 wraps up the residency with an exhibition while the Studio Museum is closed for expansion and renovation. Meris was born that much further away, in Haiti, but he is not, so far, looking back. He adds warmth and color to his paintings with magazine clips that look suitably commercial and American. Never mind that they include photos of red blood cells, already ominous enough. They must be so for him, who has a compromised immune system.

Lest you doubt it, he needs crutches to walk, and a sphere of crutches pointing out hangs from the ceiling at the center of the room, like a Death Star. He also paints with cuts into roofing materials, which themselves provide shelter while exposed to the elements. Those two body casts, both busts, fall well short of motherly love. They look badly damaged in their unpalatable white resin. Come to think of it, Morris hangs his door too high on a wall to offer access, and it leads nowhere. Another landscape seems about to be swamped by a tidal wave, and enormous eyes look out a window to spy on you.

It is all the give and take of survival and hope. Morris bathes his scenes in sunlight, and his assemblage moves easily from the city into nature. He paints young people beside a tree and on the grass, resting or reading, like his version of Luncheon on the Grass without the nudity and provocation. He also adapts the materials of home to nature. A chair leg becomes a branch, and scraps of paper become the trees of a young forest, where junk like key chains scatters color on the ground. More paper twigs serve as a shawl or the cape of a superhero.

Charisse Pearlina Weston sticks to abstraction where, so long after Minimalism, you can expect a chill. Paintings stick to black and white or to white and a pale, icy green. The colors move across the image like sudden blasts, and she incorporates texturing so that the blasts seem to have shattered. Sculpture runs to heavier but still vulnerable materials. Glass breaks off awkwardly, etched with impenetrable text, and rolled lead might have curled up a moment before. The glass and steel give weight to and threaten one another.

Could they also take the shape of windows? One can make out curtains, peeling back but without a view inside. Weston cites a public program that sought to relieve the decay of the South Bronx and Harlem—but not by doing more to keep housing functional or to provide amenities. How about a few more windows with nicer curtains and potted plants? I cannot take “And Ever an Edge” as this year’s exhibition title and its poetic diction all that seriously, but all three artists do have an edge. They will just have to call it the edge of home.

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

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 through April 7, the museum welcomes emerging artists all the same and to keep things light—and I work this together with a recent report on the clamor and cacophony of “Open Call 2023” at the Shed as a longer review and my latest upload.

Besides, 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.

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

Is blackness invisible? Maybe literally so, and maybe so for African Americans everywhere who ask to become fully visible to white eyes.

The twenty-eight artists in “Going Dark” demand to be seen—not as targets for the police, but as individuals with human needs. They demand to be seen as artists, too, shaping what it means to be an individual. Much the same demand underlies the electrifying opening of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as well, and several here take its title for theirs. Still, the show’s title continues, this is “The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility,” and every one of them contributes to the darkness. Just how they seek invisibility is more than half the point. That alone keeps the show compelling the full length of the ramp, at the Guggenheim through April 7.

Not all its voices are black. Farah Al Qasimi, say, is from Abu Dhabi, but for her, too, It’s Not Easy Being Seen. The curators, Ashley James with Faith Hunter, do not make plain just when race informs their choices. They seek only invisibility—as sought, imposed, a form of inquiry, or a matter of perception. Each has its own tier of the ramp, although the art keeps pointing to all four. Still, this could be the perfect survey of currents in African American art. It leaves out most fashionable figure painting and myth making, but such is the price of going dark.

To be sure, black Americans are seen more than enough, as stereotypes and objects of fear. Blackness itself can become visible, as a barrier or as an invitation to find comfort in the dark. Stacy Lynn Waddell and Tariku Shiferaw take that as their subject in the galleries, and so do the artists here. Invisible Man for Kerry James Marshall reduces to white teeth and white eyes—somewhere between a stage villain and a minstrel show. Faith Ringgold leans for hers on the flat, mute colors of African masks. The Invisible Man series for Ming Smith leaves its actors out on the streets, metal gates down for the night and covered with graffiti.

Still, Marshall is never less than amused, and Ringgold’s faces acquire warmth and individuality as both men and women. Smith’s photos build a larger portrait of Harlem, from children at play to adults finding sacred ground, but still at risk and alone. Sandra Mujinga’s Spectral Keepers are at once larger than life and forever hidden. Nine feet tall, they tower over the viewer in loose green pants and green hoods. They might almost be emitting a green light from within. And they are not the show’s last hoodies.

Kevin Beasley dips his sweats in resin as sculpture, while photos by John Edmonds lend his accents of sharp color, and David Hammons takes an entire bay for a single hood. With her hoods, prints by Carrie Mae Weems, are just Repeating the Obvious. Hiding behind clothes may take other forms as well, in Camouflage Waves for Mujinga and camouflage colors for Joiri Minaya. Doris Salcedo needs only needles and thread, while Rebecca Belmore needs only hair. Belmore’s shrouded figure kneels, in prayer or despair. It has straight black hair, not dreadlocks, but then the hair is synthetic.

Of course, the easiest way to hide behind a photograph or video is in the processing. A blue light hides Chris Ofili, leaving only swirls like loose curtains. Glenn Ligon prints each of his fifty self-portraits in a different off-kilter color. Yet Smith blurs her central figures with nothing more than her command of lighting, while prints by Stephanie Syjuco take on the rhythms of her shutter release. Sondra Perry speeds things up instead. A dancer’s uncanny blur contrasts with the stasis of an unfinished Sheetrock wall.

At the same time, they gain in presence. That, after all, is the show’s central demand. There is no escaping faces emerging from the darkness in close-up from Lorna Simpson, Ellen Gallagher, and Titus Kaphar. There is no escaping, too, the materials—Kaphar’s asphalt paper, Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s leather (as in kinky sex), WangShui’s oil on aluminum, or Tomashi Jackson’s marble dust on PVC, even when their images fade to black. Photos may also show only backs, paired with the sitter’s front for Lyle Ashton Harris. Your phone and the FBI may not ditch face recognition anytime soon, but these backs are personal and real.

Charles White enters as a kind of father figure, although his hard-edged portraits in a sea of swirls look decidedly old-fashioned. History itself takes a back seat, apart from dark landscapes by Dawoud Bey, including the site of John Brown’s tannery. One bit of history, though, could sum up the vital paradox of the show’s demands. The 1995 Million Man March cried out for dignity, even as an individual had to surrender to a million. Ligon depicts it in a diptych that leaves the other half black, and Hank Willis Thomas calls for One Million Second Chances in images of the nation’s flag and Capitol with all else fading into white. When Sable Elyse Smith counts the days and nights for prisoners, she could be counting out America for all.

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

Has Marta Minujín gone soft? Don’t count on it, not for an artist who brings a creature to New York so large and colorful that the half-costumed, half-naked regulars in Times Square cannot begin to compete, not even for your selfies. There is no getting around it, although you can comfortably settle in below and look around. You never know what you will see.

Entering her eighties, Minujín is still raising her voice—about book burnings, dictatorship, sexual norms, and such lesser details as the pandemic. She means her retrospective at the Jewish Museum as at once a battle cry and a celebration, much like its title, “Arte! Arte! Arte!” It ranges from painting and sculpture in bronze to torn mattresses, installation, and video. Still, it opens, like her approach to Times Square, with soft sculpture and what I took for a smile. You can see it through glass doors well before you enter. It may be whimsical or unnerving, but it is still an invitation, through March 31—and I bring this together with earlier reports on artists who instead present obstacles to admission as a longer review and my latest upload.

Born to Russian Jews in Buenos Aires, Minujín had a conventional arts education and started her career conventionally enough, but then late modern convention called for destroying painting as we know it and casting aside its materials. She got to work with Albert Greco, one of the country’s leading artists, and adopted his thick surface, dark palette, and sobriety, but in lacquer, pigment, and glue. Soon, though, she lightens up, in busy abstraction with bright colors and a touch of Surrealism. Let the party begin. This was the 1960s, when mayhem and a party had to include free love. She made her first soft sculpture in 1963 from, sure enough, a mattress.

Her sculpture in Times Square, for the full show’s first week or so, is a return to her roots—or maybe rootlessness. She has lived in Central Park as well as Argentina and Washington, D.C. Her New Museum installation took a full floor for its many passages, enough to disorient anyone. Her retrospective, her first in New York, has an immersive room as well. If Yayoi Kusama can have people lining up around the block for her vacuous “infinity rooms,” surely Minujín deserves the same. To my mind a soul mate, Pipilotti Rist, had two Chelsea galleries during the run, Hauser & Wirth through January 13 and Luhring Augustine through February 3, to pour her body out.

Soft sculpture returns to Minujín’s roots in other ways as well. It connects to everything that she has done, however hard and firm. First, it supplies the motifs and materials. Its broad stripes blend, well, seamlessly into the show’s second series, for all-over painting in collage. There she cuts the strips from mattresses, without a hint of folk art or quilting. As one title has it, it is her Soliloquy of Mixed Emotions.

Second, it relates art to the body, hers or yours. She returned to painting in 1975 for Frozen Sex. A self-portrait is almost Cubism, but in shades of pink. Third, it verges on performance, like her stay in the park, and hers began with “happenings” (or, as she sometimes had it, “kidnappenings”), in conjunction with Alan Kaprow and Robert Rauschenberg, who shared her interest in collaboration and dance. Of course, she kept her sense of humor and, like the soft sculpture, invited one in. Opening events for Frozen Sex, at what is today the Americas Society, included a strip tease.

Last, it is political. Minujín could have better timing, but she moved back home in 1975, just in time for a military coup, and she responded with “Toppled Monuments.” Franz Kafka’s America greets immigrants with only a sword in place of the torch in the Statue of Liberty. Her Liberty is merely lying down, perhaps for a well-earned rest. Where there is destruction, there must also be building, and she created an entire Parthenon of Books— in Buenos Aires and again in Germany, on the site of Nazi book burnings. In photos from 1985, she and Andy Warhol trade ears of corn in payment for, they can only imagine, the Latin American debt.

Not that all is despair. She also built a Tower of Babel of books, and she likes the babble. She calls a strip collage Endemic, War, and 1000 Other Things. She could be barely able to grasp the horrors, but she is still joking. She is also communicating. You could step right into her old-fashioned phone booth, or Minuphone, back in 1969 and place a call. It turned out psychedelic sounds and colors, but you could still come with her afterward to Soft Gallery for a drink.

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

Raymond Saunders casts a long shadow. He cannot help it, not in a two-gallery show where the shadows will not stop coming, all but decimating the walls. Its layers keep coming, too, in oil, graphite, enamel, oil pastel, and plenty of pasted paper.

Unlike Anthony Dominguez, he is anything but an outsider, except perhaps to New York. Yet he, too, found his art waiting for him on the street. For him, that meant not its hidden corners and subterranean passages, but on boarded-up buildings and in the air. And I bring this together my report on Dominguez as a longer review and my latest upload.

For Saunders the details accumulate, in years of found objects, frail scraps, and paint—to the point that one can neither put a name on the shadows nor dismiss them. They may lurk in the background, as shadows in the shadows, or seemingly leap right off the canvas, aiming for you. Should you start in Tribeca, a shadowy figure does both just as you come in, at Andrew Kreps through March 30. You may find yourself poring over the clues, there and at David Zwirner in Chelsea through April 6, to see where they lead. If you never do find out, try not to blame yourself. That first shadow is watching.

Black may be his favorite color, but it is not his only color. That figure’s bright yellow face and shock of yellow hair would be hard to overlook even if the rest of his body were not hunched within a loose black coat. But then the yellow continues unbroken behind him—and the blackness returns behind that. Saunders loves reversing expectations, including the expectation that the ground must be white. He must like, too, undermining the distinction between painted image and ground. Works hang on the wall and serve as walls themselves.

Black may function as a ground for fields of color, like that yellow or a tart reddish pink. It may serve, too, as a playground for his impulses, in chalk scrawl. Numbers in that shadowy first painting run horizontally, as if to count the seconds, while a tribute to Charlie Parker reads Bird above a poignantly small photo. Approaching ninety, Saunders is old enough to remember when chalkboards, meaning blackboards, were black. Above all, a painted surface may serve for whatever he cares to find, whether advertisements or warnings. He calls the show “Post No Bills,” after a 1968 painting and the image it contains, but then he has no qualms about breaking the rules, including his own.

The show has more room to run through his violations in Chelsea. His methods suggest graffiti, but he is defacing only himself. It returns him to the streets, and his quotations are decidedly urban. Like black, they also allude to his status as an African American. While the LA artist has had little exposure in New York, he is at home enough to borrow a delightfully nasty front page from the city’s once-stellar alternatively weekly, The Village Voice. You may have forgotten whatever scandal, but he has not.

The references can be inscrutable, especially compared to the text art and political art of his time. You may dismiss his collage on one visit as a waste of good waste, see it on another as dazzling. (I did the first on catching him in LA art at MoMA PS1 in 2013, and look now.) Still, he will always have a firm reference point in the shadows and himself. An artist’s palette is just an illusion, but brushes are real enough, as if painting themselves. They are also black.

His favorite or not, “Black Is a Color,” as his 1967 manifesto has it. I can only wish that a formalist like Ad Reinhardt had adopted it as a motto, but Reinhardt died two years before. Like a Minimalist himself, Saunders works with monochrome and the space as well. He covers some walls in his tar-like black. He cloaks others in a caked white that is already coming off the wall. Naturally the cracks are black.

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