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art reviews from around new york

Niki de Saint Phalle may have been the most child-friendly artist ever. She filled parks and playgrounds with the shapes of real and fantastic animals. Rather than a museum sculpture garden, she preferred Central Park’s Conservatory Garden, where she installed her sculpture and handed out balloons to the kids.

Her MoMA PS1 retrospective is an enormous lost opportunity, especially given the enormous clout of the Museum of Modern Art. The architect of parks and playgrounds dared you to come out to play. So why not recreate an installation in a New York park? One must see her instead through sculpture and documentation. Smart critics have raved, but could they rely just as much on vivid memories? You will have to trust to her gift for pandering to while provoking you.

When she set to work on the fight against AIDS, her posters speak of boyfriends and condoms, but the illustrations look awfully innocent for those in need of either one. She called a long-running series in fiberglass her Nanas, or girls. Just how suitable, though, were they for children? Could she have led directly to the childishness of artists like KAWS?

At MoMA PS1, through September 6, you might be hard pressed to find work suitable for adults, but look again. Saint Phalle started out with Tirs, or shootings, which had her taking a rifle to her art, releasing paint spatters as its blood. Her retrospective, like her garden, centers on a huge sculpture with exaggerated “tits and ass,” and the playground slide is the tongue of a dragon. Nanas means girls only as demeaning slang for attractive young women—and Emile Zola’s fictional Nana grew up to become a whore. Her Golem for Jerusalem takes its name from a demon endowed with human life, and critics worried that it would teach aggression. She funded it all by merchandising at that, another unfortunate trend in contemporary art, with a line of perfume.

A bemused headline spoke for the proper and pious: qui a autorizé cette “horror”? I wish I could take credit for having authorized the horror, but I was only a child myself, and anyway I worry more about the grownups in the room. I have the same feeling faced with such bad girls and bad boys in contemporary art as Paul McCarthy, Jeff Koons, and Mike Kelley. While MoMA PS1 has a soft spot for overcrowded shows, the two hundred works reflect an artist with little patience for restraint, and they come padded with no end of photos and studies. I breezed through in record time. She often collaborated with her second husband, Jean Tinguely, whose kinetic structure self-destructed for an eager audience at the Museum of Modern Art (or at least started to do so until the Fire Department showed up), and memories of her work may self-destruct even faster.

For all that, Saint Phalle combined the genuinely entertaining with a dark side worth remembering. She had her shootings, her dragons, and her work in the face of AIDS. She also had demons of her own. Born in 1930, the French girl grew up on the Upper East Side of New York, where she went to a privileged school and fell in love with Central Park. Yet she had her horrors, too, including child abuse. The artist who proclaimed that la mort n’existe pas (or death does not exist) spent her adult life in agony, from arthritis and worse.

No wonder she sought relief in the hopes of children. She also sought relief in the mystical, like a tarot deck of her own devising. “Order and chaos,” she proclaimed, “are united in the eternal.” Most of all, she sought relief in obsessive creation. She got the idea for her Tarot Garden after enjoying the excess of a cathedral by Antoni Gaudi in Barcelona, and its five acres found a home at last in Tuscany in 1998. And then she kept extending it, with a monumental figure here and a maze there, until her death in 2002.

The curators, Ruba Katrib with Josephine Graf, make no bones about the pain. They include a gilded altar to Jesus, snakes, bears, and bats. They argue, too, for Saint Phalle’s place on the cutting edge. She collaborated with Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, and John Cage. Like Tinguely and Yves Klein, she joined France’s Nouveau Realisme. If she departs from them all, she wished merely to make the mix more unruly.

There is no getting around the childish and the commercial in this Paradis Fantastique. The show comes just as KAWS, another merchandiser who harps on cartoons, has his run at the Brooklyn Museum. Still, we were all children once, and Saint Phalle’s mysticism came wrapped up in her feminism. She wrote letters to Clarice, her favorite Nana, and one enters an installation through a female crotch in order, she reasoned, to return to the womb. She asked only, she said, that “you give me a few seconds of your eternity.” Now if only that were enough.

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

To pick up from last time, when New York summer sculpture takes to the parks, it takes art back to nature, right? Perhaps, but then it spotlights the parks themselves as useful and as works of art.

“Re:Growth” spans nearly five miles of Riverside Park—from its wide-open southern extension to the twists, turns, foliage, and facilities north of 72nd Street. Curated by Karin Bravin of BravinLee Programs, it is not always up to competition from its surroundings. It does, though, ask just how hospitable nature and humanity are to one another. That “Re:” brings hope of rebirth and reflection, but only after a multitude of human sins, through September 13.

Much of “Re:Growth” is hard to locate, even with an online map. Works merge with their setting on both sides of the West Side Highway, along the Hudson River and along Riverside Drive. They take repeated crossings under the highway—those, too, a challenge to locate and a still greater challenge to climb or descend. Gaps between works can run to over a mile in the park’s barren north end. A more concentrated siting would have paid off big time. All I can say is that I did my level best.

Still, the difficulty points to the show’s ambition, even beyond its size. Besides sculpture, it has room for banners along a pier by Dahlia Elsayed and paintings by Rico Gatson, running the length of a ball field in Pan-African colors. Shuli Sadé brings art directly to your phone, as Upstream Downstream—although you may wonder why you walked so far for augmented reality. (And here you thought you could still work from home.) Joiri Minaya leaves her mummified body here and there, in photos of performance. Freestanding sculpture comes as a relief, like ancient “Rhoman” statues as imagined by Joshua Goode or honeycombed steel by DeWitt Godfrey, not least because you can see it from a distance.

Others stick to growth, like glitzy pretend spores by Sui Park and prints of leaves on steel by Letha Wilson. Wendy Letven means her curves to evoke dappled light and swirling winds. Marry Mattingly fronts a “reading room” with actual plants, the better for reading about nature. But then nature may have you wishing for shelter. Glen Wilson prints photos of mail carriers on the fence of an abandoned ballfield#8212;because they keep at it, in rain, sleet, snow, or dark of night. And humanity plays some nasty tricks on nature in return.

Niki Lederer constructs her petite “snow squall” and “swailing” (meaning low-lying wetlands) from plastic bottles, while Jean Shin covers rocks with bottle caps (naturally enough, from Mountain Dew), like moss but more glittery and gleaming. Toxic waste may have a place after all. Yet the greatest artifice may be the easiest to pass unseen. Artificial flowers from Valerie Hegarty appear to tumble out of a Dutch still life and onto the floor of a park building. Its gated stone could belong to a fortress or a prison. Her “nature morte” could be all the deader and darker for it—or all the more unruly and alive.

Art in Brooklyn Bridge Park heads north to Dumbo—the part that, barely a decade ago, was the park and its home for sculpture. Claudia Wieser tiles her five plinths and pedestals with geometric patterns, glimpses of New York and a family vacation, and fragments of Greek and Roman Sculpture. It may speak more to longing than to coherence, at the foot of Washington Street through next April 17, but it is only her Rehearsal. Nothing at all made it this summer to the Park Avenue median strip, but Yayoi Kusama brings her hall of mirrors to the New York Botanical Gardens, along with her cute-and-cuddly cohort of polka dot plants and animals, through October 31. It would be heartless not to smile and foolish to say more. But then one might say the same for summer sculpture in New York.

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They call it “sugar sands.” To pick up from last time on 2021 New York summer sculpture, the Pine Barrens are that paradox, a sandy ecosystem and a barrens that is not altogether barren.

It is admired and undeveloped, in part because so little will grow there. It may be the best thing the northeast corridor has going, so close to New York and Philadelphia, and yet here, too, trees are dying as humanity’s footprint intensifies the salty, acidic habitat. Maya Lin has hauled forty-nine of them from New Jersey to Madison Square Park, where the innocent eye might not know that they are dead. A site for summer grass and summer sculpture has become her Ghost Forest, through November 14.

They arrived in May, well in time for summer—not pines, but Atlantic white cedars. They stood out from their gnarly neighbors only by their slim, pale trunks and few remaining bare branches. Before their departure, as leaves fall, it may be other trees that have one seeing ghosts. And their impact depends on how little Lin has done, from an artist who knows when to hold back. She made her name as still a student with the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, where she declined to erect a statue or a column. Her transformations of a trolley repair shop into SculptureCenter and a workshop into the Museum of Chinese in America left basement tunnels and well enough alone.

Lin’s small-m minimalism brings out the cost to a nature preserve of increasingly salty sands. It may serve the cause better than her past work on the theme of climate change—as less allusive, but also less arty. It casts a cold eye over the old advice to plant a tree. She does so, forty-nine times over, and it will not bring a single one to life. The square was barren enough in the 1970s, when it mostly housed the homeless. Only summer will tell whether the work will flourish enough.

Melvin Edwards calls his contribution to City Hall Park “Brighter Days,” through November 28. Edwards is still flourishing at age eighty-four. (Not that he can top Carmen Herrera, who had the park at over a hundred for New York summer sculpture in 2019.) He is also about as far from tributes to unspoiled nature as art can get. In much of his sculpture, rough edges and rust colors call attention to his work as a welder. Quite as much as Minimalism, he also points to the thing itself and its weight.

Here those characteristics are gone. Call it a loss, but it gives Edwards his rightful place in modern sculpture. Even in a show about black power at the Brooklyn Museum, he insisted on an African American’s presence in abstract art. Here four works have the burnished finish of David Smith, with disks and other geometric shapes like Smith’s sculpture at Storm King Art Center as well. A friend mistook the work for Smith’s—and her husband was an African American painter, Eugene J. Martin. But then Smith had worked as a welder in industry, too.

Edwards does have a political side, with shapes like manacles for a chain gang or a slave. Here the silvery work enlarges those shapes while abstracting them away—with one as Song of the Broken Chains. A fifth sculpture suspends slim chains from red ovals on the ground, and the last could almost rock back and forth, too, but in massive iron brown. They also play well with the site. The work on pedestals follows the central walkway, while the rockers rest on grass. No six works can serve as a retrospective, but they are enough to show once again that there is no greater living sculptor.

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Relish the irony that sound art shares parkland with a drone, but this drone is not a dull hum. A windowless white airplane seems to swoop down on Tenth Avenue, heading, quite possibly, for you.

New York Summer sculpture is like that, coming from seemingly out of nowhere to enliven the long, lazy months of a noisy, hyperactive city. It took me to Socrates Sculpture Park, where Guadalupe Maravilla and his Mexican grandparents are stirring the pot, and to the High Line for the drone by Sam Durant and the “Musical Brain.” It took me to Madison Square Park, where Maya Lin has seen the ghost of the Pine Barrens, and to City Hall Park, where Melvin Edwards rediscovers Modernism and refuses an African American’s chains. It took me to Riverside Park for five miles of art, in “Re:Growth,” and to the New York Botanical Gardens for Yayoi Kusama. It took me to the Met’s rooftop bar, where the pandemic and the Alex Da Corte leave no room for grown-ups or a drink, and I shall cover them all in posts this week. But then who needs an excuse to explore New York in summer?

Sam Durant is only the second to command the “spur” of the High Line crossing Tenth Avenue, after Simone Leigh. His airplane gains as art from its setting and sleek exterior, through next March, but you still have to be sufficiently right-thinking to see a drone as ominous rather than a pricy child’s toy. Also in the elevated park, a tree sprouts from an upside-down smokestack for Ibrahim Mahama, as an industrial neighborhood’s very own Lady Liberty, while Hannah Levy leaves a Retainer—and she does not mean the restraining action of the surveillance state. Who needs braces, when one can have polished marble like this for teeth? By comparison, a show of sound art is a recipe for invisibility, for its appeal is not to the eye. All the more so amid the sounds of the great outdoors, with “The Musical Brain.”

Naama Tsabar hopes to catch the eye with a monumental metronome, David Horvitz with former railway spikes for bells, and Mai-Thu Perret with chimes in the shape of vital organs. Raúl de Nieves models a glitzy, gaudy, life-size musical performer for its, er, “magical splendor,” Rebecca Belmore and Osvaldo Yero a mythical siren luring you to your fate, while Guillermo Galindo demands attention for a treacherous border crossing, with a water drum shot full of holes as his Fountain of Tears. But then sound art goes silent, and magic or splendor is hard to find. Antonio Vega Macotela records silence, thirty seconds of it, on a disk that looks already obsolete. You may find yourself attending more to sound—not of art, but of extravagant real estate under construction. Vivian Caccuri directs the eye to just that, covering his Portuguese “baile funk sound system” (a throbbing bass line to you) with reflective glass.

When Paul Ramírez Jonas called his work in Socrates Sculpture Park last year Eternal Flame, little did he know. He meant it as a contribution to “Monuments Now” and to the park itself—with a classical column housing BBQ pits. He also expected it to be gone in March, and here it is, not eternal, but kept on for those glorious summer days on the Queens waterfront. A sign for “BBQ Rules” takes on new meaning. It does rule, and so does the community. The monument also helps fill out this year’s summer sculpture, by Guadalupe Maravilla, who takes the long view, too.

Where Ramírez Jonas offers a monument to his neighbors, Maravilla remembers his ancestors. He calls his work “Planeta Abuelx,” with an eye to Mother Earth but looking past anyone’s mother to his Mexican grandparents, ending in a woke gender-neutral X. They appear on the Broadway Billboard above the park’s entrance, stirring a pot, as hands bring a pencil and a lightning bolt—perhaps the hands of the artist. He calls an abstract drawing on the grass his Tripa Chuca (or “rotting guts”), but rest assured: its silvery white will not lend itself to grilling.

The show’s centerpiece may look unappetizing, too, and its mythic aspirations a bit much as well. Coral inspires its crusty metal forms, but for him coral is no more than natural growth, and the forms include the Three Sisters of corn, squash, and beans. (They appear on the billboard, too.) If the work, Disease Throwers, sounds threatening itself, Maravilla is a cancer survivor, and he means those healing plants to throw disease to the winds. Twin gongs bring healing sounds, and one can sit on his drawing, within a shining circle of metal rope, for a sound bath. Had the three sisters in Macbeth been so comforting, Macbeth would have lived to a ripe old age as a noble lord.

Doors by Sam Moyer across from the Plaza Hotel, through September 12, may seem impenetrable, given their weight. Yet they open onto the imagination and the city, through September 12. He lends material quarried from New York itself a painter’s impasto, much as at Sean Kelly through this past April 24. In front of Rockefeller Center, succeeded by an even more hideous contribution by KAWS, Sanford Biggers wants his art to be weightier still. An enthroned figure with stereotypical African features and of uncertain sex bears the gilded torch of Lady Liberty rather than a scepter, as Oracle. At nearly three stories tall, it might feel every right to mock the artist’s pretensions and my derision.

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To wrap up a late-summer week of catch-up posts, when I think of art today, I think anything but minimal. Sure, galleries have shut the doors since the pandemic, although whole neighborhoods had already come and gone. Still, enough remain in the material world and online to challenge anyone to keep up.

Art itself speaks of eclecticism and excess. Sticking to one style already marks you as blind to the diversity of peoples and cultures—or so it often seems. If the same time artists have to leave their signature just to stand out in a crowded market, that, too, takes dancing around. Who wants to be just another painter or sculptor, mired in imitations of the past? For all that postmodern dance, though, late modern art refuses to let go, in and out of quotation marks. Roland Gebhardt and Carl D’Alvia find a less impersonal side to Minimalism and its rigor, and I bring this together with a report earlier this summer on D’Alvia as a longer review and my latest upload.

Part of the pleasure in catching up with Gebhardt is in seeing how he does it—and part, too, is in how little he hides. No doubt all art has its touch of black magic, and Minimalism simultaneously intensified and dispelled the sleight of hand by making everything explicit. (Not a bad trick at that.) Gebhardt does so to this day, with regular shapes and repeated patterns in two and three dimensions. Part of the pleasure, too, is watching where one dimension leaves off and another begins.

Not that he spells everything out in words, like Sol LeWitt in the titles of his wall drawings. (Try to reconcile LeWitt’s trust in words with late Modernism’s insistence that everything is what it is, not a sign of something else. It can be done, and it says a great deal about the time.) Rather, Gebhardt trusts to simple shapes and shifting patterns. They can march across a surface or in a sequence of identical objects, at David Richard through August 6. He is simultaneously carving and painting in space.

The show, “Diverse Vocabularies,” accepts the priority of words while making them hard to pin down. Verticals in unpainted wood stand side by side, no higher than one’s waist. Shorter and thinner models painted white gain in height as they cross a table. The first bear identical cuts, interrupting the solidity and lightness of poplar. They ascend from one beam to the next, much as black accents on the painted wood rise closer and closer to eye level. The cuts also reach around the corner of the beam, until at last the part to the side reaches past the top and is gone.

Works on the wall have their sequences, too, of short black diagonals on white. They, too, can turn the corner only to disappear. They have crossed the line to panel paintings, but they may also pair with a version closer to sculpture, with the diagonals as cuts. One might be a study for the other or a playful alternative. The play on deletion and drawing also appears on paper, where a black trapezoid slides out and to the right from a white diamond, daring you to recognize what it left behind. It might tempt one to think not of Minimalist sculpture, but of Ellsworth Kelly and shaped canvas.

Galleries during the pandemic can seem like little more than pop-ups—all the more so with short runs for summer closings (my lame excuse for this late review). And Gebhardt has been around, from his birth in Suriname in 1939 to studies in the Netherlands and Germany, but he is not just preserving the past. The light, polished wood has its appeal to craft and to the eye, quite different from industrial materials for Carl Andre or Donald Judd. It also shares the gallery with an artist closer to the eclecticism of contemporary abstraction, through August 13. Galen Cheney has two bodies of work, one with a collage of fabric and Flashe, a rubber-based paint that has caught on in just the last few years. Yet she, too, speaks to what remains and what is left behind.

Cheney’s combination of materials allows for the play of reflective and opaque colors. It also gives the series new energy, as long curves and dense overlays radiate outward from a painting’s center. If the colors are bright, the white within them is brighter still. The other series, in turn, roots her in an earlier generation, when abstraction in America had its triumphs and slow burn. Their thicker surfaces, broad strokes, colliding or overlapping rectangles, and use of black recall Clyfford Still and West Coast art of the 1950s. Here, too, though, her lighter touch and color justify the show’s title, “Slow Burn.”

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

Karyn Olivier is out in front of the headlines. “At the Intersection of Two Faults” opened the very day of a condo’s collapse in Florida, and I had to look twice to be sure that I had not seen her opening photo hours before online.

It shows a wall of cinder blocks strewn with clothing, and it could well be collapsing before one’s eyes. The collapse seems to extend to nature itself, with a ledge of dark earth in the landscape behind it—and with actual earth layered onto the photo in front. Still more black earth, strewn with confetti, supports a terribly plain folding chair. Before one encounters its darkness or its color, though, one must pass a more formidable wall.

Olivier has a talent for situating her constructions within urban histories and the gallery. She just needs gallery-goers to inhabit them, at Tanya Bonakdar through July 30 (and pardon me for a late-summer week of catch-up posts). Her physical wall relies on red bricks, for a touch of local color, running twenty feet across and twelve feet high. Clothing multiples, too, not just on top but between bricks, spilling out every which way. It speaks, too, to the lives of others, in dress clothing, casual clothing, and in rags. Olivier could almost be counting on those lives to hold the bricks together in place of mortar.

In reality, though, she relies on the gallery—and not just on you. The wall runs up against a ceiling beam, which determines its height. Is Fortified a barrier or shelter from the storm, in a gallery that began the year with a one-room building in wood by Haim Steinbach? Neither all that much, for one can walk around it to see more, limiting its width. It is also just a wall, with clothing overrunning its back, completely obscuring the brick. Still more clothes hang down from a fence post, while a bright yellow hoodie has adopted a coal shovel as a coatrack.

Olivier has mined the site specific and the city’s past since she ran tracks through the basement of SculptureCenter, a former trolley repair shop, in 2004. She aligned appropriation and the handmade the next year, too, as an emerging artist in “Greater New York,” with a column of furniture. She brought her greater New York to the Whitney and as an artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2006. One could admire her jungle gym in both sites for its polished construction, its wildness, or its familiarity. One might have to leave playtime to imagined others, but her urban histories are open-ended, like urban life. They have become more diverse and colorful in the years since, with all that clothing, but she still prefers black tar and black posts to grass and trees.

They have also become closer to disaster. For all the scraps of clothing, a yellow clothesline hangs empty apart from a gnarly scrap of wood. One might mistake it for a bone from a dead animal or a fossil. She may have her maritime disaster, too, with buoys hanging down over the tangle of rope from a lobster trap, as How Many Ways Can You Disappear. An artistic disaster might be lurking as well, in ornate picture frames devoid of pictures and sliced in two. She has painted them white, like the wall, because history and its unraveling begin here, in the gallery.

Summer group shows have grown tamer in the wake of the pandemic, most of gallery artists. Upstairs, though, her gallery adds another impressive urban history. Curated by Keyna Eleison and Victor Gorgulho, it reconstructs the scene around Teatro Experimental do Negro and its founder, Abdias Nascimento, in Brazil. It has its memorabilia, but it brings that black experimental theater into art as vivid as the present. “Engraved into the Body” runs from video of male nudes and of burning, recalling protests against a repressive regime, to abstract sign systems and portraiture akin to Alice Neel. Faced with so many unfamiliar names, I hate to single anyone out for praise. Just be aware of the many ways to engrave male and female, black and white, politics and art, into the body.

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