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art reviews from around new york

Nancy Elizabeth Prophet set high standards—for herself, for art, and for America. Her show’s very title sounds unrelenting, and her chosen medium looks unyielding as well.

“I Will Not Bend an Inch,” the Brooklyn Museum proclaims, and she offers nothing as malleable as clay. The museum sets out a shelf of her tools, through July 13, and one can feel them cutting into hard and soft wood alike. Her subjects, like a Congolese and a Cossack, look unforgiving as well. Do not be surprised if they turn out to resemble the artist.

Her very name puts those who encounter her on the spot. It is too late to change what an Old Testament prophet has seen. Her work looks like nothing so much as the chronicle in wood by Elizabeth Catlett at the Brooklyn Museum just months before. All it lacks is the knockout punch from Catlett’s larger than life wood fist. While Catlett lived to see the civil rights movement and had relatives who knew slavery, Prophet’s time on earth, from her birth in 1890, pretty much coincides with a history of modern art. Now if only it felt as free.

Her sculpture stands in one long line at the center of the room, and the museum gives her a time line as well, all but devoid of incident. Mostly she went to the Rhode Island School of Design (or RISD) and made art. She is, though, is not so easy to pin down. Just by gathering her sculpture into a collective history, the display literally takes them off their pedestals. Watercolors render nature sparely, in casual loops, with soft colors for architecture—and one set of towers sways in the wind. Like it or not, it bends more than an inch.

If she ever drew a line in the sand, she stepped right over it. Her busts are not just women, not even close. Like the Cossack, they are also not just black. Their anonymous faces have a particular debt to classical art. In her hands, it becomes be hard to tell the cloaks of ancient Roman statuary from a woman’s dress. Faces are themselves of uncertain ancestry and race, and titles speak of poverty and youth.

Are they gods, emperors, or African American labor? For Prophet, the categories run together, and African Americans have earned their place in history. Domestic labor and everyday human connections bring her closer to the gods. She was herself of mixed ancestry, with a black mother and Native American father, and the show identifies her as (ready?) Afro Indigenous. The closer her busts come to self-portraits, the lighter their hair. The more, too, they resemble masks.

She took an interest in diversity in her life as well. She taught at Spelman, the historically black college in Atlanta, and went to Paris to see art. Critics associate her with the “New Negro” movement, a coinage by Alain Locke, theorist of the Harlem Renaissance. That tight row of sculpture brings out the breadth an contradictions of race in America. All face out, in one direction or other, with much the curled lips and firm stares. They have the room outside Judy Chicago and her Dinner Party, an icon of feminism with its own love of goddesses.

Prophet changed the spelling of her name from Profitt to take responsibility for what she saw, with cause for outrage along with pride and hope. Has she entered history, or can she return to a sideline that Modernism had outgrown? For William Butler Yeats, art always takes the long view. “Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages, / And all the drop scenes drop at once / Upon a hundred thousand stages, / It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.” It may yet, though, bend an inch.

If you have not dropped in at the Whitney in a while, now could be the time. You may never again receive such a warm welcome, but beware: you may come away wondering if its welcome is meant for you.

The lobby gallery is always free, already a welcome and welcoming gesture. Give the museum due credit. Its shows almost always focus on emerging artists, too, another gesture of outreach from the imperious art world. Now, though, it gestures in American Sign Language, an unprecedented sign of inclusion—and on a scale all but impossible to overlook. Two enormous red arms are wiggling their way to you. Christine Sun-Kim is something of a gatekeeper herself, as can happen in support of DEI, but you need not speak any one language to get the message, through July 6.

Together, the two arms reach across the gallery and to each other, one inflating as the other collapses. One hand points toward its destination, a niche cut into stone, with a gesture familiar enough to anyone: pay attention, and not just to me. The other wiggles, its palm open and facing down. That gesture depends on ASL for its meaning, a plea for recognition. It could ask to initiate a true dialogue or for you to hold back, to give the deaf space and time.

Which one? Sun-Kim gets three floors of the Whitney, not all free, for “All Day All Night” and what comes to seem a gesture of certainty. She is joined on video by her partner, but as part of the same silent lecture. In works on paper and on the wall, she creates pretty much her own language and never stops talking. Why, one drawing asks, do her parents use ASL, too? Because they are way cooler than your parents, because they love her, and because they understand other visual sign systems as well—such as pie charts, Venn diagrams, and musical notation.

Well, maybe not the part about other systems, but she sure makes use of them, on her own terms. She borrows musical notes for their shape alone, stacked like chairs. Her circles overlap as in set theory, but their placement is meaningless. Her pie charts have any number of data points, but their width is meaningless, too. I borrowed two of her answers to the question about her parents and threw in a third just for fun. I cannot swear that it makes a difference.

To be sure, her many languages extend the welcome, and only a terrible pedant would expect a music or math lesson. Her adaptations show a welcome ingenuity and sense of humor, maybe even artistry. They address what could otherwise be a contradiction, a plea for ASL that in no way requires a knowledge of it from museum visitors. Besides, how nice that she is on speaking terms, so to speak, with her parents. I shall not tell you about mine. Still, the welcome and the humor vanish from the moment one starts reading.

The show’s entire premise has its limits. Sun-Kim is responding to Alexander Graham Bell (better known for the telephone), who campaigned against ASL as isolating and disabling. The deaf should learn lip reading and a full participation in the spoken word. Bell, though, died more than a hundred years ago, and the battle against him was long since won. Besides, he meant well, and the debate should down to the data, like a proper pie chart. It should come down, too, like halfway decent stand-up or performance art, to less of a tin ear.

Sun-Kim has a point, and (sigh) you better get it. Besides science, the case comes down to engaging the deaf on their own terms, as a community of the enabled and the living. And she rewards engagement with her witty notation and those enormous red hands. Charcoals outside the education department could be incipient constellations in an all-encompassing black sky. Get to the top floor, though, and she dominates the conversation with or without her parents. I want to be DEI and not a disabler (and I wrote about the point of political art or, for that matter, sound art just this spring), but art is not just about her, me, or you.

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

Michael Armitage paints refugees on a dangerous crossing. Fortunately, they still have each other—unless that is the worst of the dangers.

For his latest work, he takes as his theme the passage from Africa, a theme that he must take personally. Born in Nairobi, he lives and works in London. Those who know his work will recognize the wild confusion of his narratives and the straight-on encounters in his portraits. More than before, though, that translates into political commitment and heart-felt sympathy, at David Zwirner through June 17. And I work this together with past reports on Elizabeth Catlett in black America and Jacob Lawrence, known for a very different Migration Series, as a longer review and my latest upload.

Armitage himself had a perfectly safe crossing—or as safe a crossing as an African can expect. He came to London to study at its finest art colleges, and he has made a successful crossing to America as well, appearing in a show of black artists at MoMA. He terms himself with a Kenyan Brit, and you can hear the confidence in his cultural heritage. Few are as certain that they can claim both Africa and the West. He paints on Ugandan bark and called his last show, in Germany, “Pathos and Twilight of the Idle,” challenging the uninitiated to spot the pun on Friedrich Nietzsche and Twilight of the Idols. If you feel a certain condescension, so be it.

The show is his “Crucible,” another boast. The Crucible is a play by Arthur Miller about the Salem witch trials, and Africans are dying because of prejudice now as well. Armitage asks to see a crucible as more than a watery journey. Its meanings broaden to the very concept of a dangerous passage and to metaphor. It returns the word to its more common meaning as a test or trial. People, he can hope, emerge stronger and more able to speak for themselves.

He calls a sculpture a near synonym, Trial, another boast of a European heritage. The Trial is a novel by Franz Kafka with a deadly ending, and here, too, individuals are caught in narratives that they may not survive and will never understand. I had not seen the artist’s sculpture before, but he places it first, with priority to its blackness. The cramped space of sculpture in low relief has its counterpart in the familiar space of his paintings as well. They include standing portraits and imaginings, in open waters, neighborhoods of London, and indefinite space. You may have to shift perspective after discovering which is which.

Three boys have found their way to shore at night, beneath turbulent clouds, stars, and artificial light. Should they take comfort in each other? Two of them hold the third, who can no longer to stand on his own—unless they are keeping him from finding escape. Friendships for Armitage are treacherous crossings, too. Sometimes small groups sit side by side, as eerie clusters of green, although flesh tones are normal enough. Shadows on naked flesh take an ominous shape, like skin that has away.

Distortions like these recall the agony in artists like Francis Bacon, R. B. Kitaj, and Lucien Freud. Armitage may have a British heritage after all. And that heritage extends to an all but exclusive focus on narrative and faces. I find that focus conservative and confining, like a test. Still, he has something that they do not, primary colors in daylight and blackness out of Africa. Just remember to rely on one another.

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

Otobong Nkanga invites you to approach her work in stages, and each stage opens onto larger and larger vistas. She calls it Cadence and speaks of it as the cadences of life—but human life, she adds, is only a fraction of the cosmic picture. I want to say a negligible fraction, but it is the part that humans feel most keenly.

In fact, the big picture looks indelibly marked by humanity. Whether that is a good thing is hard to say, but it is impressive all the same. On commission for the outsized and unruly atrium at MoMA, she does her best to run out of space, through June 8. And I work this together with earlier reports on mixed media taking on painting, sound art, and installation as a longer review and my latest upload. Julius Eastman, Glenn Ligon, and Nour Mobarak also just happen to take on issues of race and personal identity as well.

There is no right way to tame the atrium, the worst element of MoMA’s 2004 expansion, because no one, however adept, really can. I still think of it as little more than a shopping mall whose chain stores have gone out of business. Recent installations, though, have refused to get lost in its waste of space. They can let classic works, like Rhapsody by Jennifer Bartlett or New Image painting by Susan Rothenberg, run its full length. They can play on the furniture and function of the museum itself, like Amanda Williams—or recreate city streets and fire escapes as a gathering space, like Adam Pendleton. Nkanga works on a still larger tapestry, literally and figuratively.

A single image sets the scene, draping down across an entire wall of the atrium, but not the center wall. Is that to keep it from dominating the rest? Rope sculpture hangs down from above, too, coming to rest on shiny black sculpture of craggy rocks. Bulges punctuate the rope, like bulges in wire sculpture for Ruth Asawa. Downright small work has the remaining walls—relief paintings, with caked surfaces like dried earth. They are largely monochrome, even when interrupted by unreadable text.

Or is it merely to give the tapestry the atrium’s largest wall. (Who knew that the walls differ in size?) It is a landscape, but not a familiar one from planet earth. At bottom, shimmering white curves outline what could be plants or waves. At top, orange fills the sky in bursts, like galaxies without stars or bombs bursting in air without the patriotism. About halfway up, a couple seen from behind contemplates the scene. They seem to take it all in without a care for the damage that people can exact.

Then, too, Nkanga might have chosen that wall because you cannot see it until have entered. Rounding the corner from outside, you first encounter the sculpture and a tempting glimpse of the small paintings. Once inside, you can stumble around fairly uncluttered space. It is officially the Marron Family atrium, and no doubt “family” refers to the donors, but parents do let their kids run about. You have already accumulated a reserve of impressions, varying in size, texture, and color. And then you can turn to discover the cosmos.

You can hear it as well, although not the explosions. A chorus chants something ethereal, while a single male voice repeats just one cadence. Nkanga hardly minds if you cannot understand a word of it. She is not spelling things out. Born in Nigeria, she works in Belgium, but nothing I could see alludes directly to her heritage, and the couple in the tapestry is probably white. And I do wish the work cohered and the text made sense, but everything seems to emanate from the landscape.

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

To wrap up from last time on boom, bust, and the future of art, what then counts as success? In 2009, at the very height of the boom, Edward Winkleman released How to Start and Run a Commercial Art Gallery, and he if anyone should know how.

A Williamsburg pioneer, he brought his gallery to Chelsea, expanding the action a block to the west along with three more of the most adventurous out there. He also started an art fair devoted entirely to high-tech, interactive art, including my very first experience with virtual reality. Still, for all its sane advice, it takes something for granted: you or anyone else really can start and run a commercial gallery—and you are dying to try. Oh, and did I mention that Ed’s gallery is long since gone?

Just to speak about what comes next after the pandemic has its own hidden assumptions as well. It takes for granted that art really is coming back, and it assigns blame for the losses to a virus. What, though, if the boom needs explaining in the first place? Yes, artists can make their own scene, and ideas matter, but that cannot be the whole story. Great movements in the past had their champions like Gertrude Stein, Lillie P. Bliss, and Petty Guggenheim, but not entire neighborhoods. And only the last of those three was a dealer.

Look back at HaberArts. I started with the art of museums, because I had years reading and seeing in my head. Besides, galleries did not take anywhere near as long to describe, as Minimalism and conceptual art lingered on. I summed them up with twice a year “gallery tours,” continuing for over a decade. I knew that something was changing, but what? Who knew that art today would treat discoveries then like old masters, with still life to match?

I took new arts districts as a pleasure, but the onset of big money as a threat. I wrote of what Jerry Saltz (now more of a cheerleader, I am afraid) called the “battle for Babylon.” I distrusted exhibitions as paybacks to donors and collectors. I hated that as fine an architect as Renzo Piano devoted expansion of the Morgan Library to a cafeteria. Already, Yoshio Taniguchi had used expansion at MoMA for a block-long lobby and an unworkable atrium. Did anyone still care about art?

In fact they did then, and they do—and it had a great deal to do with change. New audiences were transforming art into a popular art form. In turn, dealers and museum directors saw not just an opportunity, but a duty. Museums added education centers and no end of wall text. If people also require food to get them through the day, who am I to complain? Lines for the old-world cafeteria at Neue Galerie exceed those for the museum, and the Frick now has its first.

In short, there is no going back. Does that make this the bust to end all busts? Not necessarily, and I cannot predict the outcome of Donald J. Trump’s disturbing economics, but this history shifts debate from the roots of change to how the arts address it. The growth of inequality is real, but critics, artists, and institutions can see it as more than an end in itself. They can hope for crowds while resisting the allure of big money and mass entertainment. Meanwhile I just hope that the Jewish Museum brings back its black-and-white cookies.

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

If you stayed with me last week, you know what I am thinking these days, stuck indoors with an injury and too little else on my mind: should I cut back sharply, even as I regain full mobility? Have I simply run out of things to say?

Then, too, has art itself run out of things to say? And no, for once I am not talking about the “anything goes” spirit in painting, with old stories and familiar brushwork to match. Eclecticism has its rewards, after all, especially when it means discarding old divisions between the personal and the political, mythmaking and making art. Especially, too, when it translates into diversity, with more room for nonwhites and women. Rather, I mean lassitude on the business side, as galleries find it harder and harder to survive. I have given up counting just how many went under that seemed like permanent fixtures and how many dealers saw 2024 as a good time to retire.

Not that the two issues, what to say and how to pay for it, are unconnected. Quite the contrary. When art turns to new ideas and new energy, artists and collectors alike rush to share in the possibilities. It happened with Abstract Expressionism, and galleries are still turning up forgotten painters and neglected sculptors—or convinced that they should. It happened again with the millennium, when this Web site was still young. I set out with the belief that painting was not at all dead, thank you, and art history still matters. I was rewarded with a gallery boom, museum growth, and larger audiences for both.

Not that the boom is over yet either. The expanded Frick Collection reopens to high praise this very month, with the New Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Princeton University art museum on their way. And, however many have gone under, dealers trying. Who would have imagined the clean lines of a full building in Chinatown for Magenta Plains, the sprawl across Chelsea and Tribeca for David Zwirner, or seven stories for Pace gallery, with another branch just up the street—or the nonstop art fairs? And yet the losses are inescapable. More to the point, what if loss is the new normal?

Art has a way of renewing itself in the face of failure, because that pretty much defines the making of art. I my own writing a single painting each by Jan Vermeer, Jan van Eyck, and Giovanni Bellini because I could not get them out of mind. I started, too, with the first signs of a shift in galleries from Soho to Chelsea. I followed galleries to Williamsburg, Dumbo, and Bushwick—and watched them die. A gallery scene leads to gentrification, but art moves on. Can a shrinking Lower East Side and the new concentration of galleries in Tribeca fare otherwise?

Regardless, I can always learn something each step of the way—and not just from the dozens of niche art markets that remain. With Asian art alone, last year brought me face to face with calligraphy, mandalas, aboriginal art, heaven and hell, and the hell we are creating a climate of coal and ice. Buddhism aside, though, what if there is more to the story than cycles of renewal? What if thirty years of growth were the exception all along? What if attrition remains when the stars of the show pass? What is left at the end of the day?

Part is sheer economics. The cheap rents that brought past spurts (and allowed me to get by) are not coming back. Collectors have proved difficult to lure too far downtown or out of Manhattan. You know the old lines that the market can stay irrational longer than you can wait? As Dumbo proved, real estate interests can hold onto vacant property longer than you can afford it. Art develops in an agonizing parallel to inequality in a market economy as a whole, as the wealthy take up more space and more spaces, art worlds all to themselves.

To see what that means for the future, it helps to look back. Yes, I followed the cycle of boom and bust for thirty years, with the emphasis on the boom. And yes, I watched as a hurricane closed Chelsea and recessions took their toll. I watched, too, as Covid-19 shuttered museums, galleries, and art fairs entirely. But that still leaves the perils of business as usual, and I do mean business. Consider, then, an alternative history of contemporary art—and I pick up next time with just that.

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