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art reviews from around new york

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.

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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.

SculptureCenter misses the old neighborhood, and it should know. It has made its home in Long Island City long enough to have seen everything change.

Founded in 1928, it moved to a dead end just off the main drag in 2001, early enough to have driven change itself. Can it, though, truly miss the days of empty storefronts, abandoned buildings, and nowhere to live or to eat? R. I. P. Germain shares the ambivalence, even as he brings his own graffiti and shuttered gates, as Avangarda. It may have been be a bit corporate for street smarts or an avant-garde, but he and Claudia Pagès in the back room found an antidote to dryness in something very much like SculptureCenter all the same, through March 25.

It took a long time for gentrification to reach the neighborhood. You can now find a decent bookstore and a noodle joint right across Jackson Avenue from SculptureCenter, although real growth lies closer to the East River, amid artist studios, craft breweries, and a waterfront park with a gorgeous public library. Still, change in New York comes with conflicting claims and a welter of graffiti. Developers demolished a building across from MoMA PS1, just a short walk from SculptureCenter, angering those who miss its paint job as a genuine expression of neighborhood spirit. The developers, in turn, tried to cash in on its street name by adopting it for apartments. Are Germain and SculptureCenter already late for the party?

The Berlin artist may not know his way around the hood, but he does mourn a loss of community. As his name has it, R.I.P. He describes storefronts everywhere as places to go and to meet. At the same time, he sees them and the gates that cover them as obstacles, designed to keep people out. And Germain sets out four gated storefronts, one after another, like a series of obstacles. You can walk past the first, but will you pass them all?

Not that they go all that far toward filling the impressive main hall at SculptureCenter. That can only reinforced the impression of abandonment. It can also restore faith in the trolley repair shop that Maya Lin left largely intact while putting it to the use of art. Each of Germain’s gates has its own graffiti, but not with the naiveté and egotism of tags. They come teasingly close to text but impossible to read. All that you may remember is the image of a silvery robot, on a rampage or on guard.

Their backs offer a slightly different picture. One has a glass door. A small assemblage on the floor behind each one includes a pot, a potted plant, and a magazine with its own dark stories to tell. Germain may be leaving open the possibility of life or closing it off for good. The entirety looks confused and slightly pathetic, not to mention out of touch with Long Island City today. But then welcome to the search for affordable housing and community in New York.

Pagès payed a different kind of tribute to SculptureCenter and its basement tunnels, through February 19. Not that she would admit it, but her video could well be exploring them. Downstairs, the institution displays “world cinema” from a recent biannual in Taipei. Together, their fifteen works take a serious commitment, but dipping in may be enough. It accords with the themes of incompleteness back upstairs. I caught some shifting patterns, disaster areas, and zombie creatures, but nothing like the basement’s own layered history.

Pagès can match that history and then some. Her explorations take her to a cistern in Spain, where her camera’s restless motion may remind you of your own. Moorish invaders remade the ancient roman caverns as their own, before Christians used the structure for a church and moderns for a fancy hotel. If her wanderings seem to lack direction, the video does not—abruptly flooding the tunnels and leaving her waist deep. Did you think that an institution called SculptureCenter would be showing sculpture? Gentrification itself may leave you high and dry.

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

To wrap up from last time on folk art, the American Folk Art Museum is out to add color to American art and history, people of color. With “Unnamed Figures,” through March 24, it asks how folk art drew on African Americans as artists and subjects while refusing to name names.

It shows how their absence testifies to unseen presences, while its presences testify to exclusions. In fact, it does that so well that one can almost forget what it leaves out. The show passes over conflict, the slave states, life after the Civil War, and a specifically African American art. They appear nonetheless right next door, if only in part, with “Marvels of My Own Inventiveness“—and I bring them together with an earlier report on outsider artists as a longer review and my latest upload.

Each of its five artists has only a handful of works, but enough to leave a mark and a name. One can see their determination with the oldest of the five, Mary T. Smith, born in 1905. Working in the 1980s, she applies black in broad strokes, for big outlines, big egos, and big hair. Her figures face front, like the familiar icons of black power, but with colorful, casual compositions that take nothing for granted. The people themselves could just as well be nameless. They do not so much confront the theme of black invisibility as rebel against it.

By the time one reaches the youngest, Claude Lawrence, colliding colors are more than half the point. As a title puts it, Why So Blue? Born in 1944, Lawrence packs them in, not so much layered or intermixed as fighting for space. Faces appear, but an explicit politics is gone. Certainty must have given out anyway after the election of Ronald Reagan, even for Smith. That still leaves presences, if only one could pin them down.

The modest show comes as a postscript to the larger one, but also a counterpoint. The very hallmarks of the older folk art are gone, from its stiff, firm outlines to its narratives. Black artists today have often drawn on the flatness and patterning of African American art in the South or African art itself, but not here. Smith’s scrawls suggest street art and defacement, not unlike those of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Yet they avoid his deliberate clichés and aggressive juxtapositions. They leave open just what is left of outsider art other than the outsider.

The show’s awkward title adapts a line from Hortense Spillers, a literary critic who has sought an “African American grammar.” Echoes of William Butler Yeats, with art as “monuments of its own magnificence,” may be deliberate as well. The combination points to identity politics, but also shifting perspectives. J. B. Murray has a reputation as an Abstract Expressionist, which accounts for his freely detailed brush, but not much more. The tiny marks could be figures in half a dozen history paintings at once. One could almost treat its divisions as panels in a graphic novel.

Purvis Young is fond of busy marks and crude divisions, too. Wood slats overlay his paintings, like stretchers that have moved to the front or frames that refuse to close. There is a riot going on. It may or may not be race riot, and Leonard Daley depicts both blacks and whites amid a painting’s discarded materials. If a white figure looks to a livelier black figure for help, its whiteness has faded to a bright, pure, ghostly white. If the black figure is a tempter, painting has its temptations, too.

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