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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.

Once again, allow me to use a holiday week to catch up with some posts that never made it to the blog. It has been a busy fall.Tracey Rose loves a pose. Her work at the Queens Museum takes no end of pleasure in putting on a show, but the actors and their roles are not so easy to pin down.

Women put on makeup and snarl for the camera—one, a title explains, on behalf of the KKK. Others dress up a bit much for propriety or not at all. The camera may close in a standing figure or step back, to reveal a stage set or forest landscape as welcoming and puzzling as they. Just do not expect this notably political artist to score much in the way of political points, through September 10.

Rose plays her part in a costume drama that is itself hard to pin down. One may not even guess correctly where it begins or ends. She gets the central open area for an enclosure that might be left over from Xaviera Simmons the season before, give or take a fresh, seriously bright paint job. She shines brighter still on surrounding walls. So which belong to Ciao Bella, which sounds like a love song, and which to Lucie’s Fur, which puns on Lucifer? No matter, with so content an all-woman cast.

Naturally the woman from the KKK, in whiteface but with a black eye or two and badly smeared black on her lips, belongs to neither one. Naturally, too, one cannot exactly enter the enclosure for a place to call home. Could that leave one in the forest, along with a woman on horseback with a preposterous top hat and another woman gesturing toward nothing that one can see? Could either be Lucie, which also puns on Lucy, the prototypical human being? One dare not call them primitive or in need of fur. They generate their own warmth, for those willing to play along.

One of two side galleries has room for work from twenty-five years, enough for a midcareer retrospective. Rose calls it “Shooting Down Babylon,” a bit odd, perhaps, for a show that cultivates voices. There the South African artist turns down the poses just a notch and admits men. There, too, the story coheres even less, except when it is too obvious for words. The white train of a bridal dress stands tall, but for what ceremony? A loose knit in the colors of the African National Coalition covers what might be black tomato with text that she alone can read.

In the show’s earliest photo, a man in performance etches his words into the wall of an arts institution that long barred blacks. Here the text is more cryptic still, and he might be sentenced to write it out like a schoolchild in need of a lesson. But then a biracial couple enacts The Kiss, after the sculpture by Auguste Rodin. There the lesson is clear—all the more so because the couple departs from Rodin’s pose to become intimate but relaxed. Is Rose too politically correct or not nearly enough for a modicum of coherence? Either way, these could be fragments of a story waiting for her to find an ending.

Either way, too, this is one politically correct museum, which has its uses. It devotes its other gallery to Aliza Nisenbaum, who has had a residency at the museum and a commitment to teaching art to the Mexican American community in Corona. Indeed, the show’s hanging and bright colors can suggest a schoolroom. (It adapts its title, “Queens, Lindo y Querido,” from a pop song in which the beautiful and beloved is Mexico, not Queens.) It also depicts members of the community, including workers at a food pantry and LaGuardia airport—a taxi driver and security guard included, along with pilots and flight attendants. A couple shares the Sunday New York Times.

The large paintings run to a loose perspective that enhances its diversity and color. Like poses for Rose, that has its pleasures. Both are well-intentioned, and their intentions can still get in the way. Rose speaks of her art as about the body, performativity, post-colonialism, healing, and rituality. Have I left anything out, and has she? Maybe it would work better as a photograph.

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