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art reviews from around new york

Once artists had workshops, with young assistants to grind pigments, to prepare a painting’s ground, and at times to paint. Now they may have only a studio and a computer. They may work out their thoughts on it, in virtual sketch pads. They may even call the results art.

Harold Cohen does, but he leaves the software to carry out the details, with plotters as its pen and acrylic for color. It gives him a dual canvas for his own art, in software and, ultimately, on the wall—and I work this together with recent reports on the new media of an artist’s lifetime as a longer review and my latest upload.

Cohen, then close to forty, got the idea at the University of California, San Diego back in the 1960s, and he set out to make it real. By the 1970s it had its own exhibition and a name, AARON (like, I presume, AI-ron). It has new relevance today, when people cannot talk often enough about their fears and hopes for AI. It also has a retrospective at the Whitney, through May 19, but what exactly is it? Is it an assistant, a collaborator, a competitor, an alter ego, a friend, or simply a medium? Could it have, like an assertive child, a mind of its own?

You may have heard this story before—and not just online. When Leonardo da Vinci painted an angel for Andrea del Verrocchio in 1475, the master, it is said, was so awed that he never painted again. To less romantic scholars, it was merely what would have been impossible before the Renaissance and medieval money, a business decision. Verrocchio had a demand to meet for both painting and sculpture, so why not specialize? It is only fitting that AI most often makes the business section of The New York Times today. But could the label conceivably apply to Cohen starting fifty years ago?

Regardless, his show makes a flashy first impression. It devotes an entire wall for what could equally well be video art or a painting’s coming to be. At any given moment, it is a work in progress, and Cohen considers his task an examination of an artist’s cognitive processes. Others might put software on a diet of Web sites, with every new work filling in the blanks. That could leave instructions to such generalities as a painting about X in the style of Y. The British-born artist would rather take things step by step.

That big mural really moves. If AARON does have a mind of its own, it thinks fast. It lays out one shape after another and on top of another, for an increasingly dense landscape of truly wild flowers, before starting again. Color fills the black outlines as quickly as they appear. When it comes to actual canvas, too, Cohen’s strength lies in those layers. Subjects include still life and figures akin to portraits, with a woman behind a flower pot, for a compressed space within a deeper world.

Modernism was always about space and its perception, and his early work picks up on Paul Cézanne and his bathers. It sets bathers within that denser, wilder landscape. AARON may not realize them as individuals, and what look portraits might be studies in the very idea of introspection. Eyes cast downward, and a hand raised to lips might hold a cigarette or serve as a shield. Cohen, in turn, gains over time from a return to basics in the software itself. Sketches reduce figures to jointed lines, like machines.

Their style may look more appropriate for advertising or nursery school than for art, much as I enjoyed that video mural. Even there, software has it limits, although human art can be formulaic enough, too. If AI from Refik Anadol amounts to visual elevator music, its successor in MoMA’s lobby, by Leslie Thornton, has its own soothing swirls. For all the hype, does any of this add up to intelligence? Stendahl quipped that God’s only excuse is that he does not exist, and one might say the same of AI.

For all that, AARON’s landscapes have an appealing density, figures and still life an appealing simplicity. Cohen’s premise is more interesting still. The Whitney considers the canvases the art and the video a look behind the scenes to their creation, and it gives equal weight to both. It has only a handful of paintings, from the museum collection, the video, and two plotters that Cohen designed himself. There have to be two, because software can turn out any number of multiples from the same instructions, as theme and variations. One might call think of AI as more an aspiration than a fact, but one can always hope.

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

To continue from last time on the theme of inheritance and diversity, Sadie Barnette would like you to make yourself at home, her home. She opens “Inheritance” at the Whitney with spray paint, photos, and a nice, plush sofa—and I work this together with earlier reports on an artist’s extended family in Pepón Osorio as a longer review and my latest upload, with apologies for using the excuse of the theme to catch up with a review that I never managed to post here.

Not that you can sit in her sofa, for this is after all a museum, but then you might not care to try. It looks comforting enough, but too tacky for words, in a silvery holographic vinyl speckled with rhinestones. So do the prints and posters behind it, which she claims to be a black woman’s most precious memories. They look more like ads, although one bears her name in the garish font and colors of a birthday card. They might celebrate commercialism and family or back away from both. No matter, for both are her inheritance.

“Inheritance” takes its name from a film by Ephraim Asili, which plays out in an alcove near the end, through February 4. The director charts his dedication to black power and the black arts, with archival and created footage, although a young woman in the film loses patience with them, too. (As a matter of fact, Barnette’s father co-founded the Black Panthers.) A video by WangShu might be speaking for her when its narrator pleads for more than positive images. Yet the exhibition wants it both ways, critical but a celebration. It cannot get over painful memories, but it insists on a happy ending in the present.

When Modernism vowed to “make it new,” it turned from art about the past to art about itself, and Postmodernism repaid the favor by turning that lens on Modernism. Critics began to question the loss of its inheritance and “originality of the avant-garde.” And the Whitney includes a foremost critic in Sherrie Levine—her photographs of photographs by Walker Evans. Decades later, that very criticism has become the good news, as exhibitions everywhere embrace diversity and its global heritage. What, though, does that leave for “Inheritance” beyond a highly selective and utterly superfluous recap of art today? What, too, if that recap is painful, prefabricated, and commercial?

They say that charity begins at home, and the curator, Rujeko Hockley, begins with family. The first room centers on Mary Kelly, whose 1973 film lingered over a woman’s belly in the final moments before birth. (Hey, we all have to come from somewhere.) A father figure makes his appearance in film by Kevin Jerome Everson, blowing out the candles at age ninety-three, but mothers abound. Bruce and Norman Yonemoto mix up their personal histories with cigarette commercials, much like Sadie Barnette, but they, too, are enjoying themselves. If your childhood was anything but happy, do not look to the Whitney for support.

Theaster Gates has traced African American history through family and friends, while museums have singled out the Black Arts Movement and a legendary black-run gallery. Sure enough, two more rooms cover African Americans and the “global South.” Todd Gray manages to sum up the entirety of colonialism in a single photo collage. An-My Lê drapes a banner across a statue of a Confederate general. Could, though, an artist’s greatest inheritance be art itself? A room in-between picks up on Modernism and Minimalism, with a smashed tube chair from Wade Guyton, a silver striker by Hank Willis Thomas, and a red curve after Ellsworth Kelly by Carissa Rodriguez, cast in salt.

Still, what is the point? Surely others have had had equally moving accounts of Africa, slavery, and Black Lives Matter. And has any artist not looked back, like Cecily Brown to Flemish still life? Should artists be proud of their inheritance or ashamed? And what will others inherit from them? As it turns out, a lot, and it does much to redeem a confused and confusing show.

These are vivid memories, in all their pleasure and pain. Beverly Buchanan recalls the rural sheds of her ancestors, Mary Beth Edelson their mothers and gods, John Outterbridge their prayers and their dance. In a five-channel video, silhouettes and stereotypes from Kara Walker come to life. On the dark side, Faith Ringgold maps the United States of Africa, while Cameron Rowland recreates police radio, in all is racism. Kambui Olujimi pictures forced labor beneath a darkening sky as ghosts. Ana Mendieta leaves her impression in shifting landscapes and unsteady sands.

Just as much, one can relish the ambivalence. Lorraine O’Grady does, in her white dress and witty incursions into Central Park. So does David Hartt at the publisher or Ebony and Jet, where African art looks ever so forlorn. So, too, does Sophie Rivera, whose photograph of a child never quite emerges from its shadows and reflections, as I Am U. That video by WangShu lingers over luxury high-rises, cut off from the life below. Yet every so often the glass of their towers allows a view through to the sea.

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

To pick up from last time on Native American art (and apologies for a review that never posted in time for the show), art for Natalie Ball looks thrown together at the last minute, on the cheap, but give her time. The details matter to her, as part and parcel of her heritage. Yet that still left her at the Whitney this winter wondering who she is and what she has done, through February 19.

Gallery-goers are used by now to art as taking out the garbage. Nairy Baghramian fills the sculptural niches of the Met façade with what look like discards from museum infrastructure, but with brighter colors and less reason for being, through May 28. For Ball, though, going through the trash takes on the urgency of finding herself.

It cannot be easy for a Native American, whose lands have been seized and people have been killed, or an African American, who must plead even now that black lives matter. And Ball identifies as at once black, Modoc, and Klamath, tribes in Northern California and Southern Oregon, where she lives to this day. She says as much in opening wall text, which takes care to appear in English, Spanish, and a native language. Yet it appears on plywood, about as makeshift a material as you can get. More plywood appears as armature for sculpture, as flooring beneath it, and covering an empty wall, like a poor excuse for wallpaper. She is not saying just how it relates to her people, but then there is a lot she does not care to say.

The materials of her sculpture look just as shoddy and just as meaningful, up to a point. They include rawhide, which sounds right, and newsprint, which records things for posterity, but much else as well—including chests of drawers from which she may have drawn more. Collectively, they suggest ritual dress and, a title confirms, tribal dancers, but their colorful patterns give way to smileys. She might have salvaged them from whatever she had. Unlike the elaborate outfits of Jeffrey Gibson, they could be just as plausibly thrown away. Has everything she valued become empty rituals for empty suits?

The tallest sculpture seems itself unsure how to stand. Its two poles of polished wood never quite give up their memories of the trees that supplied them. They rise, suspended from the ceiling, but cut the cord and the entirety will collapse. You can wait as long as you like, for Ball has put out plenty of seating, but of gray folding chairs that might easily be on loan for the occasion. They also seem to have fallen where they may. Have a seat where you like.

he title alone seems to have arrived in a hurry. bilwi naats Ga’niipci means we smell like the outside, but Ball does not explain further. Does it mark her people’s distance from white America or her distance from them? Is she herself the ultimate outsider artist? Metaphors are elusive, like art. Ball’s place at the Whitney is itself both inside and out—the lobby gallery, free to the public because it stands within the museum but well outside its ropes.

Art has had no end of installations cobbled together from untraditional materials and popular culture. Who needs another? If it stands out, it is for her lack of certainty. Born in 1980, she can proclaim her identity, but she cannot pin it down. If that leaves me unsatisfied, so be it. For the record, only about six hundred Modoc survive, all in Oregon. And there she stands, inside and out.

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

Some artists sacrifice themselves for their art. Beau Dick sacrificed his art.

He saw his training in wood carving as a gift from his father, his grandfather, and an entire tradition, and he had no interest in wresting it from his Native American ancestry. This was not art for his sake or for art’s sake, but for his people, at Andrew Kreps through May 11. Did that mean reducing it to ashes? So be it.

A documentary about Dick ends a solo show with an excuse to look back—at the deep past and at what one has just seen. It shows him shortly before his death in 2017 in context of others, a bearded activist and chief. When he speaks to the camera, though, he is just an artist entering his sixties and reflecting on his art. A quote on the wall sums up his dual identity. “Our whole culture has been shattered,” he says, leaving it “up to the artist to pick up the pieces” and, he adds, to “put them together, back where they belong.” At the very least, he can try.

The situation, then, is hopeless but not at all dire, as often happens when it comes to art. In fact, it looks downright cheerful—creative, colorful, and funny. While his masks cover a lot of ground, they give little sense of the artist’s development, because he may not have had one. They could be the cast of a single comedy, as “Walas Gwa’yam,” or big, great whale. As the film’s title has it, he was a “maker of monsters.” They just happen to look thoroughly at home on earth.

They include supernatural beings from the Kwakwaka’wakw people in remote western Canada, like the Man and Woman of the Forest. They look, though, not in the least like transcendent beings outside of time and space. They can be human or animal, and one can morph into the other. A reasonably human face sprouts long ears like a cartoon puppy, except that they are also the wings of an eagle rising above. The long snout of a fox or wolf could be a canoe. A flame seems to rise from another forehead, but it is only a feather, as if the most elaborate of headdresses needs no more to catch fire.

They adapt all sorts of materials and purposes, freestanding and along the walls. Some carvings have smooth surfaces, for sharper colors and blacks. Others have a coarser texture, like plaster, that deepens his colors. They could be wearing lipstick or war paint. If that sounds irreverent, it is not a dig at tribal culture, but a tribute to the culture’s punning, cunning irreverence. There, too, living creatures can change shape, and masks can change people.

His monsters might still be a threat, but to Canadian authorities that Dick held responsible for oppression. He saw his work in context of potlatch, a rite of gift giving, where sharing to him approaches socialism. Still, he was not creating idols to a lost cause. Diversity in art these days tends to mean a recovery of identity, as fixed and essential. Dick precludes that, much like Native American art in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, Melissa Cody at MoMA PS1, or Natalie Ball at the Whitney (and I tell you more about her next time). The motif of a canoe appears as well with Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, defining a history last year at the Whitney, but Dick refuses a proper unfolding.

On film, Dick plays the part of an activist and artist with roots in tradition. In art, he plays the role of a trickster. If the work ever seems light or repetitive, he took his responsibility seriously. He once brought his masks back to his home turf for use in a ceremony—and then he burned them. For an artist, it was the ultimate sacrifice, but not an ending. While he lived, he could always make more.

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

To pick up as promised from last week, African American art has never looked better. The sheer amount of portraiture today reflects the wealth of possibilities and its increasing acceptance in the galleries.

With the Dean collection at the Brooklyn Museum, the Obama state portraits, or such artists as Henry Taylor at the Whitney, one can almost take it for granted or as a right. More than ever, too, that acceptance extends to black abstraction. Sam Gilliam, Melvin Edwards, and William T. Williams are no longer a niche or in need of recovery, but at the very center of the action—to the point that such younger artists as Odili Donald Odita have to fight for space. Even apart from photography, video, echoes of Africa, and overtly political art, here all art is both personal and political.

So at least runs one decent enough story, but consider another. Actual political art is shunted aside, because too many artists I do not care to name cannot get off their high horse. Portraiture looks less and less real and less human because they cannot let go of the glitter. They are so proud of their identity that the tensions inherent in the label are kept behind the tapestry and shoveled under the rug. They are painting not individuals now, but icons. They may pull their subjects from the street, but the fire of the streets is gone.

Could both stories be true? If so, it could attest after all to a vibrant, thought-provoking state of the art. At least one young artist is back on the streets as well. He is also challenging himself and others as to who owns the streets and who gets to enjoy them. At the end of the day, and Alexander Brewington loves the night, he and his friends can stand tall and take it easy. Hey, they didn’t start the fire.

As we saw last week, Arthur Jafa titles his video with a row of asterisks, like something unprintable. This artist spells out no more than he must, while articulating the feelings of others. In the past he has wrapped a huge tire in chains, but he is not just out to run you over. He titles the second installation (with its typo), Black Power Tool and Die Trynig. He brings irony to his own hopes for black power, and he knows what it means to die. He knows, too, when to walk away.

Then again, it can be hard to name the streets and harder still to call them a community. Fresh from his MFA at Pratt, Brewington is walking Manhattan, including midtown Manhattan, where not everyone can afford a drink. Even with the Chrysler Building visible at the end of a street, I could not pin down the neighborhood. Two friends share drinks at one bar, but others at the window are looking in, perhaps never to arrive. So much for Brooklyn or Harlem with their true communities, although stone row houses may equally well belong to them.

In “What Burns Beneath,” the streets sure look familiar, at Thierry Goldberg earlier this year through March 16. Black or white, you can recognize the trains as New York and the entrance to the Williamsburg Bridge as a landmark. Inside, well-stocked bars could make anyone feel at home. Those walking the streets or hanging out for a drink might already be your friends. At the very least, they look like individuals. Warm-weather coats and frank expressions replace fine art’s idea of street clothes.

At the same time, the fire has spread. Paint on board from Brewington has visible highlights dribbling along the edges. Less explicable pools of yellow and orange cluster and rise, from the pavement or in windows, whether as comforts or as threats. While two men seem to be warming their hands, in Flambé, the flames may or may not be real. Others might want to keep their distance, perhaps even Jafa’s taxi driver. It is all part of life in the city.

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

In truth, “Klimt Landscapes” has little in the way of landscapes. It hardly needs them.

The Neue Galerie begins elsewhere, with its magnificent collection of Austrian and German Expressionism and its ongoing display of portraits by Gustav Klimt, including one of its most precious holdings. How could it not take pride in a portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer from 1907, in its patterned gold? One hardly knows whether she is sitting or standing—and whether those triangles and eyes to her dress, her lavish interior, her own brilliance, or the Austrian artist’s inner world. The portrait’s gallery has its richness as well, with still functioning clocks by Adolf Loos, earlier Klimt portraits in their black clothing and pallor, and two works by Carl Moll. Moll’s brighter, crisper outdoor portraits absorb the lessons of Impressionism as Klimt never could. Upstairs, the show itself displays the full range of his interests and where in the landscape they took him, through May 6.

Born in 1862, Klimt came of age when academic training was a must and Symbolism was a movement. They left the young artist searching for a place between tradition and Modernism, and at first he tried to combine them. He could draw nudes and tell stories just fine, much like an older artist, even if one cannot make out the fables. He was to develop separate pursuits of allegory, portraiture, and landscapes, but already he was chafing at the limits of distinct genres. They all fed his psychologically charged landscapes. So did his love of patterning, whether in Symbolism itself or his celebrated later portraits.

So, too, did his artistic circle, and I work this together with an earlier report on a close contemporary, Ferdinand Hodler, as a longer review and my latest upload. He was there at the start with the Vienna Secession and Vienna Camera Club in the 1880s. The first insisted on a break with the old, the second on heading out of doors. Remarkably, the medium also sustained his growing interest in color. Decades before true color photography, he printed with multiple dyes to convincing effect. Not coincidentally, his works on paper favor collotypes, a process involving light-sensitive chemicals brushed on metal and glass plates—like a cross between photographs and lithographs.

One last inner circle was smaller still. Emilie Flöge, the sister of Klimt’s sister-in-law, founded a workshop for her fashion design. Neue Galerie includes jewelry as well as prints and paintings. While they never lived together or married, they headed together to the country, where he posed often for the camera with the beard and robe of a Greek philosopher. Then as now, all the right people fled the summer heat and urban crowds, and Klimt, too, traveled among the right people, like his patrons. Then, too, who would want to return when avoiding the crowds left the city so empty?

Even an artist deserves a break, and a vacation can bring a breakthrough in art. Pablo Picasso (whom the Met has displayed alongside Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele) headed for Fontainebleau to find his way to Three Musicians, Three Women, and what might come after Cubism. Klimt, too, made the best of time to himself. Portraits earned him a reputation, but landscapes were pretty much his alone. Summer holidays took him to Austria’s lake district, home to chapels, castles, and well-off homes, and all appear in his paintings. They just happen to lurk behind entire curtains of greenery, just as Adele Bloch Bauer emerges in gold.

The curator, Janis Staggs, describes his landscapes as an evolution from a misty Impressionism to decorative patterns. The exhibition itself leaves the first to reproductions in a helpful time line—and to his portraits. Its actual landscapes begin instead with Large Poplar Tree I in 1900. Its thick trunk and diverging leaves might belong to a single demon or three giants, while glints of color at its base might be eyes of still more hauntings. This is one animated landscape. By Klimt’s Park at Kammer Castle in 1909 and Forester’s House in Weissenbach II (Garden) in 1914, the curtain had already descended.

In defiance of gravity, a clearing at the base of the curtain may look onto a building’s windows, a pond, an animated cluster of thin trees—and the light. Above, flecks of color within the greenery make it a monumental source of its own light. Klimt died soon after, in 1916, far too soon for Hitler to declare work like this “degenerate art.” Still, his overlapping circles included Jewish patrons, and the Neue Galerie describes how the Nazis looted its prized portrait, only later restored to the family’s descendants and repurchased for New York. But then the Jewish Museum has told the story of Nazi-looted art, too. Here it all appears, as if by magic, from behind the green curtain.

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