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Cauleen Smith could have even a New Yorker nostalgic for Southern California. That may sound like a tall order, although the sensation may last all of fifteen minutes, but Smith will make you feel right at home, recently at 52 Walker. And I work this together with a recent report on immersive video by Mary Lucier as a longer review and my latest upload. Smith, too, shows how a multichannel video can and cannot encompass a life, but will one fall for the illusion or pierce it? Is this really the video of a lifetime?

Smith sets out plush sofas—so comfortable that you may get up only to be sure that you have caught all four of the installation’s projections. Throw rugs can hardly cover the upscale Tribeca gallery (aka David Zwirner), but then what could? Besides, you know what people say: everyone out there is famous for fifteen minutes.

That includes Wanda Coleman, and Smith, who appeared in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, is out to extend the late poet’s moments of fame. The filmmaker is nostalgic not just for the city of her childhood, to which she has at long last returned, but also for a black woman who loved music almost as much as words. This is The Wanda Coleman Songbook, through March 16 (and apologieas for the late post while I catch up a bit), and you get to play DJ. You will just have to trust the gallery that Coleman, who died in 2013, earned a reputation as the poet laureate of Los Angeles. Her name may not mean much to a New Yorker, but then neither might this view of the great city without a city. This is LA as itself poetry but oddly remote from life.

Smith, who is African American, does not quite efface the urban core that many blacks call home, but she does relax and enjoy it. She treats the film’s multiple channels as an immersive experience. Two projections cover the facing long walls, the other two the alcoves to either side. Besides the sofas and rugs, she includes a coffee table for Coleman’s books and a quaint countertop with a good old turntable, where the songbook in question plays along. Smith commissioned music for the five tracks of an EP. Now she invites visitors to place the needle and to listen.

An EP may seem like a letdown or a rarity for those nostalgic for LPs, but this one is itself art. It comes in pink vinyl with splotches of bright red. I am tempted to say blood red, but in the installation’s spirit it might be better to think of candy canes and melted strawberry ice cream. Coleman also went by the name LA Blueswoman, but only some of the tracks are bluesy. All are as close to background music as the projection. It could be a direct retort to the California of Ed Ruscha.

Where Ruscha goes heavy on irony and detachment, Smith is sincere and totally involved. Where he photographed Every Building on the Sunset Strip, she is seemingly random but also selective. She cuts among sunsets, palms, utility poles and a railroad crossing, where she waits like anyone else for a train to pass before she can move on. The building on the far side has its share of graffiti, but she does not see it as defacement. Even the region’s bane, traffic, looks charming from overhead on a highway at night. Segments may rush past, but they feel slower and longer, like those proverbial fifteen minutes of fame. Poverty and luxury alike are nowhere in sight.

So much else is surely missing, not least the poetry. Coleman’s words appear on-screen now and then, but difficult to read, and aloud on vinyl, but just as difficult to hear. Is there a dark side? Three cut-outs leave their silhouettes on the walls, as more utilities and a creepy mask. Still, in a fourth projection, outstretched fingers like an ILY (I Love You) sign spell LA. As you head off to the gallery scene, downtown restaurants, and an overcrowded Canal Street, that sign-off, too, will soon be gone.

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

It was never easy to take in the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo himself labored beneath the ceiling on scaffolding of his own design, while struggling to reach the figures still taking shape overhead.

“Up Close: Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel” in 2017 brought thirty-four photographs to the World Trade Center PATH station—on their way to a second showing at the Garden State Plaza in New Jersey. Maybe, just maybe, it brought with it a closer approach to the art. Still not close enough? Andrew Witkin lines a wall with images, so that there is no craning your head, but also no dispelling the mystery. On August 14, 1511, as the Sistine Chapel once again welcomed congregants to Mass, the ancestors of Jesus were conspicuously absent. So they are again with Witkin, just recently at Theodore through April 6, but you may think you see them in their silvery shadows, and I work this together with an earlier report on “Up Close” as a longer review and my latest upload.

Even now, with so much else to see, visitors to the Sistine Chapel might never notice the ancestors. As Howard Hibbard notes, they are also among the hardest spots to see. They are missing once again today in etched magnesium. Witkin wanted to remove distractions, whether visual or in the ceiling’s details and history. Perhaps he hesitated to compete with Michelangelo as well. Yet their majesty and motion shine through in their absence—in the depicted stone on which they sat and in their silhouettes.

Michelangelo had kept a remarkable pace nearing the end of what is still the most celebrated project in western art—not just the scenes like the creation of Adam on the Sistine Ceiling, but also the prophets and nudes bridging the ceiling, the windows, and the walls. He had been laboring for five years, but more work lay ahead. He took down his scaffolding at last, so that Pope Julius could celebrate Mass and the Assumption of the Virgin. The rites completed, he set up lighter, more movable scaffolding to wrap up the lunettes, that awkward space above the windows. The familiar architectural element takes its name from their shape, like the crescent of the moon. Additional ancestors turn up elsewhere on the ceiling as well, with a lonely virtue prefiguring their absence.

The ancestors may get passed over often as not, but Michelangelo did not lack for fame in his lifetime. His David alone assured that, as a standing nude and as a symbol of Florence’s independence. The ancestors, too, found a ready audience, in thirty-two prints from around the time of his death in 1564. Adamo Scultori, the printmaker, had the added cachet of working not from the frescoes one sees today but from drawings, by Michelangelo or a follower. I shall guess the former, given an artist who did not work well with others. He did fire his assistants, lock the doors, and start over with the Sistine Ceiling, with Raphael working and waiting just outside.

Still, you never know, for the drawings have not survived. In any case, Witkin’s plates are copies after copies—and they omit their very subject. The burnished metal surfaces in their place could be what Jacques Derrida lauded as marks of erasure. Andrew Witkin, also a dealer, must know well the postmodern vocabulary. He calls the show “After (After Ancestors).” So much for the originality of the avant-garde.

Got all that? Nor does he proceed as an engraver would, from the plates to prints on paper. Still, mind games may not be so bad after all, not in trying to pin down a long-dead, troubled artist’s mind. Besides, the metal shines. Scultori worked in dense parallel incisions, the cross-hatching of a trained draftsman—but not, as it happens, like Michelangelo drawings. Scultori’s technique may count as mechanical compared to his and already dated, but Witkin turns vice into virtue.

Make that competing virtues. With magnesium rather than an engraver’s copper, the shine ranges from dark gray to near white, while the visible cuts add to its energy and instability. And then come an uncut metal frame, its shadow on the wall, and the burnished omissions. Twenty-seven plates hang in three tight rows, unlike Michelangelo’s spandrels and lunettes. The unseen figures seem to struggle against the original curved framing, much like the originals. They call attention to Michelangelo’s musculature and motion in stillness.

Michelangelo did not play well with others either, and he may have counted the pope as his only male friend. Julius may increasingly have felt the same way. Hibbard, in his book on Michelangelo, attributes the languor of the ancestors, verging on sadness, to their role as precursors, neither here nor there. In 1511, though, as textbooks explain, the Vatican was losing its wars and bracing for an invasion. Dismiss the Sistine program as baggage, better off under erasure, but Michelangelo could not. One cannot separate its ambition from fears for what might survive.

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

“Sex and Death” may sound like a Woody Allen film, with all his surfeit of certainty and irony. But no, it is still life by Rachael Catharine Anderson, not in the least weighed down by either one. All she wants, as a work’s title puts it, is Space for Thought, at Signs and Symbols through April 13.

She finds it, too, but in the space of a painting—a space that grows more shallow and suggestive the more you look. She might have taken the gallery’s own narrow space on Houston Street and compressed it further. It has room all the same for things that refuse to die.

Anderson has done her level best to kill things off, in the very the act of construction. Somehow, though, they are still standing. Scissors have just cut off a fig leaf, which balances nonetheless, its stem on a narrow table or ledge. It might be leaning against the back wall or standing in front with no visible means of support. Light pours directly down, to judge by its tiny shadow, illuminating every vein of its surface. Yet it leaves the wall in darkness.

She loves the fragility of things about to die. Plums lie still uneaten, while bare twigs grow into intricate constructions. Most have no obvious source of light, but enough to multiply the shadows. This could be artificial light, like that of the gallery, which draws shades over its windows. It could also be Winter Light, as the tallest and most delicate work has it, for a time of encroaching darkness. Sharon Louden, in the gallery’s previous show (through March 2) used her colorful installation to mirror and to dismember visitors, but here everything is intact, for now.

A painting’s shape and illumination recall light boxes by such artists as Joseph Cornell, a born collector, which makes it the space of memory. It is an enclosure that no human touch can shatter. The scissors, their task done, lie on the ledge, cut off at front by the picture plane but no closer to you for that. Most of all, this is a space for thought. Anderson speaks of the “pensive image,” quoting Hanneke Grootenboer, a writer new to me. The latter, in turn, sees “art as a form of thinking.”

Sex and Death 101 really is a film, but a sci-fi film—with, as far as I can determine, no particular concern for thought. Yet sex and death are also the theme of still life in Dutch and Flemish painting. Cecily Brown makes a point of the tradition in her own painting. Things are sexy for her because they are alive and dying. At the same time, they defy death, in showing off the artist’s virtuosity and art’s ability to last. She paints big, bright and “all over,” refusing the very stillness of still life.

Anderson is not half so as confident. She quotes Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher and mathematician, in 1670. “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” Maybe so, but the paintings also allay fears, with the solidity of subdued color, painted ceramics, and marble dust in oil. My favorites, though, are the branching vegetation and its wispy shadows. Things do not look particularly sexy, much less dead, and a good thing, too.

Official notice: you can become an outsider artist without ever venturing outside. Plenty of artists have, but not Anthony Dominguez on the cold streets of New York. Only now is he receiving a less chilly reception not so very far from where he once lived, at Andrew Edlin through April 6.

Outsider artists have often been insiders in everything but their art. Many have worked diligently within a community, like the Gee’s Bend quilters, and folk art in portraits has become an emblem of early American art. Yet a step outside the art world was never enough for Dominguez. He took to the streets for over twenty years until his death in 2014, and his art does nothing to disguise the costs. For him, even a cat begs to cat-sit for pay. Baby, it’s cold outside.

Some outsider artists have been trapped inside with their madness, in an institution or in their head. And there is no getting away from the madness of his decision. Others artists have grown up in an artistic family, in his case with a commercial artist for a father, or dropped out after a few courses in art and headed for New York. Not everyone, though, abandoned an East Village apartment at the very depth of East Village malaise and the very peak of East Village art. Dominguez had to be ingenious just to survive, making art from whatever scraps he could find. Not surprisingly, he never made it to his mid-fifties.

Not that he cared all that much about the label outsider art, and he had one dealer and then another. Without them, his work could not have survived, although both galleries passed away as quickly as he. Yet he valued nothing so much as freedom, and nothing less than homelessness would do. One can see it in the show’s very first work, where Lady Liberty in jail comforts a fellow prisoner. “What are you in for?” “Breathing.”

It is the closest Dominguez comes to hectoring. Uncle Sam and a cop with a dollar sign for a head parade right by, while others behind bars are either catching what sleep they can or dropping like flies. Once back on the street, though, his bitterness melts away. A comfortable jogger is just part of the pageantry, along with a man rich enough to toss a bill into one trash can, waste paper into another. In time, he found religion, but giant insects appear more often than a savior. Text within paintings accepts everything he saw, like one that gives the show its title, “Kindness Cruelty Continuum.”

The gallery pairs it with a second show for writing found on the subways, in fake ads, doctored posters, and handwritten rants. Are they witty, tedious, or hateful? All of the above, and Kenneth Goldsmith, who collected them along with Harley Spiller, gives them a name from his poetry, “Are You Free on Saturday from 4–7 PM?” The words look suspiciously like an invitation to his opening, with tabs at bottom for your RSVP. Like Dominguez, Goldsmith would welcome anyone who can make it before 7. I just hate to think whether they would shut up.

Those scraps of raw prose underscore the sophistication of white on black for Dominguez. He brings totemic patterns to large works, in his paint’s chalk-like line on black, and a delicate texture to decals pricked with bleach. He also brings color and the look of traditional samplers to songs after teaching himself to write music. Even the street scenes stop short of cartoons, although one might as well call them a graphic novel. Yet he would still rather be alone. As one lyric begins, “Company loves misery.”

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

A chill wind blows through the art of Charisse Pearlina Weston, but a powerful one. All three of this year’s artists in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem feel the chill in their own lives, and all three look for shelter from the storm.

Jeffrey Meris goes so far as to include body casts of himself and his mother, because attachments matter, and so does the search for identity. Devin N. Morris paints an ordinary black kid on an ordinary city street, mounted above a chest of drawers. He even mounts a door right on the wall. Welcome home.

For all that, they know displacement, even as their art has found a home, through April 8. For the fifth year, MoMA PS1 wraps up the residency with an exhibition while the Studio Museum is closed for expansion and renovation. Meris was born that much further away, in Haiti, but he is not, so far, looking back. He adds warmth and color to his paintings with magazine clips that look suitably commercial and American. Never mind that they include photos of red blood cells, already ominous enough. They must be so for him, who has a compromised immune system.

Lest you doubt it, he needs crutches to walk, and a sphere of crutches pointing out hangs from the ceiling at the center of the room, like a Death Star. He also paints with cuts into roofing materials, which themselves provide shelter while exposed to the elements. Those two body casts, both busts, fall well short of motherly love. They look badly damaged in their unpalatable white resin. Come to think of it, Morris hangs his door too high on a wall to offer access, and it leads nowhere. Another landscape seems about to be swamped by a tidal wave, and enormous eyes look out a window to spy on you.

It is all the give and take of survival and hope. Morris bathes his scenes in sunlight, and his assemblage moves easily from the city into nature. He paints young people beside a tree and on the grass, resting or reading, like his version of Luncheon on the Grass without the nudity and provocation. He also adapts the materials of home to nature. A chair leg becomes a branch, and scraps of paper become the trees of a young forest, where junk like key chains scatters color on the ground. More paper twigs serve as a shawl or the cape of a superhero.

Charisse Pearlina Weston sticks to abstraction where, so long after Minimalism, you can expect a chill. Paintings stick to black and white or to white and a pale, icy green. The colors move across the image like sudden blasts, and she incorporates texturing so that the blasts seem to have shattered. Sculpture runs to heavier but still vulnerable materials. Glass breaks off awkwardly, etched with impenetrable text, and rolled lead might have curled up a moment before. The glass and steel give weight to and threaten one another.

Could they also take the shape of windows? One can make out curtains, peeling back but without a view inside. Weston cites a public program that sought to relieve the decay of the South Bronx and Harlem—but not by doing more to keep housing functional or to provide amenities. How about a few more windows with nicer curtains and potted plants? I cannot take “And Ever an Edge” as this year’s exhibition title and its poetic diction all that seriously, but all three artists do have an edge. They will just have to call it the edge of home.

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

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.