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art reviews from around new york

For Della Wells, it is always a sunny day. Butterflies are free, and sunflowers rise with the sun. Sunlight suffuses her exuberant collage, to the point of a bright yellow sky. Even clouds and shadows are blue. Girls and women wear their Sunday best, indoors and out. It will never rain on their parade.

They got sunshine on a cloudy day, every day, so why are their faces sulking, angry, determined, or scared? Wells knows their feelings well, and she is on their side all the same. This Is Our House, a title declares, and she is out to make it hers—and to share it with others as African Americans. Her latest work, dense and colorful, is a wild ride. It can be hard to believe how well it coheres into something so recognizable, familiar, and comforting. Beverly, Don’t Let Your Fears Paint Your Picture, another runs, and Wells never will, but the fears will not go away, at Andrew Edlin.

Nor will the stereotypes in the face of history, through August 9. Watermelons can turn up anywhere, high up on flagpoles or resting casually on a shelf. So can chickens, gazing up at Beverly herself, peeping out from a tote bag, or behind a brush. Both dare to compete with the American flag. In another artist, like Kara Walker, stereotypes would signal satire or shame. For Wells, they are just business as usual, funny, and fun.

Not that her actors will ever settle for stereotypes. That shelf holds books along with a slice of watermelon, looking downright scholarly. This is the black community, and it demands to be taken seriously. It is also changing before one’s eyes. The front of one building pasted onto another becomes a church. Wait a Minute, another title warns, but do not wait too long.

Think again, it warns, and collage here demands rethinking. It can be hard to know indoors from out—or magazine clippings from drawing and paint. One portrait is Simply Paul, but nothing is quite so simple, and Paula has a red circle over one eye like a bruise or a lens, Beverly a black one. Another clipping turns standard-issue packaging into a yard sign: Fragile / Handle with Care. You had better take care, too, before assigning this art your own stereotypes and expectations.

Wells, a self-taught artist at a gallery dedicated to just that, has the obsessive imaginings of outsider art and the subject matter of folk art to boot. Still, she is way too self-aware for the labels, and her collage looks back to Romare Bearden and others as well. Above all, it will not sit still—not if that would allow white eyes to define it. The show is “Mambo Land,” but another yard sign promises antiques. To Paula’s right, a girl rises past the borders of the picture, literally and metaphorically, leaving only her skirt and feet. Now in her seventies, Wells, too, is rising, but with her feet on the ground.

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Last week I featured a show at the Brooklyn Museum of black collectors in the arts, so how about a show earlier this year of much the same, but ever so different? This review somehow slipped through the cracks at the time, but here it is. I would be insulting Spike Lee if I said that his collection is more about him than about art. What else should guide a collection but passion? The alternative is what someone thinks will sell.

Of course, that passion should extend to the world around him, but no problem there. If one thing holds together four hundred items at the Brooklyn Museum, through February 4, it is a passion for New York. It may not be much as, strictly speaking, an art collection, but this is his New York and very possibly yours as well—and I work this together with a recenter report on Henry Taylor, the black community, and his local heroes as a longer review and my latest upload.

Not that Lee’s sense of what matters is any less real. It just happens to filter through African American eyes in Brooklyn. He grew up there, though born in Atlanta—first in Crown Heights, just blocks from the Brooklyn Museum, and then in Cobble Hill, when it was still Italian. In every sense, he is returning home. He bases his production company there, too, Forty Acres and a Mule in Fort Greene. His first film, She’s Gotta Have It, is about a graphic artist in Brooklyn.

This is a filmmaker’s collection through and through. It opens with posters for his movies (the first in Haitian Creole, also spoken in Brooklyn) and returns often to movies. One room has posters for the classics that were just changing minds when he was growing up, from Rashomon and global cinema to The French Connection on the streets of New York. It has music, including musical numbers from his films. Lee’s father was a jazz bassist, while his mother taught. It has no end of sports figures and their uniforms, especially his beloved New York Knicks.

What it does not have is much art worth remembering. It has Deborah Roberts and Michael Ray Charles, African American painters with a style rooted in folk art of the South, and Kehinde Wiley with a sitter in Jackie Robinson uniform. Mostly, though painting appears, often as not anonymous, as designs for prints—whether posters or the cover of Time featuring Toni Morrison. Not that it downplays the visual arts in favor of Lee’s development. While the curators, Kimberli Gant and Indira A. Abiskaroon, call it “Creative Sources,” he is not giving anything away. Everything on display is complete except for America itself.

That is cause for celebration and a reminder of struggle, racial struggle, just as in his movies. No one appears as often as Malcolm X. In show’s first video, Malcolm speaks at a rally, he explains, not as Democrat or Republican, Christian or Jew, because blackness preceded them all. Am I crazy, then, or an arrogant white male if I say that this is my history as well? I have not taken a show so personally since “Analog City” in 2022, and Lee, I think, would approve. This is the city that shaped me, too, only starting with Lee’s work itself.

These are the books I read, the vinyl I heard, the movies I saw. I cannot tell you how much time I spent alone in my room listening to Knick games in 1969 and 1970, the year of their coach and starting five in a portrait here. When Brooklyn burns in Do the Right Thing and good intentions die, my city was burning, too. Anyone who grew up in those years might feel the same way. Who would not envy a first edition from Zora Neale Hurston? Who could not envy guitars from David Byrne and Prince—or brass from Branford and Wynton Marsalis?

If the story can also be yours, credit Lee’s passion and open mind. Gordon Parks and Richard Avedon photograph cultural icons, black and white (while Carrie Mae Weems photographs Lee himself). A thematic arrangement avoids a single story as well, requiring one to double back on one’s tracks to exit. That has the advantage of avoiding an unhappy ending, with a clip cutting from a Klan march to Donald J. Trump’s talk of “fine people”—and a bat from Aaron Judge the year the Mets and Yankees imploded. If the show still sucks up to celebrity, with too few surprises and too little art, I can understand. This is a museum with its own weak spot for the neighborhood.

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