9.23.24 — Hope Against Hope
Hope springs eternal. Each year the Governors Island Arts Center does its level best to fill the summer doldrums, and one can always hope.
At the top of stairs from the café, flags displays red roses and a message of “Yes,” while a bedsheet beside them shows what I took for a dreamer. Who would dare disturb its sleep, even for art? But then, as the show’s title has it, “Hope Is a Discipline,” 
just this summer through September 29. Bread and Puppet Theater, which made both works, has been at it now for almost sixty years.
A display case tells its story. It began as a cross between activism and Off-Off-Broadway (or maybe Off-Off-Off Broadway) theater without ever quite ascending to the pantheon of performance art. Books and magazines speak of puppet making, but also justice and a dance of death for the victims of “Assistant Mass Murderer” Antony Blinkin, the secretary of state. I hardly know whether to call it dogmatism or discipline. And still Adama Delphine Fawundu, another contributor, can remember When the Spirits Dance. Twin tapestries drape onto the floor with pigments from Sierra Leone, herbs from Mali, “whispers” from Africa, and shells from Cuba, South Carolina, and Maine.
Africans, she insists “built this place,” which must have taken discipline and persistence. Still, hope for the future can be hard to sustain. Maggie Wong sets out a drafting table, painted an acid red and with a red blanket trailing behind it. It could be her work table, for a work in progress, but newsprint has already filled it with devotion and anger. But then a bedsheet smeared with house paint sounds discomforting enough on its own. Who can ensure that those dreams will not be nightmares?
Hope may envision a future, but the entire show looks back, much like the display case. Suneil Sanzgiri sees his video trilogy as a conversation with his father. And it, too, is cautious when it comes to hope. Grainy footage shows a protest in India, but also seemingly purposeless walks through dim corridors and closed courtyards. A second video, an “experimental documentary” by Kyori Jeon, bears Flesh-Witness. Solitary standing figures could be proud or weary, even as others help their companions onto a platform and wave their banners to those who can see.
Hope may be more evident in a second show sharing the space. When “Tropical Frequencies” looks back, it sees a continuing tradition. It is hardly the first to focus on Caribbean art and the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, nor the most memorable. It does, though, have an insistent interplay between painting and assemblage. It becomes an interplay between African American faces and ephemera as well. Quiara Torres sets a portrait within a pearly lamp or cage, where one can feel the confinement and almost smell an unseen candle.
The portrait has its echoes in flat, earthy reds for a pregnant woman by Bony Ramirez—or a standing figure by Emily Manwaring, both with an overlay of shells. Still more shells hang from chains for Ramirez, along with coconuts. Are they relentlessly optimistic? The Kiss of Protection from Mosie Romney sure sounds reassuring, but Cheyenne Julien dots her figure with small red nails. I exited not by the main entrance, but back down those stairs toward the ferry, leaving the flowers and bedsheet behind. I might have abandoned all hope.
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