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In stepping off the wall, can art trace the materials of a life? This year’s Studio Museum artists in residence make it so.

A bit premature, with most of their lives ahead of them? The program has a track record of singling out African American artists with a future. Still, late Modernism taught to see drawing in space and art as object, and now anything goes, anywhere between the ceiling and the floor. New York galleries step off the wall all the time, to give material shape to a career. And I work this together with past report on Paula Wilson and Virginia Overton in Tribeca and Leonardo Drew in Chelsea as a longer review and my latest upload. It might be all about them or you—oh, sorry for missing my Wednesday morning post for once, but I was having an ankle repaired, and here I am hopping back to business.

A program of artists in residence is a good deal all around. Artists in need of a break get a free studio, the imprimatur of a museum, and a show at year’s end. The rest of us get an insider’s view of an artist at work. Whatever are they doing in all that time, and what emerges day by day? That is not to say that I can handle another open-studio weekend, long past the heady days of Williamsburg, Bushwick, and Dumbo—and no one to screen the artists but those who attend. But this program belongs to the Studio Museum in Harlem, still closed for expansion and renovation, and the exhibition takes place one more time at MoMA PS1, as “Pass Carry Hold” through February 10.

It sounds modest enough from its title (psst, pass it on), and it looks modest enough, too. The three African American artists get adjacent quarters along the hall, rather than dividing one of the museum’s spacious wings like last year or the year before. It could well replicate the layout of their studios uptown, only smaller. Why the modesty? You might expect the three to spend the year amassing a body of work and a profile as an artist. Instead, each has nurtured a single work as it comes to be.

At least it seems so. Malcolm Peacock divides his space with a black curtain, like a theater, and his comedy or drama stars family and friends. Their indecipherable voices fill the air around just one object behind the curtain, in the shape of a giant redwood. A tree like that lives a long time, and who knows how much it might grow in the course of a year, but this emerging artist aims for stability. The trunk’s warm red comes from from hair on a wood frame that seems to twist as it grows, like the twist and turns of a human lifetime. Hairs have sharper colors as well, in highlights of his own devising.

Zoë Pulley starts with family, too, while reaching out. “What,” she asks, “is a memory you have with one clothing item from your childhood?” She assembles memories of her own and her parents’ childhoods, which is good, because I, for one, could not have come up with a single one. She fashions images of a blouse, a shirt, and a suit into plastic and vinyl, hanging beside a tapestry of seat belts. Apparently the past is more confining than she might wish. And maybe the truly clothes conscious start young.

If Pulley feels constrained, though, she never lets on, and the same items appear in photos of family members with ornate black frames. Their ovals suggest still older fashions, as do memorabilia like a telegram from Western Union. They are separate works, but connected: they recall a wrenching move from Washington to Prince George County—not far, but just far enough to her set her on the course of a life. If an emphasis on clothing translates into gender awareness, the third artist, sonia louise davis, sees her woven work as “feminist abstraction.” And she, too, treats it as almost an installation to itself.

These are “soft paintings,” in the present-day fashion for a woman’s craft as art and weaving as painting. They earn their softness at that, with varieties of wool in a loose, broad weave. She hangs some off the wall so that one can see both sides of a material object, contributing to the sense of an installation. So does a second room for sound art, a simple banging on metal from, she explains, impressions on her daily walks in St. Nicholas Park in Harlem. It rings out like bells beside wall painting that could be anything from living things to a Soviet hammer and sickle. Memories are deceptive and often sentimental, and so it is for all three, but so, too, is the passage from childhood to a career in art.

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

To pick up from last time on Alvin Ailey, an island for art right off the elevator points to his influence. The Whitney has commissioned portraits of dance by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Jennifer Packer, each a study in movement and color.

Also in 2024, Karon Davis renders a dancer in profile in plaster. Its tribute to freedom of motion takes on a spooky fixity in white. Here and elsewhere, the show exceeds Ailey’s lifetime. And it dares one to pick out what else does and what does not.

The Whitney sees the same themes as applying to Ailey and to twentieth-century art. Growing up fatherless in rural Texas, he would have seen what Thornton Dial called Shadows of the Field in 2008, and listened to spirituals, like those playing softly at the Whitney. He would have seen makeshift homes like the cabin in the cotton in a painting by Horace Pippin—or constructions in wood scraps like those of Beverly Buchanan well after Ailey’s death. The Great Migration took him to Harlem for its tombstone houses, its preachers, and its street life—just as it took others in works by Jacob Lawrence, Charles White, and William H. Johnson. All date to well before Ailey’s maturity.

He loved music, like the song of a choir boy in a photo by James van der Zee. He knew jazz musicians, like Elvin Jones in a photo by Roy DeCarava. He admired black women and black liberation. And he reveled in dance, much like a dancing elder in wood, fabric, and beads by John Outterbridge. The exhibition has room for an entire suite by Romare Bearden, Bayou Fever, full of life but far from Harlem. You will just have to take the Whitney’s word for it that abstraction from Sam Gilliam reflects the same rhythms.

If Modernism and contemporary art were not enough, the show throws in a landscape from 1851, a view of Cincinnati by Robert Duncanson. It brings Hudson River School light to a community for black Americans. But then history has a way of getting out of hand, even for Ailey. Who can claim it all, and who would want to try? Where to end and where to begin? Everything about the show rings false, but even its falsity has its rewards in discovery.

That very first island for art has its discoveries. It includes sculpture from Richmond Barthé as far back as 1913. Its video record includes Lorna Simpson in 2011, with pale orange dancers might have come from another dimension. Who knew a woman from Barkley Hendricks in unmoving profile as a dancer—or nylon stockings weighted with sand from Senga Nengudi as a dance? Now, perhaps but only perhaps, you will.

The surprises keep coming. A silhouette by Kara Walker hangs over the iconic Black Woman by Elizabeth Catlett. Manacles by Melvin Edwards speaks of black liberation. And then comes a River of steel chains and rope by Maren Hassinger. Lonnie Holley binds rocking chairs like electric chairs, with fire hoses. This will be one long emergency and one long struggle.

You may still reject the show’s premises, or you may see in it what set Ailey apart. The ABT was not half as confrontational as black experience might lead you to expect, for all the “edges” of Ailey. Jerome Robbins in West Side Story and George Balanchine in Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, both white, choreographed violence. For Ailey, the African American struggle is a struggle for beauty. A black woman, so often at its center, is still looking for love. And the wide-open floor for dance and for art has its beauty, too.

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

The largest gallery at the Whitney just got bigger. It has knocked down nearly every wall, leaving a dance theater that Alvin Ailey himself could never have experienced. For a more impressive stage, he would have had to turn to New York itself.

It is also an exhibition space—as capacious, the museum hopes, as African American art. It sees Ailey as a guide to the story of that art, including art that he may never have known. It must sound ridiculous. Who would attempt to tell that story in an exhibition or even two, no more than the story of Western or global art? It risks condescending to black artists by pretending that it can. And yet it succeeds, for theater becomes art and art becomes theater, as “Edges of Ailey,” through February 9, while an Ailey veteran, Ralph Lemon, at MoMA PS1 reaches for the stars.

This is epic theater. Works from more than eighty artists, many as large as a human performer, take the spotlight before disappearing into a greater darkness. Some occupy islands within “Edges of Ailey,” and you can circulate around and between them. Right off, that knocks out any hope for a chronological exhibition or even a story, but do not despair. The rest line the walls, as you would expect, and articulate the show’s themes. Smaller spaces at each end of the floor tell Ailey’s own interdisciplinary story.

Born in 1931, he studied with Stella Adler—not a choreographer, but a renowned acting teacher. He acknowledged the influence of Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Duke Ellington, and the show returns often to the Harlem Renaissance, painting and dance, black experience, and music, particularly jazz. He credited Geoffrey Holder as well, a friend who moved easily between the stage and art. Ailey founded the American Dance Theater in 1958, with thirty-two dancers and two directors. There, too, he was thinking of influence, collaboration, and community. He died in 1989 of AIDS.

The show includes publicity posters, playbills, and film clips culled from thousands of hours, and scheduled performance continues downstairs in the museum’s theater and on its roof as well. It has color photos of Ailey himself dancing, lingering on not just his movements, but his expressive face. Ailey made the scene in all sorts of ways. The ABT performed at the opening of Studio 54, the epitome of a club scene that would never admit you. And the show’s only window overlooks a Hudson River pier that served as a gay pick-up spot. The AIDS quilt bars the view.

Overhead on the show’s fantastic stage, choreography, too, lines the walls, in one long video collage spanning eighteen screens. It adds color, like the yellow robes of dancers. It provides a constant background of music, even if you look instead at the art. Mahalia Jackson introduces a work with music by Ellington, barely mentioning Ailey. This is his achievement all the same. It just happens to come down to two distinct exhibitions, for dance and for art.

The show is itself a collaboration, between the Whitney and the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation. Neither is willing to let Ailey’s work die with him. Nor are the curators, Adrienne Edwards with Joshua Lubin-Levy. They could have included only art that the choreographer admired or influenced, and perhaps they do. If so, he knew and influenced a lot. And that still leaves open just how present he is in the art—and I wrap this up next time with the art itself.

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

Oh, no, not another biennial or triennial. What could conceivably make this one any different? It is “Flow States,” La Trienal 2024 El Museo del Barrio through March 16. Will it just go with the flow?

A museum dedicated to the Americas in New York has a ready answer. It is all about cultural difference—and the borders meant to keep differences out. Not that La Trienal is a dry and affirming lecture on diversity. The artists themselves may wonder what to call home. With just thirty-three contributors, it leaves ample room to share in their dilemma. With a dozen works commissioned for the occasion, it hopes to nurture them as well, and I work this together with past reports on Amalia Mesa-Bains and “Domesticanx” at the same museum as a longer review and my latest upload.

Visitors cross more than one border just by entering. A black beaded curtain, by Cosmo Whyte, leads to rooms often reserved for a second show, but among the museum’s best for installations and big work. Whyte calls it Persona Non Grata, for not all are equally welcome in America. It leaves one face to face with a mural by Caroline Kent that takes her lively abstract shapes into a mix of painted and solid forms. It is, she explains, interdimensional. Borders, it appears, are for time travelers, too.

You may not even know that they are there. Nearby, Estaban Cabeza de Baca adopts the same mural scale for a tropical landscape. You might have settled in for vacation only to find yourself on the border between the United States and Mexico. Still other place markers are invisible, like bird calls from Mark Menjivar and scents from Chaveli Sifra. Paint for Ser Serpas (also in the 2024 Whitney Biennial) spills out from the walls and onto the floor, for an immersive experience. Trump’s wall is mostly a fiction anyway.

Artists have crossed borders personally as well, starting with their heritage. Kent has a Mexican mother and an African American father. Regardless, they surely sympathize with those who have made the crossing just to survive. Studio Lenca suspends migrant caps from pieces of a Ford F-150 truck. Liz Cohen photographs women workers, while Studio Lenca calls its paintings Journeys. Tony Cruz Pabón marks the distance from San Juan to New York with pencil marks that bring him closer to Minimalism than folk art.

They may cross borders with their materials as well. Carmen Argo constructs her beings from plastic ties and palm leaves, while Sarita Westrup applies native crafts to a good old New York traffic cone. Raw materials like tar take Karyn Olivier from carnival in Trinidad to shelter in North Philadelphia. Then too, borders are place markers. Joe Zaldivar maps where every artist has landed, in New York and behind. As curators, Rodrigo Moura, Susanna V. Temkin, and María Elena Ortiz fill the entire museum, as if mapping a continent.

These are unsettling journeys, whatever the artist’s cultural identity. This is not one big happy family. Alina Perez in charcoal remembers her family as anything but what she calls a Family Romance. Photos by Christina Fernandez remember long suburban nights in LA as a war zone. Mario Martinez uses light brushwork out of Abstract Expressionism to evoke every New Yorker’s favorite toxic Superfund site, the Gowanus Canal. Kathia St. Hilaire can pack almost anything into low relief, from banknotes and banana stickers to a painted candle piercing the darkness.

Artists here may shy away from from conflict or boosterism, but anger remains. “They stole our land and now they call us migrants,” a fisherman says in video by Alberta Whittle—and yet beauty remains in his labor and his nets. This translates into large work, and artists can easily coast on it. Smaller pieces and older media mostly fall short. Can a triennial, then, truly make a difference? Maybe so, but please do not ask for yet another.

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

Does it matter where a work of art originated? Do we need to ask about the artist, the time, or the culture, or can we just appreciate the art? And if we do not appreciate the art for itself, have we betrayed it and, just as much, ourselves? Why should art not speak for itself?

I have pursued questions like these often over the more than twenty years of this Web site, along with my role as a critic. In fact, I doubt that I can match the more philosophical attempts in the past! The questions came up again, though, not so very long ago on Facebook. When I posted a link and brief reply, a second artist was even more skeptical. Suppose I rework my further comments, as a rather longer article and my latest upload in defense of not just looking. I shall combine my address to both, in the form of a letter to an unknown artist, maybe even you.

You raised the questions as both an admirer of art and an artist, so it is doubly real for you. You have heard friends speak of what they see in the patterns that they have made. As a savvy viewer who cannot see the same, you have to wonder whether that could ever matter to you. You may wonder whether your thoughts appear fully in your work as well. If not, you may wonder whether your work has taken on a new life, apart from you, or rather failed. It is, after all, a work of your imagination.

I have argued before why art takes words. It has to take words for me as a writer, and I have to hope that my words can open art to some others as well. In my earlier piece, I looked in particular at changing attributions. The Rembrandt committee had changed its mind about a painting in the Frick that so many of us have taken for granted as his. It has even shaped our personal understanding of Rembrandt. Since then, big money has backed novel attributions to Michelangelo at (gasp) age twelve (illustrated at left here) and, more recently, Leonardo da Vinci.

I still think that attributions matter, which is why arguments about millions of dollars for a supposed Leonardo get so heated. Allow me now, though, a fuller context for much the same questions—beyond attributions. I can start with your recent experience, on the way to that of others. Now, no question that an artist’s intentions cannot tell the whole story. Hard as it is to admit, an artist may even get it wrong. I am still attached enough to Modernism, New Criticism, and the like to think so.

Yet if the “intentional fallacy” means that it never matters how, where, and when a work of art began, then it is wrong. As Nelson Goodman, a philosopher of art, has said, he will believe that a painting speaks for itself when people start to admire poetry without reading the words. If you think that ugly painting is by Leonardo, you have to look for and indeed to see things that are simply not there. You have to see Leonardo and his other works differently, too, to their detriment. And then your questions may help you think freshly about those once again, to their betterment.

Think that you could not agree less with Goodman? I could understand that, but you may agree much more than you think, so let me tell you why. To me, it is just common sense. My answer will take several parts, so bear with me, but I shall try to stay more practical at the cost of serious theory than my previous effort. It involves the work and how the work comes to affect others. Pardon me, though, if it starts with you.

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

There is not a lot of shaking going on at the American Folk Art Museum, unless it is deep inside one’s soul. In fact it can be hard for an outsider to imagine the shaking and quaking that animated prayer meetings of the Shakers and Quakers, giving them their name.

One remembers instead the clarity and simplicity of Shaker furniture. One remembers, too, the removal from modern life in the Quakers, a lifestyle that most today would find confining. Yet a show makes the case for the Shaker esthetic as “Anything but Simple,” through January 26.

There had to have been more than the obvious to that esthetic, for the Shakers lived with it and let it shape their lives. Photos at the museum show objects in their place in homes from which people have long vanished, and one can feel the furniture and people alike close at hand. They did not need to go far in pursuit of a revelation. At the same time, they embraced simplicity as one of the prime virtues along with celibacy, pacifism, and egalitarianism. The combination of esthetic, practical, and spiritual virtues has long become an emblem of an older New England for the Shakers and rural Pennsylvania for the Quakers. It seems as essentially American as Washington crossing the Delaware.

Nor is it entirely passed. Shaker craft opens the exhibition along with the photographs, with all its richness in simplicity, like the wood grain and dark stain of nested oval boxes. Everything fits. Much the same paradox animated Minimalism in the 1960s, for all its industrial esthetic. Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Agnes Martin wanted to keep their hands dirty and their vision clear. That decade also looked to Quaker pacifism in response to the Vietnam War.

Like a viewer today, the Shakers lived in more than one time at once. They began shaking loose in England before taking their millenarian project to the United States in 1774, where they revered a founding figure in Mother Ann, or Ann Lee. There had to be something more, they felt, than the Enlightenment march of time or the hairsplitting of organized religions—and they found it in a perceived act of restoration. Much the same thoughts motivated Hassidic Jews in Eastern Europe in those same years. Like the Quakers, they, too, dress for those years while claiming the very first millenium. The Shakers just happened to turn out art and merchandise worth something today.

They knew it, too, and they meant their “gift drawings” of the mid-1800s for a larger public, for sale as a means of financial support. Yet their images of wreaths, hearts, fruit, and the tree of life also encode the gifts of heaven. They really did know beauty as soul shaking. They can close in on a single leaf or multiply their fruit, in bright, flat colors distinct from both “outsider art” and the brilliant illusion of Baroque still life and Romantic images of nature. Text at times helps to explain the code, barely breaking the symmetry, but you may not need it. Call it the calm after the quaking and shaking.

If the 1960s found something to admire, it may have rendered their austerity all but superfluous. Not that a movement devoted to celibacy had long to live. The movies and metaphors aside, there was no apocalypse now. Their dying off may explain so small a show—alongside selections from AFAM curated with an eye to Thornton Dial, the artist, and a packed display of game boards. It could serve as a preamble to the Met’s rehanging of its American wing on its hundredth anniversary, but also a rejoinder. Something here still brings stillness and bears fruit.