6.12.24 — Local and Global Color
Give Melissa Cody some credit. When she titles a tapestry I Am Navajo Barbie, she is not cashing in on the movie. She created the work more than ten years ago.
She is also just one of three artists boasting of their defiance, their heritage, and nontraditional media at MoMA PS1. They differ only in how far they range beyond those platitudes—and how close to the culture that threatens to swallow up them all. What starts as political correct and artistically pro forma takes on local and global color, and I work this together with earlier reports on the Native American art of Natalie Ball and Beau Dick as a longer review in my latest upload. 
Cody seems happy to limit herself, but her American dream is more than a passing fancy, through September 9 (with additional work at Garth Greenan through June 15). She calls her show “Webbed Skies” to honor the Spider Woman—not the superhero or the heart of a Latin American novel, but one who descended from the skies to bring weaving to the Navajo/Diné people. Cody’s motifs, she says, evoke western mountains, whirling logs, and the snake that threatens to undermine them all. She also remembers her father’s descent into Parkinson’s disease, and her colorful work could be an act of restitution. So might block letters woven here and there just short of legibility beyond a plea for lost love. If all that seems a lot to ask, it is.
Is there still room for Barbie, and can the work reflect the ambivalence of her hopes? Not really, but she does have a gift for color. Many an artist these days uses hangings to evoke craft traditions, but hers set the elements of tradition just slightly askew. Her patterns depart from symmetry just enough, like in a video game, and her natural and unnatural colors clash and glow. What look at first like Native American blankets in the latest Whitney Biennial end up neither entirely old nor new. They could be equally out of place on tribal lands or in a pricy design outlet.
Pacita Abad is more colorful still, because she works larger and sucks a great deal more into the picture. Single figures can resemble totems, but from what world culture? Denser designs approach abstraction. One might not know it from her opening room, through September 2, but they also acquire narratives about communities on six continents. She does pick up a needle and thread, but in a collage of found materials and found imagery from a long career. She died in 2004.
Abad survived under the Marcos regime in the Philippines before moving to Thailand and again moving on. Her images of home seem both active and defiant, behind apartment windows or barbed wire. Her totems have heavy eyes and unsightly grins that could attest to sheer fatigue or the demon within. Lady Liberty herself makes an appearance, as LA Liberty. She, too, expresses global displacement, but Abad’s New York still looks like home. Her eclecticism, like Cody’s ambivalence, may never quite add up, but neither, I suspect, do their own feelings.
Regina José Galindo trades in craft for video and ambivalence for nothing but defiance, through August 26. She stands naked, proud and impassive, as a bulldozers digging up the Guatemalan earth closes in. If she appears to protest wealthy developers, it is only a metaphor, you see, for decades of civil war. If she also has white gunk all over her upper body, it is just more of the work’s chill. It could use some local color. Her art is genuinely unnerving, but what if the bulldozers will not back down?
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.