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art reviews from around new york

Entering the holiday season means leaving the busy fall season behind. That makes it a good time to look back, and what better way than with a belated report on the fall art fairs? Here goes.

For years I had promised myself to skip the New York art fairs. What can they add to an already busy gallery scene in New York?

What can they bring to the already enormous pressure of that first week after labor day, when openings run wild? If those same galleries find their sales dropping, and more and more experience dealers are calling it quits, the fairs bear their share of the blame here, too. So if I could cut back at last this past spring, could I pull it off again in September? Could a compulsive critic withstand the compulsion?

Maybe not, but I could look once again for the alternatives. That has its drawbacks, too. Who feels the costs more than the kind of galleries that exhibit at “alternative fairs”? If they are not on a budget, who is? Others may feel under pressure to splurge on booths at two fairs, the Armory Show and one more, closer to their buyers and their roots—and I work this together with a past report on the spring New York art fairs as a longer review and my latest upload. Still other exhibitors have no dealers or curators, only aspiring artists, and what ever too often is the pleasure for a critic in that?

I have no answer, but I still have my compulsions. And what could be more of an outsider than a fair with just one dealer, the gallery that hosts it, but calls itself an Armory Show affiliate anyway—Salon Zürcher for “11 Women of Spirit +” If “Spirit +” sounds more like a flavored vodka than a true shot in the arm, it allows Zürcher to reset its count of editions to Part One. It still leans to women in abstraction, a timely enough cause as well. It may be running thin, especially after a summer group show of a hundred women, but such is the pressure to exhibit art.

It does have charming enough local landscapes by Brigid Kennedy—and charming enough knitted portraits by Mary Tooley Parker. Marykate O’Neil groups her portraits of leisure, with a woman, perhaps the artist, sipping wine on a larger scale if passing judgment on them all. Abstraction, in turn, can be jazzy, as with Susan Cantrick, or brushier, as with Patricia Spergel, who adds an artist painting. Still, it does tend to run together. I remember more the work that lives between abstraction and figuration—flowers by Tracy Morgan and open skies by Sue Carlson with a yellow arc on top. I took it all in but was ready to move on.

Once Volta was a path-breaker, the fair with single-artist booths, the fair that makes you look and remember. Now even a room for Ukrainian artists packs them in, everything looks familiar, and wiser galleries exhibit elsewhere. A girl at night on a country road, in black-and-white photos by Sophie Zhai (with London’s Mandy Zhang) or portraits of blackness, in color photos by Joanne McFarland (with Accola Griefen)? Yeah, sure, although both stand out, and McFarland’s sitters could be role models, plastic dolls, or the baby girl next store. Maybe, though, the real problem lies with the perpetual art fairs, all of them? Can anything stand out any longer in all the madness?

You may not think so at Clio, borrowing the space of a Soho gallery, where artists choose themselves with predictable results. Look instead to what could be the true New York scene, its office buildings, and Spring/Break seems out to explore them all. The fair that sounds like a holiday at the beach has moved to Hudson Square north of Tribeca, and it fits right in. Small offices offers close-ups, but office culture shines best in common areas. The fair does have painting, from cheery abstraction to dark fantasies, and sculpture, like an eccentric chess set or large wood pieces in a forgotten game (and I do not name artists because Spring/Break often fails to identify them). Still, it seems only right that one office holds Post-It notes, and one artist leaves out his colored geometry as if taking over the bar—and I continue next time with Art on Paper and the Independent.

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

Mary Sully took the long view. It did not settle anything, but it did bring a kind of peace.

The Met calls a selection of two dozen drawings “Native Modern,” through January 12, and she was equally at ease with Native American craft, Modernism, and her own rebellious spirit. She herself called them “/personality prints,” and they depict no end of other personalities as well from stage and screen. She produced many indeed from the 1920s through the 1940s, none of them dated. It is all she can do to encompass New York between the wars and her own mixed ancestry—and I bring this together with my recent report on Aboriginal Australian bark painting as a longer review with more of the long view as my latest upload.

Each drawing has three parts, stacked vertically, for another kind of long view. Coming to Sully amid indigenous art in the Met’s American wing, one might dismiss her work as more of the same. Her vertical format and obsessive patterning recall traditional blankets and dresses, and the museum throws in one of each for good measure. She herself cultivated the image of the unknown, self-taught artist in America’s oldest Indian village. She appears on film, working away while dressed to the Native American nines. One can almost overlook the film’s producer, Paramount Pictures.

She knew her Dakota homeland, but she also knew New York, where her sister studied anthropology under Franz Boas at Columbia University. She celebrated Easter on Fifth Avenue and dedicated a drawing to Fiorello La Guardia, the New Deal mayor. She called another drawing Greed, lest there be any doubt that corporate interests brought on the Depression in the first place. In a drawing for Walter Winchell, the radio news anchor, Sully’s zigzag patterns could be bursts of radio waves, carrying the city’s message to the world. A drawing for Florenz Ziegfeld has at top a circle of pretty faces, right out of the Ziegfeld follies. Others allude to Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, the Broadway actors, but also a child actress, because sophistication is in the eye of the beholder.

Sully cultivated her family history, too, in all its amalgams and contradictions. Her father, Philip J. Deloria, was an Episcopal minister in a Native American church, and a drawing depicts a ceremony. It has a minister at its center in a proper prayer shawl, while curtains to either side might be officiants themselves and seem to take on wings. She took her name, though, from her mother, herself of mixed ancestry. The young artist could not have minded that it also marks her as the great-granddaughter of Thomas Sully, the painter born in England. She could not have minded, too, that his parents were actors and his portraits include composers along with Thomas Jefferson.

She was taking the long view, too, in a triptych for Three Stages of Indian History. The patterned lower third may adapt “Pre-Columbian Freedom,” while figures on the grass just above inhabit an idealized version of Standing Rock Reservation, her birthplace. That leaves the crowded silhouettes at top for “The Bewildering Present.” Unless, of course, their dark outlines derive from Pre-Columbian pottery—and the wild zigzags for upheavals in Native American and modern art. Oh, and did I say that Sully titles that sunlit expanse “Reservation Fetters”? Freedom may not come easily.

The curators, Patricia Marroquin Norby and Sylvia Yount, single out one drawing for its “unusual ambiguity,” but ambiguity for Sully comes with the territory. Elsewhere dark silhouettes could represent Depression-era labor, entertainers, or celebrants. The colorful patterns could derive from her ancestors or still-revolutionary abstract art. Often text appears at bottom, as a fourth panel, to identify the subject. One for Gertrude Stein quotes “rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” Repetition like that could be naïve or revolutionary, too—and, of course, sheer patterning.

Not many artists back then were fluent in terms like “Pre-Columbian,” and not many had a linguistic ethnographer for a sister. And how many could turn colored pencil and pastel crayons into drawing with the precision of ink and a softness akin to watercolor? Sully is no closer to fame, but then she had reservations about fame, even as she pursued it. One last triptych has a cart at top overflowing with flowers, a floral tapestry, and then the zigzags. It could mark the passage from the streets of New York to the reservation and finally to abstraction. Or it could run the other way, from abstraction to nature.

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

Can there have been a first Aboriginal work of art? Yes and no, and Asia Society gives it a room to itself, but against a backdrop of churning waters projected on the walls. These are ancestral waters, and painting itself has a history without a beginning, in ancestral practices—and, an exhibition explains, in “patterns of the ancestral land itself.”

That conjunction, of practices known only to clan and community but there for all to see, guides “Madayin,” eighty years of Aboriginal Australian bark painting, through January 5. The title means both the sacred and the beautiful, which is to say both a ritual and (oh, dear) fine art—and that 1935 point of origins has a back story as well as a backdrop. A white investigator had taken up the cause of four men in prison for murder, and Wongu Munuŋgur thanked him with a painting. Aboriginal painting had long worked in sand and on bare skin, but now it became reddish-brown pigment on eucalyptus bark. It became, too, the conjunction of the timeless and timely. Painters have been asking just how much to call it theirs ever since.

They live in Yirrkala, about halfway along Australia’s remote northern coast, and Asia Society supplies a map. The Yolŋu “knowledge holders” who curated the show were not entirely comfortable with that. To them, what a scientist might call a reference frame or a colonizer a navigational aid is a betrayal. The Yolŋu themselves had no written language, just a multiplicity of spoken languages, until Europeans showed up. To this day, artists refuse to adopt the patterns of other clans—not, they insist, out of scorn but out of respect. If all this “primitive art” starts to look the same, do bear that in mind.

If it still looks much the same, it will always take the long view. That opening work rests on the floor like Native American tapestry, while other work hangs vertically with dominant vertical fields. They afford space for ancestral beings, including snakes, sharks and men. Fish might be swimming upward as if swimming upstream. They might also be swimming into a trap, part of the myths and patterns at play, too. Layered on top in thicker pigments, often white, are rocks and clouds.

These are sacred spaces, and they articulate gurrutu, or kinship. More precisely, they picture a kinship system, encompassing art, country, and the environment—or lands, stories, and fire. Short diagonals dart back and forth against the verticals. Everything runs freely, supplying points of unrest and stability. These artists could not draw a straight line with a ruler if they tried. But then that would be mapping.

Museums have made a point these days of hanging long-past art beside contemporaries, like the Met with Japan, Korea, and Tibet. Contemporary art sells, and board members are collectors. It makes sense, though, when a people refuses a time line or a map. Asia Society draws on the show’s partners, the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia and the Buku-Larrngay Mulka Centre in Australia, along with new commissions. It also starts all over again one floor up.

The restart introduces women. They began to paint in the 1930s, too. Forms in their hands become larger and more prominent, like a starlit sky for Nyapanyapa Yunupinu. (Could this be the Yolŋu Starry Night?) They show humans as active today or all but eliminate them on the way to abstraction. And then comes one last room for half a dozen contemporaries.

They recall another beginning nearly eighty years ago, in the United States. Carlene West looks to the Surrealism that Jackson Pollock once had to leave behind, Riko Rennie and others to geometry and color. They may send you back to the rest of the exhibition to see what, if anything, has changed as Aboriginal art enters the mainstream. From the start, one motive for painting on bark was to swap with outsiders for food and provisions, and now it has earned its place in New York. Besides, there is always one problem with seeing the world as a system: the more it grows, the more it can fall apart.

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

Think keeping up with the news is hard? What about keeping up with the streets?

With “We Are Here,” the International Center of Photography exhibits “scenes from the streets,” through January 6, and its title is an assertion. It speaks for the show’s subjects, in sixteen countries, asserting their presence and demanding a voice. It speaks to the pace of the streets and the very nature of photography, snapping away as best it can. We are here, it says, and soon we will be gone. What, though, will anyone remember? And what has happened to photography’s decisive moment?

Of course, Henri Cartier-Bresson coined “the decisive moment” to describe a vision of the present that not all photographers share—and I work this together with past reviews of Mark Steinmetz, Hans Breder, and Cartier-Bresson’s ideal as a longer review and my latest upload. Fashion photography or product photography needs time to create an image and to land a sale. Abstract photography asks to step out of time, even when it provides a window onto the photographer at work. From ICP’s founding, though, fifty years ago, it made photojournalism not a choice but a responsibility. It was not just keeping up with the news but making news. Lives were at stake.

Street photography can seem a casualty—or a foster child of silence and very fast time. You know what to expect at ICP, a city in motion. Look back to New York in the 1970s with Martha Cooper, when crime was at its peak, for empty lots and kids climbing the fences, if not the walls. Just crossing Canal Street with so many others is enough for Corky Lee. Skip ahead to the present, and collective motion means protest—for Freddie Gray in Baltimore with Devin Allen or for Women’s Day in Mexico City with Yolanda Andrade. Rest assured that the riot squad will turn up in force, even when no riot is going on.

Look for symbols, like the American flag put to personal use. Look for protest signs and graffiti, like spray paint that rechristens the American West for Nicholas Galanin as No Name Creek and Indian Land. Look for Palestinians on a day at the beach, Ferris wheels, kids doing cartwheels, or everyone just hanging out. Look for displays of street fashion, one girl or woman at a time. Look for them all again and again. The thirty-odd photographers get several shots apiece to do them justice. Most are contemporary and barely known.

The trouble is that you very much can expect them, over and over. Nothing seems all that decisive. As one protest sign has it, for Vanessa Charlot, the people demand “full humanity.” Actual humans, though, can get forgotten along the way, as older street photographers like Ming Smith and William Klein would never have allowed. The photographs do not want to make isolated, iconic images, which is exhilarating. Something, though, is lost—be it the issues at stake in protest, the poignancy of outcomes, or photography’s experiments.

There are things worth remembering nonetheless, on top of the sheer weight of the familiar. Street lives matter. While many stick to black and white, a tribute to street photography’s past, color can tell a story, too. It can erupt in umbrellas for Janette Beckman or women together, in South Africa for Trevor Stuurman or and in China for Feg Li. They are not just showing off but being themselves. Smugglers cycle or cart their bright bundles for Romuald Hazoumè, and yellow caps make police no less dangerous for Lam Yik Fei.

Is a riot going on after all—a riot of color in the riot of the streets? Chastening to a critic, even the breaks in uniformity come more than once. I had admired Anthony Hernandez before for LA seen through a chain-link fence, but here the distancing comes again with Michael Wolf. Long exposures from Alexey Titarenko turn St. Petersburg into a city of ghosts. And then women in white at church in Nigeria for Stephen Tayo could be an extraterrestrial delegation for peace. This, too, is the street.

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

For more than fifty years, Mexican artists toiled in the shadow of revolution. So, too, does the Met with “Mexican Prints at the Vanguard,” through January 5.

The Mexican Revolution took ten long years, starting in 1910, but artists before it could see it coming in all its violence. Well after, it served as a model and a call for change. To the left, and there were many on the left, it served as a cry to support for other revolutions, in Russia and Spain. Later still, it served as a bitter memory, as a government dedicated to remaking the country and the world gave way to yet another dictator. Could, though, the cries put Mexico at the vanguard of twentieth-century art? Perhaps, but only by remaining in the trenches.

“Mexican Prints” is thoroughly out of fashion, which is to say seriously modern. These days, a proper Mexican revolution would be a cultural revolution, with women in the vanguard, like Amalia Mesa-Bains recently at El Museo del Barrio, and Mexican tradition their passion. The Met ends in 1955 as if to avoid all that. References to Pre-Colombian art do appear in square-jawed heads, but not often, and figures costumed for a carnival come only at the end, with Carlos Mérida, as one of the few spots of color. But then Mérida also produced an abstract composition, give or take a bird. Frida Kahlo, in native costume as a woman’s act of defiance, does not appear at all.

The curator, Mark McDonald, starts in the 1700s, but not with native tradition. He looks instead to Europe, much like a past show of “Painted in Mexico.” Later, Tina Modotti will depict soldiers with a debt to Baroque paintings of a Madonna rising. In between, artists turned to the satire of Honoré Daumier. But this was always art as illustration, in service to a cause. Text can overwhelm images. Tracts and newsletters precede starker lithographs by David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Of course, Siqueiros was also a muralist, and the show runs in parallel with Mexican murals. Diego Rivera, turns up a print after one of his most famous. Emiliano Zapata, the revolutionary, stands beside his horse. Rivera came to New York as well, for a show of his work at MoMA. José Clemente Orozco came as well, too, with a print of a vaudeville act in Harlem. Here or in Mexico, change was in the air.

Mexican prints first entered the museum’s collection at the instigation of a French artist, Jean Charlot, who moved to New York in 1928. He contributes a woodcut of Rich People in Hell. Others, too, adopted woodcuts for their jagged edges, with praise for Lenin and Stalin as the bombs fall. Siqueiros himself depicts a Trinity of Scoundrels. This is art and ideology in black and white. After the revolution, the new regime sponsored arts education. As that became a tool for state propaganda, Taller de Gráfica Popular (or Graphics Workshop for the People), took up the slack.

Still, something sets Mexican prints apart from Europe and America—and from their own easy answers: revolution comes at a cost, and death enters even in triumph. Zapata looks humble and heroic enough, but he stands astride a dead body. Rufino Tamayo pictures a native couple as heros, but they might be confronting hills on fire. Alfredo Zalce sees the Yucatan, a target of agrarian reform, as a paradise. Yet his figures struggle with the overgrowth.

Death enters even before the revolution. Celebrated in his time, José Guadalupe Posada continued the tradition of pages dense with text. Couples embrace, but “death is inexorable,” and wooers, bikers, and angels alike are skeletons. So is the “people’s editor.” Less well known, Emilio Amero stands apart in 1930 with a clock and telephone in Surrealism’s ghostly light. This is modernity, and art is in the vanguard, but it might end in darkness.

A wall lay in ruins, and Ilit Azoulay salvaged what she could. It must have been a tough choice of what to save and what to let go.

For Azoulay, trash can itself be precious, for it tells of the people who left it behind. And anything, no matter how revered and how precious, could one day soon end up in the trash. As the Jewish Museum has it, they are “Mere Things,” through January 5—and I work this together wish a past report on still life with thoughts of death by Rachael Catharine Anderson as a longer review and my latest upload.

Those ruins from Tel Aviv form the basis of Tree for Too One, as in (almost) “two for one” and “Tea for Two.” You can forgive Azoulay an easy pun and the old soft shoe. She puts things through a process very much like punning, which is to say art. It takes a full museum wall to display them all, some on shelves and others transformed again by photographing them, before displaying the photos as well. This is both physical collage and photocollage, and it leans a magnifying class on one its pieces—to aid in looking or to put under scrutiny what she sees. Earth tones help unify the work and preserve its real warmth.

Just how precious, though, is it? Azoulay is not saying, but a gasket can look like a wedding ring, and a tree (or whatever is left of it) grows right there, in a flower pot—falling to its right toward death. More objects rest in a display case a few feet away. That strangely human wish for meaning does the transforming, but so do snapshots salvaged from the site. They look all the more poignant for their bright smiles and clumsy prints, set amid a sophisticated work of photography. People, too, can become objects and images, but as testimony to lives.

This is not NIMBY—not a protest against construction in the country’s most cosmopolitan city. A pressing need for housing dates back even before the international accord that promised a state of Israel and a Palestinian state. Refugees to Israel knew all about displacement, much like art. Builders were so desperate, the museum explains, that they built walls from whatever lay at hand. And yes, that was another way of valuing and preserving trash. Azoulay need only reveal what walls once hid.

Museums go through a similar process of deciding what to value every day. No surprise then, if the rest of work since 2010 responds to museum collections. None is exactly site specific, because it is also continuing its transformations. Again and again, she seeks parallels among disparate objects, like a piper and a stone saint. A photocollage makes objects from the Jewish Museum itself take flight, as Unity Totem. Azoulay produced her most massive work while in residence at a museum in Berlin, where she lives. As the title has it, there are Shifting Degrees of Certainty.

Two more works start with photographs of objects in the Israel Museum and the Museum for Islamic Art, both in Jerusalem. No surprise there, too—not when Israel still seeks safety and Palestine its due recognition. No surprise as well if the first includes HVAC units and other museum infrastructure. That work includes a collage of human cutouts and stone, while fragments of Arab art become a magician’s robe. Once again people are the most precious object of all. As the work after the Israel Museum has it, No Thing Dies.

The curator, Shira Backer, stresses how much the artist relies on digital magic. “A pebble becomes a boulder, the handle of a ewer the scepter of a queen.” I was struck instead by the weight of images—not just the emotional weight, but the physical weight of museum objects. The eighty-five photos from Berlin have distinct shapes and separate frames, nesting together like a single precious structure. Born in Israel in 1972, she keeps returning to both her origins and Berlin. The work provides a tour of physical space as well.

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