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art reviews from around new york

Cleopatra’s throne does not look comfortable. No wonder she has taken her business elsewhere, into Egypt or into art.

Maybe it comes with the territory for so iconic a ruler and so fabled a beauty. The price of becoming an idol is a loss of humanity, in People or in history, all the more so when she knew that she was about to die. And Barbara Chase-Riboud does indeed give her a golden throne—or simulate one in small squares of polished bronze on wood. It looks magnificent, but also uncomfortably rigid and peeling, and no one would dare sit on it at the Met. She will, though, make more than one return along with a host of familiar images in a show of Black artists and Ancient Egypt, as “Flight into Egypt” through February 17. But are they truly an African American heritage for today?

Many have looked to Egypt before them—and thought it vital to black America’s humanity and dignity . Relate to Your Heritage, proclaimed Barbara Jones-Hogu, in psychedelic colors. The artist spoke out for a movement, AfriCOBRA, formed in the radicalism of the 1960s. Malcolm X traveled to Egypt three times, and a video shares a stop in Cairo. A photo by Eve Arnold accompanies black kids to the Met itself, where a boy in a while shirt and narrow tie could almost be Malcolm himself as a child. It seems only right for a show on the theme of awakening.

From the start, the Met argues, blacks contributed to scholarship on the region, from the Egyptology of the early twentieth century. George Washington Carver collected a sample of Egyptian blue (its ninth oxidation). Aaron Douglas applies the translucent colors that place him among the greatest in the Harlem Renaissance to a vision of ancient monuments. It could just as well represent a modern city under construction. The show takes its title from a loose painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner, perhaps an oil sketch, in 1923. He had painted the interior of a mosque a quarter century before.

Two contributors, Steffani Jemison and Jamal Cyrus, set out a study room so that you can discover more. As usual with such rooms, it has an interest in telling you what to study. Frederick Douglass, the ex-slave and abolitionist, had no doubts what is at stake: whites had set out “to deny that the Egyptians were Negroes” in order “to deprive the Negro of the moral support of Ancient Greatness.” The curators, Akili Tommasino with McClain Groff, have to agree. Yet the art on display has many colors, and that could be an African American heritage, too.

Fred Wilson sets out busts of Nefertiti, after the famous one often seen in strict profile, in gradations from white to black. They occupy, the work’s title explains, a Gray Area, and this is its “brown version.” Lorraine O’Grady pairs still more images of the Egyptian queen with photographs of children she has known, as her Miscegenated Family Album. As for Cleopatra’s shade of brown, no one can say. She was the last in a dynasty that Alexander the Great had installed in the path of conquest, which is not to say what it became. Barbara Chase-Riboud does well by leaving her out of the picture.

Europe and America alike had a fascination with Egypt, like many a child at the Met today. J. P. Morgan traveled in person to confirm his scholarly credentials and to stock the Morgan Library. Maxime Du Camp, a close friend of Gustave Flaubert, took up photography to document cities and monuments. Meanwhile black artists like Emma Amos have made a pilgrimage to Africa in search of their cultural and family history, but not to Egypt. Others, like Toyin Ojih Odutola from Nigeria, are still between continents in their art. Exhibitions have returned more and more to the Afro-Caribbean diaspora.

Then, too, can a focus on African Americans shift those gray areas a little too far toward black and white? Could the Arab world and Islamic art have their own colors and history? Could that, too, be a part of black history in a way the Met cannot fully grasp. Tanner did, after all, paint a mosque. And yet the show at its best questions its own pat history. As a white male, I cannot speak for African Americans, but its artists are still asking what remains of ancient greatness—and I pick up next time with just that.

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After drip paintings came stained canvas, from postwar artists who could leave more to nature and nothing to chance. So what comes now? How about color carried to your eye by the wind and by paint?

Violeta Maya returns to the materials, imagery, and style of the late 1950s, with acrylic, raw pigment, and plenty of canvas to let them breathe. This is nothing but painting, in a tradition where abstraction is just that, just as for Susan English in Chelsea. It is also much of her best work, lbut she took me most by surprise with canvas hanging freely from four wooden arches and, every so often, billowing upward.

When it comes down to it, nothing really separates Abstract Expressionism from color-field painting except, perhaps, a heading in a textbook. Drips, stains, targets, or slashes, it was all gestural abstraction in postwar art, where only the gestures had changed and not so very much at that. It was, if anything, just a matter of temperament, as the delicacy and violence of flung paint gave way to the lushness of poured paint. One could almost call it a matter of male and female temperament, of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning joined by Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell. One could, that is, had not galleries begun to rediscover such women artists as Michael West (Corrine in real life). As for the richness of poured paint, with color as a target, field, or veil, it all but belonged to Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis.

Maya risks a return to not exactly unfinished business, but fashionably close, at Nicelle Beauchene through February 15. Painting is no longer dead, they say, and anything goes, but “anything goes” can take art only so far. It does, though, allow a certain breathing room. Barely in her thirties, she works in Madrid, just as galleries have begun to see AbEx as an international movement, with a steady flow of artists back and forth between New York and Europe. She counts Japanese art as an influence, just when museums have looked again at Asian art and seen calligraphy. She sometimes works on multiple panels to stretch color further, and Chinese or Japanese art can unfold across several sheets of paper as well.

She takes her own claims lightly. As the show’s title has it, with an almost British reserve, “Me Atrevo a Decir que Esta Pintura Está Viva” (I dare say this painting is alive). A painting’s title takes her acknowledged pleasures under advisement, in English: Enjoy the Ride While You Can. The stains unfold horizontally, eaping across canvas or in counterpoint. The four hinged arches are physically attached, much as the panels are attached visually.

Their canvas, too, can leap only so far. If a breeze enters the gallery, it is a gentle one, and the fabric builds up around a point of rest on the floor. They and the wood approach sculpture, with its own imagery. They resemble mirrors, with their rounded top, a bit taller than a gallery-goer. Maya may look at her work and see just a bit more than herself. It is her Miedo a lo Desconocido, or fear of the unknown.

Speaking of a leap, my little history skips over a good third of the twentieth century. After gesture came Minimalism, before Postmodernism, in dialogue with it, or insistently itself. It also came with its own idea of late modern art. It spoke of art as object and image, line and color, space and light, the thing itself and the thing to be seen. One could subsume them all into contrasting elements of painting, edge and field. Susan English takes just that as her art, at Kathryn Markel also through February 15.

English translates the nearly invisible traces of the 1960s and 1970s, as in Agnes Martin, into pale, matte colors. They vary within a field, like the sky, and a horizon line is implicit, as is gesture, although landscape itself is not. This is as pure as abstraction gets, but it has plenty of excuses for line—the line surrounding a painting or separating its parts. She stresses it with contrasting colors and panels, where the viewer must determine which truly bounds a color field. She also paints in white along many an edge, just short of a frame. The quiet colors and stable borders give every reason to slow down.

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For Mary Mattingly, nature’s most intense colors come out only at night. One could almost call them supernatural.

Mattingly photographs an exotic garden, set in an uncertain world. Its glow seems to come from the flowers themselves, in dense clusters of yellow, orange, purple, and blue. They run more to spheres than to the petals, like artificial lights. The surrounding greenery could almost stand in for wiring in a museum or holiday display.

They pop, but Mattingly’s “Night Garden” cannot altogether penetrate the darkness, at Robert Mann through February 22. Just try to imagine where you are. It could be underwater for the depth of black and the shimmer of light now and on the surface. Could those be fish swimming by or just more flowers soaking up the light show? They could belong to a nighttime landscape as well, with distant hills, more than once, and a full moon. It unfolds in layers, including layered flowers, like a landscape painter’s means of defining depth. The shimmers form veils or curtains waiting to be pulled aside.

Not that one could expect to see more, not when color like this cannot penetrate the darkness. The heightened contrast between elements helps create the interplay of natural and unnatural. Nature here seems perfectly well observed, in a painterly tradition going back the Romantic landscape and to flowers in close-up from Baroque still life through Beatrix Potter to Georgia O’Keeffe. Double exposures and darkroom additions, I assume, are allowed, including actual lamps, but nothing in violation of ordinary linear perspective. Hills have the breadth of the Hudson River School and an atmospheric blue. A trained eye could identify the flowers.

Mary Mattingly must have trained herself all over again. She began modestly enough, with twilight visits to Socrates Sculpture Park on the East River waterfront, where she has herself contributed her Water Clock. One may remember it more for trees, lawns, and art than for flowers, with the Noguchi Museum a block or two away. One may expect less of nature anyway in the coldest weeks of the year. Try to enjoy the irony of a school football a quarter mile up on Broadway with strictly artificial turf. But then the photos have no indication of place or time.

She began, then, not in the studio, but with chance discoveries in a neighborhood respite. It is hardly a botanic garden, but it will have to do. Still, she says, the park inspired her to take clippings from its flowers and to study them with care. Yet the crispness and color come equally from photography. Remember the bright, halfway creepy look of early color photography, as with William Eggleston, when they hardly passed for art? Mattingly retains that look but in the color that she has seen.

A skeptic could find a little too much artifice and beauty. These photos do not shy away from special effects. And who can object, as in her past work, to reminders of climate change? Still, she knows what to keep in reserve in the blackness. It obliges one to see art and photography, too, as a work of the imagination rather than a mechanical record—and a discovery as much as a creation. Maybe sunlight will return come summer, but for now it is up to you to say where and when you are.

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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.

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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.