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art reviews from around new york

“My back is scarred by the lash—that I could show you. I would if I could make visible the wounds of this system upon my soul.”

Frederick Douglass made the wounds of slavery visible for a generation of white Americans, starting before the system itself came to an end in the Civil War. Making visible is also the business of art, and Isaac Julien recreates an address by Douglass in all its eloquence, on “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” And what is it, Julien asks implicitly, to African Americans today? The address provides the framework for an intimate look at the speaker’s life as a free man, on video at MoMA. In the exhibition’s title, it poses Lessons of the Hour, through September 28. It asks, too, whether a divided nation can ever escape slavery’s lessons.

This could be Julien’s year. Douglass escaped slavery in at age twenty-one, in 1838, and Lessons of the Hour takes its title from a speech in 1894, a year before his death. Again on video, in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, Julien brings to life the Harlem Renaissance and its leading sculptor. He also curates an exhibition of that sculptor, and I bring together my reviews of that exhibition and Julien’s video as a longer review and my latest upload. As I wrote then, there is nothing savage about the art of Richmond Barthé—and, if there were, he would be the first to tame it. If you have any doubts, head right for Feral Benga, in a gallery retrospective of a thoroughly sophisticated artist.

“I have watched from the wharves,” Douglass said, “the slave ships in the Basin, anchored from the shore, with its cargoes full of human flesh. . . . In the still darkness of midnight, I have been often aroused by the dead heavy footsteps, and the piteous cries of the chained gangs that passed our door.” His words evoke pictures, and so does Isaac Julian, but less painful ones. He opens to trees, to a gentleman’s study and a woman sewing, and to the man himself, slowly leading a horse. He follows Douglass on the train, looking inward and perhaps creating those words in his head. He ends with Douglass standing tall on a mountain’s peak, like the statue of a hero.

He works in film, transferred to video, for the epic clarity of its color. It runs from day into night and from introspection to fireworks on, of course, the Fourth of July. It includes shots of an hourglass marking the hour, if not its lessons. Still, time and history have a way of playing tricks. Day breaks again after the fireworks, on its way to the mountain. The sands of time sometimes flow and sometimes stand still.

Julien hopes to encompass both reality and hope, especially when they collide. A hand picks cotton, but it might almost be picking white flowers for their beauty, with echoes soon after in yellow glistening on a tree. The audience for oratory files into a Methodist church with the bare architecture of an arena today. It includes blacks and whites, men and women—some in the fashion of the day, others in the present. Other clips borrow police surveillance tape of protests against police murder, although I somehow missed them. The video runs just under half an hour, but one can enter as one pleases and, in time, see the loop begin again.

I first encountered the artist, born in England, in London in 2003, already moving in and out of history. Two videos placed him both within a Trinidad community forty years earlier, after a poem by Derek Walcott, and a contemporary city much like Baltimore, where Douglass lived as well. When I caught up with Julien again, with Playtime in 2013, I worried that he fixed all too easily on his heroes and villains. (Do read my review then, for a fuller picture.) Has he finally found the hero he deserves? Has his hero found the response he deserves, in fireworks and, in church, applause?

As Douglass, Ray Fearon makes his character nuanced, steady, personal, and profound (and I wish that the museum took more care to credit him). Then again, I may have sold Julien short all along. Ten Thousand Waves, in 2010, already has many messages and many channels to mess them up. His latest video, a highlight of the Biennial, comes closer still to an installation and a hall of mirrors. It also moves easily in time, back to the Harlem Renaissance. Now MoMA presents Lessons of the Hour, first shown in 2019, as a historical document itself.

Douglass was the most photographed American of his time. And the curators, Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi with Erica DiBenedetto, set out photos, publications, and newspaper clippings, floor to ceiling and in cases. They also include the handwritten text of a speech on the role of images of black and white America. Is blackness once again “going dark,” feared by or invisible to white eyes? For Julien, Douglass speaks forcefully but never gets over his introspection, his memories, and his pain. “Anything, no matter what, to get rid of thinking!”

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

“Crafting Modernity” tells a familiar story, about a world torn apart and renewed by Depression and world war. Only one thing: this time it unfolds with a tapestry, a table, and a chair—and on another continent entirely. Make yourself at home.

You know the story, about modern life and modern art. As recovery looked more and more urgent and more possible, it brought not a revival of the gilded age, but a home life that many more could call their own. Middle-class comforts included much that could not have existed before the twentieth century. Renowned artists and designers embraced the cause, with furnishings that many more could afford, without the stifling air of Edwardian wallpaper. In no time, capitalism made that cause a consumer revolution, as craft gave way to new technologies and new pressures to spend. If it thus took back its own promises, it sound surprisingly like change today—only centered not on Asia, Silicon Valley, or Madison Avenue, but Latin America at the Museum of Modern Art, through September 22.

If you have heard this story before, it may well be at MoMA as well. In 2015 it presented the same four decades of Latin American architecture, ending around 1980. You may recognize Oscar Niemeyer and Lina Bo Bardi, whose architecture appears along with others projected on the walls, as a backdrop for what might have stood inside. Here, though, they contribute furniture—Niemeyer a low table, suitable for stacking or a communal meal on the floor. Bo Bardi brings quite an array of chairs. Roberto Burle Marx, who with Niemeyer created buildings for the new capital city of Brasilia, has a painting, like a sketch toward the new interior design.

The museum is out to extend what one even means by design. Gego appears not for her wire sculpture, but for wiry white diagonals on a huge hanging. Olga de Amaral, also with art of the Andes now at the Met, and Cynthia Sargent display fabric as well—and I also work this together with an earlier report on that show at the Met as a longer review and my latest upload. Here, though, it appears not as art for itself but tapestry for the home. The filmed architecture, in turn, sticks to homes, not to massive public projects. It is remaking modern life one family at a time.

Still, it is remaking private life in public. Chairs appear by far the most often, not bedroom furniture, and films focus on exteriors and common spaces. The International Style favored slim columns and glass houses, which allow one to look out on nature, but also allow others to look in. The curators, Ana Elena Mallet and Amanda Forment, feature just six countries, to give their distinct traditions their due. At least one artist claims to draw on pre-Colombian art, but be careful. One might just as well speak of global art in a newly global economy.

A long wall diagrams each country’s social networks, like maps of the art world for Mark Lombardi. They testify instead to interactions and displacement. Naturally they include Josef Albers, Anni Albers, and others from the Bauhaus, but also Alexander Calder, Black Mountain College in New England, and ever so much more. In the show as a whole, artists can trace their origins to a dozen European nations and the United States. But you have heard that story before, too, about refugees from fascism who helped create postwar art. No wonder furniture had an eye to portability and reassembly in the face of exile—like Niemeyer’s Modulo, a “puzzle chair,” or lounge furniture from Roberto Matta that fits neatly together as a square.

Assembly and repetition also encourage the shift from craft to brand names. Antonio Bonet, Juan Kurchan, and Jorge Ferrari Hardoy (later Grupo Austral) gave their initials to the B.K.P. chair, a descendant of the Marcel Breuer chair with its tube frame and suspended leather. They conceived it not in Argentina, but in the Paris studio of Le Corbusier—and copies quickly entered Fallingwater, the Frank Lloyd Wright house, and the Museum of Modern Art. International enough for you? MoMA provided another spur to invention with a 1940 design competition. Several of the chairs look out on the museum’s sculpture garden now.

Both threads, craft and commerce, offer surprises. Other brand names include a logo for Olivetti typewriters. Ceramics, as with Colette Boccari, may depart from a perfect circle, as if fresh from the oven, without losing their subtle color. High tech can have an industrial look, too, like flashlights by Emilio Ambasz that could pass in reproduction for pipes. Much the same red plastic enlivens a bar cart, an ice bucket, and a TV. Sit down, turn on, and pour yourself a drink.

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

From the very start, LaToya Ruby Frazier stepped outside the New York art scene. As a young artist, she returned to her family home in the Rust Belt. She photographed herself as one of three generations of women, as she puts it, “unified by illness” but the illness extends poignantly to race, gender, and poverty in America—and it is the subject of a longer review in my latest upload.

For Frazier, the decline of the Rust Belt can only be a family affair. Born in Braddock, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh, where Andrew Carnegie opened his first steel mill, she knows the people it employed, the jobs lost, and the desolation it brought to water, land, and air. Her mother had life-saving surgery at Braddock Hospital and still shows its scars. Her grandmother spent her failing days there, looking ever so smaller than her pathetic hospital bed. Frazier photographed both encounters with life and death for The Notion of Family, at the Brooklyn Museum in 2013, the series that occupied the first fourteen years of her adult life. And she still calls Braddock home.

Yet her notion of family has changed. More than ten years later, it extends to an entire city seen from above, where family and loss are only implicit but no less real. It extends, too, to other places where workers fight for their jobs and their very lives. She wants to give every loss a face and every face a voice, and photography itself has given way to photo essays, with personal accounts twice over, in images and text. She calls her midcareer retrospective “Monuments of Solidarity,” and it ends with words alone, at MoMA through September 7. Could, though, monuments overwhelm the artistry and solidarity the individual?

When White Columns presented “Monuments for the USA” some years ago, one had to expect an uneasy mix of patriotism and irony, and the group show delivered both. LaToya Ruby Frazier is interested in neither one. She accommodates many narratives and takes everything seriously. What begins as the story of black women “united in our illnesses” becomes first a town’s sickness and then a wider family. Auto workers in Ohio in 2019 include men and women, black and white, and their testimonies as well. Just past the exhibition’s exit, Frazier sings “Solidarity Forever,” the union anthem, to her own accompaniment on guitar.

This is not just about her. When Frazier began, family placed her among three generations, and their resilience stopped well short of boasting. In photos alongside her mother, they seem to share one set of eyes and lips. Yet shadows divide them, and her grandmother’s refuse, including a Pall Mall carton, litters the carpet. She was not yet thirty when she appeared among the emerging artists of “Greater New York” in 2010 and, as the family’s youngest, still coming to be. She returned in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and with “The Notion of Family” in Brooklyn, and I leave a fuller account of how much it moved me to the longer version of this review, with my report back then.

Still, things looked different from the moment she looked out and up. She could see the hospital, closed in 2010, in ruins and the view from a helicopter of a polluted river. She could see the town’s welcoming sign sponsored by a pest-control company and ads for Levis that took blue jeans and Braddock as the real America. If, as the ads read, “everybody’s work is equally important,” where are the black and women’s faces? A video in collaboration with Liz Magic Laser asks just that. It was time to head elsewhere.

In Flint Is Family, ending in 2020, families cling to their uncertain supplies of fresh water, and a mother and child leave for Mississippi. They might have needed the health-care workers in More Than Conquerors, which adds the last missing elements, photo essays. Workers pose for a picture and supply plenty of words, more than anyone is likely to read. Mounted on large steel frames, they become an installation. The health-care workers, in Baltimore, speak of inequality in opportunity for them and access to care for others. The auto workers in Ohio lament the last Chevy Cruze and what it means for them. They identify so much with their work that a worker crawls under the very last car to record its serial number.

The workers resist to the last, through their union, and Frazier shares their desperate optimism. She lays out the frames from Ohio in one long row, painted an industrial red, like an auto body run wild. “It is incumbent upon me to resist,” she says, “one photograph at a time, one photo essay at a time, one body of work at a time, one book at a time, one workers’ monument at a time.” It is getting harder, though, and the show ends with A Pilgrimage to Dolores Huerta, a migrant labor camp. The artist’s geography has left family and steel far behind. If you sense a collision in priorities between environmental degradation and job loss, Frazier is testifying to needs, not to a policy agenda.

The words of others are also her answer to the weight of the monumental. True, she is less and less vulnerable and closer and closer to a lecture, but “all I’m doing,” she says, “is showing up as a vessel.” On the Making of Steel in 2017 collaborated in its photography as well. Sandra Gould Ford, a steel worker who was losing her own job, takes up the camera. The curators, Roxana Marcoci wth Caitlin Ryan and Antoinette D. Roberts, give it an oval room under changing red light, to simulate the night sky that still overlooks it all. The overflow of words and the accompanying portraits, little more than selfies, are deadening nonetheless. Frazier has come a long way from the poignancy of the young photographer’s art, her stories, her family, and her illness.

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

Käthe Kollwitz started her career with death and ended with love. It could just as easily have gone the other way around.

Her first print series, from the 1890s, follows a worker’s revolt from its beginnings in Need and Death. This is A Weaver’s Revolt in Silesia, industrial country, where workers knew need and death well. A march that should be a triumph of solidarity and action looks more like a forced march, the workers hunched forward in weariness. And then comes simply End, with bodies on cots and the living barely set off from the darkness, pondering what has happened and what is to come. Her art comes down to the rise and fall of dignity and democracy, at MoMA through July 20. She knows, though, where she stands and how much she has loved—and I bring this together with a recent earlier report on the politics of German Expressionism and a forthcoming one on Paula Modersohn-Becker as a longer review and my latest upload.

Each series by Kollwitz has the same arc of death and love. Peasants’ War from 1902 to 1908 looks to the sixteenth century for models, and it finds one in a woman sharpening a scythe. It, too, ends in violent suppression. A third series, just after World War I, testifies to the costs of war. Titles speak of Mothers, The People, and Survivors, but not as heroes. Rows of women and children look formidable in their grief.

Kollwitz felt the arc of rise and fall personally. Born in 1867 in East Prussia (parts of today’s Russia and Poland), she moved to Berlin in her twenties with her husband, a physician who saw to the poor. She learned grief from his patients. Quickly acclaimed, she would have won a gold medal at the Berlin Art Exhibition had not the Kaiser himself stepped in. An award to a leftist and a woman would have gone too far. Still, war’s end made Germany a republic—and made her a professor at the Prussian Academy, its first woman ever.

Yet the arc had not finished with her, not by any means. She lost her younger son in the Great War, and the elder almost died from diphtheria. She lost her teaching position and freedom to exhibit to the Nazi rise to power. She died just weeks before their fall. It seems only right that MoMA hangs A Weaver’s Revolt from left to right, so that one encounters first its end. Still, she had found her purpose as an artist in insisting on the purposiveness of art.

Kollwitz took to paper because of that purpose. Prints to her meant multiples, to reach the people, like poster art to this day. It also allowed her to rework her art with a record of every stage. She combines woodcuts, etching, lithography, and drypoint, enhanced with sandpaper—and then overlays prints with whatever comes to hand. Her drawings could pass for series, too, as she begins again and again. If there is a progression from start to finished product, it eludes me.

She never lets go of a theme either, like revolts and state violence. That includes her most titanic drawings, of a mother with dead child. That woman holding a scythe has almost the exact same pose, but with a sharp object in place of a child. By the show’s end, she has taken up sculpture, and the pose has become first lovers after Auguste Rodin and, at last, a mother protecting her child from death as the ultimate act of love. It involves the same confusion of hands and limbs. It looks back to a Renaissance Pietà and the contortions of Mannerism—but then she was an academic, and other deaths recall a Dead Christ in older art.

The curators, Starr Figura with Maggie Hire, open with self-portraits as an extended prologue, but they, too, recur often. Kollwitz betrays neither fear nor certainty, her cross-hatching touched by washes and highlights, like the shine on her forehead. By the show’s end, she has documented aging with unflinching realism. She belongs to the first wave of German Expressionism, but without the gilded flattening of Gustav Klimt or the swollen, exaggerated hands of Oskar Kokoschka. She responds to World War I much like Max Beckmann, but not to satirize Berlin high society. She was never, for all her greatness, a revolutionary in her art, but she still has her arc and her archetypes of the people.

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

Joan Jonas launched her career in performance and video by pushing against the wind—a strong wind, on the coldest day of the year. If that sounds futile, she has described a later video as “moving with no pattern.” She still loves stories, but she finds them in things, from manta rays in the deep sea to fireworks in the sky.

She may begin with a story, like Juniper Tree after the brothers Grimm and Reading Dante. Her retrospective, through July 6, speaks of her drawings as “storyboards.” Futility itself can be a story with no need of an ending. Wind took Jonas and friends to the Long Island shore in 1971, where five huddled in a mass, for companionship and warmth, and two walked separately together. Her work recreates her life as both performance and travelogue, from desert sunlight to the darkness in her studio. When it comes to art and the powers that be, she is still pushing against the wind.

Jonas has been working in the space between installation, sculpture, video, and performance for as long as anyone. She could well have defined it. She has united music, dance, and her own athleticism, leaving her props, large and small, as cryptic reminders. Before and alongside classics of 1970s feminism, she extended what video could do with a woman’s own body. Her MoMA retrospective follows their use and reuse, while the Drawing Center looks to her drawings for clues. As a postscript, a 2007 exhibition packed much of it into a single room—and together they are the subject of a longer and fuller review in my latest upload.

Wind already shows her attention to the feel of things, as the elements of nature and as experience. It also shows her dedication to others, with art as collaboration. It underlies her work with the Judson Dance Company and such musicians as Jason Moran, the jazz pianist and composer. It lets others structure a work or refuse to do so. When they head down to the vacant lots that would become Battery Park City, for Delay Delay, they mill about as if waiting to begin. With her first Mirror Piece, three years before she took up a Sony Portapak in 1972, she could collaborate with herself.

That urge to collaborate helped draw Jonas away from traditional media. This could no longer be just about the artist. When she does appear on camera, it may show rolling frames of only her legs, like a screen test gone terribly awry. The urge to cut, to multiply, and to recombine appears, too, in a mirror piece, where mirrors supply the patterned hem of a dress. The work does unfold in time, but not what others may take for real time. In Delay Delay, it takes sound longer to reach her than light, a doubled delay.

She acquires another alter ego soon after, as Organic Honey, dressed in whatever she could find in an erotic shop in Soho. Like Oscar Wilde, she can resist anything but temptation. When she heads for Las Vegas, she seems equally at home in a casino, in desert heat, and on Sunset Strip. The alternatives suggest, too, the role of drawing, within and alongside video. It could be drawing with a rake in the sand, with a casino’s lights, or with loop after loop of plain chalk. Large red drawings of rabbits, dogs, or nothing at all round out the story—or the lack of one.

Not that the drawings are finished work of art, whatever that means. Rather, the props stand within and alongside new media, and her retrospective cannot get enough of them. They begin with mirrors and the steel hoop that she brought to Jones Beach Dance. (Later her favorite companion, her dog, jumps through a smaller hoop.) It could support Vitruvian man, arms and legs spread wide for Leonardo da Vinci, but without a trace of Renaissance idealism. In Tap Dancing from 1997, a man just shuffles his feet back and forth on the floor.

Increasingly, she has returned to the sea, but not just to the shore. As she puts it in 2019, her work is Moving Off the Land. It reflects a real concern for human damage to the planet, but also her impulse to collaborate. A marine biologist has taken her underwater and, just as important, created the lenses for observing the deep sea. Those videos come with props, too. Small glass spheres, both black and white, might not look so out of place in Vegas.

Jonas reuses props from installation to installation. It is all part of what Organic Honey called her Visual Telepathy. The curators, Ana Janevski with Lilia Rocio Taboada and Gee Wesley, end with a work on several monitors to wrap things up. The manta rays from underwater have become kites overhead. The look both up and back to past work, given new life, suits an artist in her eighties with diminished output for twenty years now but still going. In the retrospective’s title, “Good Night Good Morning.”

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

To wrap up on the theme of new media from the last two posts, this past summer I offered a partial report on “Signals” then at MOMA. I did not have time to ask more pointedly what it said about new media—and what that left unsaid. Now that we have time, consider now what it was not. It was not interactive, although you may spot yourself on a monitor now and then.

It was not a record of performance as for Nam June Paik and Richard Serra, an immersive experience as for Bill Viola, a blunt political message as for Martha Rosler, sound art and historical memory as for Susan Philipsz, self-examination as for Lynn Hershman Leeson, or a philosophical meditation as for Gary Hill. It was not a step toward augmented reality, virtual reality, and AI. You may have seen several of these on the way out, in works from the permanent collection, displayed on nine monitors set in six formidable black boxes. But what do all those nots leave for a decent history or a show?

MoMA sees video art as political—not just a tool for protest, as for Rosler, but political in itself. The show’s very title points to both. And that means a constant tension between its use on behalf of power and its ability to push back. With Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, Paik himself plays on both. Still not convinced? Me neither, but that is where artist voices take over. They put 1984, the year many people started on the Web, behind them.

This being a trendy affair, here politics is identity politics. It can come from collectives, like the Black Audio Film Collective, with John Akomfrah, and American Artist, a black collective that also appears in “Refigured.” It can be an individual assertion as well, like that of Carlos Motta on gender identity or Emily Jacir between Ramallah and New York. Tony Cokes calls for a “black celebration,” but it will have to settle for plain text on a black screen. More often, though, identity is caught up in a mass movement of people between worlds. And that is where revolution enters the picture.

Nil Yalta speaks for Turkish refugees in Paris, Chto Delat for Crimeans in danger from Russia. Harun Farocki and Andre Ujica have their Videograms of Revolution, Artur Zmijewski his twenty channels’ worth of uprising, as Democracies. This being trendy, too, much here is pro forma, a revolution in spirit but not in the medium or in art. It picks up on the very weakness of the Internet, TV, and their voices. Syms also recites her one hundred and eighty Lessons on blackness, but who needs another lesson? Cacophony really can drown things out.

Yet the medium itself pushes back, starting with so many monitors in the show’s first room. Here images become installations. Yalta’s stack is another Tower of Babel. Ming Wong’s Windows on the World could be a control room, for a television studio or a space station. Motta leans in the opposite direction. His installation all but outgrows its roots in video, with pink triangles for his gayness and striped carpet on the floor.

Some artists leave installations to their own devices, in more ways than one. Dara Birnbaum views revolution and repression in Tiananmen Square through an entire wall of devices, from phones to TVs. Amar Kanwar sets nineteen channels and the torn pages from books and magazines, into wide-open metal frames. Frances Stark uses custom frames creatively, too, for his “mix tapes” of U.S. Greatest Hits (meaning wars), while Information America for Julia Scher spreads out above an ordinary desktop. Stan VanDerBeek invites one into a Movie-Drome. More than anyone else, even Paik, he also takes one back to the real question, the roots of new media.

Those black boxes out front are merely a postscript, but also the most impressive installation of all. Each is a “viewing station,” with a narrow black shelf coming out from the box for seating. Their mass and repetition look back not just to new media, but also to Minimalism—in the same galleries that, three years ago, held Donald Judd. Do they also offer a more honest history of video art? A more traditional history has the last word after all. It has also been televised, and next time it will be on the Web.

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