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art reviews from around new york

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.