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art reviews from around new york

“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.