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art reviews from around new york

At El Museo del Barrio, the dancing never stops. Put it down to a museum with a taste for local color in New York and the Americas, wherever its exhibitions care to go.

Put it down, too, to the technological magic of video, which still captures dance in Brazil in 1980. It need never quit the length of a museum wall or the entirety of museum hours in remembering Salvador da Bahia, where Mestre Didi dedicated his life to “Spiritual Form.” Put it down most of all to a country where none can escape the carnival and few would dream of trying. A retrospective reaches out to embrace all manner of dancing, in life and in art, through July 13.

Depending on which way you enter, the dance may precede him. Didi, born Deoscóredes Maximiliano dos Santos, was still just hitting his stride when Arlete Soares gathered her fellow dancers to put on a show. They may press singly toward the picture plane in black and white or weave in a tightly choreographed mass. Their white dresses only emphasize their body weight. The mestre was lighter in weight in more ways than one. His sculpture stands tall, lean, and just as active at the center of each room.

Just thirty works hold the floor, sharing the museum with a larger retrospective of Candida Alvarez. Leather-bound sheaves form decorative patterns touched by flowers in photos the size of the wall. Beneath it lie still more patterns in reproduction with much the same motifs. A step inside the show has it coming actively into being. In another photo, you can see him binding the tapestry in palm ribs. Again the dance and the layering keep coming.

He works calmly and steadily. These are his orishas, or “scepters,” and he is weaving a “sacred site” in deference. This is solid ground, populated by ziggurats and cowrie shells, but the patterns are largely planar. Didi showed his work easily back then, but Bahia is not Rio, and he has largely fallen off the map, at least in New York. He died in 2013 well into his nineties. Here, though, he can once again serve as a central place for local artists, Yoruba tradition, and the currents that fed the artist himself.

The curators, Rodrigo Moura and Ayrson Heráclitof with Chloë Courtney, treat the occasion as a group show of nearly a dozen other mischief makers, like the dancers from forty-five years ago. This is not a survey of Brazilian art, which has had no shortage of attention with its woven histories, South American architecture, and photographic “Fotoclubismo.” Shows have focused on such artists as Hélio Oiticica, Tarsila do Amaral, Lygia Clark, and Lygia Pape. Didi’s version of Latin American art skipped the carnival in Rio in search of the spiritual. It shares its strategies with others all the same as recently as today. It obliges one to think harder about what they have in common behind him on the wall.

They may work with bold geometric abstraction like Rubem Valentim or, like Goya Lopes, in silkscreen on red floral textiles. They may turn to craft, like Nádia Taquary in basketry and beads. They may have freestanding geometric sculpture, like Emanoel Araújo, or dark cast metal masks like Agnaldo Manoel dos Santos flat to the wall. Jorge dos Anjos tells stories in ink, while paintings by Abdias Nascimento are colorful, mythic, and playful. Antonio Oloxedê creates scepters of his own. Like Didi, they see no contradiction between the spiritual and the dance.

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

To wrap up from last time on the Met’s Rockefeller wing of non-Western art, no matter how well you prepare yourself for the reach of the Met’s renovated Rockefeller wing, a single step can come as a shock.

And that is just what you face in taking an actual step halfway around the world, from Oceania to the Americas. It means leaving islands separated by wide oceans for a newfound density of human habitation. Make that a density of imagery as well in patterns and faces. They appear in tapestries with warm red tones suiting settled interiors. They appear in ceramics as burst of natural and supernatural life. Here, myth has it, the dead are destined to become ancestors.

Not that it is easy to tell the real from the unreal, but the accumulated grimaces feel like a discovery of the human. If they turn out to be far more than human, it is the divine in everyday regalia and the human in the midst of divine combat. Cats are symbols of dominance. Even in its patterning, art is taking risks. A cotton fabric embellished with features is fully abstract, with a simplicity not seen in Western art for centuries to come. It takes the form of alternating rectangles in yellow and deep, soft blue.

Art has a greater diversity within the Americas as well. Its sections mover from the agricultural planning of Colombia and Peru to Mexico City with the Avenue of the Dead. White clay permits burial jars as well. The time dimension becomes more important, too. There begins a post-classical civilization with the Incan empire—and from its loss in the face of Europeans. In due time, murals extend to city walls.

After all that, to turn at last to male and female figures of Africa is to discover a familiarity and a relief. So many Mexican images within images? So much national and cultural combat? The art of Africa, it turns out, represents an unmatched sophistication and stability. Art serves to preserve not sacrifice and war but trade across peoples and biospheres. Maybe it took the new wing’s gathering of light, but the continent is nothing like the darkness you may have thought you knew. It is a point of origin for good reason.

Here, too, art has a sense of craft and materials, here in the hands of blacksmiths. It has a favored medium, too, masks—not just face masks but helmet masks, body masks, and headdresses. It would take a diligent viewer indeed to track their style and purpose across thousands of years and emerging nations. Are they, too, ancestral beings? Are they on the side of the angels? Once again you may find yourself with questions.

Africa raises more than any. Its galleries have the greatest integration of recent art as well. They had me thinking back to everything, that I had seen, including that feathery Peruvian blue. Strips of blue fabric from Mali hang gathered and loose. I cannot swear even now that I am at home in the reopened wing. I shall be trying to find my way for years to come around a third of the earth.

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

To pick up from last time on the Met’s Rockefeller wing of non-Western art, “the paddle is the beginning of life.” When you live in a land of a thousand islands, it can only be so. The paddle brings life, as a tool of survival in desperate ocean kingdoms, and connectedness. It makes culture itself possible, as a life among others.

So the inhabitants of Oceania understood starting thousands of years ago. It also brings out common cultures that give a precarious unity to the Rockefeller wing of the Met.

Nothing can truly unify the renovated wing’s vast territory—nothing like calligraphic art in Asia, patterning in the Islamic wing, or a coherent history of republicanism, racism, and struggle for the American wing with its imagery of slavery, transatlantic revolution, and indigenous people. It can, though, claim a distinct, shared conception of people and art. Expect neither art for art’s sake, as a regal, formal, decorative affair, nor storytelling, with images of exalted rulers and myth. Expect instead testimony to craft and the native materials to support it. Expect, too, no distinction at all between a paddle or anything else as a literal means of passage and a metaphor.

Even more, expect human purpose and connection through family. Local peoples claim ancestors as a source of authority, descendants as an enduring legacy. The artists set as their goal to overwhelm their allies and their enemies. They ask to waken spirits. It is a story always in the making, of power and justice. It may take protection from ceremonial shields, but not at the expense of magic.

The wing’s dozens of nations are distinct all the same. I came to it from where longstanding habit would suggest, the main hall and Western art. That brought me to memories of Oceania, and it is exhilarating. There one first encounters standing figures—tall, wiry, authoritative, and fun. The curators describe them as between earth and sky, art and life. They represent Asmat, the people, us.

They stand near canoes of impressive length, populated by small paired figures clinging to one another in combat or in play. Naturally they are carved wood, but other media of Oceanic art include whale teeth, fiber, painted bark, and horn. As raw materials go, these are raw indeed. Ceremonial shells are more precious and hardly altered, and musical instruments attest to rituals unseen. Note, though, that the canoes have room for only ancestors and demons. You can only imagine the canoes that others rode.

Most lived among the many islands or in Papua, New Guinea, but not all. For a contemporary viewer, they cannot help raising the question of just who are the people, the us. The carved figures look delightful enough, but could they be the real threat? The Met identifies monstrous hudoq, creatures with sharp teeth to defeat malevolent spirits. Can you find your way in the Rockefeller wing between enemies in life and war? All you can know for certain is the search for reciprocity and balance—and I continue next time with the art of the ancient Americas and Africa.

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

New York’s largest museum just got bigger, a lot bigger. The Michael C. Rockefeller wing has returned after a long and splendid renovation. Newly designed and opened to the public June 1, it brings to New York the very origins of civilization and the very idea of art—and I offer review and a tour for the test of this week.

It displays more than seventeen hundred objects from three continents and six thousand years—and that only a fraction of its founding contribution from Nelson A. Rockefeller, the former governor of New York and vice president of the United States. (It initially refused his gift.) With art of Africa, Oceania, and the ancient Americas, it now represents over a third more of planet earth. Maybe you never knew it existed, even before it closed in 2001. Even if you were old enough, fewer approach the wing for modern and contemporary art from Greco-Roman antiquities on the first floor, rather than Impressionism in France a floor above. Now, though, the invitation is hard to refuse.

Is Africa the dark continent? Here all three continents are swimming in light. After the ordinary grid of modest rooms with perhaps an atrium for other wings, like a sales destination or a maze, this wing has tall ceilings that ease the flow from one room and one continent to the next. Broad entrances from room to room, some with arched tops, ease the transitions. The entire south wall is tilted glass, creating vistas and pulling in the light. Glass partitions with short white stripes help to define divisions while visually eradicating them.

Kulapat Yantrasast of WHY Architecture, working with Beyer Blinder Belle and the Met’s design department, enable all sorts of transitions. You may run up against the glass, but you can always start afresh. To mix things up further, the arts of Oceania resume to the south after a break for the Americas. And that raises another tough question: what are these continents doing together? Is this simply the Third World, stuck in a Cold War past? Is it more than a wealthy donor’s tribute to his son Michael, likely lost at sea or killed on an expedition to New Guinea?

Then, too, is the matter of time. A wall of contemporary African photos by Samuel Fosse faces the modern wing directly. Fosse packs his portraits with no end of dignity, whether in dress uniform or bearing the numbers of a criminal. The curators integrate other recent work throughout—including El Anatsui, known for his “metal tapestries” of colorful liquor bottlecaps and sheer scrap. They dip back to the nineteenth century now and then as well. If you had any doubt of the ancient world’s influence on the present, you can check them at the door.

The architects set a small gallery aside for temporary exhibitions as well. “Between Latitude and Longitude” brings Iba N Diaye of Senegal together with the European painting that influenced him, through next May 31. He admired equally the fraught expressionism of Francis Bacon or Francisco de Goya and the classicism and introspection of Rembrandt. In his own paintings, fields of color pour into one another—applying Abstract Expressionism to African sandstorms and African politics. But would he have agreed with the Met’s selection? He died in 2008.

Back in 1996 the Guggenheim Museum presented “The Art of Africa” as the dark underside of Europe, a place of primitive discord. The Met puts that and indeed its own past practices to shame. A video shows an ancient wall painting—in southern Africa and not in the caves of Spain. Actual objects pick up the story on the Nile, just as a show at the Met of African American artists placed them in context of Egypt and Sudan. If you are left with questions, be grateful for them. I know something about non-Western art and the world that spawned it, but nothing like this.

All I can do is to share the bare facts and my own very personal impressions. You are left to the curators and on your own. The Met, though, has some hints to get you started. If, like me, you are nothing short of overwhelmed, the cultures here took that as a necessary function of art. And they felt an imperative to provide continuity over the centuries—to bring ancestors and dependents fully into the present. The very first human, they say, was an accomplished carver, and I believe them, and I continue next time with the hall’s unifying features and the art of Oceania.

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

Is photography an art? Well, if not, what is it? Ask a country known for the spirit of innovation and experiment, the United States.

If not art, photography might be photojournalism as a record of its time, literally making history. It might be the portrait you once kept in your wallet before you had a smart phone, to remind you of what it means to love. It might be social media or a science experiment. Photography has taken pride in making an influencer, even as it struggled to be more than a meme. It has been struggling in much the same way since well before there were digital media to influence. Now “The New Art: American Photography” heads back to its origins, through July 20.

The art of photography was not always new and not often American, but it was always an experiment. The Met draws on a single, mammoth body of work, the William L. Schaeffer collection, which it already calls its own. Selections run from the birth of photography, in 1839, through groundwork for the first New York subway, shortly before 1910. Just outside is a pale, piercing blue that photographers today would hardly recognize. And right at the entrance is an enormous camera. Experimenters had a lot to carry and a lot to learn.

There will be other devices to come, a touch more manageable, in an exhibition divided by competition to define the medium. They differ only in the metal, glass, or paper that offers support and the light-sensitive emulsion that coats the support and makes it work. That includes first daguerreotypes, then ambrotypes and tintypes, which conquered the unreality of reversing right and left. Albumen prints on paper combined portability and a finer resolution soon enough. And that blue is the color of cyanotypes, which anticipate photograms in placing their subjects on photosensitive plates without a lens. If photographers experiments extended the process from direct impressions to street scenes with a subway soon to come, experimenters were ingenious.

Just how much did the experiments differ? Less than you might think, for many a print lost its characteristic color as photographers touched them up with a brush. They were artists after all, just good or bad artists. Alice Austen nurtured the artistry of staged portraits, much as the young model for Alice in Wonderland pouted and posed for Lewis Carroll in England. Yet others scorned Victorian artifice, like Matthew Brady during the American Civil War. War photography offered no escape from dead bodies or marks of the lashes across a slave’s back. Just the facts.

Questions have dogged photography ever since, all the more so today. By the time of Modernism, including abstract photography, photography need no longer make excuses to make art. And Postmodernism’s critique extended to artistry of all sorts, wherever institutions and collectors cast their eye. The beauty of surfaces and mind games were two sides of the same coin. It was about time someone asked what purposes photography serves, no? But did that lead to acceptance or dismissal?

Some, like Carleton Watkins, cultivated the greatness of the American West and the shimmer of its waters. Josiah Johnson Hawes and John Moran insisted on their work as American and as art. Others saw potential in cities and towns. Every shopkeeper, photographers imagined, deserved a personal record. Group portraits could find an audience with families and communities. Other demands were eminently practical. It was just a short step from the first small paper prints to cartes de visite or “cabinet cards” for businessmen and gentlemen.

That still leaves something closer to home—pets, children, and other cuties. The types of photographs truly were social media, long before that had a name. Is it art after all or the antithesis of art? Is it a social or scientific experiment? How about a dog trained to stand with its front paws on the top steps of short platform or ladder? Like a successful posting, it was preaching to the crowd.

Remember geometric abstraction from nearly half a century ago? For Frank Stella, it could take flight like an exotic bird. For Elizabeth Murray, shaped canvas could explode into scraps from everyday life. It could have the craftsmanship and rigor of Charles Hinman, the casual but vital cool of Richard Tuttle, or the defiance of its own logic of Robert Mangold. For Ellsworth Kelly, it need not even depart from the rectangle.

It might seem newly relevant, now that painting is back, but less as formal exercise than as a hybrid of styles and media. I keep coming back to that hybrid, not solely with shaped canvas and its heirs. I have caught art between painting and sculpture or challenging the opposition between exuberance and geometry. Still other artists, though, are putting geometry through its paces much like Stella, including Don Voisine strictly within the rectangle. Voisine looks that much more provocative a decade later. His art does not need shaped canvas to reshape the rectangle.

And Voisine is getting messier. It may seem like sacrilege coming from one of the cleanest painters in town. Few have shown off as well how much energy a design can acquire just by cleaning up its act. Voisine keeps returning to diamonds, rectangles, and squares, framing them carefully with color, with the spotlight on the image center. Sound boring? You got tired of that, I know, in the 1960s, when what you see is what you got. For him, though, symmetry is itself the key to symmetry breaking. And I wrap this together with an earlier review of Voisine’s geometric abstraction as a longer and fuller review in my latest upload.

When Voisine showed exactly ten years ago, he brought to mind the shaped canvas of Frank Stella and Elizabeth Murray in the 1960s, without once departing from the rectangle. He evoked Stella’s Irregular Polygons without the least irregularity. All it took was oil on panel, with plenty of blue, black, and white. Setting familiar shapes on their side, in concatenation, and treating some as accents converted triangles into arrows in space. Framing strips of a single color at top and bottom absorbed their pressure. It brought out the Neo in New York Neo-Geo.

Now he all but gives up the balance, but not altogether the symmetry, at McKenzie through June 29. This is his self-conscious revision, as “enact/re(d)act.” The borders remain, as notably broad as ever, anchoring the whole. They retain their unusual colors as well, including maroon and orange. Some are off-white, with a tempting translucency, making them thicker for the eye to penetrate. Squares may gather that much further to the center of a composition, as diamonds.

Titles suggest a combination of playfulness and restraint. You are at Poolside for the summer, with a Quip. This is Tranquil but Shearing all the way Through. Juxtapositions play a greater role throughout. Triangles become taller, slimmer, and slightly tilted, like metronomes in motion. Variations on black itself come into juxtaposition, challenging you to decide whether in fact they differ.

You could end up thinking that he has ruined the whole show, and he could be fine with that, too. Such are the risks of abstraction. Such, too, is the virtuosity of opaque color and translucent black. I could not say myself whether he had put his past to rest or built on it splendidly, but I spent a long time enjoying the effects. Besides, Stella has long since made a mess of the whole painterly show himself. Still, the focus is on clarity, in sorting out a thinner rectangle or a thicker X.

There is, as ever, plenty of decent abstraction out there. Take your pick. Not all of it need be woven, as a textile. Erika Ranee applies broad brushwork on a large scale, a mix of flatness and drips, predominantly red, in what could almost pass for Franz Kline redux, at Klaus von Nichtssagend through July 11. She calls it “My Saturn Return,” a reference to astrology that I could live without. Still, she means it to highlight an act of at once transformation and renewal, and many an abstract painter could say the same.

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