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Stepping Out
John Haberin New York City
Pass, Carry, Hold
Paula Wilson, Virginia Overton, and Leonardo Drew
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. Paula Wilson, for one, has too many media and motifs to fit on a wall in Tribeca, 
including a woman's self-image, Virginia Overton has all but a car crash only shinier, and Leonardo Drew covers an entire Chelsea gallery while gathering light. It might be all about them or you.
Psst, pass it on
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."
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.
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.
Fun, fun, fun
Paula Wilson serves up not just a show, but a compendium of her art. At a time when nontraditional materials have become a priority, she brings no shortage of those as well. Now that weaving has become an assertion of women's work as fine art, she leads straight to what must surely pass for just that. It might be a self-portrait, only larger than life, or an empty dress. At a time, too, when glass and ceramics have attained dignity as art and design, she gives the media a history in stained glass. Steel tracery outlines an image, while gallery light passes through like sunlight.
In a show called "The Wind Keeps Time," first impressions may soon be gone with the wind. Wilson has a reputation as a mixed-media artist, and the show includes video as well, but she is still a painter with a trust in imagery. I first encountered her in summer group shows in 2013, with an entire catalog, as I wrote then, of painting, architecture, and remembered pleasures. She executed it, though, in tapestry, or so I think, but it simulated bricks, grillwork, decorative reliefs, and graffiti. Here what looks like something else entirely is most likely a print or acrylic. Only a true painter would see its potential for imagery and light.
That portrait stands face front at the center of the back wall, at the gallery's second, shared space up the block from its first. The rest fills the room in front of it, largely apart from the walls. If that suggests a chapel dedicated to the artist herself or to women, it includes simulated stained glass. It frames a girl's image as well, the silhouette of a dancer in sunlight. It might almost be a magazine clipping—and the entire show a kind of collage. Wilson can make pretentious claims into free play.
Virginia Overton, too, takes materials off the wall as something tangible and a place to play. Her 2016 terrace sculpture for the new Whitney Museum gave it a reflecting pool or perhaps a real one. Her 2018 summer sculpture in Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens turned brown steel into a swing. She also parked the very symbol of American freedom out front. Did that mean a car? She may not have taken one to the principal space for Wilson's gallery, but then Tribeca parking is a nightmare.
You may find yourself thinking of cars facing silvery metal inside the gallery. You may feel the momentum of a moving car from its physical presence as well. Her most impressive work fills the long central wall with foot-wide strips of it, rippling across the space. A smaller work fills three walls of a side room. Up close from the moment one enters, it demands attention to beaten metal and to every bolt. Thin, darker beams curve apart from an apex at the top, held together by a clip even as they threaten to fly away.
Overton has salvaged them all from the archetype of the great American highway, a sign, which she disassembled strip by strip, beam by beam, and bolt by bolt. The gallery's Web site shows none of this—only cars parked outside an establishment that I hope never to patronize. Puzzling or not, it rings true. The house number on the building behind them even matches that of a pricier Tribeca dealer right across the street. Park yourself inside to relish the shine before it fades. Art will have fun, fun, fun till her daddy takes the T-Bird away.
Stop at nothing
When a work takes over the gallery, is it site specific, or was the gallery an obstacle on the way to making art? For Leonardo Drew, the choices are inseparable. He makes work so massive and diffuse that it stops at nothing—if only as a figure of speech. In real life, Drew stops for everything, only to keep piling it on. The result is untitled, for who would dare pin it down? The walls themselves are a breath of light.
Drew has been piling it on for a long time now. I first encountered him in what become one of this Web site's first gallery tours, in early 1997, and again in 2001. I started the site with extended reviews of art's deep history in museums, where my heart still lies. I had gone to galleries, though, and was just then seeing the departure from Soho in action. One dealer on the move, Mary Boone, had shaken things up on West Broadway with a scorn for late Modernism and a studied elegance, with such artists as Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl, and David Salle. Drew, though, had little time for either elegance or scorn. He was trashing the place much as late modern art had done before.
Richard Serra had flung molten lead, at his own risk. Barry Le Va had broken glass, and Chris Burden had crawled across the wreckage. Artists have been sorting through the damage ever since. For Ilit Azoulay at the Jewish Museum, every loss is the bearer of memory in the Middle East. And one can look at Drew's scraps a long time in search of something familiar, from his studio or his history. He is, after all, African American. He, though, has his eye elsewhere.
Another side of late Modernism nurtured the optical and physical qualities of nonstandard materials. Back when, Drew incorporated rust for its powdery texture and iron oxide glow. Now he combines wood scraps, glass and paint. They produce dark colors against the gallery's freshly painted white. He also arranges them in square panels, hung on the walls much like squares for Ad Reinhardt. He asks to restore Reinhardt's translucency, color, and approach to black while playing to the house.
Still, these are remnants, and he lets you know it. Back in the day, I saw a little too much theater. I compared the air of decay to the end of Planet of the Apes, the Statue of Liberty among the ruins, while less sure about what to curse. Drew can, though, be genuinely site specific, accepting what came before. When he turned to public sculpture in Madison Square Park at the start of the pandemic, he let the grass shine through. It was high time I revisited my own cynicism.
It is hard to dismiss outright work that covers the walls, nestles into a corner, and surrounds supporting columns. Scraps on the wall seem to rise as if from a single act of force, and the corner pile gives that force direction. Scraps on one column gather at top like a mushroom, while scraps on the other fall around the base. They look back to the artist's studio while running free. They are anything but Reinhardt's, but they still play with materials, darkness, color, and light. Theater or not, it is the show's heart of glass.
"Pass Carry Hold" ran at MoMA PS1 through February 10, 2025. Paula Wilson ran at Bortolami through August 30, 2024, Virginia Overton through August 9, and Leonardo Drew at Galerie Lelong through October 19.