The photographs of LaToya Ruby Frazier occupy a shifting ground between social document and fine art object, a space where politics, poetry and autobiography share equal weight.  At the young age of 31, the artist and activist is celebrating her first solo museum exhibition in New York, LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital on view at the Brooklyn Museum through August 11. The show features over forty black and white photographs that are part of an ongoing project in which her family — favored subjects include her estranged mother and recently deceased grandmother – acts as a prism through which to view the economic downturn of their hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, site of Andrew Carnegie’s first steel mill. Frazier powerfully appropriates the boldly austere aesthetic of Depression-era photography. Without a hint of pretense or sentimentality, her work transforms images of blighted urban landscapes into a total psychic portrait of a town, a family, and a nation in crisis. Be warned: you will be seduced and changed by this truly haunting exhibition.

The Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY (718) 638-5000

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September 7 to October 7, 2012
205 Norman Ave, between Humboldt and Jewel
Brooklyn, (718) 383-9380

Kris Scheifele’s second solo show at Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, Fade, represents the investigative efforts of an artist in search of a personal and singular form of expression.  In a continuum to her 2008-2011 Contortion series, these new works extend an intimate, methodological and obsessive relationship with acrylic,finding their locus in the materiality and literalness of paint.  Reveling in the alchemy of her process, Schefele intersperses layer upon layer of viscous paint with polymer binder and then proceeds to remove the encrusted surface from its wood panel support, slicing the peeled-off rubbery skein into a flexible, hanging, knotty strap.  Associations of bridles, reins and other apparatus abound – equestrian and S&M alike.   But Fade is much more than an iconoclastic gesture: aesthetically intriguing and procedurally relevant, this exhibition of an artist who graduated from Pratt Institute in 2009 exudes an air of maturity, forethought and clarity that doesn’t diminish the inherently playful and effervescent nature of her project.

The front room of the Gallery is an appropriate host for Schiefele’s thirteen intimately sized paintings, all but one made in 2012, and all suspended by nails which directly puncture the skin of the acrylic slabs.  Since the pieces are not supported by any type of frame or armature, Scheifele’s hanging method encourages a sense of performance — gravity, time and temperature exert their presence, exaggerating the work’s affinities to drooping fabric, the sagging body and begging the question (in demure tone) – when is a painting actually finished?

Scheifele’s brand of humor is not only visible in her installation method but palpable in regards to the placement of each work in relation to the next.  In Hate Fade, 2012, one of the smallest works in the exhibit, what is left of the painting’s midnight blue, blazing orange and blood red epidermis dangles asymmetrically from the wall, tattered and riddled with holes– the center completely consumed as if by the ravages of fire or a swarm of locust.   The follow-up to this act of violence is Summer Fade, 2012: a bright lemon-yellow piece, its thickly applied outer layer buzzes with almost irritating verve and then gracefully dissolves at its bottom, revealing hidden layers of oxidized green and Tiffany blue. Up close, the exposed under layers (excavated through Schiefele’s laborious use of a box-cutter) emit a blurry or pixilated softness that differentiates them from the preceding layers and adds a subdued sensuality to the work.

Antithetical tension (the grotesque versus the charming) created through placement in the case of the two works described above, is often an inherent characteristic of Schiefele’s most successful pieces. Money Fade 2012, a freshly minted glistening silver acrylic slab, and Quiet Fade 2012, a ghostly white and introspective purple piece, for instance, flaunt an individualized and peculiar brand of beauty, the type that has been tempered and humbled by the seemingly corrosive and abusive attributes of an unforgiving existence. signifying — or at least hinting at — something that exceeds painting’s formalist chastity belt.

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July 12 to August 24, 2012
535 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues,
New York City, 646 230 9610

In “Post Black America” can an all-black art exhibition still bring novelty to the artistic discourse, especially when the artworks solicit consideration for an arguably exhausted topic – what does the black body symbolize in contemporary society?  Before answering this question, let’s recall the most comprehensive and perhaps infamous iteration of the concept:  Thelma Golden’s 1994 Whitney exhibition, Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art. The contemporaneity and symbolic character of O. J. Simpson and Rodney King ensured the theme’s gravitas and relevance, in excess and when contrasted with present day representations of black masculinity e.g. Air Force One, it is evident that times have surely changed.

That said, in 2012, an all-black show with an all-black focus can still facilitate provocative and relevant debate, especially with so acclaimed a curator as Mickalene Thomas and featuring an artist of such unflinching socio-political determination as LaToya Ruby Frazier, a stand-out in this year’s Whitney Biennial.  The exhibition is dominated by portrait photography from both African and American Artists: Derrick Adams, Frazier, Jayson Keeling, Deana Lawson, Zanele Muholi, Clifford Owens, Mahlot Sansosa, Malick Sidibe, Xaviera Simmons, Hank Willis Thomas and Mickalene Thomas herself rounds out the group exhibit with her own authentic and conceived Polaroids. The title, tête-à-tête, denotes a private conversation, with implications of a candid encounter, and yet the exhibition does not, to quote Jean Baudrillard, “mournfully shoulder the burden of representation.”  The lure to defend or legitimize the black body has given way to the demands of contemporary pathology – the spectacle of the image.  As such, the show glows with vivacious enthusiasm: golden brown, deep-mahogany, and sable skin is presented with arousing desire and in high definition.

The exhibition’s foremost portraits confront the viewer with the gaze of a homo-erotized male: Clifford Owens’ Anthology (Jacolby Satterwhite). The artist commissioned instructional text from various black American artists, exercising carte blanche to interpret the submitted texts which comprised the bases for a series of arresting and authoritative performances at MoMa PS1 last winter.  This performative “score” (Owen’s term) is presented as a print in which the upper two-thirds contain the void of a bare white wall while Owens places himself in the lower third, his dark body fully nude but partially concealed by flowing white linen and sprawled across a bed in the manner of countless historical muses.  Though presented as an instrument for sexual pleasure, Owens’s face exudes a palpable indifference to this objectification. The simple but richly layered and historically engaged image touches the exotic “celebration” of Robert Mapplethorpe’s Black Book (1988) and scrapes the abject protest of Lyle Ashton Harris’s Construct #10  (1989).

This salacious image is counter-balanced by cerebral works that continue the investigation of performance and collaboration, conveyed through diverging motifs: mother and child, couples, and shadows of the self. In Nuit du 31 Dêcembre (1966/2002) Malian artist, Malick Sidibé presents a modestly sized black and white gelatin silver print that captures a group of fully-dressed party-goers. This seemingly authentic and spontaneous photo depicts a quiet and ordinary human story, one that wades in the mind deeply and resolutely for it paradoxically contradicts standard depictions of “celebration” while still confirming to its conventions.

The photograph from Xaviera Simmons’ closes the exhibit with the same vibrancy with which it commenced.  Her piece investigates the myth of the landscape and the body through implications of fractured and loaded narratives.  In Untitled (Pink), 2008 a pigment print, the artist performs the role of the female protagonist whose voluminous afro carries associations of seventies insurrectionist Angela Davis.  The female figure stands in a fluorescent green patch of land, overgrown by dense forest and tangled vegetation. The character wears an haute couture, flamingo colored dress fashionably tailored to expose her breast. With accuracy and force the chic warrior princess swings a long thin branch in the direction of what can best be described as an ominous and animated mound of vegetation whose sculptural contours bring to mind…a large gorilla?  The image is saturated with textured meaning, sophisticated absurdity and aesthetic pleasure.

The most relevant works in the exhibition not only present the black body but point specifically to the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and history. Despite the overall celebratory nature and consumability of tête-à-tête there is still something of “the shock of the new” at play here, the historical discomfort that accompanied the rise of modern art.  The black body alone provides the key ingredient for this shock and when combined with contemporary society’s obsession with the spectacular image with all its connotations of glamour and desirability, a peculiar tension is created.   In a system of exchange-value the work in tête-à-tête simply brings the white or non-black body face-to-face with its inverse — the “other”.  But, to paraphrase Emmanuel Levinas, the other is an unknowable object and cannot be made into an object of the self.  Thus, this exhibit joyfully presents a condition without remedy—the black body.

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June 7 to August 24, 2012
511 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212.633.6999

Young Curators, New Ideas IV, the brainchild of Amani Olu, attempts to reinvigorate formats of display by presenting twelve individually curated micro-exhibits under the rubric of a single event.  As a curation of curators, the multifarious show equates curatorial choice with artistic production – a challenge to traditional values that might prove to be a barometer of future ones. The first iteration of Young Curators, New Ideas was hastily executed in the summer of 2008 at the painfully small, now defunct Bond Gallery in Brooklyn.  On that occasion, five curatorial groups (mostly friends of the now 31 year old Olu) were given ten square feet each in which to materialize their concerns in regard to contemporary art photography.

Fast-forward to its fourth installment, at Meulensteen Gallery and the project has ostensibly reached maturation. Olu initiated an international open-call that yielded over 100 proposals from which a dozen “emerging curators” have been given 150 square feet to experiment, fail, and triumph – varying degrees of which can be witnessed – as the work of 29 visual artists, various concerns, methods and materials are sprawled between two floors and 7,000 square feet.

The show starts with a cerebral buzz, in Susi Kenna and Tali Wertheimer’s aptly titled exhibition: The Artist is Not Present.  The curatorial duo presents Problem, a language and object piece that relies on the viewer’s willingness to engage a solipsistic statement.  Problem, produced by Teresa Henriques in 2011, consist of the word “problem” stenciled in black letters on a bare white wall.  Several feet away binoculars are positioned in front of the wall creating the declarative statement “Look at the Problem”. Its  placement and the conceptual structure of the show, transform the rhetorical statement into an intentional proposition that re-states and emphasizes the crux of Young Curators, New Ideas IV—a willingness to look at and offer an alternative and more inclusive model to the problem of the stagnate and insular Chelsea galley system.

At first glance this show seems as intricate, knotty and composed of discrete niches as the art condition at large. But the micro-exhibits have dialogues going on with one another. On the first floor, the work makes references to formal, painterly, and illusionistic concerns; despite an object like quality or photographic sensibility.  This graphic aesthetic is seen in the modest sized paintings of Josh Reames and Pan Aterson; the former contained in a Robin Juan exhibit, the latter in an Ariella Wolens exhibit. Reames’s Refraction (pale green) 2012, in acrylic on canvas, contains Jonathan Lasker-like calligraphy within shifting geometric shapes. Aterson’s Untitled, 2011, in oil on paper, consists of coils and smears of white AbEx gestures over a black ground.  Yet both works appear to be rendered by digital or photographic means. In curator Rachel Cook’s exhibit, another definition of painting is offered as photographic image and sculpture conflate in Jillian Conrad’s ingenious mixed media slide projections which function as both planar illusion and sculptural object.  The conversation of planar image and actual object continues in the painting Judith, 2012, produced by artist Hugo McCloud, and displayed in Beautiful Refuse: Materiality, an exhibition from Larry Ossei-Mensah.  The 8ft tall and 6ft wide Judith packs a punch, invoking the “push-pull” of Hans Hoffman, but McCloud’s squares disintegrate into something reminiscent of an Antoni Tàpies-like wall.  The artist works on welded sheets of corroded copper where the weathered, metallic surfaces are obfuscated by crusty blotches of red, blue and green paint that slip into pools of dark tar. The most dramatic moments occur when layered physicality is juxtaposed with immateriality as pristine, untarnished copper passages break through layers of detritus to shimmer with hallucinogenic radiance. McCloud’s performative painting offers picturesque dilapidation – as a challenge to the veneer of a digitalized universe.

The exhibition continues on Meulensteen’s lower floor where the white cube transitions into a cavernous unfinished basement.  All the Boys and Girls, curated by Jordana Zeldin, greatly benefits from this more domestically scaled atmosphere: low ceilings, semi-enclosed space a tattered blue couch and the infectious split screen, two-minute video Grow-Up (2010) by Judith Shimer.  The aggregate is a knowingly nostalgic theatrical installation.

Down the hall, 23-year old curator Tiernan Morgan presents American Power, a well-executed micro-exhibition that relies less on the specialized skill of art literacy and more on a willingness to contemplate the mechanisms and socialized symbols that reflect our collective reality back to us, namely the mass media.  It Felt like a Kiss, (2009) a 54-minute film by British filmmaker Adam Curtis, uses video montage, serendipitous pop-music and the dashing 1950s movie star Rock Hudson (who in 1985 became one of the first Hollywood AIDS mortalities) as de-facto narrator and signifier of the jarring difference between constructed identity and lived reality.

Extending Lionel Trilling’s famous remark on romanticism and modernism, William Deresiewicz has suggested that “if the property that grounded the self, in modernism was authenticity, in postmodernism it is visibility’.  Young Curators, New Ideas confirms this diagnosis as curators conceive of themselves not only as impresarios but as artists, too, with Duchampian Conceptualism and the celebrification of contemporary art providing a ground for this encroachment.  Use of the word ‘curator’ runs the risk of being seized by publicity-adept upstarts who fail to convincingly advance the arts but succeed instead at adding to the layers of self-serving bureaucracy that cover an already alienating Art World superstructure. And yet, what makes Young Curators, New Ideas IV successful is precisely its ideological organization, that is to say its idea of curatorship.  Despite the allure of the limelight, the curators remain true to their historical function and deliver a composed experience that highlights diverse subsets and alternative modes of artistic production.

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