When “ABC Art,” published in 1965 in Art in America, went the equivalent of viral, it launched the remarkable, decades-long, international career of art critic and art historian Barbara Rose. Rose, who was also a curator and filmmaker, died on December 25, 2020 after a long struggle with breast cancer. She was 84 and was active to the end. In that seminal article, she outlined clearly and forcefully the significance of the pared-down work by a coterie of little-known, lower Manhattan artists who would soon become Minimalist icons. Among them were Frank Stella, Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt. Since that debut, Rose helped shape the discourse of some of the major art movements of the late 20th Century through a constant stream of exhibitions, publications and documentaries. While she concentrated on modern and contemporary art, she also explored European art history in The Golden Age of Dutch Painting (1969). Fast forward to 2011, she became the first Morgan-Menil fellow at The Morgan Library and Museum in New York, resuming research on a project that linked the medieval illuminated manuscripts of the Apocalypse with commentaries of Beatus of Liébana with the drawings of Joan Miró, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso.

Her first book, American Art since 1900: A Critical History (1967), highlighted artists who were not fully canonical: John Marin; Joseph Stella; Stanton Macdonald Wright; and she included Irene Rice Pereira among them, at a time when female artists were seldom—if ever—acknowledged in such surveys. Pivoting, Rose began to champion painters and painting in the 1970s, in defiance of Greenbergian formalism and the nearly universal declaration of the medium’s demise, transformed into an impassioned advocate. She curated American Painting: The Eighties, an exhibition of 41 artists at the Grey Art Gallery in 1979, in advance of the decade, the bravura a characteristic trait. It was both applauded and derided, also characteristic. But whatever criticism was lobbed at it, the essential premise, that painting was alive and kicking, was absolutely right. It was followed by a sequel, Abstract Paintings: The 90s at the Andre Emmerich gallery in 1992 as she reprised her commitment to painting many times over.

Other books by Rose included Pavilion: Experiments in Art and Technology (1972); Monochromes: From Malevich to the Present (2006); and, more recently, Painting after Postmodernism: Belgium-USA-Italy (2016.) The latter accompanied the exhibition of the same name that she curated in Brussels, an exchange between artists from those three countries. In it, Rose laments our extremely unstable and changing times and our “increasingly inhuman, technologically driven, globally-networked world.” She defines the spaces of its reproduced imagery as postmodernist, borrowed from “photography, film and video.” To counter that, she said, we need a “rebirth of a pictorial space” which is “ambiguous and amorphous” created by a “visionary consciousness.”

Born in Washington, D.C., Rose attended Smith College, but completed her undergraduate degree at Barnard College in 1957. She studied art history at Columbia University, which was one of the top-ranked departments in the nation, with an illustrious faculty that included Julius Held, Meyer Shapiro, and Rudolf Wittkower. Among the friends she made then were filmmaker Michael Chapman, artists Carl Andre, Larry Rivers, and Stella—whom she married in London in 1961, when in Europe on a Fulbright fellowship to Spain. Her Spanish sojourn was the beginning of a long, requited affair with a country that became a second home to her, awarding her the Order of Isabella the Catholic in 2010. Other awards include the College Art Association’s Distinguished Art Criticism Award in 1966 and 1969, as well as a Front Page Award in 1972. She did not complete her doctorate (contemporary art beckoned) but Columbia awarded her a Ph.D. in art history in 1984, in recognition of her many contributions to the discipline.

Rose wrote regularly for Studio International, Art in America, Artforum, Vogue, New York magazine, Partisan Review, and others over the years, and was editor-in-chief at the Journal of Art, which she co-founded, covering a range of subjects that dealt with art, culture, and politics. As well, she wrote monographs on many, if not most, of the artists of the 1960s and 70s, a dazzling line-up that included Claes Oldenburg, Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, and Barnett Newman.

She taught at Sarah Lawrence and Hunter College, among other institutions and was director of the art gallery at the University of California, Irvine and the Katzen Arts Center at American University in Washington, DC. She was curator of exhibitions and collections at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston—not without controversy—where she curated Miró in America (1982); Fernand Léger and the Modern Spirit (1982); and a retrospective presciently, cannily dedicated to Lee Krasner (1983), too long eclipsed by her famous spouse. Rose’s films include the documentaries The New York School and American Art in the 1960s (1972). She collaborated with François de Menil and Philip Glass to make North Star: Mark di Suvero (1977).  Lee Krasner: The Long View (1978) was a solo effort, as was the film about the master printmaker, Tanya Grosman: A life with painters and poets (1979).

Rose was married four times to three husbands: art and music stars Stella and Jerry Leiber, and bookending them, economist Richard Du Boff, her first and last, who survives her, as do her children Rachel and Michael Stella and four grandchildren.

Rose was an art world fixture and provocateur. Criticism did not cramp her style or self-assurance.  She was a character, a force, a diva, quirky or brilliant or both, depending upon your perspective. She had panache, spirit, curiosity, and ambition, and disdained the increasing monetization and corporatization of the art world. She said, with typical pungency, in Nathaniel Kahn’s 2018 film, The Price of Everything, that she’d only been to one auction, and it was distressing to see “art on the auction block, like a piece of meat.”  Trenchant, outspoken, confounding, she could be formidable but also amiable. She could also be hilariously irreverent—and often salty. Let’s not rehabilitate her. She was bracingly, admirably who she was, and that was much more than enough.

The post A Character, A Force, A Diva: Barbara Rose, 1936 – 2020 appeared first on artcritical.

 

Marcia Hafif and I would have dinner together over the years, often at her loft. Her space was always serene, meticulously appointed, nothing superfluous, reflecting her current projects and life. Many pictures of Marcia come to mind. In one of them, she is in her  kitchen, the light—Vermeer-like— streaming through the large window, the vegetables, carefully considered and impeccably arranged on a wooden chopping block, a Japanese knife in hand, expertly cutting them just so. Then in one improbably elegant swoop, she drops them into a ceramic bowl—where they fall beautifully. Or watching her make tortillas, or tea or, really, just about anything. Each gesture of her hand as she touched things, lightly, fastidiously, seemed to be a kind of gathering of information, taking possession of them matter-of-factly but also seeming to invent them anew. I imagined that was how she would paint, draw, make her small sculptural forms, her hands deft, steady, unfailing, her movements assured, without wasteful flourishes. She was a singular mix of the sensualist and the ascetic, one who keenly observed the world, its matter and materiality, and thought about it and brought those observations, however filtered and condensed, into her art, into her ideas about art and life, all inextricably intertwined.

Marcia Hafif was born Marcia Jean Woods in Pomona, California on August 15, 1929 and died April 17, 2018 in Laguna Beach, California, aged 88. She is survived by a son, Peter Nitoglia, and his family.

She attended Pomona College, graduating in 1951 and interned at Ferus Gallery for a time, the gallery that put Los Angeles on the contemporary art map. She married Herbert Hafif around then, the marriage dissolving ten years later. Always eager to explore what she wanted to explore, she left for Italy in 1961. Intending to stay for a year, she remained in Rome for eight where she made the paintings that catalyzed a much-respected six-decade career. Returning to California in 1969, she began to work in film, photography and sound, all of which she would incorporate into her production throughout the course of her life. She earned a MFA at the University of California, Irvine in 1971 and soon after, moved to New York, eventually settling into a spacious loft on Mercer Street. During the last few decades of her life she would split her time between New York and her house in Laguna Beach..

Among her  books of published  writings and photographs were Pomona Houses, 1972, and Letters to J-C (author and artist Jean-Charles Massera), 1999. She also made  text-based installations such as the erotically charged musings (some called them pornographic, she said) that she chalked across a blackboard in Rooms, PS 1’s legendary 1976 group show. These were  recently reprised at that institution in a new version.

But she was primarily a painter. The relocation to New York was, in a way, a quest to find a way to paint again after it had been declared dead by many in the art world. In search of that, she made her first pencil on paper drawing on New Year’s Day in 1972, no doubt a symbolic act signifying a new beginning. She covered a moderately large piece of paper with short vertical strokes following each other, from top to bottom. This repetitive marking without expressionistic inflection became the basis of much of her work, including the color experiments that comprised the body of the work which she came to call “The Inventory.” This included the magisterial Extended Gray Scale, 1972-73, a series of 106 small square paintings that consisted of gradations of black to white, the number of canvases representing as many shades as she could differentiate.

In her oft-cited 1978 Artforum essay “Beginning Again,” Hafif determined that the way to do so was to just proceed, a method and point of view that would inform her practice from that time forward, based on a study of color that would make visible the “qualities and attributes of a specific pigment color in a specific medium and format,” she wrote. During that period, from 1974-81, she exhibited with Sonnabend Gallery in New York and Paris, adding to “The Inventory” other series such as Mass Tone Paintings, 1973; Wall Paintings, 1975; Neutral Mix Paintings, 1976; Broken Color Paintings, 1978; and Black Paintings, 1979. It ultimately numbered 26 different sequences, the last the Shade Paintings of 2013–18.

Despite the range of her ventures, Hafif has been most frequently allied with monochrome painters such as Olivier Mosset, Joseph Marioni, Phil Sims, Frederic M. Thursz and Gunter Umberg, appearing in group exhibitions with them here and in Europe, where she has always been better known. Of late, she was the focus of renewed attention. Some recent exhibitions include Marcia Hafif, The Inventory: Painting at Laguna Art Museum, 2015; Marcia Hafif: The Italian Paintings 1961–69 at Fergus McCaffrey, New York, 2016; and Marcia Hafif, The Inventory: Paintings at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen and Kunsthaus Baselland, Switzerland, 2017. A solo exhibition of her work is on view until April 25th at Galerie Rupert Walser, Munich; and upcoming exhibitions in 2018 include: Marcia Hafif: Films (1977–99), Lenbachhaus, Munich; and Marcia Hafif: A Place Apart, Pomona College Museum of Art. She is represented by Fergus McCaffrey.

For “Made in Space,” a 2013 group show at Gavin Brown (curated by Peter Harkawik and Laura Owens originally for Night Gallery), she created a wall text inscribed over an immense yellow rectangle: She wanted to write the text herself was was eventually dissuaded. Unflinchingly direct and even shocking (perhaps because it was conceived by a woman in her 80s), it was a challenging text about a woman’s right to have strong sexual feelings at any age. Her message was clear: desire never abates. Hers certainly never did–not for art, not for life.

The post A Singular Mix of the Sensualist and the Ascetic: Marcia Hafif, 1929 to 2018 appeared first on artcritical.

Looking at the magnificent Proscenium the other day at the Neuberger Museum made me think of a building, or perhaps more accurately, a monument that had been taken apart, its components lighted like all monuments are, especially monumental ruins. In fact, it looked like a Greek temple to me. Not just because Stephen was Greek but also because I have, as many of us have, our own romance with Greek temples, with ruins, with the thought that such remnants are what remains of once vital civilizations. I thought of this as a ruin—a rune?—of sorts, albeit a lively, brilliantly colored one that Stephen had evoked through a spare, signature lexicon of architectural elements, the basics from which structures could be constructed, destructed and constructed again as parables of eternal returns.

In its layout, I thought about how architectural his inclinations were, how sensitive he was to space, and how he constructed surfaces, but also rooms and chapels with light, with neon, with color, and with an array of simple but universal geometric shapes, inclining toward architecture because it is so tangible—and to light because it is not.

The joy of making is always evident in his work—and there is no mistaking the purity of that joy—which might in part consist of putting something out there that wasn’t there before, of drawing lines in space that transform into the dimensional, trailing a kind of aura.

His light was quotidian light and spiritual light. And it was historical light. It was the light of the present and future. It was both phenomenological and metaphoric. He treated it differently from other light artists of his generation and I believe he was the first to use neon extensively as an art material.

I remember the times he would show us his beautifully made models of chapels on display in his West Broadway studio—a project room, an installation in itself. He made over 30 of them but only one was realized as a completed structure—at least to date. That was the Chapel of the Heavenly Ladder, for the Venice Biennale in 1997, when he represented Greece. I remember how excited he was to show them to us (hard to think of that in the past tense), how wonderfully, infectiously excited he usually was to show us what he had recently made, what he had recently been thinking about, what he had recently discovered.

In Proscenium’s dynamism, as its forms and light pull you and your gaze around the vast Philip Johnson gallery of the Neuberger, it seems as if one component activates the next as a kind of relay—you can almost hear the sizzle at the points of transition—as a spark, a quickening, a kindling which made me think of human inventiveness, resilience, and aspirations.

Stephen knew something about old and new; it was part of his heritage, part of what he was, situated, like many of us who came here from older countries, between a more ancient heritage and one that was relatively new, and perhaps partially because of that, he was entirely at ease looking back while also looking ahead.

I have selected four architectural images more or less arbitrarily (the theater at Priene the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, Bernini’s Colonnade in Rome, and Raphael’s School of Athens in the Vatican—one of the most utopian spaces in the history of western painting) as examples that relate in a general way to Stephen’s work, starting with the circle, the half-circle, the incomplete circle and the line that becomes the column, that becomes a square, a rectangle that becomes a temple, a theater, a church, a chapel, a room. There is also the kinship of their great serenity and their embodiment of an idealized space and place.

I think Stephen liked the notion of taking neon – that had associations with the garish, the carnival, the carnal, the commercial – and changing it into something elegant, serene, immaculate, at times even holy. It tickled his fancy, his sense of mischief, I would think, but also his sense of completeness to equate temples and theaters. The temple lends its architecture to the theater which began as a more sacred space for rituals and the enactment of mysteries, before becoming secularized as venues for entertainment. But both are portals, stages, he reminds us, the proscenium signaling a plunge into imaginative, intangible realms, separating it from the realities of the mundane.

He was always challenging conventional boundaries in art, in what an artist could make and how he could make it and with what. His impulse was multidisciplinary and synthesizing and he was prescient, in advance of the kinds of practices without borders that are so prevalent today. He strove to open his practice up, to keep it open, to always let more in, to let viewers in, to let the world in, to open up what was possible with the vocabulary that he had chosen, that was necessary for him.

It was curiosity that always led him on. Naomi Antonakos, his wife, says that Stephen never knew when he started where he would end up—he just wanted to see what might happen. And so he did.

The post “Sizzling at the Points of Transition”: Lilly Wei on Stephen Antonakos appeared first on artcritical.

There is a photograph of Fred Holland captured with knees bent, on his toes, his body taut in an angulated S-curve, wearing a ten-gallon hat that obscures his face, looking downward, his arms akimbo, about to pivot into the next position and the next in a swift sequence of movements catapulting him toward the dance’s end. The picture was on a long table at his memorial service on April 10 at the Middle Collegiate Church in the East Village. With it were a number of other photos of him performing—several in which he is even more precariously balanced, more dramatically torqued—as well as ones of him as a stylish bon vivant. Holland died on March 5, in New York at the age of 65 after a more than six-year struggle with cancer. It was a little over a week after his show opened at the Tilton Gallery. While too ill to attend in person, he was present via FaceTime from his hospital bed.

Holland began his career as a performer and choreographer, although he had studied painting in art school. Born in Columbus, Ohio in 1951, he graduated from the Columbus College of Art & Design in 1973, coming to New York in 1982. He danced with the Zero Moving Dance Company, with Ishmael Houston-Jones, Meredith Monk, and others, who introduced him to the dance world. In addition, he designed props, backdrops and whatever else was required for the performances. In 1992, due to an injury, he switched to the visual arts, a natural transition. While a performer, he won a Bessie Award and four National Endowment for the Arts choreography grants, among other honors. As a sculptor, he received a Creative Capital Award, a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council grant and two Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants, to name a few, and was a participant at residencies sponsored by MoMA PS.1, Vermont Studio Center, Art Omi, Cité International des Arts and the American Center in Paris.

Holland showed in a number of galleries and art institutions in New York (including Gallery X, PPOW, Momenta, and the Drawing Center), across the country and internationally (Praetoria, Montréal, Paris, Lodz, Istanbul) in solo and group shows from the early 90s until his death. He had two solo exhibitions at Tilton, the earlier one in 2009. The last exhibition, consisting of recent sculptures made from the simple, often organic materials that he loved, offered a narrative of personal memories intertwined with that of his African American heritage. Holland makes these materials, frequently domestic, unmistakably his own, wresting a delicate, poetic beauty from them that was both folkloric and urbane. There is a clear glass female figure recalling slender fertility goddesses filled with his signature black-eyed peas, a staple of southern cooking. There are many pillows; some are stacked then tenderly draped with a wine-red shawl turning it into a kind of bier atop which are several cupping glasses, alluding to a traditional medical treatment. There are two plaster-covered, mostly monochromatic reliefs of embedded Lincoln pennies, another favorite item and salvaged bricks tagged with little brass plaques that read “When Negroes Lived in Harlem.” An installation of transparent glass bottle-like forms stamped with his face that he called Buoys (2015) and Compass (2015), another of white plaster casts of his head arranged in a circle around a toy compass might point to categories of consciousness, the focus on the mind, the body discarded. The latter also seems to say that the journey of life is circular, the beginning and end indistinguishable, the end once again the beginning. The reversal of the word “compass” as the title of the show, “SSAMMOC” underscores the idea of circularity, indicative of a two-way passage, a journey in which the outward navigation eventually becomes the journey home, with no further directions needed.

Not long before his death, Holland said, “I’ve made some good work.” He sounded satisfied.

The post The Journey of Life is Circular: Fred Holland, 1951 to 2016 appeared first on artcritical.

While downtown Detroit, sparkling under a clear blue September sky, doesn’t look like a place in so much distress that it was forced to declare bankruptcy two years ago, it has to be said that there are curiously few people about in what was once the country’s fourth largest city. That might be a plus, of course. Even more curiously, there aren’t that many cars either (ditto), even if it is still Motor City, as the towering General Motors complex at the Renaissance Center is quick to remind you. In the 1950s and ‘60s, with Motown’s sounds blasting from car windows across the world, Detroit was home to around 1.8 million people. Now it’s down to a little over 700,000 with a median age of 35. It is 82 per cent black, although African Americans were not much in evidence in the areas I saw. There seems to be a trickle (mostly white) moving back in, and if anecdotal evidence means anything, it includes quite a few Millennials who have emigrated from a no longer affordable, no longer edgy Brooklyn.

Gary Wasserman is not a millennial but he is a native son, art collector and now gallerist. One of Detroit’s most enthusiastic boosters, Wasserman said that he had thought of opening an art center in Miami but then came the light bulb moment. Miami didn’t need another art space but Detroit did. And, he pointed out, it had the infrastructure to support a cultural resurgence: the Detroit Institute of the Arts, with its world-class collections no longer headed for the auction block; the renowned Detroit Symphony Orchestra; the Michigan Opera Theatre; and thriving hip-hop and techno music scenes. It also has its esteemed educational institutions such as the University of Michigan and Cranbrook Academy of Art. And there is the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, its experimental, socially conscious programs increasingly noteworthy, highlighted by Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead, in permanent residence on its grounds.

The result of his epiphany was the interdisciplinary Wasserman Projects, writ large across the handsome brick facade of a renovated firehouse. The opening on September 25 coincided with the Detroit Design Festival. The soaring, sky lit interior of Wasserman Projects is entered through Harley Valentine’s Dream Machine, a tall, twisty geometric sculpture in eye-catching red facing a red portal (Wasserman’s favorite color). It is purposively sited in Eastern Market, a historic Detroit marketplace for fresh produce that has been re-branded as a destination for the creative, the artisanal, and the unique, from specialty foods to innovative restaurants, small retail shops and studio complexes for designers and inventors such as OmniCorpDetroit.

Markus Linnenbrook and Nick Gelpi’s collaboration, THEFIRSTONEISCRAZYTHESECONDONEISNUTS (2015) dominates the gallery. An elegant, multi-planar construction, it had several small windows cut into its plain wood exterior so the inside was visible from different vantage points. There is an entry to permit viewers to step up into its extravagant rainbow-striped interior, as if entering into a painting, the dripped paint a Linnenbrink hallmark. It also pulls apart to form a fantastic stage. Outside, Jon Bromit repurposed a metallic grain silo into a sound installation that feels part do-it-yourself, part ultra-sophisticated, called Elf Waves, Earth Loops, and *Spatial Forces. The soundtrack – activated by the viewer – emanates from ceiling and floor and reverberates as if you were inside a multidirectional sound box.

Another interdisciplinary project, scheduled for fall, 2016 is Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen’s Cosmopolitan Chicken, an ongoing venture he began 20 years ago, previewed on a video monitor. Crossbreeding a local chicken type with a more global pool of genetic material, it’s a “metaphor for diversity,” the artist says, that reflects, in this instance, the diversity of Detroit. And if the fine-feathered fowls he has previously conceived are any indication, this new breed will also be stunning to look at.

If you are creative, optimistic, energetic—not to mention young and resilient—and in need of space and an artistic community, Detroit, as Wasserman put it, “is the city for now.”

The post Painting the Town Red: Wasserman Projects, Detroit appeared first on artcritical.

Born in 1941, in Sharon, Pa., Leffingwell took art classes as a teenager at the nearby Butler Institute in Youngstown, Ohio, stimulating the interests in art making and museums that would eventually define his life. Arriving in New York in the mid-1960s, he became a regular at Max’s Kansas City and Warhol’s Factory, enthralled by the iconoclastic spirit of Lower Manhattan. His friends at the time ranged from the likes of political activist Abbie Hoffman to Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, Warhol superstar Ultra Violet to sculptor John Chamberlain (who became a lifelong friend). He was equally at home in the art world of Los Angeles, also spending much time there. In 1978, he returned home to care for his mother and to finish his schooling, earning a B.A. at Youngstown State University in 1982 and an M.A. in art history from the University of Cincinnati in 1984.

In 1983, he presented “Chinese Chance: An American Collection” at the Butler, his first curatorial project, featuring the collection of Mickey Ruskin of Max’s Kansas City, who had recently died of a drug overdose. It was followed by an exhibition by Conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner at the University of Cincinnati. In 1985, Leffingwell returned to New York as the program director, then chief curator of P.S. 1, hired by Alanna Heiss, its founding director. Heiss said that Leffingwell preferred artists of “extreme vision” whose work his own vision would make coherent. He curated shows of James Rosenquist, Neil Williams and Michael Tracy. One of his most notable exhibitions for P.S. 1 featured John McCracken, the first comprehensive survey of the Californian minimalist sculptor on the East Coast. Leffingwell often introduced little known artists from California and elsewhere to New York. It seemed natural, then, when in 1988 he was appointed director of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Art Park. His most ambitious venture for the gallery was “LAX: The Los Angeles Exhibition” in 1992, a seven-venue biennial installed throughout the city, conceived as a model for future exhibitions.  He returned to New York in 1992 after his job was eliminated due to budgetary cuts. In 1997, he curated an important, critically acclaimed exhibition of Jack Smith at P.S. 1, renewing interest in the provocative artist who is now acknowledged as a major influence in the history of performance art, experimental filmmaking and queer cinema.

In 1989, Leffingwell became a contributor to Art in America, writing hundreds of reviews and articles over a 20-year span. He also began to visit Brazil with increasing frequency as his interest in South American art and his love of the country deepened.  He was named the magazine’s corresponding editor from Brazil, reporting on six of the São Paulo biennials and becoming an authority on contemporary Brazilian art. Elizabeth C. Baker, former editor-in-chief of Art in America, credited his curatorial experience and acumen for his ability to write on “an unusually broad range of artists. He brought us things we didn’t know about and he was willing to tackle almost any subject we might suggest.”

He wrote numerous essays and monographs; one of his last published essays was a contribution to AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE (1960-2007), a catalogue documenting more than 40 years of the work of Lawrence Weiner, co-published by LA MOCA and the Whitney Museum in 2007.

For much of the time after he returned to New York from L.A., Ed lived in a tiny walk-up apartment on Sullivan Street, elegantly jam-packed with ornate and curious objects, artworks, books and the memorabilia he had acquired during an eventful, multifaceted life. It was his castle, where he cooked bouillabaisse for friends and entertained them with endless, often digressive, sometimes scandalously humorous anecdotes about the art world—true and not—enjoying himself immensely.

The post Critic, Curator, Dandy: Edward Leffingwell, 1941 to 2014 appeared first on artcritical.

In what proved to be his last public event, Jene Highstein, who died on April 27 at his upstate farm of lung cancer, described his childhood summers swimming and fishing off the white sand beaches of North Carolina.  This dialogue took place in late February at ArtHelix, Bushwick, where a selection of his recent Cape Breton drawings formed an exhibition curated by Bonnie Rychlak.  Cape Breton was a place where many of his friends had bought land in the 1960s although he visited it for the first time only in 2002—and instantly fell in love.  It reminded him of the idyllic holidays of his youth although the landscape was northern and very different.  But he loved the “wildness” and “remoteness” of Nova Scotia, the restless, constantly changing weather that re-drew sky, sea, and earth.  And above all, he loved the light.  So he, too, bought land, spending parts of summers and sometimes other seasons in this private arcadia. The light-flickered, delicately colored Cape Breton drawings are a Postminimalist sculptor’s musings on phenomena, on what disappears, what changes and what remains, one whose work over an almost 50-year career was more typically characterized by refined, although enormously scaled, weighty, often distinctly architectural forms in monochrome, in shades of blacks, whites, grays and the natural coloration of the material. Yet a rebellious sensuality could almost always be detected in these austere, potent sculptures of metal, stone, wood, concrete, plaster, glass, their geometry softened by the artist into something more idiosyncratic, humanized by a curve, a swell, an irregularity, as it was in his playground-sized sculpture for the Wanås Foundation in Sweden, a sloping, irregular ovoid that he dryly called Grey Clam (1990/2001).

Like any good artist, Highstein liked to challenge and be challenged, and like any good artist, he was compelled to experiment.  He was at ease within a range of media and disciplines, collaborating at times with other artists, dancers, musicians, and architects such as Steven Holl with whom he constructed a resplendently luminous nine-meter tall ice edifice in Finland in 2003.  Called Oblong Voidspace, this piece was, as Highstein explained, “about the absence of sculpture: the outside being more architectural and the inside more experiential.  Like a ceremonial space, the interior focuses attention on the convergence of body and mind.”  Highstein also designed sets for theatre productions, working with the ELD Dance Company in Stockholm for many years. The evolution of his work, he had often stated, depended upon finding new forms.  These forms were abstract, not taken directly from nature but from experiences of nature, associations with nature, steeped in nature but conceived in the studio.  These memorable configurations were distinctively his own in the particular integration of the abstract and the biomorphic, an empathetic, substantive “convergence of body and mind” that is present in all of his works, seen most recently in New York at Danese in a well-received show of his towers and elliptical sculptures.

Jene Highstein was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1942 and attended the University of Maryland, then the University of Chicago in the mid-1960s, where his major was philosophy.  He later studied at the New York Studio School and the Royal Academy Schools in London, earning a degree in art in 1970.  His first exhibition was at Lisson Gallery, London, in 1968.  Returning to New York, he showed at 112 Greene Street for a time, part of the utopian-minded, fiercely independent, artist-run alternative space that included much of the downtown avant-garde such as Jeffrey Lew, Gordon Matta-Clark, Richard Nonas, Alan Saret, Mary Heilmann and Vito Acconci.  By 1976, Highstein was showing with Holly Solomon among other galleries in New York and soon after with Ace Gallery in Los Angeles and in New York. More recently, he had solo exhibitions at Texas Gallery, Houston and Danese, New York, as well as in Europe and Asia. His many one-person museum shows include those at the University Art Museum, Berkeley, California (1980); the Philips Collection, Washington, D.C. (1991); MoMA PS1, New York (2003); and a solo throughout Madison Square Park, New York (2005).  An exhibition of early works is scheduled to open at the Clocktower in Lower Manhattan this June.  Highstein received four National Endowment of the Arts awards over the years and a Guggenheim Fellowship among other honors and his work is included in numerous private and public collections, including every major museum in New York.

Extremely well-spoken, well-read, and well-traveled, a student of Buddhism, deeply committed to art, a keen observer of the world and the art world with an elegant, highly original turn of mind—he was trained as a philosopher, after all and reveled in argument and paradox—Highstein also had a bracing streak of irreverence and a dislike of pretension. When an audience member approached him after the ArtHelix talk and asked if a statement he had just made was contradictory, he replied, laughing, “don’t believe anything I say, I’m making it up as I go along.”  Which of course meant, don’t believe that—or do.

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The tranquil, beguilingly lovely Evans Pond, approximately 80 miles south of New York City in Camden County, New Jersey, is surrounded by a tangle of woods. It is also the subject of an ongoing, multipart visual exploration by Deborah Garwood, an artist, critic and scholar who grew up nearby. She has studied its history, learning that, in colonial times, it was a millpond established by Quakers in co-existence with the Lenni-Lenapes, a Native American tribal people; in the 19th Century, it was a “station” on the Underground Railroad; and now, it is a public parkland. Photographing it in different seasons and lights, she has captured Evans Pond’s range of guises and moods, a range that inevitably reflects her own. It is a prolonged portrait, a visual biography, the afterimage of which is a self-portrait, a visual autobiography, an alter ego. Investigated with singular dedication—she has photographed it one weekend a month for 10 to 12 months of the year every year since she initiated the project–it is part historical record, part environmental report and land survey, and part poetics of place, a meditation on the cycles of life, on what is lost and what remains. In Evans Pond: A Long-Term Study of a Single Place, Ms. Garwood taps a naturalist vein in American culture, one that is deeply attuned to landscape, to memories of wilderness altered by the encroachments of industrialization and (sub)urbanization, to the spirit of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman (Camden’s most famous resident)) and William Carlos Williams (who made a New Jersey river immortal).

Ms. Garwood’s suites of modest sized images, 2,3, or 4 to a suite, are most often gelatin silver prints although some are in color. Taken with a variety of cameras–from view cameras to box to digital—and using different films and processes, Ms. Garwood has created an archive of the medium, synopsizing its aesthetic and technological history. The pictures themselves vary, the clear brilliant colors of digital prints in contrast to the dreamy tonalities of the black and whites, the former very much of the present, the others moodier, some in soft focus and less crisply perfect, evoking 19th-century scenes. It is a survey in real time but also a survey of the history of the medium, the pond seen through the camera eye of different periods. The point of view can be close-up or more panoramic, looking upward or straight-on, creating in its sequencing an immersive experience. These still photographs, formatted as diptychs and three or four-part sequences are installed so that the resultant rhythm creates a cinematic sense of movement, the progression slowed, stopped for a moment by the shift from one image to another, by the intervals between images, the site deconstructed and reconstructed. The effect is like that of a film in slow motion, one with a pause button handy.

Evans Pond, as a project, seems straightforward, factual but, ultimately, it is much more quixotic, a kind of fine, understated madness, an act of private possession as well as public presentation—which is what makes it particularly gripping. Who photographs a pond for 12 years? In Ms. Garwood’s narrative, we are quietly offered a place, unpeopled because people come and go although their presence is implicit. With that, we are also offered reassurance as well as Ms. Garwood’s stubborn belief in some imagined beauty, in the invincible, renewable earth.

Lilly Wei is a New York-based independent curator, essayist and critic

Slideshow: click thumbnails to activate:

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