Permission to Create: The Legacy of Mary Sherwood Wright Jones, at The Works: Ohio Center for History, Art and Technology

February 5 – April 2, 2022

55 S. First Street
Newark, Ohio 43055
attheworks.org

When I was very young my grandmother, Mary Sherwood Wright Jones (1892 – 1985), would often draw a picture and give it to me as a gift when we came to visit. Holding the small sheet of notepad paper I could see her sure hand in the lively pencil lines creating the outlines of a squirrel or a rabbit or a deer. With this exchange an invitation to her world of making images also passed between us. I felt a kinship with her in these moments. I knew I belonged in her world.

Best known as an illustrator, my grandmother’s legacy is complicated. After working with my cousin, Michael Kennedy, on the exhibition “Permission to Create: The Legacy of Mary Sherwood Wright Jones,” at The Works Museum in Newark, OH, over the last three years, I can see that everyone has their own perspective on who our Grandmother was and why she made the life choices she did. What I can say with certainty is the personal space she created for self-expression and her generosity and encouragement gave me permission to claim my own territory of expression, permission that has animated my life’s work.

Mary Sherwood Wright Jones’ warm, understated presence was inseparable from her charmed circumstances. She grew up in an ornate, red brick mansion with Victorian era interiors on the top of a secluded hill surrounded by evergreens, oaks, cultivated lawns encircled by rich farmlands. In her early 20s, with encouragement from her banker father, she left her secure midwestern nest to spend two years studying fine art in New York City. She studied with members of the Ashcan School in 1913 and 1914, and her small oil paintings in the show, The Gardener and Nude, are fine realist works. Several of her charcoal self portraits from this time show a serious young woman deftly revealed in light and shadow looking directly at the viewer.

This is the first time her serious paintings and drawings will be shown to the public. While visiting my studio in Mattituck, NY, this summer Michael proposed we show only our grandmother’s fine art works despite her established reputation as an accomplished illustrator for children’s periodicals. My cousin’s suggestion to show our grandmother’s earliest works freed me to speak something unspeakable in my family: something about my grandmother’s illustrations – and the attention they have gotten – has always bothered me.  Yes, my grandmother loved to draw, she enjoyed collaborating with the top educators who were her editors, and she liked being paid for her work. At the end of her over three decades illustrating for My Weekly Reader, her longtime editor Eleanor M Johnson wrote, “Mary Sherwood Wright Jones had an ability to deal creatively with reality and fantasy. She used the objects and creates of nature (bugs, raindrops, flowers, birds, bees and fish) which mean so much to children in their discovery of the world.” However, I never wanted to create something under someone else’s direction as my grandmother had done – and I wonder if that choice was an unhappy compromise on her part.

After my own life spend engaging with the vagaries, biases and challenges of the fine art world, I can understand her choice. I understand that the trade-off between creative control, money, and access to an audience has many shades. And yet, I felt she had held something back by choosing illustration. Something colorful and full-bodied and real was missing from her work.

The show is meant to bring attention to the early fine art she made for herself, and to trace her legacy across generations, putting her work in company with the work of my cousin, my daughter, and myself. I have been making art since those early days with my grandmother. I’ve searched, explored, and experimented, on my way to finding ways to make meaning. I chose two new large-scale paintings on stained, cropped, and stitched unstretched canvas for the exhibition. These works show my process of working from the inside letting the boundaries be determined by the interior play of paint flows amidst flashpoints of color. Michael is presenting his abstract paintings made in the last year, which draw upon the color palette from our grandmother’s early 20^th century pieces in the show.  And, Phoebe, my daughter, is showing photo-collages that explore trends of the American family throughout the 20^th and 21^st Century using imagery sourced from her own experience together with photographs, letters and other printed matter from prior generations, including those of her great-grandmother.

And yet, like many families I suppose, ours is not without challenges that cloud the legacy we are celebrating. My oldest sister Julia, who kept safe the enchanted, protective circle my grandmother first drew around me, suffered a traumatic injury in 2015. Our family was split in its aftermath making honest exploration of family history fraught at best. One result: my mother refused to loan works by my grandmother for this show. Despite her efforts to bring a limited view of my grandmother’s legacy, we are proudly presenting work that excites us.

In one very direct way, my grandmother’s illustration work has had a renewed influence on me. I have been working on my artist’s book, The Garden, launched at this show, since Julia’s injury. Itpresents a series of emotionally evocative abstract images with eleven semi-autobiographical singe-page stories centering on themes of abandonment and loss. Contrasting feelings of flux and balance run throughout The Garden, generating a cyclical experience that wavers between steady and destabilizing. Stylistically, the work is reminiscent of the children’s fairy tale books my grandmother illustrated. The Garden’s visible binding, with exposed, long, colored threads, highlights the physical joining of the book’s form. I am using my grandmother’s format. Her audience was young children, her iconography bright; I tell a darker more complex tale.  That too, is part of her legacy.

I have spent a lifetime exercising my grandmother’s permission to create.  I’ve taken my art practice where she could not; I’ve had choices that she did not. Still, precious little has changed for women seeking to be seen. Permission is, of course, just the start of a journey filled with risk. My grandmother showed us both the price of being different and the payoff of putting in the work, day after day. I am now one year older than she was the year I was born; I want to shine a light on the work that shows her undirected self.  I want to give her permission to create.

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Picasso: Painting the Blue Period at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Phillips Collection

Toronto: October 6, 2021 to January 4, 2022
Washington, DC: February 26 to June 12, 2022

“Picasso: Painting the Blue Period,” seen by this reviewer at the Art Gallery of Ontario and headed to the Phillips Collection, Washington DC, in February, conveys above all the young artist’s painful hunger. Some of those cravings were carnal. Rakish charm and stints of poverty made women easier to obtain at times than food, it would seem. In his  ambition to best every other artist, past and present, he bounced from style to style. Scanning the walls reveals a list of masters that Picasso was chasing down, all at once, from 1901 to 1904: Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne, Degas, Puvis de Chavannes, El Greco, and Daumier just for starters. A dive into the catalogue reveals that as a sixteen-year-old student at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, Picasso was already anxious to take on the whole circle of Catalan modernistes, principally Isidre Nonell, whose technique he pilfered aggressively.

Even the preternaturally talented Picasso could only digest so much at once. Consequently, a lot of the earlier Blue Period pictures fail to cohere. In 1901 he attempted a bold fusion of Cézanne and El Greco in Evocation (The Burial of Casagemas) (1901). The eponymous painter-poet friend, dead by suicide, is enshrouded on a hillside in front of a tomb, as mourners gather. One figure, wrapped in blue, may as well be the grieving Mary. In the upper portion of the picture, Casagemas is mounted on a white horse. His arms are outstretched, and a nude woman is smashing her face to his as her legs dangle in space. He gallops through the sky to his supernal reward, which is apparently a bevy of stockinged harlots. (From a certain standpoint that would be just recompense for Casagemas, who had been defeated in love by impotence.) This is rendered unconvincingly in the blocky hachure of Cézanne’s faceless bathers. It lacks the older master’s inner directives, it being instead a project of reverse engineering. Still, Picasso is such that it can be interesting even to watch him screw up. He never painted anything like this again, and while he lost the war, he won the battles, demonstrating that he had understood something significant about how both Cézanne and El Greco worked figures into their compositions.

Picasso was not a religious artist, but there’s a distinctly Catholic tone of mourning to Blue Period works that postdate Evocation. One catalogue author suggests that he attended an Ancient Art Exhibition that was held at the Palace of Fine Arts in Barcelona, where he would have seen two thousand examples of Romanesque and Gothic work. The heavily robed female figures who appear around 1902 and ‘03 support the assertion. The subject matter was informed by visits to a women’s prison in Saint-Lazare. (Speculation continues as to whether the reason for them was because he didn’t have to pay the syphilitic models, or because he was being treated himself by a staff doctor. Not often proposed is that he felt genuine pity for the women’s plight, which ought to be considered.) Though secular, there is a Maria Dolorosa affect in A Woman with Bangs (1902), whose asymmetrical face suggests resignation to insanity.

She looks as though she was carved from jade. Picasso played to his natural strengths when he was modeling form. The hairdos of Two Women at a Bar (1902) rest along the top of the picture like storm clouds. The figures hanging in the cyan-tinged darkness beneath them, with their mass and angularity, seem to have been hewed with an ax. The cloak enshrouding Crouching Beggarwoman (also 1902) has more of a feeling of clay, even an entire cliffside. This is leagues beyond the work from 1901. It is also remarkable that someone this skilled at crafting dimensional form would eventually pioneer a genre of painting driven primarily by flat planes. It would be right to suspect that some kind of shape-making engine drives both projects, and Picasso’s was of an unusually high horsepower.

Blue served a Symbolist purpose, and Picasso likely adopted it due to his fascination with the painter Santiago Rusiñol, in whose work the employment of blue had become something of a trademark. But it also allowed Picasso to take a break for a couple of years from dealing seriously with color, which plagued him. His otherwise prodigious visual memory did not record details of hue, and his reflex was to put down full-strength, acidulous primaries. One of the 1901 still lifes, Chrysanthemums, is garish. Some Rose Period works, hung as a postscript to the exhibition, show his difficulties beginning to resolve. La Toilette (1906) is orders of magnitude more sophisticated in coloration. I contend that Picasso was so good at form that for a while he had a problem deciding what not to do with it. It wasn’t the Morisot-inflected Impressionism of the nude Jeanne from 1901, nor the post-Impressionist wedges of Cézanne. It was, finally, the sculptural calm of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Only when he worked that out did his color mature.

The AGO exhibition gives edifying attention to the influence of Puvis. Picasso became interested in how to establish full-length figures in a given space. He had accomplished this sporadically using licks cribbed from Cézanne, notably in The Blue Room (1901), but with them came Cézanne’s tendency to pop the planes at the viewer. Puvis’ spaces, in contrast, are architecturally sound. The Soup (1902) appears amid dozens of drawings, one of them worked until the artist dug through the paper. Picasso slaved at the 18-inch wide painting for months under conditions of cold and short funds, while figuring out how Puvis made his figures interact. The older artist’s influence was not just formal, but moral. Puvis had treated the theme of charity in magnificent canvases, and Picasso developed a heartfelt concern for the privation he had witnessed beyond his own. The space in this painting is also a touch askew but not by Picasso’s standards, and The Soup remains a Symbolist triumph, full of sympathy for its subject. Hungry ghosts can die, it is said, and be reborn into the human realm. That seems to be what’s happening here.

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December 2, 2021 to January 23, 2022
124 Forsyth Street and 136 Eldridge Street
Both between Delancey and Broome streets,
New York City, highnoongallery.com

These new paintings by Jennifer Coates, like her previous bodies of work, arrive in a headlong rush of invention festooned upon a canny theme, in this case the female body in nature. Previously, Coates made exuberant, punkish paintings exploring dubious episodes in the life of processed food. Now she places groups of nude women –– she names them as nymphs, dryads and goddesses –– into clearings in deep, dark forests, thus activating irresistible tropes of a Western painting tradition that arose with spied-upon bathing beauties (Europa, Io, Venus, Susannah) meant for royal boudoirs. But while this hook induces thoughts about the male gaze, from Titian and Correggio to Cézanne and Matisse –– and about the feminist reckoning with that moribund tradition (Spero, Schneemann) as well as the postfeminist inversion of that reckoning (Kurland, Yuskavage) –– the figures themselves can be all but incidental in Coates’ overgrown miasmas of tree trunks, wildflowers, whiskery stalks and impenetrable leafage. As with the food paintings, where her toxic acrylics performed a kind of transubstantiation into Cheez Whiz and Smuckers, Coates’ forests are indexical floriations: sinuous strokes are branches; spills can be glitters of leaves; spray paint, fog; protruding paint-licks, thorns, ticks or mosquitos. A more occult art history comes to mind in these unkempt, unruly wildernesses, one which begins where the babes-in-the-woods tradition itself, after giving birth to modernism, withers away.

Dryads and Pollinators (Birds) (all works 2021), one of two large paintings with that title in the exhibition, is a swirling chorus of graphically insistent hummingbirds, white blossoms and filigreed stalks that recalls the backyard watercolor raptures of Charles Burchfield. While Burchfield’s glades are uninhabited, Coates’ everyday ecstatic includes luminous beings, spirits of the forest whose spare, archaic profiles float among the flowers. Faces, flowers, birds and weeds are painted with a kind of folk-art zeal while the cerulean forest behind, solidly modeled then dematerialized by dancing layers of sprayed pigment, is appealingly contrary in color, scale and attack.

Coates’ experimental approach to mark-making — thick or thin, macro or micro, tight or loose, brushed, sprayed or sponged –– goes for both forests and figures. In Grieving Woman, a lone woman in a classical pose is incised in white against the mottled background like a fading figure on a krater. Also cut from Hellenic lines, in this case black, are five hollow women in Mystery Cult, who seem to be lost in the (ergot-infested?) weeds, while by contrast, the protagonists in Three Dryads are entangled in a single libidinous squiggle of green and yellow paint that, like flesh according to Francis Bacon, verges on the repulsive. Changing tactics again, Coates gives the golden apparitions in Three Nymphs careful, earthy substance. They gesture with a narrative refinement that suggests, along with their warm, coppery tarnish, the microcosmos of a Sienese predella. Coates, however, putting the brakes on such skillful seduction according to her restless temperament, encloses this exquisite scene in a dark, seething knot of trunks and branches as brut as the figures are delicate.

Nor does Coates forswear outright satire: Bacchanal Before a Herm of Pan ridicules the sublime, if rather stiff, Poussin painting of that title as a girl orgy, complete with two hapless goats. Wry gender critique aside, the painting’s busy, stop-motion scenography seems like an attempt to do the master over again after Henry Darger­­ –– or vice-versa. In any case, thoughts of Cézanne’s “after nature” version of Poussin, his bathers, cannot but come to mind. Poussin’s trees are uncannily naturalistic, his figures –– extricated from sarcophagi –– not so much, and thus there is a certain logic to the way the trunks and limbs of Cézanne’s bathers undergo metamorphosis, like the nymph Daphne, into timber. And thence into Cubism, and all that followed.

The most compelling figure in the show, for that matter, is distinctly Picassoid. Re-engineered for function, the small, reclining nude of Fire Watcher marvelously contains her own bath. Behind her, the fire of the title rages as a preposterously scumbled orange-green goo, barely contained by the jutting blue and purple forms of super-cooled, super-flat conifers. As in all the paintings, however experimental, internal typology is firmly organized: trees are trees, figures are figures –– and in Dryads and Pollinators (Moths), insects are insects. In this second large, ravishing version of the theme, clamorous day has turned to mysterious night. The precisionist symbolism of Odilon Redon and Fred Tomaselli echo in Coates’ crisp ferns and fluorescent lepidoptera, scintillating against a nocturne of blue-violet and black. Yet rogue textures –– icky drips and thorny bumps interrupting the most beautiful passages –– remind us that nature, just like art, is a messy and dangerous concoction.

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Larry Day: Body Language at Arcadia University, Woodmere Art Musueum and the University of the Arts, Philadelphia

Absent Presence, Arcadia University, August 30 to November 21, 2021
Silent Conversations, Woodmere Art Museum, September 25 to January 23, 2022
Nature Abstracted, University of the Arts, Philadelphia, October 8 to December 3, 2021

Unlike most realists, who celebrate the world’s material presence, Larry Day seems as concerned to capture palpable absence in his work: something unseen, yet powerfully implicit. His mature paintings and drawings expressed his singular ascetic reserve,  a sensibility that managed to juggle American precisionism and pittura metafisica. In such subjects as a quotidian back-alley, a charades party, a poker game there is an awareness that transcends the everyday in suspended moments of painterly reflection.

Day, who died in 1998 in his late seventies, was a doyen of the Philadelphia scene. A great conversationalist with a strong capacity for sustaining friendships, he was a beloved teacher, mentor and friend to more than four decades of artists. A selection of his astute, subtle writings on art is included in the catalogue of this three-venue retrospective of nearly 150 works, guest curated by David Bindman. Divided by theme between the institutions, the exhibition spans the 1950s to the 1990s with cityscapes at Arcadia University, figure compositions at the Woodmere Art Museum and abstract works at the University of the Arts, where Day taught for many years. Cumulatively, the exhibition explicates his dialogue with art past and present.

UArts presents Day’s Abstract-Impressionist work from the 1950s and early ‘60s when he was very much part of the social world of the New York School. The theatrical “bowing” of Ab-Ex painting was replaced in Day’s work by a deft, subtle pizzicato of interlocking color passages suggestive of foliage—as in Abstraction, (1958)—possessing a contemplative emotive presence. In a parallel body of abstract paintings Day’s work in this era employed a syntax derived from Willem de Kooning in 1949-50. The standout in this idiom is Landscape for St. John of the Cross, (1955).

Such works established his initial reputation, but by 1962 he was dissatisfied with what he was doing and began defining a post-abstract realism. This was not an abandonment of modernism, but an embrace of its contradictions. In the Arcadia show, Absent Presence, we see Day extending and deepening his interest in structural invention in the interplay of buildings in a back alley or a construction site, which could provoke a reverie of a miniature universe. This could be a view of an ideal city, but at other times Day could evoke a melancholy, nihilistic vision, as in Zone, (1976). There are affinities here to Mario Sironi’s paintings of desolate cityscapes and the Neo-Realist films of Antonioni. Through a surprising fusion of opposites, Day came into his own, rejecting expressionism and adopting something of Charles Sheeler’s emotionally cool, linear style. In these austere, unpopulated spaces, Day creates a poetry of the anti-poetic.

According to David Bindman’s catalogue essay, Nan Rosenthal, late curator at the Met, characterized Day’s work as “ironic realism,” the validity of which Day himself accepted. But what does it mean to call realism “ironic”? Realists coming of age since the advent of abstraction such as Lucian Freud or Philip Pearlstein work directly from life to avoid stylistic mannerisms, to create an authentic unity of experience out of the complexity of perceptual painting. By contrast, Day felt that such a funneled vision purity was insufficient to express the fragmentation of modern consciousness. He wanted his contemplative life as a painter to encompass all his interests, whether in philosophy, literature, or the traditions of European art. His process was to work toward pictorial wholeness without jettisoning the insights of fragmentation; a synthetic process akin, in actuality, to collage: teasing out an idea through drawings, partly done from life, or from photographs of friends, past art, and images in magazines. In this way, Day exercised his amused and sardonic sensibility to reveal our awkward moments of self consciousness and the contradictory aspects of our cultural beliefs, both enduring and moribund.

This new style was the result of a search for what really mattered to the artist. In wartime service he had faced death repeatedly during the invasion of Iwo Jima and came to realize that “Some of the things that move us most are the things we take for granted. How we dreamed of the ordinary as ideal, when we were in the army.”

A narrative of everyday life became his pictorial domain, but not in any literal sense. It was actually the planarity of late Cubism that led Day to his love of Renaissance frescoes. He exchanged thickly built paint surfaces for thin coats that affirm the flatness of the canvas. I believe that as he examined frescoes, with their often missing al secco paint layers and seriously damaged areas that reveal the drawing in sinopia, beneath, he found metaphors for the evanescence of awareness or limitations of memory.

Like R.B. Kitaj, Day incorporated images from advertising, photography, cinema, and snapshots of himself and friends, sources he used to droll effect. By contrasting our consumer culture to the culture of other times he revealed both a sense of continuity and the pastness of the past.

Narrative: To the Memory of Matteo Giovannetti, (1967), named for the painter of frescoes at the Palace of Popes in Avignon, is presented as a medieval mural –  yet it feels as much like an homage to Antonioni’s early films, contrasting post-war architecture and an ancient fortress in an otherwise barren landscape. Hipsters mingle with businessmen and middle-class tourists while the totality of the scene remains ambiguous. We are not in a traditional narrative but in a tableau of signs reflecting the artist’s consciousness of a turbulent period.

In paintings like Group, (1967) Day evidently believed that get-togethers could reveal inner states that lie beneath social masks. Day appears twice in this studio setting, I would contend, seated at the center in profile, pausing during a portrait-drawing session of friends and family, and again standing at the far left, head bent in contemplation. Here the use of degrees of unfinish suggests two contradictory states: those who are absent in their presence and those who are present by their absence. Like an emblem in a Hogarth painting, the unpainted canvas framing Day’s seated profile depicts young artist friends Natalie Charkow and Mitzi Melnicoff. Adding to this fictional melding of characters is the image of the film actress Monica Vitti, one of Day’s great infatuations.

Changes, (1982) presents an idealized, Platonic type of the nude. In the background we see images by two mannerist masters, Rosso Fiorentino and Joachim Wtewael. These original works are small, and yet they loom oversized in Day’s representation of them.  Day and an observing female student are separated by a large dark space from the naked model on the right, seeming to capture the gulf between the European past and a deflated, realist, American present.

Similarly, in Day by Day, (1991), from near the end of his life, he presents a room split by a receding diagonal ledge, dividing past from present as much as left from right. On the left, Day presents himself drawing alone, framed by a pale cityscape into which his presence begins to merge, suggesting  awareness of life’s transience, while on the right a mischievous youthful self contemplates a life of the imagination.

Throughout his life Day drew constantly and copiously. In his last years, his creativity bloomed in inventive drawing sequences. As Day turned from the marvelous Tempi Del Giorno drawings, 1992-93, he moved from an interest in himself to a meditation on the mythopoeic aspects of the physical and imaginative world. In the Caprice series, (1997), and the final Elegies (Homage to Rilke), (1997)  the art past is always present and melded into our daily lives.

Day wrote in one of his notebook jottings, that “to examine an object or an event, one, of course, also examines oneself.” An autobiographical reflex allowed Day to create a psychic landscape of outer forms that express self-awareness. In this ongoing pandemic, many people are re-examining their values and ambitions. This three-venue exhibition offers us the gift of one who was there before us, illuminating an examined life that evolves before our eyes. Day’s work invites us to resist fixed ideas and accept the ambiguous and challenging complexity of being alive.

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September 10 to October 23, 2021
508 West 26th Street, Ground Floor, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, greenenaftaligallery.com

Abstract painting is having an awkward, teenager moment. Most recent major reviews have been dedicated to exciting figurative painters addressing incredibly topical issues. By contrast, abstraction appears as either a conservative appeal to art history or as a decorative alternative for those with high taste. Neither is true. Jonathan Lasker’s recent survey, Born Yesterday: Drawing into Painting, 1987-2020, at Greene Naftali, couldn’t therefore come at a better time. On view are some 16 paintings using a strict painting language to revisit the semiotics of abstraction. He does so with a kind of leery-eyed skepticism. The artist has famously claimed that he’s after subject matter, not abstraction. He casts a wide net in that department. Audiences will perceive Lasker’s interest in comics, Ghana rugs, flags, and heads, which all feature heavily. In these works, all manner of content gets folded into a strict pictorial framework of gesture, line and impasto. There are no accidents in Lasker paintings. He begins with a sketch in a 4-by-6-inch notebook, then makes a small oil study on cardstock, and eventually scales up for the finished painting. Artists famously make rules for themselves. Often the rules can produce diminishing returns. Not so in Lasker’s 40 years project which resonates as exploratory and challenging.

I would position him between the high modernist optimism of Robert Ryman and the dystopian postmodernism of Peter Halley.  Using a consistent pictorial language, he avoids a singular motif, which is something he shares with Thomas Nozkowski. Background, middle ground, and foreground are interchangeable planes. By standardizing geometry, line and gesture he creates a taxonomy, a painting alphabet, fossilizing abstraction.

The Vagaries of Existence, (2002) is composed of a blue and red checkered pattern at bottom left against a white ground. Each rectangle is drawn in the artist’s signature looping scribble.. The checkerboard reads as convex and concave. Above sits a large black rectangle that hovers as it overlaps the checker pattern, while on the right, heavy, pink impasto reads as overlapping letters and numbers. Below sit four diamond forms, painted in the same fashion as the checker pattern. All of these read as floating icons that repeat, overlap and mirror one another. The painting is a master class in visual dichotomies: tactile/smooth, flat/concave, light/dark. It buzzes with a contained energy.

As the survey progresses, we see Lasker empty out his process, funneling his practice into something increasingly symbolic and graphic. White backgrounds feature heavily in the recent paintings to startling, graphic effect. In early works like Spiritual Etiquette, (1991) and Expressive Abstinence, (1989) the artist builds up the composition from pastel-coloredbackground . American Obscurity, (1987) is one of the more peculiar works in the show. Measuring 24 by 30 inches, it is a modest, yet crude version of what the artist eventually hones. Small, red rectangular forms repeat from left to right, top and bottom, forming successive lines and rows. Each form is then crossed out. Two impasto, yellow star forms mirror one another in the center of the painting. It is impossible not to read this as a provisional American flag missing its blue and stars. It is the closest thing we get to social commentary in Lasker.

In 1991, Sidney Janis Gallery in New York mounted “Conceptual Abstraction.” This landmark exhibition, curated by gallery artist Valerie Jaudon, helped revive abstract painting after a decadent period of expressive figuration, the so-called New Image Painting. The group was divorced from the ideals of high modernism, and instead infused abstraction with a heady, cerebral dimension. The exhibition lineup was impressive: Besides Lasker and Jaudon it included Ross Bleckner, David Diao, Lydia Dona, Christian Eckart, Stephen Ellis, Halley, Mary Heilmann, Richard Kalina, Shirley Kaneda, Bill Komoski, Sherrie Levine, Nozkowski, David Reed, David Row, Peter Schuyff, Philip Taaffe, Stephen Westfall and John Zinsser.  30 years later, Greene Naftali’s survey of Lasker indicates the subsequent effect he has had on a younger generation. His influence can be traced in the paintings of Patrick Alston, Trudy Benson, Amy Feldman, Keltie Ferris, Egan Frantz and Laura Owens. A strong group. If influence counts as anything, it can be seen as the measure of one’s reach. Other attempts to situate Lasker’s work have proven less fruitful. Post-Analog Painting (2015) at The Hole, which also included the artist, was a facile attempt to reconstitute abstraction. The show largely saw the painterly hand as a deficit, with an awkward lineage of painters, culminating in facetious work by a younger generation now easily forgettable.

Many artists today seem to consider abstraction less as a discourse about what the boundaries of abstraction can be, and more as a stylistic mode to be chosen from among many. Born Yesterday reveals how one abstract painter continued to expand abstraction’s boundaries toward content and not to merely traffic in aesthetics for aesthetics sake. In theory, Lasker’s improvisation might have dead-ended in a staid-formalism, but instead it has the opposite effect. Everything feels entirely possible, a kind of Born Again abstraction.

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Jack Shainman opened The School in Kinderhook, NY as a satellite space to his New York City galleries in 2014. A 30,000 square foot former schoolhouse built in 1929, it was renovated by architect Antonio Torrecillas. Some elements have been left intact: girls and boys bathrooms, fixtures removed, are still painted in the pink and blue of the era, the decaying plaster walls sealed permanently in their beautiful, melancholy state, in sharp contrast to the “white box” galleries elsewhere . It is worth the 2-1/2  hour drive from the city just to see the building.

This summer, the Schoolhouse presented a 22-artist group exhibition, “Feedback,”curated by Helen Molesworth “Feedback is filled with art works by artists who I’ve been following for a while,” the curator has written. “In other words, artists I ‘like’ and who I have asked to gather together today to form an assembly, a class, a chorus.”

According to Molesworth, the idea for the exhibition was triggered by first experiencing the audio piece by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller that now greets visitors upon entering The School. When a visitor steps on the “wah wah” pedal, the amplifier placed behind it begins to play a Jimi Hendrix-inspired version of the Star Spangled Banner that is amplified to the point of aural pain. When I visited there was a guard stationed nearby to turn it off immediately, so unbearable is the noise: An inauspicious introduction to an exhibition that is in many ways a gentle exploration of contemporary visions. Among its other meanings,  “feedback” is a term for the sound generated by this pedal.

Mixing and matching in each room, Molesworth has installed works to create small universes where the artworks are orbiting each other in meaningful ways and in turn responding to the architectural implications of each space.

One of the most successful in what the checklist calls the “southeast unfinished classroom,” an eerie space with peeling and pockmarked blue paint on the old plaster walls. Molesworth has assembled the works into a tableau of relationships that carry the echoes of an old schoolroom.  Taylor Davis has a trio of three watercolors that riff on the American flag (ever present in American classrooms of the past), their stars and stripes morphed into calligraphic poems that float across the page. The room is bookended by two powerful paintings: “Ecco Homo by Kerry James Marshall and The Treasures by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Each portrays a young Black man, perhaps teenaged, in very different states of mind, looking at each other from across the room. Both send mixed messages of slavery and freedom.

Marshall’s painting, with his typical attention to crisp detail, presents a young man adorned with a massive gold chain encircling his neck which can be read as a golden yoke. He meets the viewer’s eye with what can be taken, equally, as pride and a plea for rescue.

Yiadom-Boakye’s painting portrays a young man perched on a stool in a classic formal pose. Painted in dark rich hues, the figure emerges gingerly from a dark room. The brilliant highlights of his eyes, teeth, scarf, shorts and socks pierce through the scumbled paint. The painting is direct, but not naïve. The portrait radiates a sense of hope as he smiles and gazes confidently into the room.

But it’s the two freestanding sculptures that, for me, tie the theme of the room together. Rose B. Simpson, whose masterful ceramic and mixed media figures populate several rooms in the exhibition, has a piece here entitled Storyteller. A medium-sized figure, glazed in matte yellow ochre and painted with dark simplified symbols, sits on the floor. Out of their mouth erupts a steel framework upon which are perched small terra cotta figures. Huddled together they reach, cuddle, whisper and climb on one another. The work is at once evocative of pre-Columbian and Southwest American pottery forms and totally contemporary. The sculpture personifies the passing of knowledge, albeit in a different kind of classroom.

Karon Davis’s Game: 943am (Frankie)  is provocative and open-ended like other works in this room, disturbing but alternatively perhaps amusing. An elementary age schoolgirl, fabricated out of stark white plaster, sits under a vintage school desk looking upward with human eyes. An open schoolbook lies on the desk above her, as if abandoned hastily. Evocative of so many things at once. There used to be “fallout drills” in U.S. schools; upon the sound of an alarm we would all scuttle under our desks for protection from the possible atomic bomb that was about to land on us. Hardly reassuring, but a potent image of the era. Is our young girl participating in a drill or is she hiding from an unseen threat? Or is it a game of hide and seek?

Feedback is an ambitious exhibition whose success lies in imagining the school space as a totality. The exhibition is especially resonant as American’s rethink their relationship to public spaces and the nature of childhood and schooling. Feedback is an endearing and affecting artistic take on the late-summer theme of “Back to School.”

Feedback at Jack Shainman/The School runs through October 30, 2021,  25 Broad Street, Kinderhook, NY 12106. jackshainman.com

The post Report from Kinderhook: Feedback at Jack Shainman Gallery/The School appeared first on artcritical.

May 21 – September 12, 2021
1099 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street
New York City, thejewishmuseum.org

I had heard of the “bloody Sundays,” as the salons hosted by Louise Bourgeois at her Chelsea townhouse were termed for the intimidating quality of her critiques on art brought by visitors. The phone number was listed and I called to ask permission to attend. “Yes, three o’clock” she herself answered and slammed down the receiver. A full house assembled in her parlor, admitted by an assistant who was also filming the proceedings. We sat on a faded banquet and on an odd collection of chairs against the walls in an L-shape. There was  a small table in the middle offering a box of supermarket chocolates, a bottle of whiskey that no one touched, and some plastic cups.

The room looked unpainted down the decades, the back garden a dense thicket of green, and a large inspiration board was heavily layered with all manner of invitations and images. When Louise slowly entered from the kitchen through French doors with the aid of a walker, her damp, short hair combed back, wearing a white long-sleeved Helmut Lang T-shirt, the room fell silent. She sat at another small table with some fresh watercolors in a white plastic cupped container off to the side, suggesting she had been working there recently. Visitors gradually came forward with an example of their art and sat at the small table facing her and so went the afternoon. Steeled a bit, I got up and placed a smallish bronze figure on the table between us. Her sole remark was “Impressive” and I felt lucky it had escaped her wrath.

Hurtle forward to the Jewish Museum 2021. Freud’s Daughter is the first exhibition in the United States to focus on the Bourgeois’ psychoanalytic writing, shown with a selection of her art from all its epochs curated, and artfully installed, by Philip Larratt-Smith, her literary archivist for eight years. An example of his installation prowess is the small utility closet that he recommissioned for three early wood Personages, (1946-1954) now cast in bronze which nestled within light grey walls reminiscent of the kind of enclosed spaces favored by the artist.

In 1952, at age forty, during an intensifying psychological crisis, Bourgeois began psychoanalysis with Dr. Henry Lowenfeld, seeing him four to five times a week until 1967 and then off and on until his death in 1985. For eleven of those years she had no solo exhibitions, and from 1955 to 1960 she seems to have made no art at all. During this time she read extensively from psychoanalytic literature, transcribed dreams, scrutinized her psychic life with its inner truths, kept journals, and notated ideas for art.

Her sample jottings on loose sheets displayed here include the following: “3:15 am. olives, radishes with salt and butter. I would like to eat some anchovies for something salty.” “he talks like a bottle of glue. she talks with a hatchet,” “when i do not ‘attack’ i do not feel myself alive,” “futility of effort, failure, loss.” A diary page notes, “All day sitting in a chair/I could not lift a feather/nor make a phone call/depression……”  These personal writings show the viewer that her sculpture emerges from an inner, psychological life instead of from a one-dimensional intellectual approach.  It a challenge to current norms that such intimate materials, revealing her naked distress and violence, are presented to a male-dominated public sphere where armor is the rule and the vulnerable is attacked or ignored. In this way we can see that her art takes a stand for another perspective and values. 

Freudian theory framed the challenging events of Bourgeois’s life, its hidden emotions and anguish. Although many aspects of Freud’s theories have been contested, there’s general agreement that he brought into prominence the idea of the unconscious, a focus of great consequence for culture and the individual. Freud’s contemporary Erich Fromm, though a psychoanalyst himself, has said that most people resist the idea of unknown parts of themselves and moreover, if everyone knew what they could know about themselves, it would shake society to its foundations. Freud’s empirical recovery of his patients’ repressed wishes, fantasies, emotions and instincts was thus very radical, embraced by cultural avant-gardes but off-putting to a world intent on bending humans to the machine and consumption.

For Freud, self-knowledge meant becoming conscious of what is unconscious, a difficult process that is both emotional and intellectual. This lifetime process pays off by releasing energy from the efforts of repression, energy available to be awake and free. His most controversial and misunderstood idea, the Oedipus Complex, involves psychic work with a prime symbol of authority and fertility, the phallus. Some have extended its Freudian meaning to point out that his correlative theory of penis envy symbolizes female social envy of the freedom, power, and prestige of men under patriarchy at the cost of the subordination of women. “Part of the argument of this show,” according to Larratt-Smith, “is that Louise’s work and Louise’s writings, represent a contribution, and in some sense a corrective, to classical Freudian psychoanalysis.”

Bourgeois’ art neither illustrates theory nor manifests neurosis, as Freud might believe. Instead one could say, alchemy points toward a process in which the autobiographical and unconscious is rendered into artistic form. The process, occasionally described by contemporary artists, is a kind of trance while working in the studio, that allows the unconscious to flow outward to confront the materials, while bringing into play techniques and decisions exercised by aesthetic power. In both cases the ego is subordinate to other energies. T.W. Adorno argued that real art entails risk-taking, genuine experimentation, bringing to life fresh perceptions, new feelings and alternative values, in a struggle for individuation–all qualities that Louise Bourgeois exemplifies.

The artist often remarked that her childhood never lost its magic, mystery, and drama. The materials of memory and the unconscious ignited the physicality of her sculpture that could include a gamut of found and appropriated objects and materials. Her techniques, including sewing, carving marble and wood, and modeling clay and plaster, arose from uncovering expressive possibilities of these materials. “I transform nasty work into good work. I transform hate into love.”

A Cell sculpture in the exhibition, Passage Dangereux (1997) is an approximately 28 foot long, theatrical cage, made from woven iron mesh with a locked doorway, that the viewer walks around and enters visually. It includes the materials metal, wood, tapestry, rubber, marble, steel, glass, bronze, bones, flax, and mirrors. The art work is populated with objects such as chairs hanging from the ceiling (a French custom in attics), the raw depiction of a sex act  in steel and bronze , a small bronze spider (symbol of her mother’s industry and protection), a tiny child’s school desk, a tapestry from the family workshop, a large wood electric chair, and others.

Experiencing this artwork is somewhat akin to being in the midst of a dream with its condensed vibrations, with objects that light up a larger realm than the individual. The artist stated that her cells represent “….different types of pain; the physical, the emotional and psychological, and the mental and intellectual. Each cell  deals with the pleasure of the voyeur, the thrill of looking and being looked at.”

Arched Figure No. 3, (1997) is constructed with a thick slab of steel partly revealed, partly covered by a sewn volumetric female form in black fabric. Its backward arching figurative pose simultaneously connotes hysteria and sexual ecstasy.  Knife Figure, 2002 made from fabric, steel and wood forms an amputated coral-colored cloth figure with a large, sharp kitchen knife poised over it, threatening violence. Mother and Child, (2007) made from dark blue fabric and thread, constructs a rounded, voluptuous female torso with a tiny dark blue head tranquilly resting on its maternal middle. These sculptures reveal the body as a sensing, feeling entity whose knowledge and wisdom channel significant experience.

By the time of her death in 2010 at age ninety-eight many considered Bourgeois the foremost female artist of our time. She managed to give suffering a voice in complex yet accessible sculptures that summon the sting and bite, the vitality and shock of earlier modernists. Philip Larratt-Smith has noted how Bourgeois is a symbolist and storyteller. As she herself said, “The connections that I make in my work are connections that I cannot face. They are really unconscious connections. The artist has the privilege of being in touch with his or her unconscious, and this is really a gift. It is the definition of sanity. It is the definition of self-realization.” Empowered by Bourgeois’s writings and sculpture we can say more: that the unconscious provides a foothold from which to imply critique of the culture, asserting a tangible resistance to an administered society and its suppression of the individual, from the deepest registers of the psyche, a utopian anticipation of social freedom.

The post I Transform Hate into Love: Louise Bourgeois at the Jewish Museum appeared first on artcritical.

July 7 to November 7, 2021
79 Montauk Hwy, Water Mill, NY 11976
Parrishart.org

On a balmy evening this summer  at the Parrish Art Museum, in open fields surrounding the museum, the grass swayed to the rhythmic beats and plaintiff chants of an ancient Algonquin ritual, performed by Shane Weeks and Kelly Dennis, members of the Indigenous Shinnecock Nation. The event celebrated the opening of Tomashi Jackson: The Land Claim, an exhibition of the artist’s new multi-media works.

The predominantly white audience of museum members and VIPs intermingled with comparatively diverse groups consisting of members of Jackson’s entourage and representatives of communities that are the focus of the museum’s outreach programs. Stirring prescient memories of  historical racial divides, the ritual incantations were intended to remind us that these very fields were once home to Indigenous people living in what have become the “Hamptons,” the necklace of affluent townships strung across the East End. These fields then became the displaced habitat for African American slaves who harvested domestic produce from them. Today, they are workplaces for Latinx workers, many of whom are undocumented immigrants, fearful about their future, denied the options available to those they serve.

Houston-born Tomashi Jackson (b. 1980) is well known for the prolific social and cultural research that informs her art, most notably for her works at the 2019 Whitney Biennial which explored the destruction in 1850 of Seneca Village, a Black community, to make way for Central Park.  When I toured the current exhibition with Corinne Erni, Senior Curator of ArtsReach and Special Projects at the Parrish, she recalled how “Jackson, unfamiliar with the East End community, immediately asked, ‘What is happening here with people of color?’ I told her about the immigration plights of Latino people, often detained by ICE for alleged traffic violations.” This fueled the direction of Jackson’s 2021 artist-in-residence project at the nearby Watermill Center, a laboratory for the arts and humanities where she created the works and organized the archival material for The Land Claim. While this title draws from the ongoing efforts of the Shinnecock Nation to reclaim their land, it relates to the exploitation of various people of color—including Indigenous, Black and Latinx. Jackson spent much of the Covid lockdown interviewing members of these communities virtually. “I learned about multiple issues,” she told me during a telephone interview, “about the Long Island Railroad intruding on land; Indigenous people dispossessed, violated and exploited while resisting and advocating for themselves and others.” From Donnamarie Barnes, curator and archivist at Sylvester Manor Educational Farm, Jackson learned that in the seventeenth century the Sylvester family brought enslaved Black people from Barbados to work a provisioning plantation on Shelter Island. Kelly Dennis, an attorney and member of the Shinnecock Nation, told her about the dislocation of Indigenous people from their lands, and the desecration of local burial grounds by developers. And Minerva Perez, Executive Director of OLA (Organization Latino-Americana), updated her about the plight of the Latinx community, their fears of deportation exacerbated by a lack of basic housing, access to public health care, and transportation.

The exhibition begins outdoors, under the eaves of the museum where visitors can listen to an audio montage, simultaneously broadcast stories told by the exhibition’s nine interviewees. Snippets of individual histories intermingle with one another and then, windswept, fade into the very landscape where ancestors once picked potatoes. Something similar occurs visually within the seven multi-media works comprising the exhibition. The narrative, never didactic, evolves as you focus on a particular work. Past merges with the present through Jackson’s deft handling of expressionist color and sculptural materials. Beyond her commitment to social research, however, Jackson is an abstract artist whose merge of form and content is a tour de force.

Consider Three Sisters (2021), constructed on canvas with collaged layers of textiles, paper shopping bags, a storefront-like awning and vinyl strips. Jackson projected photographs of people onto this surface and hand painted their portraits, adding blocks of bold, saturated color, wampum dust, local soil and printed text. The work’s title references an Indigenous method of intercropping three different vegetables—corn, squash and beans— in ways that encourage each variety to thrive. It likewise relates to the integration of ethnic types with tintypes of two early East End Black women residents juxtaposed with more recent photos of women at a Shinnecock family gathering. Jackson layered these portraits on canvas and vinyl strips, painting them with halftone intersecting lines and setting them within and against vivid blocks of orange, yellow, blue and purple. This collision and fusion of  abstract color and figuration causes the photographic likenesses to emerge and fade within the composition, depending on the viewer’s focus, a phenomenon that speaks volumes to the ways in which color as a racial marker defines how white  society perceives people of color. But according to Jackson, “Indigenous, Black and Latinx people are not invisible or expendable to each other and that is the perspective I’ve been empowered by. The issue that arises here is about value and how value is determined: value is a term used with chromatic color and value refers to how people are regarded.”

Color, used metaphorically and formally in this way, drives these works, but there is more to it than meets the eye. Jackson’s integration of color and social relevance draws distinctly from two treatises: Josef Albers’ color theory and Thurgood Marshall’s stunning opinion in the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown vs The Board of Education, which declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional. Albers in his landmark book Interaction of Color (1963) demonstrated how color constantly deceives us because color perception is relative to its surroundings. He also proffered that what appears to be transparency when colors overlap is actually a new color, one that combines elements of neighboring hues. There are uncanny similarities between this language and Marshall’s discussion of the gerrymandering of neighborhoods to segregate public schools.

You needn’t know about these influences to appreciate the compelling narratives and the abstraction in Jackson’s works, but the more you understand the connections she makes between the languages of art and the rest of life, the more poignant these works become. For example, the labyrinth of blue lines in Among Protectors (Hawthorne Road and the Pell Case) function like gerrymandered roadblocks framing news stories related to the Shinnecock battle to recover stolen land. In one section of this grid an Indigenous person blocks the advance of a truck to prevent the desecration of Shinnecock land by developers. In another, a photographed figure painted in red on vinyl strips sings in prayer at a development site where Indigenous human remains were unearthed. As halftone lines in sacrificial red interact, as blocks of light and dark blues intersect, the racial realities history so often forgets, collide, collapse and merge. Jackson’s energized abstractions contrast the transparent with the opaque, the figurative with the non-objective, the ordinary with the extraordinary— in terms both painterly and aspirational.

This well-documented, important exhibition includes an archival display of source materials and photographs, many of them reproduced in the seven exhibited works, as well as drawings by Martha Schnee of the individuals Jackson interviewed for this project. A 96-page catalog, due this fall, includes additional scholarly research by Erni and curatorial fellow Lauren Ruiz, as well as the in-depth stories of the nine interviewees. Jackson considers all these curatorial elements, along with her multi-media works, as integral constructs of this project.

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July 10 to September 18, 2021
1395 Boston Corners Rd, Millerton, NY 12546
thereinstitute.com

“Only connect,” E.M. Forster once famously wrote. How many times in the last year and a half have we heard the declaration, “We are all connected,” despite a period forever defined by the intolerable hardship of “social distancing,” when many families suffered enforced separation from their loved ones, and many people tragically died alone? The global pandemic has dramatically proven that our categorical “connection” is both a bane and a boon—while we can potentially all infect each other, we can—and must—also attempt to reach out to each other.

Brenda Zlamany’s extraordinary array of 500 portraits in The Itinerant Portraitist, on view through September 18 at the Re Institute in Millerton, New York, provides a powerful and poignant testament to our connected humanity. In an era when selfishness, and the “selfie” have ruled, her work, going back a decade, redefines the contemporary notion of “face time.” Indeed, one could consider each of the individual faces in her myriad, rainbow coalition of physiognomies, the ultimate un-selfie.

Zlamany’s pictorial project began in 2011, funded by a Fulbright grant. The earliest works in the show were done in over 30 aboriginal villages in Taiwan, which she visited with her young daughter, Oona. The artist travelled light: Zlamany, an accomplished oil painter whose commissioned work is on permanent display at Yale University, stripped her practice down to the bare and portable minimum; paper, pencil and watercolors.

Aided by a time-honored tool, an old-fashioned camera lucida –a technique she learned from David Hockney, a close friend whom she met when she worked as a printmaker in the 1980s- Zlamany sits face to face with her subject and sketches a basic outline. Then, over the course of a single hour, during which she sensitively but persistently prompts her sitter to divulge deeply personal stories, she finishes the form, rendering the portrait in quick, expressive watercolor strokes. Think of it as speed portrait painting (a much more intimate interaction than speed dating.) The subject, while the focal point, is also engaged in a kind of confessional. “I am trying to capture something that happens between us over the hour of listening to them,” Zlamany says.

The completed portraits brim with life in all its stages, from cradle to grave. But they also serve as a memento mori. They are quintessentially ephemeral, a delicate layer of pigment on paper that captures a fleeting moment of time. Zlamany’s chosen medium and technique perfectly convey the transience of human life.

The exhibit has been divided into groups of portraits of indigenous people living in far flung locations, from Alaska to Saudi Arabia, from the Hebrew Home for the Aged in Riverdale, New York, to the sunny vineyards of Sonoma, California. They include Cuban taxi drivers, Alaskan national park rangers , girls from an Abu Dhabi orphanage, and New York art world denizens. They start with infants, and move on to the very old, one of whom died the day she was painted.

The approach is egalitarian. “Art is a like an elevator,” the artist says, “And I wanted to stop on every floor. Everyone has a chance to get involved.” At the end of each session, Zlamany documents it with a photograph of the subject proudly holding their own portrait, which they, rather than the artist, has signed.

The exhibit begins with a bang: an enormous image of Noura, an Arab woman in a hijab, proudly festooned on the entrance to the vintage red barn that houses the gallery. (And sure to provoke local Trumpsters.) Inside the gallery, the walls are papered with rows and rows of hundreds of faces, cheek by jowl, creating a tessellated effect. The hanging isn’t random but organized so that the various indigenous groups are differentiated by the dominant colors in their portraits. Alaska, for instance, includes images mostly done in green; Saudi Arabia mostly done in black. The first impression of this vast display is overwhelming, but soon the eye focuses on the individual faces, in all their many differences.

As she travelled to more than a dozen destinations over the last decade, Zlamany clearly honed her craft. One of the first images, of a sleeping baby, is tentative and impressionistic, the artist’s brush barely grazing the page. By the time she painted the images of the elderly in the Hebrew Home, done in 2017, Zlamany has mastered her form, creating decisive works that powerfully portray her subjects, simultaneously signaling the political and social implications of their specific habitats (climate change, for instance, as seen in Alaska and Sonoma wine country; the quality of life in nursing homes.)

Covid-induced masking also provided Zlamany with fertile ground: in Zlamany’s work, both masked and unmasked, the eyes emphatically have it. “Eye contact is an exciting element and helps you gain trust. And from my Saudi paintings I knew how to get a likeness with just the eyes,” she says. “But this was a lot of fun, because instead of focusing on facial features, there was so much pattern and decoration and abstraction. It was a great break.”

Despite her initial terror at being in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, an epicenter of the virus, Zlamany did a series of 85 socially-distanced portraits of mask wearers on her building’s loading platform, a welcome release from isolation for both the artist and her subjects. And in her most recent series, done in 2020-21, she captured more mask-wearers in upstate New York, some of which are among her liveliest paintings. Take her portrait of Gary, his vibrant blue eyes seen through round black designer glasses, his “Exit Trump” mask in red and white and black color-coordinated with his shirt.

From traditional-costume wearers in Taiwan, (one woman in an ornate headdress) to weathered firefighters in Alaska to young concertgoers in Oxfordshire, Zlamany has documented a swath of the globe in all its diversity. And while the stark images of the nearly obscured Saudi Women in Hijab are haunting, the watercolors of the workers in Alaska, Cuba and Sonoma, humbling, and the portraits of the New York art world members engaging (Zlamany did one a day for an entire year; check out Deborah Kass, Katherine Bradford, Alex Katz, Lilly Wei, David Ebony, Peter Drake, Linda Yablonsky) perhaps the most moving series in the show is “100/100:” the end-of-life portraits done at the Hebrew Home in Riverdale, which has been given its own wall.

Unlike the other portraits – meticulous high-quality prints of the original watercolors considered too fragile to hang – these are the original works, previously framed by the Hebrew Home. Says the artist of this 100-portrait project, “It was probably one of the most emotionally challenging things I’ve ever done in my life. To go in there and deal with life and death at that level. Some people died before I painted them, some people died shortly afterwards. I painted a Holocaust survivor who had been in the camps with her twin sister. I listened to stories that were heartbreaking, but then there were some incredible lessons. All portraits are about mortality, but in many cases these were literally final moments. When I got home, I would be emotionally spent, often in a fetal position. For me it was life-changing.”

Despite their pain and disability, and even the “post-verbal” condition of these subjects, Zlamany has managed to capture not only their frailty but their remarkable level of dignity. The portrait of Mabel, crowned with a blue turban, and looking, it seems, into infinity, is regal. And although Ruth wears oxygen-tank tubes and cannot hold her elderly head erect, the half-smile on her face brings it to life. For Zlamany, this was revelatory. “I never painted wheelchairs before, in the beginning, I tried to flatter people. But then I started to paint what I saw. And people loved it. Instead of having me flatter them, they wanted to see how they looked to me. They wanted to discover who they were through my eyes. They wanted that honesty. Ruth is a painting that tells you that. That is someone who is being seen at the end of their life, with their breathing tubes, yet she is truly delighted by her portrait. I tried to find the person who was there.”

With The Itinerant Portraits project, Zlamany has created a multifaceted celebration of life. The show ends as it begins, with a bang: hanging from the ceiling, so that in order to exit the gallery, you either have to push past her or genuflect below her, is a larger-than-life image of gallerist Julie Torres, wearing a pink “Pussy Power” t-shirt.

“It’s just a subtle thing about the power of women,” Zlamany says. “I am a female artist painting portraits, and traditionally portraiture has been the domain of men. And so I just wanted to assert the power of women: Noura on the front of the barn—a Saudi woman who just got the right to drive. And the power of my own vision as a female artist: the female gaze on the world.” And then some.

The post The Ultimate Un-Selfie: Brenda Zlamany in Millerton appeared first on artcritical.

In the long slow summer of 2020 Kathleen Kucka, artist and former curator of the Shirley Fiterman Art Center at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, headed up to her 1850s country barn in Falls Village, Connecticut to make large scale works that would have been impossible for her in the city. During that time she discovered a unique building in the center of Falls Village that seemed to be lying fallow: A former post office, town hall, plumbing shop, and grocery store, this edifice was a bank just prior to the town acquiring it in the early 1960s. Twenty years ago, the Canaan Board of Selectmen began renting spaces on the first-floor to artists for their studios. Kucka saw a unique opportunity to bring artists she admired in the city to her own doorstep and in the process add life to her Connecticut community. An introduction to the powers that be led to a meeting with the town council, and before she knew it, she had herself a gallery.

Its name, Furnace/Art on Paper Archive refers to the town’s history as an iron smelting center while specifying her curatorial mission.  The 22 by 19 foot gallery has high ceilings that make the room feel airy and welcoming with lots of natural north light. The clean white flat files that hold the “archive” of works on paper by gallery artists, is prominent without taking up wall space and lets visitors know that there is much more to see than immediately meets the eye. In addition to her gallery space, Kucka has also taken hold of the bank vault as an exhibition space, accessed through a hallway where the Falls Village Café is about to be added.

Stephen Maine was the subject of the inaugural show at Furnace/Art on Paper Archive in May. The former Brooklyn-based artist and art critic and his wife, artist Gelah Penn, now live nearby. Titling his show “Cupcake Uptake and the Cloud of Unknowing”, Maine presented a selection of paintings on paper and two canvases.

His process-based abstract idiom combines the arbitrariness of chance with his acute aesthetic sensibility. Maine describes his practice deftly:

Some years ago, it occurred to me that conveying paint to canvas by means of a system that uses printing plates instead of brushes . . .yields the great pleasure of surprise while providing a concrete way to think about color, surface, scale, seriality, figure/ground, original/copy, and the psychology of visual perception.

When I look at these works, the artist Ingrid Calame comes to mind: Her tracings of actual shapes made by the every-day wear and tear on a typical sidewalk results in an all-over abstract pattern with a pristine graphic quality that belies the grittiness of their source. In Maine’s images, however, the organic patterns feel first hand, rather than mediated, in layer upon layer of mind-bending technicolor that protrudes from the surface like the buildup on any well-trodden road. Blobs sit on top of other blobs, creating not only the illusion of dimensionality with drop shadows, but actual dimensionality. They beckon scrutiny and reward the viewer with multifaceted incidents of color and form. His combinations of saturated color create dissonant vibrations that are mesmerizing and seductive and not a little jarring.

On the wall to the left as you walked into the space were four beautifully framed pieces (all of the works on paper are untitled, approximately 22 x 18 inches). They led you to the far wall facing the door and a six and half foot tall canvas, P17-0302 (2017) whose gorgeous aquamarine and ochre complemented, rather than detracted from the works on paper, adding to the sense of galactic immersion he masters in both scales. A further small canvas in bright red and green kept company with several more framed works on paper, as well as unframed paintings from the same series easily accessible in the flat files.

The show has a cohesiveness that illuminates the breadth and depth of possibilities Maine has been able to mine from this very specific and idiosyncratic method and yields an infinite combination of colorful possibilities that inspire reverie at a time we could all do with more of that.

Furnace/Art on Paper Archive, 107 Main Street, Falls Village, CT. Gallery hours: Friday–Sunday, 11:00–4:00

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