June 15 to August 12, 2016
487 West 22nd Street (between 9th and 10th avenues)
New York, 212 727 8585

Memory rarely resolves itself with the acuity we might wish for. Our past can never neatly unwind and allow us to recall with precision the where, when, and why of things long gone. It is, as William Faulkner famously noted, not even past, but rather an ever-evolving accumulation that grows, both foreshadowing and changing the present. In this way, the act of remembering is more piecemeal, the skeins never quite unfurling gracefully, but growing and evolving, the story changing each time we stop and pause to recollect.

In the work of the Scottish-born painter Steven MacIver, the presence of the past is acknowledged and questioned, often drawing on both the familiar and hazier areas of memory to explore how these inflections continue to inform and alter the present. With a new work on view in the compact space of Dillon Gallery, MacIver employs the physical geography and his own childhood memories of    his native Orkney, to produce a series of complexly realized drawings. MacIver began with studies of the island’s topography, gradually incorporating the forms of World War II lookout posts, which dot the coast of the United Kingdom. Like the hard-edged geometric paintings of Frank Stella, these works create space out of surface; paint and copper leaf is surgically applied to birch panels, shapes forming their own echo, patterns knitting together and forming the compositions.

In Aspect B (all works 2016), the utilitarian form of the lookout post never entirely emerges from the flawless perspectival space rendered in ethereal white against a moiré of birch. MacIver played in and around these posts as a child, and depicted here, the spaces are partial, skeletal, like the memory of a dream. A pair of panels, Sentinel 1 and Sentinel 2, at first appear as complementary positive and negative variations of each other, with gold lines intersecting one another at acute angles, but on closer inspection, the patterns formed are themselves subtle inversions, their differences yielding a larger harmony. Previously, MacIver has employed similar radiating forms, frequently using geography as a springboard, allowing patterns to emerge from nature through the act of drawing.

This transition, from the three-dimensional spaces of geography to the flat plane of the drawing, is subtle, and upon first glance, one might be inclined to place this work alongside mid-century breezy geometric abstraction, such as the prints of Anni Albers or the films of Len Lye. MacIver’s works share the tensions, the agile tactility that is latent in much of the high-Modernist output, the anxieties that artists faced in a century that constantly riled and upturned precedent. Apprehensiveness runs through MacIver’s work, and while there is an undeniable Minimalist repetition present, a greater debt could be paid to Robert Smithson and his Gordian non-sites in MacIver’s dislocation of place. Smithson’s relocations of the natural into the gallery setting questioned the very strictures of the space; MacIver’s ruptures are less dramatic, but equally assertive in their examination of space.

At a time when the world appears to be taking an inward turn, MacIver’s spatially questioning drawings seem to propose an alternate, more open view; in his expanded topography, both of memory and place, the blunted edges of the past are formed into precise geometries. The geography of memory is not logical, yet it arises from an accretive process, like the erosion of a coastline. Here both are liminal, evanescent spaces. In Strata B, triangular planes cascade down, or perhaps up, forming a larger construction that appears to disperse, colors fusing into the grain of the wood. Spaces are undone in these works, even as they coalesce. While the frictions in this work are many, between memory and geography, the natural and the manipulated, the physical and the abstract, all exist easily at the convergences of its exceptional lines.

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April 28 to September 27, 2015
2 Columbus Circle
New York City, 212 299 7777

traveling to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, October 30, 2015 to February 28, 2016

The stated purpose of this show is to consider the notable contributions of women to modernism in postwar visual culture. Certainly an argument can be made for paying more attention to the contributions women within craft traditions, particularly in the 1950s and ’60s, an era when painting, sculpture and architecture were largely dominated by men. Artists such as Ruth Asawa, Lenore Tawney, Toshiko Takaezu and Karen Karnes used such materials as metals, textiles and clay in ways that push their work toward fine art concerns, demanding to be seen in a fine art context. Yet to date, while each of these artists is well known, their collective contribution has remained unexamined.

The current show at MAD aims to adjust this imbalance, in part through sheer volume of works presented — over 100 individual works by 42 artists fill every gallery on two floors. The range is comprehensive and ambitious. By including important Scandinavian designers such as Rut Bryky and Vivianna Torun Brulow-Hube, the parallels between women working in Scandinavia and the United States are highlighted. And by focusing on European émigrés such as Anni Albers and Maija Grotell, the legacy of modernism within American craft is established. Bauhaus trained, Albers and Grotell brought with them the conviction that craft could serve as an arena of modernist innovation.

The exhibition begins on the second floor where it focuses on a particular cadre of artists, who besides Asawa, Karnes, Lenore Tawney and Takaezu included Sheila Hicks and Alice Kogawa Parrott, who were influential as designers, makers and teachers. As the show points out, this pioneering group came to maturity along with the Museum of Arts and Design itself, which was founded in 1956 at the center of the emerging American modern craft movement.

Marianne Strengell and Grotell taught for many years at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where their students included Takaezu and Parrott. The placement of works by mentors, protégés and colleagues underlines the networks and alliances that influenced and sustained these women throughout their careers.

Many pairings of “craft” and “fine art” have been integrated to encourage viewers to reconsider traditional categories and, de facto, to rethink modernist narrative in light of gender. For the most part this works well, although some of the pairings need more explanation. It is not clear why works by Lee Krasner and Eva Hesse, for example, have been paired with Takaezu and Tawney. They didn’t influence each other much and the formal connections are slight. But this is a minor quibble in what is otherwise a feast of works by women rarely seen together on this scale.

One need only think of the careers of male artists such as Isamu Noguchi, Peter Voulkos and Scott Burton, to recognize the need to further examine the concerns raised by this show. Noguchi did a great deal of design work throughout his career, including lamps, chairs, set design but he was always located firmly within a fine arts context. Voulkos made wheel-thrown vessels throughout his life, but he is widely recognized for pushing clay into the realm of sculpture. Perhaps the most dramatic comparison might be Burton, who designed objects out of marble and stone intended to be viewed aesthetically while at the same time functioning as chairs, tables, etc. This paradigm can be traced right back to Constantin Brancusi whose Endless Column ensemble, erected in Romania in 1934, includes a large stone table with twelve stone chairs that Brancusi himself felt was as important to the whole as the column itself. The point being that male artists have not had problems playing with craft traditions and making utilitarian objects, but women who made work in craft areas were historically relegated to this arena.

Nevertheless, the exhibition at MAD is celebratory. Viewers venturing through the connected rooms will make many surprising discoveries: Marianne Strengell’s Forecast, a rug made from 80% aluminum for Alcoa; framed weavings by Anni Albers; a striking metal construction by Vivian Beer for instance. A piece titled DE—SIGN by Gabriel Ann Mahler, which includes a garment and a video exploring stereotypical male and female postures and clothing, was a revelation for this viewer. For the most part, the fourth floor is filled with later generations of artists and designers. Yet, as one enters these galleries, dominated for the most part by works of industrial design, one encounters an interesting counterpoint and nod to design legacy in a pairing of ceramic works by British ceramicist Magdelane Odundo. These raven-black clay forms are stunning: they provoke, startle and mystify by being at once vessel and sculptural form.

One of the delightful ironies of the exhibition is that it includes the work of contemporary artists such as Polly Apfelbaum. Apfelbaum is firmly rooted in a fine art context but her large, site-specific installation of textiles was inspired by A Handweavers Pattern Book. She pushes back toward a craft heritage by choosing not to paint on stretched canvas but on silk in such a way that the piece spreads out as a series of colored scarves. She confidently makes feminist connections to craft and clothing.

“Pathmakers” does a great deal to meet its goal of locating women within central currents of mid-century modernist narrative. Most importantly, this exhibition opens the opportunity for new lines of enquiry into the intersections of craft, gender and modernism.

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July 20 to October 14, 2012
225 Madison Avenue, between 36 and 37 streets
New York City, (212) 685-0008

Josef Albers, a Bauhaus refugee from an increasingly intolerant Germany, immigrated with his wife Anni to the United States at the end of 1933. The move would be extraordinarily sanguine for the artist, who had been associated with the Bauhaus almost from its inception in 1919, first as a student and then as an instructor. Once in the New World, Albers found the consolations of nature, both in an America that was mostly still unspoiled wildernesses, and in Mexico, whose rectilinear architecture became the inspiration for his Adobe series. Trained early on by his father, who was a master tinker capable of carpentry, house painting, and plumbing, Albers was a man of unusual integrity, in both his person and his art. This independence of mind produced remarkable paintings: The artist’s nearly scientific wish to explore the glories and relations of color gave way to the great, and vast, sequence of paintings entitled Homage to the Square. The Morgan Library’s remarkable show of Albers’ works on paper presents studies for that series, as well as exploratory efforts for the Adobe series, and striking color studies. It shows a very different sensibility from the austere distinction of Homage to the Square.

The kind of exploration exampled in the Morgan’s show plays with the numinous accord of colors arranged in conjunction with each other. Indeed, at one point, Albers is quoted as saying, “The greens are envious of each other,” a slightly comic aphorism born out in two very painterly studies of hues Albers deems as green (to this viewer, black, purple, and gray are also evident in the color sketch). Albers, seemingly impeccable as a rational experimenter, is shown here as both tenacious and tentative in his discoveries, even evidencing an expressionist bent, a far cry from his personality and better-known art. Works on paper have an immediacy and a spontaneity that the supposedly more serious mediums of canvas and linen lack, and Albers takes advantage of this quality, working out structures of luminous tone and subtle structure. There is a red on red on red study for Homage to the Square whose luminescence is so strong it makes the viewer feel that a light source exists behind the painting. Equally interesting is the subtle yet visible difference between the picture’s three kinds of red, with the square in the center painted the darkest hue, while the other two squares are of successively lighter intensities.

Who would have thought that Albers was capable of such moving lyricism in his works on paper? There are drips here and there, and the lines between squared forms are not exactly straight; the edges of the painting are often rough rather than clean. The idiosyncrasies of the work do not add up to much in a conceptual sense, but they result in wonderfully expressive art. The Adobe series, far more rectangular in its forms, demonstrate the inherent attractiveness of symmetry. In one, from 1947, broad swathes of two dark blues act as the background, with the pink adobe house only partially seen and framed on its outer limits by green and, a different ground, black. On front of the pink façade, one sees a rectilinear orange form, with a square in the middle that articulates two black doors. Albers is very much an artist of restraint, but in works like this his restraint is joyous in nature. In study after study, his curiosity gets the better of his hand, and marvelous improvisations result. The viewer leaves with a more accurate, and larger, view of Albers as a painter.

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Black Mountain College and Its Legacy at Loretta Howard Gallery

September 15 to October 29, 2011
525-531 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 695-0164

Black Mountain College and Its Legacy, co-curated by Robert Mattison and Loretta Howard, reflects the impressive roster of artists that made the institution outside of Asheville, North Carolina legendary. As expected, the exhibition features work by many of the College’s bold-faced names—Josef Albers, Willem de Kooning, Hazel Larsen, Ray Johnson, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and Jack Tworkov—most of whom served as teachers at the school.  However, the show excels for including lesser-known artists like Leo Amino, Jorge Fick, Joe Fiore, and Richard Lippold. The exhibition often juxtaposes works at Black Mountain with something representative and later. Adjacent photographs of the artists facilitate the narrative.

For nearly two decades Black Mountain College (1933-1956) puttered and spurted along offering an improvised curriculum and a revolving door to artists, poets, composers, scientists, and anyone else who wanted to participate in its program known for placing individual creative discovery at the top of an alternative agenda. The founders hoped to intertwine living and learning, believing, as quoted by Martin Duberman in his 1972 study on the College, that “as much real education took place over the coffee cups as in the classrooms.” The college was notorious for it’s spontaneous discussions in its dining hall overlooking Lake Eden.

Anni Albers wrote in an early issue of the Black Mountain College Bulletin, “Most important to one’s own growth is to see oneself leave the safe ground of accepted conventions and to find oneself alone and self-dependent. It is an adventure which can permeate one’s whole being.” This statement captures the essence of Black Mountain College making it fitting that an exquisite tapestry by the artist is one of the first works visitors encounter.

Josef Albers features prominently in the exhibition. Despite my personal aversion to his stringent methodologies there can be no doubting his influence upon the young itinerants who stumbled into his classroom. Both his 1937 monochrome, Composure and his Homage to the Square (1960) hanging opposite are fine examples of his strict color code, but boring in their overtly calculated way.

Most impressive of the exhibition’s early against mid-career comparisons is Kenneth Noland’s small painting V.V. (1949), and Soft Touch (1963). One can feel the presence of Albers’ teachings in the colorful quadrilateral symmetry of the earlier work. Noland’s short geometric gesture stretches out in the later work to become one of his celebrated V-shaped Chevrons.  In another comparison, an early photograph by Kenneth Snelson of dewdrops suspended on a spider web from 1948, offers a remarkable insight into the artist’s use of line and tension that can be found in sculptural works in the years that followed.

Certain pairings are more referential: Pat Passlof’s early example borrows gesture from de Kooning, with whom she traveled to Black Mountain to study in 1948, while the later piece builds up color from Milton Resnick, who she married in 1961. Passlof tells the story that after Albers tore up Elaine de Kooning’s homework in front of class, Passlof promptly gathered her things and left his classroom never to return. Elaine is represented by a fabulous enamel on paper titled Black Mountain Number 6 (1948).

The exhibition could have benefited from stricter curatorial selection, most notably in the case of Franz Kline from whom there are six works from various periods, but no masterpieces. Robert Motherwell also fares poorly, although there is an interesting photograph and preliminary sketch from 1951 proof that Motherwell was working on the Millburn Mural commission at the time. The exhibition hits a home run, however, with its timely selection of works by de Kooning that includes a preliminary drawing for the painting Asheville.

Dorothea Rockbourne was one of the few students at Black Mountain with prior  training, as she had attended her native Montreal’s Ecole des beaux-arts. She arrived in search of a more diverse education and latched on to the only mathematics professor there, Max Dehn, whose basic lessons in geometry and topology had a lasting influence on her career. Her Gradient and Field (1977) –reconstructed for this exhibition-is a sophisticated installation of vellum sheets placed at prescribed levels above and below a vectored horizontal line in such a way as to amplify the divergent fields.

There are some sore omissions and unnecessary inclusions in this exhibition.  It’s hard to justify the absence of Jerry Van de Wiele, for instance, especially when Helen Frankenthaler, who was at Black Mountain for just a week visiting Clement Greenberg and hardly a part of the community, is represented.  Enticed by a letter from his friend the painter Jorge Fick (represented in the show by a selection of late works), Van de Wiele enrolled as a student in September 1954. When classes were suspended during the winter of 1955 he returned to The Art Institute in Chicago where he convinced two friends, Richard Bogart and John Chamberlain (the latter represented by later sculptures) to follow him back in the spring.

There are, however, amazing moments in this show that allow you to look across rooms and down hallways to draw associations, such as when Jack Tworkov’s hefty gestural painting Day Break (1953) is seen through the undulating stainless steel beams and cords of Snelson’s large Easter Monday (1977). Tworkov is also represented by two ink studies for House of the Sun, an important series of paintings the artist began at Black Mountain during the summer of 1952.

Upstairs hang three abstract paintings by Emerson Woelffer, invited to Black Mountain in 1949 at the request of Buckminster Fuller (represented by a large sculpture and two posthumous prints). A group of five collages by Ray Johnson hang next. Johnson was on campus from mid to late 1940s and studied with the likes of Albers, Bolotowski, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Richard Lippold, Motherwell, and Charles Olson. His collages, all done later, incorporate and at the same time upend the learning of these historic teachers.

While the College did offer classes in language, anthropology, and science, the arts remained the focus of the curriculum. An impressive selection of rare books by the Black Mountain Poets is assembled in a large vitrine on the second floor on loan from the collection of James Jaffe. The show provides first edition printings of Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Fielding Dawson, Charles Olson, M.C. Richards, and Jonathan Williams to name a few. Among the various publications sits the prospectus for the 1951 Summer Institute, which includes a terrific image of one of Black Mountain’s most remarkable dancers, Katherine Litz.

Photography was officially added to the curriculum in the fall of 1949. Hazel Larsen Archer was something of the resident photographer. Her images of a spiky-haired John Cage, a contemplative Willem de Kooning, and Merce Cunningham dancing in an open field (reprints of a few are included in the exhibition) are some of the most historic images of the school. She is credited, among other things, with giving Rauschenberg enough instruction with the camera to let him do with the instrument as he pleased. Archer, along with students in her class, decided to produce the magazine 5 Photographers, showcased here.  Aaron Siskind, a photographer particularly admired among the Abstract Expressionists, arrived in 1951 as faculty. Works from his North Carolina Series (1951) are on view, accompanied by works by Arthur Siegel and Harry Callahan.

A highlight of the exhibition comes with the projection of footage of three early dances by Merce Cunningham:: Septet (1953), Antic Meet (1958) and Story (1963). It is captivating watching Cunningham dance his own choreography and while the footage has been available to Merce Cunningham Dance Company, enabling the company to recreate these historic pieces in detail, this is the first time the footage has been publicly shown. Septet was created during the summer of 1953, the year of the company’s official debut, and is one of the very few dances Cunningham set to music.

Story (1963) features sets and costumes by Rauschenberg, assembled using anything the artist could find outside the door of the theater. This work speaks to the great collaborations that took place at the College, including Cage’s Theater Piece #1 (1952). Created over lunch and performed later the same day, the piece features Cage, Charles Olson, and M.C. Richard reading from ladders while Rauschenberg plays records and Cunningham dances.

Black Mountain College and Its Legacy is an impressive show and a remarkable undertaking considering the many facets of this historic school.  Continuing a streak of themed shows at Loretta Howard that include last year’s Artists at Max’s Kansas City, 1965-1974, the exhibition strives to make connections within the period, although sometimes lacking the tight editing necessary to make such associations more visible. The mystic Ruth Asawa is represented with a single work: an untitled looped wire sculpture from early 1950s hanging overhead. It would have been insightful to see one of Asawa’s later drawings as well in this context.  The exhibition, spread out over two floors, makes for a great treasure hunt, but it’s difficult to experience the true impact of the show in its totality. The catalogue is a bit of a disappointment with some annoying historical errors. Pat Passlof’s name is misspelled. for example, and she followed de Kooning to Black Mountain with the intent of studying with him not Mark Tobey, as recounted here. Chamberlain was never on faculty and was not  present during the summer of 1955.  Bios are included only for the most prominent artists, and poets are left out completely. Even Charles Olson, whose reputation at Black Mountain outstripped his 6’8” frame, isn’t featured. These problems need not detract from the abundance of historic materials, however, that make this a show not to be missed.

RELATED EVENTS / PROGRAMS:

A Black Mountain Poetry Reading
featuring Francine du Plessix Gray, John Yau, Vincent Katz, Maureen Howard and others. Wednesday October 19, 6-8PM

An afternoon with independent curator Jason Andrew, as he discusses his recent exhibition and publication: JACK TWORKOV: Accident of Choice, The Artist at Black Mountain College 1952. Mr. Andrew will discuss Tworkov, his arrival at Black Moutain College and his relationship with John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Fielding Dawson, Jorge Fick, Robert Rauschenberg, Dorothea Rockburne, during one of the most historic summers in the history of the Black Mountain College. Saturday, October 22, 4:00PM

JASON ANDREW is the manager, curator and archivist for the Estate of Jack Tworkov whose recent projects include the publication Jack Tworkov: Accident of Choice, The Artist at Black Mountain College 1952. A prominent figure in the Bushwick art scene, his independent collaborative projects with artists and dancers and others are presented through the Norte Maar company. He is also the co-owner of Storefront, a gallery in Bushwick featuring young talent and revisiting the work of established artists. He can be followed on twitter: jandrewARTS

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“Josef and Anni Albers: Design for Living” at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum is a tour de force of what I’ll call ‘restrained intimacy’. Both were students at the Bauhaus where they took the best their teachers had to offer, and through their intense dialogue with one another created something no artistic movement could contrive: actual love of material form.

Viewers are likely drawn to one or the other of this couple: They couldn’t appear to be more yin/yang, male/female. Bet the truth is, they both show a great deal of slippage when broken down in such terms. One remembers Josef for his ominously dull and fascinating “Homage to the Square” series that he made after coming to America; the curators decided to omit those works in favor of emphasis on his early design and furniture works. While at first looking overtly rectangular and manly, Albers as a furniture designer looks like a handmade and more austere version of Marcel Breuer. His rectangular forms seem to predict Donald Judd, only his emphasis on intimate detailing makes me feel as if Judd would have dreamt these objects as opposed to have made them. Anni Albers is known for her quilts, but really her target is painting. While at the Bauhaus she was encouraged to take weaving instead of painting. It seems obvious to me, that she never really stopped painting. Her tapestries, supremely rich in color and form, are a shockingly powerful, in their sense of efficacy that seems to have left the Bauhaus imitators in the dust. As both an advance on the Klee’s whimsy and as a precursor to minimalism, Anni Albers was by no means feminine and quaint.

But what really makes this show work is the comparison between these two artists. The curators have done an excellent job balancing them. The first room is dominated by Anni’s weavings, including two outrageous masterpieces (1925 and 1926). Through color and form, there exists no painting equal to the power of Anni’s subtle shifts in fabric. This is balanced with Josef’s asymmetrical brick fireplace (1955) and a few pieces of early furniture. While there is a cute play back and forth between these two in asymmetries, the real kick lies in the next room where we see the basic color scheme of Anni’s wall hanging (1925) reappear in Josef’s set of four stacking chairs (1927).

The comparisons get even more striking when in the next room we have Josef’s early glass designs paired with Anni’s watercolor design drawings. This is the room where the most surprises lay. Josef’s glass works look almost bohemian and funky such as in “Grid Picture” (1921) and “Park” (1924). Anni in her two rug designs from 1927, a psychedelic interplay of shapes and forms that let loose her unbridled sense of sheer creativity. While Josef in “Upward”, a glasswork from 1926, draws from Anni’s subtle forms and imbues it a sense of cool restraint. And as revolutionary as Anni was with weaving, Josef explorations with glass are similarly ‘touchy-feely’.

The last large room is filled mostly with Josef’s furniture and design objects, many dating from a commission for the Mollenhoff apartment in Berlin. They are surrounded by Anni’s later tapestries as screens, set up to look like paintings in an apartment. Again, there is an extraordinary merger of the two sensibilities. There is also a standout display of Anni’s handmade jewelry, made out of simple industrial materials: ribbons, washers, paperclips and bobby pins. Josef’s bed and night tables from 1927 really did it for me. In such simple details such as the night table round handles turned inward to face the bed, one really gets the sense of intimacy and sensitive feelings present in both these artist’s oeuvre.

The curators here have given us a special gift in this show, and that is quite simply, the Albers’ sensitive gift of love.

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