[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/620619090″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Barbara Ess: Someone to Watch Over Me
Magenta Plains, 94 Allen Street, New York – magentaplains.com

Sharon Horvath: Where Owls Stare at Painting’s Busted Eyeballs
Pierogi, 155 Suffolk Street, New York – pierogi2000.com

Peter Krashes: Contact!
Theodore: Art, 56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn – theodoreart.com

Eric N. Mack: Lemme walk across the room
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn – brooklynmuseum.org

The post Podcast of The Review Panel from May 2019 appeared first on artcritical.

Barbara Ess: Someone to Watch Over Me
Magenta Plains, 94 Allen Street, New York – magentaplains.com

Sharon Horvath: Where Owls Stare at Painting’s Busted Eyeballs
Pierogi, 155 Suffolk Street, New York – pierogi2000.com

Peter Krashes: Contact!
Theodore: Art, 56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn – theodoreart.com

Eric N. Mack: Lemme walk across the room
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn – brooklynmuseum.org 

The post REVIEW PANEL NEWS: Line Up of Speakers and Shows for May 1 appeared first on artcritical.

June 6, 2018 to March 3, 2019
Luce Center for American Art, 5th Floor
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, brooklynmuseum.org

Pools of shimmering silver, flies alighted on walls, golden snakes slithering through museum cases: Rob Wynne’s ethereal work makes a point of being impossible to pin down. His exhibition, Float, is placed as a critical counterpoint to objects on permanent display in the Brooklyn Museum’s fifth floorAmerican galleries. Wynne’s pieces interact well with their surroundings but would resonate on their own, thus making this a strong exhibition on many levels. The intellectual agility of the poured glass wall installations offers at times biting critique of the stodgy portraits and history paintings of the new American republic with their traditional European aspirations, but Wynne’s glass intrusions can by turns be tender and empathetic as well.

Wynne’s aesthetic embraces excess and is pervaded by prismatic, lustrous, and glittering qualities. But beyond any merely decorative bent, his work can plumb depths of his chosen material’s crystalline or chemical structure, hinting at infinite possibilities and interpretations. The purity of glass represents a physical and philosophical stubbornness that makes it both an overwhelming and reliable reference point.  This is particularly the case in the opening piece, Extra Life (2018), a swirling diaphanous galaxy of flickering globules that inhabits the back wall of the elevator lobby. Four white marble neoclassical mythological nymphs – lackluster to my eye – by American 19th-century sculptors masters Chauncey Bradley Ives, Randolph Rodgers,  and Frederick William MacMonnies are caught up in this abstract gesture of universality and motion—Wynne’s (in this case wordless) invocation to wake up seems to be heeded by the carved lasses, and the compositional interaction between the pure dull sheen of the white marble reacting with the silver of the mirrored particles on the wall and the room itself begins to move.

Wynne’s first decisive intervention in the collections is a small Snake (2011) inserted a case of Meso-American antiquities. That this diamond-patterned snake caught in a stylized slither is a wearable gold brooch serves metaphorically to clasp the before and after of American civilization playfully associates the mythological origins and similarities of all culturespre-Columbian and European invader alike. Wynne’s simple gesture is a nuanced commentary on the collection. Recognizing that a seemingly academic museum case full of ceramic in figures and bowls also has the potential for drama and narrative, Wynne’s snake determinedly undulates in one direction right at the back heel of a clay Ecuadorian jaguar vessel, approximately 1400-1700 years its senior, cheekily marching opposite direction,

All of the rest of Wynne’s intrusions, save one, consist of assemblages of lugubrious flat mirrored shapes applied to the walls, many of them passages of text. These are located near sculptures, paintings and objects of furniture which engage the text, either by a reference to the work itself, it’s subject, or a salient characteristic. In I Saw Myself See Myself (2018) a double-sided statement in mirrored glass which plays on Beatrice Wood’s “I Shock Myself,” Wynne presents a tautology which suggests the self-perception necessary in order to create an autobiography therefore acknowledges an inherent narcissism as well. The mirrored words float bluntly on the wall over a pithy 1934 Art Deco vanity and accompanying seat by Kem Weber, a furniture arrangement centering on self-observation and self-beautification completes Wynne’s thought process. On the other side of this room, the cast aluminum larger-than-life Fly (2008) plays the part of gossip, the nemesis of the previously mentioned idea of autobiography. Captured in the halo of a bright spotlight, the literal fly-on-the-wall gazes down on William Glackens’ erotically charged Girl with Apple (1909-1910) and John Sloane’s painting The Haymarket (1907). Sloane scandalously depicts  unaccompanied women entering a dance hall at the turn of the century.

Wynne’s fluid mirrored texts and occasional small sculptures are placed so as not to dominate the space, but that is what they often do metaphysically—I felt the presence of the artist was comparable to the whimsical and whispered voice of a wandering poet following me through the galleries. He would simultaneously bemoan the tropical heat in a Heade canvas and gush over a Bierstadt vista,   in Blaze (2018). At other moments Wynne was commiserating with a particularly uncomfortable Copley sitter in a stuffy costume in Translucent Threads of Dawn (2016). The objects of the gallery—the artifacts, paintings, sculpture, and furniture are reflected upon by the artist, literally and figuratively, and become a part of his, and our, stream of consciousness. Many of these connection between works are already there, but by adding in a line of text—a passage from a book, a line of poetry, or simply his own musing, he facilitates and strengthens these networks of meaning with his own chameleon-like texts and forms.

In the final room of the galleries, Wynne claims a well-deserved wall entirely for himself. In a room of contemporary canvasses, Wynne’s The Moon Viewers (2018) faces Alex Katz’s radiant yellow, Arthur 1 (2017). Wynne chooses exuberance as his exit motif,  using the the doorway out of the gallery as a major component of his piece. Deep blue melted glass forms cluster in the top left hand corner of the wall, tentatively beginning to trickle down from above.  The lower right hand corner of the wall displays a heartier eruption of silvery glass butterflies rises from the wainscoting to two-thirds up the height of the wall.  The dark rectangle of the door stands as a sharp-edged and geometric boundary between the two infusions. The Moon Viewers is both a rejection of the confines of canvas, frames and pedestals that dominate this and all the other galleries, and uses the gallery space as a canvas itself. The final piece is a cheerful finish to Wynne’s whirling start Extra Life,  which also took the floor, ceiling and walls on either side as its parameters. Though a text-less piece, The Moon Viewers still engages in the word play and symbolic meanings that the artist has used to circumscribe the art of these galleries. We are left wondering who Wynne’s Moon Viewers are, the butterflies looking at the moon, or the museum visitor reflected in their shimmering wings, or both?

The post Glass Intrusions: Rob Wynne at the Brooklyn Museum appeared first on artcritical.

The second of those two shows opens to the public this weekend: Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty. Kerry James Marshall has been open for a week or so.

A word to the wise: Tuesday, the day of the panel, is alas one of Brooklyn Museum’s closed days. It won’t be possible to go from museum to library on the same block on Eastern Parkway – unless you camp in the Botanical Gardens for a couple of nights.

The post And Then There Were Two: Focus on Retrospectives at The Review Panel appeared first on artcritical.

October 24, 2014 to March 29, 2015
200 Eastern Parkway (at Washington)
Brooklyn, 718 638 5000

Visitors to “Judith Scott: Bound & Unbound,” currently at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, are confronted early with one of the artist’s first masterpieces, Untitled (1988), a substantial, architectural sculpture that has been hung on the wall, as in relief. Twined and tied around several bundles of sticks is a vivid array of materials: woolen yarns, fabric strips and plastic tape in a dazzling range of colors, along with green gardening wire of different gauges. The thicker wire loops and swirls around the heart of the structure, while smaller, shaggy-headed knots of the thinner-gauged wire peek out from various crevices like diaphanous sea anemones. At nearly five feet tall, it is one of the larger works on view, and also one of the few to hang on the wall rather than rest supine on a platform. Whether this deliberate curatorial decision would have been met with approval or not by Scott (who died in 2005 at the age of 61) is anyone’s guess. Not only did she never speak a word about her work, she gave no titles to any of her more than 200 sculptures and left no instructions about her intent for their display. In fact, once Scott finished a sculpture, she seemed to have little interest in ever revisiting it. These thorny details, among others, must be grappled with when staging an exhibition of her complex and endlessly fascinating work.

“One of the biggest challenges to presenting the work of an artist whose voice was sharply circumscribed by her life experience is to avoid adding layers of interpretation that can calcify into a narrative fable,” writes Catherine Morris, a co-curator of the present exhibition in the thoughtful catalogue that accompanies the show. Nonetheless, it’s nearly impossible to discuss Scott’s work without a modicum of information about her biography. She and her twin sister Joyce were born in Cincinnati, in 1943. While Joyce was intellectually typical, Judith was born with Down Syndrome. Her parents institutionalized her by age seven, and she remained so for the next 35 years, until Joyce secured guardianship of her twin, and brought Judith to live with her family in northern California. It was around this time that Judith was finally diagnosed as being profoundly deaf, a condition that was likely caused by an acute bout of scarlet fever she’d suffered in early childhood, but which had somehow gone undetected for decades. Deafness also then accounted for Scott’s muteness. For most of her life, she’d been almost entirely cut off from the world.

In 1987, Joyce Scott enrolled her sister at the Creative Growth Art Center, a place of radical experiment for artists with developmental disabilities. Rather than using art as therapy, Creative Growth is structured as a communal art studio, where participants are given freedom to work at their own pace with whatever materials suited their interests, and with minimal instruction. Instead, they work alongside typical, working contemporary artists who provide guidance or practical assistance only as needed. It was there, about a year after her initial enrollment, that Scott discovered textile arts, and completed her first wrapped work, and thereafter she worked steadily and regularly, five days a week for the next 18 years, right up until her death (her final work, from 2005, remained unfinished and is included here).

Scott became adept at her distinctive technique of ardent binding as her work matured. She always began with a found object that acted as the anchor of the sculpture—a crutch, a baseball bat, and a tabletop fan all found their way into her work, for example—and most frequently Scott wrapped it so abundantly that the original form is rendered unrecognizable. Occasionally, as in Untitled (1993), she attached small accessories, such as beads or stones to the exterior, but more often these small tokens found their way inside the work, and the exact contents of each sculpture is usually unknown, imbuing them with a totemic quality.

She also had a sophisticated sense of color and formal control. Another work, also Untitled (1993) finds an unknown object (or objects) completely encased in woolen yarn in a surprising color combination of lavender and burnt sienna. The shape Scott has rendered is womblike, with a pregnant belly of orange-brown yarn tapering, at two ends, into slender and elegant lavender protrusions. The work is so unexpected, so gentle, and so pleasing that one must resist the urge to bend down and caress it. And in Untitled (2003) Scott incorporated a long, gauzy, white ribbon and green mesh into a piscine object swathed in rich cerulean and aquamarine yarn. The highlights of candy-apple red yarn sporadically interwoven into this marine combination pack a visual punch, and one can’t help but think of strange fish, moving through mysterious waters at the ocean floor.

Gerardo Mosquera was speaking about the problems of ethnocentrism when he coined “The Marco Polo Syndrome” in 1992 and, in an essay of the same name, wrote, “What is monstrous about this syndrome is that it perceives whatever is different as the carrier of life-threatening viruses rather than nutritional elements… It has brought a lot of death to culture.” To cast a wider net, the argument also makes a similar point for artists who are different physically or mentally, or who make their work far outside the confines of an established art scene. “Art Brut” and “Outsider Art” are terms that feel increasingly and painfully outmoded, yet somehow seem to persist in contemporary discussions. Morris and Matthew Higgs, the show’s co-curator, have made an assiduous effort in the exhibition to note Scott’s developmental disabilities without resorting to interpreting her work solely through its lens, the wall text in the show is blessedly spare, imparting essential facts but refusing to dwell on them. Instead, the focus is where it should be: on an artist whose laborious and unique process resulted in an output that demands protracted consideration, but which in turn yields both mystery and discovery. “Bound and Unbound” dignifies Scott’s work, and finally invites the artist into the art-historical conversation, not as a marginalized “other,” but as a peer.

The post Boundless: Judith Scott at the Brooklyn Museum appeared first on artcritical.

With her installation at the Brooklyn Museum, entitled “Submerged Motherlands,” New York-based artist Swoon (Caledonia Curry) has come home in full force. For the better part of the last decade, Swoon has brought her particular brand of socially conscious and thoughtfully impermanent street art around the globe, from the banks of the Hudson to New Orleans to Venice to Haiti. Her creations, like a turn of phrase by poet Ann Lauterbach, powerfully convey “something in the mix of habit and hope.” They’re lavish yet down-to-earth, full of youthful dynamism and the fragility of time. Swoon combines found materials, expressionistic figure drawing and intricately detailed patterns on a grand scale, layering personal narrative and community crises into a dense, dramatic outpouring of lovingly curated objects. Of late, she has emerged alongside such artists as Ai Wei Wei and Shirin Neshat as a master of a kind of civic-minded, positively impactful art activism that is often as exquisite as it is challenging.

“Submerged Motherlands” has engulfed the entire Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery on the Museum’s fifth floor, transforming it into a dreamy ad hoc jungle village where the sea has crawled up to marry the land. An enormous tree stands tall at the center of the gallery’s rotunda, reaching gracefully up to the skylight, its limbs draped and dripping with delicate circular paper cutouts. Flanking the tree’s massive trunk — which is woven from long, vertical strips of fabric, each dyed a different muted tone — are two ragtag boats that the artist previously floated down the Mississippi River (in 2006), the Hudson River (2008) and into the Venice Bienniale (2009). Sets of mirrored cardboard figures radiate outward from the heart of the installation, looming large like sentinels or sphinxes, deities that bless and protect the space within. One is a pair of Incan mothers, arms outstretched as they gaze skyward, with matching crowns made of tentacles and breastplates of crabs’ legs; another couple resembles plump, seated Buddhas, each sporting a careworn grimace and a bandaged hand. Here, the mundane and discarded have been invigorated and made beautiful; waste has been turned to want.

Everywhere the viewer looks there is something new to see: on the walls, the floors, the ceiling, in every nook and crevice. The forms are sundry and precise, and the textures and colors created by the play of light are splendid. According to the artist, the piece was conceived as a response to Hurricane Sandy, which struck the Atlantic Coast in 2012, and to the great tsunami that destroyed Doggerland, a landmass that once connected Great Britain and Europe, 8,000 years ago. References to the sea are pervasive: ornate mandalas and medallions made of thick lines sketched in marker on cardboard echo shells, aquatic plants and cephalopods, while the walls have been splashed with various jewel tones of blue. By fusing these maritime elements into the larger landlocked installation, Swoon rhythmically reiterates the simultaneous life-giving and life-threatening force of water, reminding us that the key to our existence and extinction lies curled in the crest of every wave. And while the artist’s style of mark making is decidedly street, embodying a frenetic sense of forward movement, the overall effect is calm, almost otherworldly, as though viewed from the quiet recesses of the ocean floor.

When faced with this magnanimous installation, one realizes the aptness of the artist’s pseudonym: Swoon. It is little wonder that standing in this space evokes a rush of emotion, like falling in love or the flush before a faint. There is a sense of safety, but no comfort, for to swoon is the body’s defense against perilous circumstance — extreme heat, fear, or fever, say — the moment when consciousness becomes too much to bear.”Submerged Motherlands” feels like the moment before that moment, or perhaps the one just after, when delirium sets in and sends the mind reeling, everything at once impossibly fuzzy and terribly clear. You focus on a single spot at the core of your vision while mirror images bloom along the periphery. Shapes and shadows swirl and flutter, multiplying and expanding until all dissolves into the unknown.

On a more literal note, the installation is also meant to be a memorial to the artist’s mother, who became ill and passed away during the gestation phase of the project. Swoon is very aware of her loss, and that awareness (and wariness) presses her toward an intimate way of making art that both embraces and cautions the viewer. Every aspect of the installation feels personal, and poised just so, as though it could collapse at any moment. Like a site-specific sculpture by Sarah Sze, the work is elaborate and immense but also vulnerable, forever on the verge of falling apart. In it, ideas of shelter and exposure, past and future, life and death are folded together into the very real, often difficult, often lovely median state where we live. The figure of a mother breast-feeding her child, or a skeletal woman whose bones are wrapped around the artist’s self-portrait are enough to convince this critic of the integrity of Swoon’s means, whatever (and whenever) the end.

The post Waves: Swoon at the Brooklyn Museum appeared first on artcritical.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/201610331″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Joining moderator David Cohen, the panel discussed Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey, T.J. Wilcox: In the Air at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Bruce Pearson: Getaways at Ronald Feldman Gallery, and Arcadia: Paintings by Bill  Scott at Hollis Taggart Galleries.

To view Slideshows: While we sort out a minor technical issue, please click the “video mov” icon to view slideshows; the options underlined in blue are not currently working

The post November 2013: Faye Hirsch, Stephen Maine, Joan Waltemath appeared first on artcritical.

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

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

The post LaToya Ruby Frazier at the Brooklyn Museum appeared first on artcritical.

February 8 to August 4, 2013
The Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, NY, (718) 638-5000

El Anatsui’s exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum begins in the fifth floor rotunda with Gli (2010), a majestic installation comprised of four sheets of delicate metal rings that are suspended at various heights, inhabiting the space from floor to ceiling. Gli is an Ewe word that has multiple meanings: wall, disrupt, or story. An accompanying text elaborates that Anatsui was thinking of walls in Berlin, Jerusalem and Notsie when making this piece. Probably less familiar to many New Yorkers than the other examples, Notsie is a town in modern day Togo, West Africa, where according to oral histories, the Ewe people settled briefly before fleeing an oppressive ruler sometime in the 17th century. Reminiscent of chainmail, these hangings are solemn and haunting, conjuring the memory of powerful walls and ancient sorrows. Gli is torn and crumpled like a curtain in places, but as one moves around the space, the sheets shift and glimmer, becoming more solid and lively.

It is for these elegant and impressive bottle cap tapestries that Anatsui is most well-known and, unsurprisingly, they are the centerpiece of Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui, an exhibition which originated at the Akron Art Museum in Ohio. The show demonstrates the range of Anatsui’s aesthetic—from the dense painterly abstraction of Black Block and Red Block (both 2010), to the gentle humor of Ink Splash (2010), and the seemingly precarious structure of Ozone Layer (2010) which flutters in an artificial breeze provided by fans hidden in the gallery wall, rattling like the gentle wheeze of an old smoker.

El Anatsui was born in Anyako, Ghana in 1944 and is a member of the Ewe ethnic group. In 1975 he moved to Nigeria to teach at the University of Nsukka, where he has resided ever since. After studying western sculptural traditions and methods at the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana, Anatsui became interested in the indigenous forms and materials of his home country. He began to look at adinkra symbols and kente cloth–a weaving style practiced by members of his family–and one of his earliest pieces experimented with the wooden trays used to display food in the marketplace. From there he moved into other wooden, ceramic and recycled forms, often choosing materials associated with consumption, before discovering a bag of discarded bottle caps outside a local distillery and starting upon the explorations that led to his current work.

Earlier artworks such as the painted wood relief Conspirators (1997) allow the viewer a glimpse of how Anatsui’s work has developed and the common themes that run through his practice. The picture that emerges is of an artist who is interested in the mutability of forms, works arduously to explore and reinvent his materials, and transforms personal and historical narratives into form and content. A number of the artworks reference specific stories that warrant a closer look. Waste Paper Bags (2003), an installation consisting of seven grey forms, modeled on the large, red and blue stripped bags that are deceptively strong, and are a ubiquitous sight at a West African bus station or marketplace—the go-to bag for a woman with a heavy load or a long distance to travel. In Nigeria these bags are referred to as Ghana-must-go, harking back to a moment in the 1980s when an influx of Ghanaian refugees into Nigeria caused tension between the two groups. El Anatsui’s versions of the bag are large enough to house or transport a family, but too heavy to move.  They are made of discarded aluminum printing plates that carry the stories of contemporary Nigerian life–newspaper articles celebrating new anti-malarial studies or a local political leader, school textbooks, wedding announcements and church pamphlets. The piece is the most monument-like of these monumental works, commemorating the rootless and sometimes uncomfortable position of an expatriate.

Like the trash that El Anatsui uses as raw materials, the difficult historical relationships associated with Gli, Waste Paper Bags, and the bottlecaps themselves (a token reminder of the Atlantic Slave Trade) are present in the galleries, but do not overwhelm our sensory experience of the work. Instead, memory and history are transformed into a celebratory occasion. The eponymous piece in the show is one of the largest of the tapestries, measuring 145 5/8 x 441 inches.  As with all his work, Anatsui wields his deceptively simple palette masterfully, building blocks of colors with subtle care and changing the direction and rhythm of the weave as a painter would carefully choreograph her brushstrokes. A red form pulsates outward across the space, meeting a cool continent of silver and yellow. Suggestive of a pinwheel, a sunset, or a flower, the energy is vibrant and expansive. It is not a finished statement, but a ball of potential energy thrown up against a wall, continually growing and shifting, adjusting to circumstances with gravity and grace.

The post The Wall is Also a Story: El Anatsui at the Brooklyn Museum appeared first on artcritical.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/201607223″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Blake Gopnik, Jane Harris and Christian Viveros-Faune joined moderator David Cohen to discuss Regarding Warhol at the Met, Materializing “Six Years”: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art  at the Brooklyn Museum, and The Times Square Show Revisited at Hunter College.

The post November 2012: Blake Gopnik, Jane Harris and Christian Viveros-Faune with moderator David Cohen appeared first on artcritical.