Emory Douglas, “Black Panther, June 27, 1970,” offset lithograph (© 2009 Emory Douglas / Artists Rights Society)
New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Through October 18 (Goldblatt exhibit through October 11)
Closed Monday & Tuesday
Admission: $12 (free Thursday Evenings 7:00 – 9:00)
212-924-3363
The New Museum of Contemporary Art is currently home to three very different but outstanding exhibits. On the second floor, the vast, bold work of graphic designer and Black Panther Emory Douglas is spread out on the walls and in glass vitrines, his striking images capturing the revolutionary aspects of the civil rights movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. For more than a decade, Douglas helped run the weekly Black Panther newspaper, which featured his overtly political drawings on the cover as well as in the interior. The exhibit, curated by Sam Durant, consists of more than 150 pieces in color and black and white, depicting cops as pigs, murdered Panther leaders as martyrs, and men and women heavily armed and ready to fight. Regardless of how you feel about the Black Panther movement — there is also an interesting documentary in which several Panthers, including Douglas, look back at that era and try to portray the group as more of a grass-roots community organization than a violent, radical collective — there is no denying the skill and power of Douglas’s work, which takes on added meaning as racism has been bubbling to the surface under the administration of the country’s first African American president.
On the third and fourth floors, South African photographer David Golblatt’s pictures, mostly hung unframed and with push pins, examine changes in Johannesburg over the last thirty years while focusing on the still critical AIDS crisis there. In the Pairs series, he combines recent shots of specific areas he first photographed primarily in the 1980s, accompanied by his own text that details what has become of monuments for anti-apartheid activists, summer gardens, a Mgwali farming community, and a Capetown squatter camp. Each picture in his AIDS series features a pink ribbon somewhere, silently pointing out how widespread the disease still is. The exhibit also includes smaller, framed black-and-white images of Joburg citizens in the 1970s as well as recent triptychs, all combining to relate fascinating aspects of the history of South Africa in subtle ways, a terrific companion piece with the Emory Douglas show.
Dorothy Iannone, “Your Names Are Love Father God,” acrylic and collage on canvas, 1969-70 (Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery and Air de Paris0
Meanwhile, in the back of the first floor, “Dorothy Iannone: Lioness” collects many of the artist’s primitive, colorful collages, which usually involve some kind of sex act, in addition to wood cutouts of celebrities and circus performers. Her first solo American museum show emphasizes the graphic nature of her work between 1965 and 1978 — both in style and subject matter — in such provocative pieces as “I Love to Beat You,” “I Begin to Feel Free,” and “I Am Whoever You Want Me to Be.” You can also see and hear Iannone having an orgasm in the video installation “I Was Thinking of You III” and read her comic-book-like tale of falling in love with Dieter Roth in the forty-eight-sheet “Icelandic Saga.”
ALSO AT THE NEW MUSEUM
New Museum of Contemporary Art
Tickets: $8 unless otherwise noted
Thursday, October 1
and
Friday, October 2 Trajal Harrell: TWENTY LOOKS OR PARIS IS BURNING AT THE JUDSON CHURCH (S), part of the 2009 Crossing the Line festival, $18, 7:00
Saturday, October 3 New Museum First Saturdays for Families: Sign and Intervene, with Rigo 23, free, 10:00 am
Saturday, October 10 African Film Festival at the New Museum presents South African Cinema Now: A Film Series — MAX AND MONA (Teddy Mattera, 2004), 3:00
Saturday, October 17 Maysles Cinema at the New Museum presents Living with Conviction: A Black Panther PARTY FILM SERIES — BASTARDS OF THE PARTY (Cle “Bone” Sloane, 2006), 3:00