JULIE MEHRETU
Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort St.
Exhibit continues Thursday – Monday through August 8, $18-$25 Palimpsest: Thursday, June 17, free with RSVP, 8:00 (available on demand June 18-20)
Pride Celebration with Julie Mehretu: Friday, June 25, free with RSVP, 7:00
212-570-3600 whitney.org
Over the years, I’ve seen many works by Julie Mehretu, but her eponymously titled midcareer retrospective at the Whitney is still a revelation. Running through August 8, the show consists of approximately thirty paintings and forty works on paper and prints from 1996 to the present by the Ethiopian-born artist, who moved with her family to Michigan when she was seven in 1977 and is now based in Harlem. Her large canvases are palimpsests of architectural urban maps, news clippings, allegorical references, economic charts, art history, and abstract lines and shapes, coming together to form a tantalizing whole that is both visually dazzling and empowered with meaning. “Mehretu analyzes and reimagines divergent cultural narratives through her own artistic methodology; an extraordinary thinker and observer, she produces work that is full of empathy, innovation, complexity, and contradiction,” LACMA CEO and director Michael Govan writes in the forward to the catalog.
Installation view of “Julie Mehretu” at the Whitney, with Cairo, 2013, and Invisible Line (collective), 2010-11 (photo by Ron Amstutz)
As captivating as her works are from a distance, the exhibition rewards visitors who spend time with them at close range, their face as near as permissible to the smooth surfaces to take in every detail. “Few artistic encounters are more thrilling than standing close to one of her large canvases, enveloped in its fullness, color, forms, and symbolic content,” Whitney director Adam D. Weinberg writes in his catalog introduction. “One is easily swept up, into, and away by the works’ informational overload and force field of visually magnetic strokes, lines, routes, and trajectories. Viewers can, and do, lose their bearings in the attempt to read, comprehend, locate themselves, and make meaning from the confrontation.”
Such ink-on-acrylic canvases as Conjured Parts (eye), Ferguson,Haka (and Riot),(A Painting in Four Parts) Part 1,Transcending: The New International, and Retopistics: A Renegade Excavation are prime examples of the virtuosity of her technique, from her delicate brushwork to her attention to the smallest of elements, as she explores such issues as migration, colonialism, white supremacy, and racial injustice. Meanwhile, ink-on-paper drawings such as her “Inkcity” series delve into the psychology behind her vision. “I was really interested in mining myself and who I was and what made me,” Mehretu says in a Whitney video. “My interest is not in trying to dictate or determine or explain or try to give any information to anyone in that way. There aren’t any directives or any proposals in these paintings. These paintings are really experiential paintings that are informed by the time, by me, by this moment, by trying to digest that.”
The centerpiece is Ghosthymn (after the Raft), a large-scale canvas that has its own space opposite a window looking out at the Hudson River, David Hammons’s Day’s End, and the recently opened pier park known as Little Island. Created specifically for the Whitney show, the work references Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa as well as New York City’s past. “The insistence on new work and the idea of how that’s important . . . there was this time of suspension with the pandemic,” Mehretu says in the video. “There’s a wall that faces the river, and I was really interested in that wall and the relationship to the river and the relationship to the exterior. As you look out — I look at it every day from my studio [in Chelsea] — you sense the nineteenth-century-ness of this city even though so much of the architecture has changed. The Hudson River is the reason the city exists. There’s a sensibility in different periods of life, of the history of the making of this place, and the kind of immigrant nature of this place.” From a distance, bursts of red, yellow, and green battle it out with ghostly whites, but up close you’re likely to be surprised by what Mehretu uses to create some of her smaller images.
Julie Mehretu works on Haka (and Riot) in new documentary Julie Mehretu: Palimpsest (photo courtesy Checkerboard Film Foundation)
Mehretu was intimately involved with the survey, which began at LACMA before coming to New York City; she is extremely generous on the audio guide when talking about her process, a must-listen. You can also find out more when the museum premieres the documentary Julie Mehretu: Palimpsest from June 17 to 20, introduced by exhibition cocurator Rujeko Hockley and Checkerboard Film Foundation president Edgar Howard. And on June 24 at 7:00, Mehretu will be at the Whitney for a special in-person Pride celebration with DJ Reborn and refreshments, during which the ravishing exhibition will be open.
EdgeCut and New York Live Arts offer new way to experience live events with other people
When I posted the first edition of the Pandemic Awards on July 4, I never expected that on January 1, 2021, we would still be at least six months away from opening venues for live, in-person entertainment. As I wrote then, it would be “the first of hopefully only two This Week in New York Pandemic Awards.” Well, here is the second round, with a third likely to come in the summer. Once again, there’s only one rule for eligibility: There must be a live facet to a performance — either the performance is happening at the minute one is watching onscreen or has an interactive element such as a live Q&A or live chatting.
We’ve come a long way since March, as creators have displayed remarkable ingenuity and forward thinking in coming up with innovative and exciting ways of developing virtual works, from dance, music, and art to theater, literature, and discussion, from all around the globe. Below is the best of the best, productions both big and small, that took the ball and ran with it. I can’t wait to see what will evolve over the next six months to keep us entertained online while we continue to shelter in place.
Happy 2021 to all!
BEST NEW PLAY ABOUT THE PANDEMIC The Line, written by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, directed by Blank, the Public Theater. Blank and Jensen’s Coal Country had to be postponed because of the lockdown, so they turned their attention to the health crisis, teaming again with the Public Theater to present a harrowing look at what New York healthcare workers were experiencing as Covid-19 raged through the city, with Santino Fontana, Alison Pill, John Ortiz, Arjun Gupta, Nicholas Pinnock, Lorraine Toussaint, and Jamey Sheridan speaking the real words of doctors, nurses, EMTs, and others on the front lines of this dread virus.
BEST NEW PLAY NOT ABOUT THE PANDEMIC
Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, This Is Who I Am, written by Amir Nizar Zuabi, directed by Evren Odcikin. Amir Nizar Zuabi’s poignant livestreamed tale of an estranged father (Ramsey Faragallah) and son (Yousof Sultani) preparing a family dish together over Zoom is a warm and heartfelt look at loss, loneliness, and reconnection.
BEST NEW PLAY READING NOT ABOUT THE PANDEMIC pen/man/ship, written by Christina Anderson, directed by Lucie Tiberghien, Molière in the Park. Brooklyn-based Molière in the Park went contemporary with Christina Anderson’s pen/man/ship, a smart, moving play that takes place in 1896 aboard a ship heading for Liberia shortly after the US Supreme Court decided in Plessy v. Ferguson to uphold the constitutionality of racial segregation under the concept of “separate but equal”; the solid cast features Crystal Lucas-Perry as Ruby, the only woman on board, Kevin Mambo as an unyielding minister named Charles, Jared McNeill as his son, Jacob, and Postell Pringle as Cecil, who is working on the ship, with interstitial animation by Emily Rawson, sea-shanty music by Victoria Deiorio, and green-screen set design by Lina Younes that mimic being on a real ship.
BEST LIVESTREAMED PLAY WITH AN AUDIENCE Crave, Chichester Festival Theatre. Chichester presented a stirring, socially distanced revival of Sarah Kane’s brutal Crave, happening in real time as a masked audience watched Tinuke Craig’s fierce adaptation that was the closest thing yet to capturing the feeling of live theater online.
BEST FILMED PLAY The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk, written by Daniel Jamieson, directed by Emma Rice, recorded at the UK’s Bristol Old Vic Theatre. The virtual tour of the Bristol Old Vic, Kneehigh, and Wise Children’s beautifully staged adaptation of The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk, about the romance between painter Marc Chagall (Marc Antolin) and Bella Samoylovna Rosenfeld (Audrey Brisson) amid some very difficult situations in the world, made its way to Skirball, where viewers were treated to its lush look, outstanding acting, and compelling, intimately told story.
BEST SHOCKING MOMENT IN A PLAY
Ali Ahn and William Jackson Harper, Outside Time without Extension, written by Ben Beckley, directed by Vivienne Benesch, Red Bull Theater. A few minutes into Ben Beckley’s Outside Time without Extension, part of Red Bull’s Tenth Annual Short New Play Festival, Ali Ahn and William Jackson Harper joined together in the same Zoom box, the first time I saw two actors in the same space. It turns out that they are partners living together; they would later appear in Matt Schatz’s two-character play The Burdens as a Jewish brother and sister.
BEST SOUND DESIGN OF A FILMEDJoshua D. Reid PLAY
Joshua D. Reid, A Christmas Carol,directed by Michael Arden. As good as Jefferson Mays’s mostly one-man version of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol looked, it sounded even better, immersing the audience in the more ghostly aspects of the story, including one moment that made my heart drop into my stomach.
BEST REIMAGINING OF AN IMMERSIVE PLAY Inside the Wild Heart, Group.BR. In Inside the Wild Heart, New York–Brazilian company Group.BR ingeniously used the Gather.town digital platform to allow the audience to guide their avatar across various rooms and floors and interact with other viewers as they navigated through a recorded version of the multidisciplinary show about author Clarice Lispector and her writings.
Lilli Taylor tantalizes the audience during countdown to New Group reunion reading of Aunt Dan and Lemon
BEST OPENING OF A REUNION READING
Lilli Taylor, Aunt Dan and Lemon, the New Group. The New Group’s reunion reading of Wallace Shawn’s Aunt Dan and Lemon begins with three minutes of narrator Lilli Taylor getting ready by calmly looking around and making all kinds of facial gestures during the countdown to the start of the play.
BEST ACTOR IN A REUNION READING OF A PLAY
Edie Falco, The True, the New Group. Edie Falco gave a master class in Zoom acting as she re-created her role as the real-life Albany political mover and shaker Polly Noonan in Sharr White’s powerful play, alongside Michael McKean, Peter Scolari, John Pankow, and the rest of the original cast of this New Group production.
BEST ACTOR IN A REUNION READING OF A MOVIE
Mandy Patinkin, The Princess Bride. Mandy Patinkin was a hoot as the revenge-seeking swashbuckler Inigo Montoya in the reunion-reading benefit for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, having trouble remaining in his Zoom box while joined by original costars Cary Elwes, Robin Wright, Carol Kane, Chris Sarandon, Wallace Shawn, and Billy Crystal, along with director Rob Reiner and Josh Gad as Fezziwig.
BEST INTERACTIVE READING Read Subtitles Aloud, written by Onur Karaoglu and Kathryn Hamilton. Media Art Xploration and PlayCo teamed up for this thirteen-part series in which the viewer supplies half the dialogue, reading off the screen in response to the words spoken by the prerecorded actors onscreen.
BEST ACTOR IN A SHORT PLAY
LeeAnne Hutchison, Pigeons, written by Amy Berryman, directed by Amber Calderon, Eden Theater Company. LeeAnne Hutchison was mesmerizing as a conspiracy theorist dealing with the death of her husband from Covid-19 in Pigeons, one of Eden Theater Company’s “Bathroom Plays.”
BEST DUO IN A TWO-CHARACTER ZOOM READING
Marsha Mason and Brian Cox, Dear Liar, Bucks County Playhouse. Marsha Mason and Brian Cox are deliciously wicked in Bucks County Playhouse’s Zoom reading of Jerome Kitty’s Dear Liar, about the longtime correspondence between George Bernard Shaw and actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell; Cox is so good as Shaw that even Mason has a ball watching him.
Brian Cox and family get involved in some playful high jinks in Melis Akers’s Fractio Panis for the Homebound Project
BEST FAMILY IN A SHORT PLAY
The Coxes, Fractio Panis, written by Melis Aker, directed by Tatiana Pandiani, Homebound Project 5: Homemade. Melis Aker’s Fractio Panis, part of the Homebound Project benefiting No Kid Hungry, took us inside the country home of Brian Cox, his wife, Nicole Ansari-Cox, and their children, Orson and Torin, as they have a ball baking bread and discussing rectal thermometers.
BEST ZOOM REVIVAL The Wolves, Philadelphia Theatre Company. Sarah DeLappe’s 2017 Pulitzer finalist The Wolves felt more empowering than ever in Philadelphia Theatre Company’s Zoom version, with a terrific cast of young women in uniform in front of a green-screened practice field as soccer became a metaphor for what ails us and what brings us together.
BEST REVIVAL EXCERPTS “The Great Work Begins,” amfAR. An amazing lineup performed moving scenes from Tony Kushner’s Angels in America AIDS epic, benefiting amfAR’s Fund to Fight Covid-19, with Andrew Rannells, Paul Dano, and Brian Tyree Smith as Prior Walter, Glenn Close as Roy Cohn, Jeremy O. Harris, Larry Ownes, and S. Epatha Merkerson as Belize, Laura Linney, Vella Lovell, and Lois Smith as Harper Pitt, and Daphne Rubin-Vega, Linda Emond, Nikki M. James, Patti LuPone, and Brandon Uranowitz in other parts, not in Zoom boxes but in well-designed backdrops.
MOST PASSIONATE SHAKESPEARE SPEECH
Ralph Fiennes, Antony and Cleopatra, Act 4, Scene 14, Shakespeare Everywhere. Shakespeare has been just about everywhere during the pandemic, but no one got into the heart of the Bard as much as Ralph Fiennes did at Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Shakespeare Everywhere gala, where he chewed up all of the desert scenery in his prerecorded soliloquy from Antony and Cleopatra, the camera getting up close and personal with his grizzled face; Fiennes portrayed Antony opposite Sophie Okonedo’s Cleopatra at the National Theatre in 2018.
MOST PASSIONATE SHAKESPEARE DISCUSSION
Patrick Page, RemarkaBULL Podversations, Red Bull Theater. Patrick Page delivers the “I hate the Moor” speech from Othello, then delves into the nature of the character, the play, and Shakespeare himself in an unforgettable discussion that will leave you exhausted and exhilarated.
BEST WALLPAPER IN A PLAY Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, Tomorrow Tix. Discount ticket service Today Tix rebranded itself as Tomorrow Tix in streaming prerecorded Zoom versions of Broadway plays with all-star casts, including Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Zachary Quinto, Vanessa Williams, Stacy Keach, Rashad, Reed Birney, Robert Sella, and Katie Finneran for Gore Vidal’s play about a vicious election, but the wallpaper around the tall, vertical Zoom boxes garnered plenty of attention itself.
BEST SCENIC DESIGN OF A ZOOM PLAY
The Irish Rep, A Touch of the Poet, written by Eugene O’Neill, directed by Ciarán O’Reilly. The Irish Rep has been among the most innovative of theater companies during the lockdown, each successive filmed production getting closer and closer to the real thing, and in its revival of A Touch of the Poet, director Ciarán O’Reilly incorporates props, costumes, and photographs and video of Charlie Corcoran’s set to make it appear that the actors are in the same room, sometimes even seated at the same table, even though they are Zooming in from different locations.
BEST PERFORMANCE WITH A CHILD IN THE BACKGROUND Why Would I Dare: The Trial of Crystal Mason, directed by Tyler Thomas, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. In Rattlestick’s Zoom staging of the transcript of the trial of Crystal Mason, an ex-con who was facing jail time for trying to vote in the 2016 election, Crystal Dickinson is electrifying as she and her lawyer (Shane McRae) battle with the judge (Peter Gerety) and the prosecutor (Peter Mark Kendall), but as gripping as the production is, it’s hard not to notice Dickinson’s six-year-old son playing in the background of the large living room where she is broadcasting from, a sign of better times to come.
Celine Song transports The Seagull to the Sims 4 for New York Theatre Workshop
BEST CASTING FOR A DIGITAL PLAY The Seagull on the Sims 4, written and performed by Celine Song, New York Theatre Workshop. Playwright Celine Song busted down barriers with her spectacularly inventive adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, re-creating the classic work live on the simulation game “Play with Life: The Sims 4,” chatting with the audience and several other theater creators as she molded Irina, Konstantin, Nina, Trigorin, Medvendenko, and others from scratch using the digital platform and then placed them in a virtual world where they had free will.
BEST THEATRICAL EXPERIENCE “Here We Are,” Theatre for One. Theatre for One reinvented the solo show with “Here We Are,” a collection of eight microplays written by, starring, and directed by BIPOC women (except for one male actor), performed live for one person at a time, with their camera and audio on so each could see the other and, in some of the works, interact; a virtual lobby allowed attendees to communicate anonymously, as if in a real theater, waiting for the lights to go down and the show to begin.
BEST MUSICAL PERFORMANCE AT A GALA FUNDRAISER
The cast of The Amen Corner, “I’m Not Tired Yet,” and “Sonnet 69,” Biko’s Manna and Family, Shakespeare Everywhere. DC’s Shakespeare Theatre Company hosted one of the best gala fundraisers, including a pair of exciting musical performances, with the cast of The Amen Corner delivering a rousing Zoom version of “I’m Not Tired Yet” and Biko’s Manna and Family performing a lovely rendition of the Bard’s “Sonnet 69.”
BEST BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE TO A LATE ROCK STAR
The Flaming Lips, “Listen to Her Heart,” Tom Petty’s 70th Birthday Bash. Dozens of musicians sent in musical contributions to celebrate what would have been Tom Petty’s seventieth birthday, but it was the Flaming Lips’s herky-jerky take on “Listen to Her Heart” that warranted repeat viewing, in addition to Benmont Tench and Mike Campbell’s touching finale.
BEST LIVESTREAMED CONCERT SERIES “Live Streaming at the Vanguard,” Village Vanguard. The legendary Village Vanguard began streaming live jazz concerts from its intimate stage, without an audience, with concerts by Ron Carter’s Golden Striker Trio, the Eric Reed Quartet, Joe Lovano’s Trio Fascination, and others.
BEST INTERACTIVE OPERA The Threepenny Opera, City Lyric Opera. Audience members were sent advance instructions so they could take part in City Lyric Opera’s extremely fun virtual production of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s opera for the people, with Justin Austin as Macheath, Philip Kalmanovitch as Mr. Peachum, Rachelle Pike as Mrs. Peachum, Sara LaFlamme as Polly Peachum, Michael Parham as Tiger Brown, Sara LeMesh as Lucy Brown, Shanelle Valerie Woods as Jenny, and Kameron Ghanavati as Filch, with live and prerecorded scenes ingeniously staged at HERE Arts Center in individual rooms and boxes terrifically lit by Karina Hyland and designed by Anna Driftmier.
BEST POP OPERA Is This the End? Part One: Dead Little Girl, libretto by Éric Brucher, music and lyrics by Jean-Luc Fafchamps, directed by Ingrid Von Wantoch Rekowski, La Monnaie. FIAF streamed Jean-Luc Fafchamps’s frantic “New Pop Requiem,” Is This the End? from the Brussels company La Monnaie, in which Sarah Defrise plays a teenager on the run through La Monnaie’s labyrinthine buildings, with Amaury Massion as the man and Albane Carrère as the woman in a futuristic nightmare scenario.
The virtual opera Alice in the Pandemic takes place down an alternate New York City rabbit hole
BEST USE OF TECHNOLOGY IN A VIRTUAL OPERA Alice in the Pandemic, libretto by Cerise Lim Jacobs, music by Jorge Sosa, art by Anna Campbell, White Snake Projects. Boston’s White Snake Projects incorporated cutting-edge digital animation in its livestreamed production of the one-act opera Alice in the Pandemic, as the title character (Carami Hilaire) traverses a lonely city in search of her ill mother (Eve Gigliotti) with the help of the White Rabbit (Daniel Moody).
BEST SERIOCOMIC TRIPPY SCI-FI OPERA SERIES Only You Will Recognize the Signal, libretto by Rob Handel, music by Kamala Sankaram, directed by Kristin Marting, video design by David Bengali, virtual stage design by Liminal, HERE Arts Center. HERE’s seven-part, seventy-minute space opera, Only You Will Recognize the Signal, will shake you out of your therapeutic hypothermia and blast you off into another dimension, where a cast of pseudo-astronauts and a humanlike AI system (Paul An, Christopher Burchett, Hai-Ting Chinn, Adrienne Danrich, Joy Jan Jones, Joan La Barbara, Jorell Williams) share their fears amid kaleidoscopic imagery, melting wallpaper, video of Cambodia and NYC, high- and low-tech computer graphics, and a fab score.
BEST OUTDOOR CHAMBER OPERA CONCERT Speaking Truth to Power / Egmont, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Orpheus Chamber Orchestra went to the Beechwood Park bandshell in New Jersey to perform a socially distanced version of Beethoven’s Egmont, Op. 84, with a new English translation by Philip Boehm, featuring soprano and activist Karen Slack and narration by Liev Schreiber.
BEST MULTIMEDIA OPERA
Marina Abramović, 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, Bayerische Staatsoper. Performance artist Marina Abramović died seven times as she reenacted death scenes from seven operas in which Maria Callas had played the lead, accompanied by dancers onstage in masks and Willem Dafoe onscreen.
BEST DANCE SCORE
Michael Wall, Brown Eyes, BalletX, Works & Process at the Guggenheim. Penny Saunders’s haunting black-and-white Brown Eyes, danced by Andrea Yorita and Zachary Kapeluck, among the first pandemic pieces to feature dancers touching each other, is set to Michael Wall’s propulsive percussive score that features ventilator-like breathing and a constant knocking that evokes a clock running out of time.
BEST LONG-FORM ZOOM DANCE Rooms, Sokolow Theatre/Dance Ensemble. The New York–based Sokolow Theatre/Dance Ensemble was preparing to present Anna Sokolow’s 1955 Rooms when the pandemic hit, so it adapted the forty-five-minute work, with such aptly titled sections as “Alone,” “Escape,” “Going,” “Desire,” and “Panic,” for online viewing, with dancers filming themselves from wherever they were sheltering in place, both indoors and outdoors, set to Kenyon Hopkins’s groovy jazz score.
BEST REIMAGINED DANCE MASTERPIECE
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Revelations Reimagined. For its winter virtual season, Alvin Ailey presented an exuberant sixtieth anniversary outdoor version of its signature masterpiece, retitled Revelations Reimagined, weaving together old footage with new scenes shot at Wave Hill, directed by Preston Miller.
Sara Mearns appears in triplicate in L.A. Dance Project work
BEST SOLO DANCE AS A TRIO
Sara Mearns, Sonata for Saras, choreographed by Janie Taylor. New York City Ballet principal dancer Sara Mearns has been a star during the pandemic, appearing in Joshua Bergasse’s Storm for Works & Process at the Guggenheim, Molissa Fenley’s State of Darkness for the Joyce, and Justin Peck’s Thank You, New York for NYCB’s Festival of New Choreography, but in Janie Taylor’s Sonata for Saras, we get three versions of Mearns, in a cute, short red dress, dancing together against a white background, flipping her long hair for six delightful minutes.
BEST SOLO DANCE SEEN SEVEN TIMES
Molissa Fenley, State of Darkness,JoyceStream. Molissa Fenley revisited her 1994 epic solo, State of Darkness, for the Joyce, where it was performed by Jared Brown, Lloyd Knight, Sara Mearns, Shamel Pitts, Annique Roberts, Cassandra Trenary, Michael Trusnovec, and Peter Boal, displaying how the same choreographic movements are interpreted by difference dancers.
BEST USE OF TECHNOLOGY IN A ZOOM DANCE Continuous Replay / Come Together, Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Dance Company, New York Live Arts. Bill T. Jones reimagines his partner Arnie Zane’s Continuous Replay in a glorious reinvention featuring a large, wide-ranging cast spanning four decades and four continents performing in Zoom boxes that video editor Janet Wong turns into a futuristic digital architectural landscape in constant motion.
BEST EXPERIMENTAL DIGITAL DANCE FILM Untitled (perfect human), Danspace Project. Dean Moss’s Untitled (perfect human) offered a kaleidoscopic, nearly scientific exploration of the human body, inspired by Jørgen Leth’s 1967 The Perfect Human, while commenting on our epic loneliness.
BEST SHORT ZOOM DANCE “…it’s okay too. Feel,” Hope Boykin, BalletX, Works & Process at the Guggenheim. Savannah Green and Ashley Simpson dance separately in Hope Boykin’s “…it’s okay too. Feel,” which includes poetic narration wondering what comes next for all of us.
BEST LIVESTREAMED DANCE
Yoann Bourgeois, I wonder where the dreams I don’t remember go, Nederlands Dans Theater. Streamed live from NDT’s Zuiderstrandtheater in front of a limited audience, Yoann Bourgeois’s I wonder where the dreams I don’t remember go is a mesmerizing, meditative, awe-inspiring, gravity-defying piece about identity and personal relationships that uniquely captures the emotional and physical ups and downs of life during this age of Covid-19 and quarantine.
BEST BEACH DANCE iyouuswe II, White Wave Dance. Young Soon Kim took her company’s name literally for iyouuswe II, a short dance film with Mark Willis, Katie Garcia, and Joan Rodriguez in the water and on the sand at Jones Beach, with music by Greg Haines and cinematography by Alexander Sargent.
The Love Space, the New Harmony Project. Gabrielle Hamilton, Janae Snyder-Stewart, Zaire Michel, and Jamal Josef join hands in Jace’s The Love Space, with text by Mfoniso Udofia and choreography by Josef, part of the New Harmony Project’s digital Sunrise Gallery series.
BEST ZOOM BIRTHDAY DANCE “Event2 for Jasper Johns,” Whitney Museum of American Art. Seventy former members of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company celebrated the ninetieth birthday of artist and Cunningham friend and collaborator Jasper Johns with excerpts from more than three dozen Cunningham works, filmed by the dancers at lovely outdoor locations, hitting the bull’s-eye.
BEST DURATIONAL DANCE
Lee Mingwei and Bill T. Jones, Our Labyrinth, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Taiwanese-American contemporary artist Lee Mingwei and American choreographer, director, dancer, and activist Bill T. Jones collaborated on Our Labyrinth, a trio of four-plus-hour meditative, hypnotic performances recorded at the Met’s Great Hall consisting of a dancer sweeping a sand labyrinth and a vocalist, including one iteration with the indefatigable Sara Mearns and Alicia Hall Moran.
MOST EXUBERANT DANCE A Jam Session for Troubling Times, choreographed by Jamar Roberts, music by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, narration by Max Roach, directed by Emily Kikta and Peter Walker, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Jamar Roberts’s Cooped was the most explosive, fierce five minutes of dance of the first part of the pandemic; his twelve-minute Jam Session for Troubling Times, which premiered at AAADT’s virtual winter season and features seven dancers reveling in newfound freedom — even though they never touch one another — is a celebration of the nightclub scene of the 1940s and ’50s and the glorious sounds of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, at a time when New Yorkers are still wondering when they’ll be allowed back in jazz and other music venues.
BEST WEB SERIES The Gaze: No_Homo. Larry Powell’s twelve-part series follows the fictional Evergreen Theatre Festival as young actor Jerome Price (Galen J. Williams) fights for his personal beliefs and battles institutional racism with director Miranda Cryer (Sharon Lawrence); TC Carson stands out as the wise and experienced Buddy DuBois.
FUNNIEST FICTIONAL FAMILY ZOOM CALL
Jordan E. Cooper, Mama Got a Cough. Jordan E. Cooper’s laugh-out-loud hysterical Zoom call was actually posted in the first half of the year, but I only saw it recently and so am including it here, the funniest sketch I saw in 2020, with Amber Chardae Robinson, Brittany Inge, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Dewayne Perkins, Juanita Jennings, Marcel Spears, and Danielle Brooks meeting up online to discuss the health of the family matriarch.
BEST TELEPHONE PRODUCTION
Woolly Mammoth, Telephonic Literary Union’s Human Resources. Woolly Mammoth takes listeners down an audio rabbit hole in Human Resources, a choose-your-own-adventure play on the telephone, offering the chance to acquire the super-secret happiness access code.
BEST MEMORY AT A ZOOM CAST REUNION
Marilu Henner, Taxi,Stars in the House. While it was great to watch Juddy Hirsch, Danny DeVito, Carol Kane, and Christopher Lloyd reminisce about their Taxi days, it was Marilu Henner, who played Elaine Nardo in the 1977-83 hit sitcom, who stole the show, not only for looking a generation younger than the other actors but for displaying an unbelievable level of recall for names, dates, places, and dialogue because of her highly superior autobiographical memory, a rare condition that only about a hundred people in the world have.
BEST CAST REUNION OF A FILM SERIES / STREAMING SHOW Reunited Apart,The Karate Kid and Cobra Kai. Josh Gad keeps serving up fun cast reunions for his Reunited Apart series, including a dual reunion of the stars of the 1984-94 Karate Kid movie franchise and the actors of the current YouTube/Netflix sequel, Cobra Kai, which brings back Ralph Macchio, William Zabka, and others.
MOST EMOTIONAL MOMENT AT AN AWARDS SHOW Eugene Levy, Newport Beach Film Festival. When Eugene Levy was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the virtual 2020 Newport Beach Film Festival, he was surprised with Zoom tributes from Martin Short, Andrea Martin, Steve Martin, Jason Biggs, and his entire Schitt’s Creek family, resulting in lots of tears and laughter.
MOST FUN HAD BY THE CAST DURING A NON-REUNION BENEFIT READING
The cast of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, CORE. The all-star cast assembled for a live table read of Amy Heckerling’s 1982 fave Fast Times at Ridgemont High — including Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, Jennifer Aniston, Ray Liotta, Jimmy Kimmel, Julia Roberts, John Legend, Dance Cook, Matthew McConaughey, and Sean Penn not as Spicoli — was having an absolute blast watching their fellow actors as they made their way through the script, especially Shia Lebeouf as Spicoli in this fundraiser for CORE’s COVID-19 relief efforts.
BEST LIVE CHATTING WITH THE ARTIST DURING A WORK-IN-PROGRESS SCREENING
Raja Feather Kelly, Any Given Wednesday, New York Live Arts. Half the fun of watching director and choreographer Raja Feather Kelly’s sneak peak at his upcoming documentary, Any Given Wednesday, about the making of his show Wednesday, a unique take on Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, was following the live chat, in which Kelly excitedly interacted with friends, collaborators, and just plain audience members, sharing insight into his thought process while having a grand old time.
BEST DEBATE RE-CREATION Baldwin vs. Buckley, BRIC. BRIC restaged the famous February 1965 debate between James Baldwin (Teagle F. Bougere) and William F. Buckley (Eric T. Miller) at Cambridge, which asked the question “Is the American Dream at the expense of the American Negro?,” an inquiry that feels just as relevant today as it did then.
BEST OPEN REHEARSALS
The Commissary, “Lessons in Survival,” Vineyard Theatre. A group named the Commissary, with such actors and directors as Marin Ireland, Peter Mark Kendall, Tyler Thomas, and Reggie D. White, re-created important speeches and interviews involving such Black creators and leaders as James Baldwin, Nina Simone, Angela Davis, Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, Bobby Seale, Muhammad Ali, and others, but as striking as those reenactments were, it was their open live rehearsals that were revelatory, regarding not only the works to be performed but the genuine, infectious pleasure they were experiencing in being able to collaborate with others during the pandemic.
BEST SOLO LITERARY READING
Paul Giamatti, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” by Herman Melville. Emmy-winning, Oscar-nominated actor Paul Giamatti gives a wonderfully spry reading of Herman Melville’s classic story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” along with an in-depth analysis of the tale and the author with scholar Andrew Delbanco.
BEST VIRTUAL REIMAGINING OF A SHORT STORY
Theater in Quarantine, Footnote for the End of Time. Joshua William Gelb’s endlessly creative use of his closet continued with this retelling of Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Secret Miracle,” in which Gelb narrated the tale of Jewish writer Jaromir Hladik as the Nazis take over Prague, with live black on white and red drawing by Jesse Gelaznik, music by Alex Weston (performed by Rob Walker on clarinet, Alex Weill on violin, Susan Mandel on cello, and Weston on piano) inspired by Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, and movement by Katie Rose McLaughlin, directed by Jonathan Levin
BEST POETRY READING
Theater of War, “Poetry for the Pandemic.” Theater of War moved away from its virtual readings of classic works to bring together established poets and National Student Poets for an evening of readings in which each young poet read a piece by an older poet and vice versa, with both onscreen to watch and listen, along with contributions from Bill Murray and Tracie Thoms, followed by a discussion.
BEST VIDEO POEM The Baptism, written and performed by Carl Hancock Rux, directed by Carrie Mae Weems. Commissioned by Lincoln Center, Carl Hancock Rux’s tribute to John Lewis and C. T. Vivian, a sharecropper’s son and the boy from Boonville, features lush videography of scenes from nature by Herman Jean-Noel, James Wang, and Ermanno de Biagi, music by Brian Eno, and such text as “The lifeblood of transition, one city to the next city, story upon story, house upon house, our wanting always cleaning the air, nourishing the soil of insistence. Every being is a building with music — grace upon grace upon grace.”
BEST TWO-STAGE BOOK LAUNCH
Chuck Palahniuk, The Invention of Sound,Garden District Book Shop. New Orleans’s Garden District Book Shop had difficulty getting Chuck Palahniuk to join the Zoom launch for his latest novel, The Invention of Sound, so the first try turned into a gossipfest with fans talking amongst themselves, displaying singed copies, treats won at the author’s famed in-person events, and Chuck tattoos; the rescheduled evening was a fascinating journey inside the mind of Palahniuk, who has also written such books as Fight Club and Invisible Monsters.
BEST MUSEUM GALA “Frick on the Move,” the Frick. In addition to appearances by Rosanne Cash, Maira Kalman, Nico Muhly, Aimee Ng, Simon Schama, and others, the Frick’s virtual gala was highlighted by a new edition of “Cocktails with a Curator” with Xavier F. Salomon and a sneak peek behind the scenes of the Frick Madison with director Ian Wardropper.
BEST ARTS MARATHON
Yoshiko Chuma, Love Story, the School of Hard Knocks, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. Yoshiko Chuma celebrated the fortieth anniversary of her collective with an extraordinary live, twenty-four-hour virtual presentation incorporating dance, film, discussion, music, art, and just about anything else you could think of.
BEST SOCIOCULTURAL MULTIDISCIPLINARY PROGRAM Unfinished Live. Host Baratunde Thurston led audiences through unique explorations of “Economy & Justice,” “Democracy & Voice,” “Technology & Humanity,” and “Questions, Culture & Change,” with contributions from Abigail Disney, Julián Castro, Yo-Yo Ma, Carrie Mae Weems, Hank Willis Thomas, Alfredo Jaar, Andrew Yang, Nadya Tolokonnikova, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Alicia Garza, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Anna Deavere Smith, Bruce Springsteen, and others, along with a live, interactive chat.
BEST FUTURISTIC INTERACTIVE EXPERIENCE “EdgeCut,” New York Live Arts. In “Captivity” and “Sanity,” EdgeCut used the Nowhere platform, placing each attendee in an oval pod they steer through fantastical landscapes to watch short presentations (dance, art installations, experimental technology demos, music videos) and talk to other viewers and the creators themselves; I’ve tried just about every form of online entertainment while we’re all sheltering in place and arts venues are closed, and nothing else comes close to this one, even given various hiccups that require patience.
Philip Guston, Scared Stiff, oil on canvas, 1970 (courtesy of the Estate of Philip Guston and Hauser & Wirth)
There’s been much heated discussion in art circles about the postponement of a major Philip Guston exhibition for ideological reasons. Initially scheduled to open at the National Gallery this past June, it was delayed because of the pandemic to February 2021 at the Tate Modern in London. But then the retrospective, which was also set to travel to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, was put on the shelf until 2024 over concerns that some of Guston’s fabled imagery involving cartoonish Ku Klux Klan characters in white hoods would be misunderstood in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and other current sociopolitical issues. In a statement, the National Gallery explained, “We are postponing the exhibition until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted.
“We recognize that the world we live in is very different from the one in which we first began to collaborate on this project five years ago. The racial justice movement that started in the U.S. and radiated to countries around the world, in addition to challenges of a global health crisis, have led us to pause.
“Collectively and individually, we remain committed to Philip Guston and his work. We plan to rebuild the retrospective with time to reconsider the many important issues the work raises.”
Impassioned debate ensued among art-world cognoscenti, including cries of censorship and extreme political correctness. The four institutions ultimately decided to move the exhibit to 2022 with extensive signage placing some of Guston’s images in contemporary context, which of course makes sense for almost any retrospective, especially one called ‘Philip Guston Now.’ But the controversy got me thinking about how we see art in 2020 and beyond, since these questions would not have been front and center for the Guston show prior to the events of this year.
So I visited several New York City museums to investigate whether it is still possible to look at art through a 2019 lens. For good or bad, it’s not. Will it ever be? Should it ever? Let’s go.
Héctor Zamora’s Lattice Detour is an artistic intervention on the Met roof (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s blockbuster exhibition “Making the Met, 1870–2020,” which was planned and partially installed prior to the pandemic lockdown, opens with an advisory note:
“In June, in the wake of the violent deaths of George Floyd and other Black Americans at the hands of the police and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests, the Met joined the nationwide call for justice. As a first step, the museum released a series of antiracism commitments, covering all of its activities, from programming to further diversifying our staff, with the goal of fostering an environment of equity, inclusivity, and dialogue.
“These events have intensified our reflections about the museum’s role in society, some of which resulted in updated and expanded texts for the show. Looking forward, we believe this moment will inspire institutional change and create new forms of engagement in the latest chapter of our history, which begins now, in 2020.”
Héctor Zamora’s Roof Garden Commission at the Met, Lattice Detour, was also well under way prior to the pandemic, but new perspectives now emanate from it as a result of what New York City has undergone since mid-March, when arts institutions, restaurants, office buildings, and other indoor venues were shut down — many of which are still closed or operating at limited capacity, as the Met is. Lattice Detour is a curved wall, echoing Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, running across much of the Met roof. The structure is composed of hollow terracotta bricks that were inspired by the celosia of Zamora’s childhood in Mexico City, building elements with geometric patterns that allow in light and ventilation. Thus, you can stand on either side of the wall and see through it; as interventionist sculpture — it is more than a hundred feet in length and eleven feet high — it blocks the usual view of Central Park and the south and west skylines, but you can still see through the bricks and take in the sun.
The only way to get to the roof is via one specific elevator, which often has a long line. For those visitors who are avoiding elevators, you’re out of luck, but there’s a maximum of two people for every trip, and I was fortunate enough to be able to go up by myself. Inside the Met, everyone is wearing masks and trying to maintain social distancing as they go room to room, some of which can get significantly more crowded than others. So the Roof Garden usually is, quite literally, a breath of fresh air, even with masks still on. But in this case, instead of being welcomed by a lovely vista of blue and green, you are instantly constricted by a large reddish-brown object blocking access to part of the space, evoking how much of New York is closed off to us.
“I find that the architecture of New York is largely designed to block the view, not to let you see in,” Zamora says in the exhibition brochure. “I think a lot about the social and legal rules that make public space inhabitable for everyone, and about their inflexibility, since those rules create an area that is totally alienated and uninhabitable for people, one where the sense of freedom is increasingly constrained. At a time when the limits imposed by political, economic, ideological, and institutional systems are restricting the freedom and rights of cultures, I propose a reflection based on what it means to build a permeable curved wall in a such a significant space for culture and history. Could it be that it is too late to try to reverse what we have decided or to unlock all those barriers that are petrifying us in the face of the need to make decisions?”
But perhaps more important than all that is how instantly pleasing Lattice Detour is, how it invites us into its space, draws us into its spell. Most visitors snap away with their cameraphones without thinking about the overtly political commentary involving Mexico, the United States, and legal and illegal immigration; does it matter, as long as the work itself engages us?
Jordan Casteel’s “Within Reach” at the New Museum features dozens of portraits of BIPOC men, women, and children (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
JORDAN CASTEEL: WITHIN REACH PETER SAUL: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
New Museum
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 3, $12-$18 www.newmuseum.org
At the New Museum, thirty-one-year-old Denver native Jordan Casteel’s first solo museum retrospective, “Within Reach,” consists primarily of more than three dozen glorious large-scale portraits of BIPOC men, women, and children. Her subjects are friends, family, and people she knows from the neighborhood or encounters on the street; each portrait is made from a photograph that Casteel re-creates as faithfully as possible. “I’m not imagining or adding language, props, or a symbology that wasn’t already there,” she notes in an online conversation with Hanya Yanagihara, which you can watch here.
Many of the works, which are named after the subjects — most of whom look back directly at the viewer, taking possession of the gaze — date from the 2013–14 series “Visible Man” and 2017’s “Nights in Harlem” in addition to more recent paintings of her students at Rutgers University-Newark. Cansuela sits on her bed, holding a stuffed panda. Jenna is poised on some rocks in a garden. Lourdes and Karina hold each other while sharing a chair. In individual portraits, Jiréh, Devan (emulating Egon Schiele), Elijah, Jerome, and Jonathan are all nude, sitting on couches, chairs, or beds.
In the interview, she continues, “The images for me become the catalyst that I don’t want to ignore, that there is a clear guideline for who this person is and what is important to them that I need to honor. But with that, I am also acknowledging my relationship to them. . . . I just don’t allow myself a whole lot of room to imagine who they are; I try to see them for who they are as they presented themselves to me and reflect back my experience of them.”
Painted with great skill by Casteel detailing every muscle, every facial gesture, every background furthering her anthropological style, the works recall August Sander’s People of the 20th Century, in which the German photographer sought to document as much of humankind as he possibly could. But in the twenty-first century, and particularly in post–George Floyd America, is it possible to see portraits of Black bodies without thinking of the many Black victims of police brutality? It clearly is not Casteel’s intent; she is celebrating each person’s uniqueness, who they are at this very moment, not who or what they may be later. It might be my own white fragility or oversensitivity, but Miles and Jojo, their skin tinted an alluring blue, do not look happy, staring out at us with accusation. One of the only canvases without a human figure is Memorial, in which a ribboned flower wreath is balanced over a garbage can on a street corner. I can’t help but connect Memorial with Miles and Jojo and the portraits throughout the rest of the exhibit, or with photographs I see in the news of murdered Black and brown men, women, and children, one after the other.
It’s also hard not to prescribe some kind of current sociopolitical bent to the works when seen in contrast to the New Museum’s other major current show, “Peter Saul: Crime and Punishment.” There is no subtlety in the eighty-six-year-old California-born, New York–based Saul’s approximately five dozen works, large-scale cartoonish paintings going back to 1963 that feature wild depictions of Mickey Mouse, Superman, George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Angela Davis, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Newt Gingrich, Kim Jong-un, John Wayne Gacy, and Donald Trump, among others, as Saul shares his ferocious opinions on wealth, power, class, race, religion, and ethnocentrism. Many of the titles hold nothing back as well: GI Christ, Saigon, Yankee Garbage, Human Dignity, Stupid Argument, Washington Crossing the Delaware, and President Trump Becomes a Wonder Woman, Unifies the Country, and Fights Rocket Man. Even the name of the show, “Crime and Punishment,” evokes the relationship of police, the law, and citizens; I thought of how often white officers are not arrested, tried, and/or convicted for the killing of Black and brown people, considering whether they feel even the slightest bit of the guilt that overwhelms Raskolnikov.
David Hockney’s “Drawing from Life” at the Morgan Library includes digital portraits (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
DAVID HOCKNEY: DRAWING FROM LIFE BETYE SAAR: CALL AND RESPONSE
Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Ave. at 36th St.
Wednesday – Sunday through January 31 (Saar) and May 30 (Hockney), $13-$22 www.themorgan.org
Echoing the words of Jordan Casteel, eighty-three-year-old British artist David Hockney says about his latest exhibition, “Drawing from Life,” at the Morgan Library: “I always think the world is full of variety, and it should be reflected in my art ’cause I see it that way. When I get to know people, you see more in the face. Everything, even the smallest sketch, involves the human heart.” The two-gallery show comprises some 125 self-portraits and portraits on paper of a handful of friends, family, and colleagues from the 1950s to today, comprising multiple depictions over the years of fashion designer Celia Birtwell; Hockney’s mother, Laura; curator Gregory Evans; master printer Maurice Payne; and the artist himself. The works reveal Hockney’s development as an exquisite draughtsman and colorist, even as he moves from paper to Polaroid collages and the iPhone and iPad.
It’s exciting to follow the same figures thorugh the decades, to see them as Hockney sees them across eras of change. Yet I couldn’t help but imagine whether Casteel would be able to do the same thing, if she were ever so inclined, to revisit James, Charles, Stanley, Harold, or Q in ten or twenty or fifty years, since their life expectancy differs greatly from that of white British elites. Just check the actuarial tables. And the daily paper.
Meanwhile, upstairs at the Morgan, ninety-four-year-old LA-based Betye Saar’s “Call and Response” gets right to the point, a series of powerful assemblages and installations that confront race in America by overturning and reclaiming traditional imagery. Accompanied by the first public display of her sketchbooks, the show features such seminal works as Serving Time, a metal bird cage with locks, keys, and human figures; Supreme Quality, in which Aunt Jemima is holding a pair of pistols; A Loss of Innocence, a white dress covered in racial epithets, hanging over a small chair, a shadow on the wall adding a ghostly quality; and Still Ticking, consisting of more than a dozen stopped or broken clocks. Time might have run out on many, but Saar keeps on fighting the status quo with her artistic genius and innate ability to tell stories using found objects.
VIDA AMERICANA: MEXICAN MURALISTS REMAKE AMERICAN ART, 1925–1945
Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort St.
Thursday – Monday through January 31, $18-$25 whitney.org
One of the key campaign promises Donald Trump made when running for president in 2015–16 was to build a wall across the southern border of the United States in order to keep out Mexicans. “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists — and some, I assume, are good people,” he famously said.
Continuing through January 31 at the Whitney, “Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945” is an expertly curated exhibit of nearly two hundred works by more than sixty Mexican and American artists that highlights the influence the former had on the latter. Curator Barbara Haskell writes in the catalog, “By portraying social and political subject matter with a pictorial vocabulary that celebrated the country’s pre-Hispanic traditions, the murals invested the age-old technique of fresco painting with a bold new vitality that rivaled the avant-garde trends sweeping through Europe, while at the same time establishing a new relationship between art and the public by telling stories that were relevant to ordinary women and men. Nothing in the United States compared.” The show might focus on art from seventy-five to ninety-five years ago, but it goes a long way to humanizing a culture that has been demonized by America’s current administration (as does Zamora’s Lattice Detour).
Among the standouts are Alfredo Ramos Martínez’s Calla Lily Vendor (Vendedora de Alcatraces), a portrait of a woman in long braids carrying several dozen giant lilies on her back, in front of a cubist background; Diego Rivera’s Lower Panel of Detroit Industry, North Wall, part of a massive mural created for the Detroit Institute of the Arts depicting men at work in a factory; David Alfaro Siqueiros’s haunting Echo of a Scream, in which a child cries out amid a massacre; and José Clemente Orozco’s Landscape of Peaks, with sharp objects forging a path to nowhere.
Divided into such sections as “Romantic Nationalism and the Mexican Revolution,” “Epic Histories,” “Rivera and the New Deal,” and “Art as Political Activism,” the works, which are placed in context alongside pieces by such American artists as Jacob Lawrence, Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, Edward Weston, Aaron Douglas, Thomas Hart Benton, Philip Evergood, Jackson Pollock, Ben Shahn, and Guston — several of whom are also represented in Jonathan Horowitz’s show at the Jewish Museum (see below) — have a contemporary relevance that speaks to what is happening between America and Mexico today, Black, white, and brown bodies caught up in a whirling maelstrom of change. Trump’s slurs against Mexicans only help to fuel a fierce urgency that hovers over it all.
Time and space are key to Donald Judd exhibit at MoMA (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
JUDD
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through January 9, $14-$25 www.moma.org
Even art that is not political in any way feels different now. In his 1987 “Statement for the Chinati Foundation,” the art museum he founded in Marfa, Texas, Donald Judd wrote, “It takes a great deal of time and thought to install work carefully. This should not always be thrown away. Most art is fragile and some should be placed and never moved again. Somewhere a portion of contemporary art has to exist as an example of what the art and its context were meant to be. Somewhere, just as the platinum-iridium meter guarantees the tape measure, a strict measure must exist for the art of this time and place.” MoMA’s “Judd” retrospective was installed prior to the pandemic, but it is tailor-made for this time and place of social distancing. Exhibition curator Ann Temkin noted in a MoMA “Virtual Views” video in April that his works are “the original self-distancers.”
More than sixty pieces are spread across the sixth floor, from oils, drawings, and woodcuts to boxes, wall progressions, and other objects — along with his famed rejection of the word “minimalist” when referring to his work, he was no fan of “sculpture” either — composed of anodized and enameled aluminum, cold- and hot-rolled steel, plexiglass, plywood, copper, galvanized iron, and other materials, often in bright, distinct colors. Not only are the pieces themselves situated far enough apart from one another that you can have private time with each, particularly as long as MoMA is observing limited capacity restrictions, but the items contain their own unique positive and negative space in Judd’s use of form, shape, and color. You can’t walk between the twenty-one small and shiny stainless-steel squares lined up in three rows on the floor, but you are invited to wander among a series of large anodized aluminum clear boxes and peer inside to see panels of color.
The spaces in between and within are essential to experiencing Judd’s oeuvre, from his familiar vertical stacks that rise from floor to ceiling, the evenly spaced intervals as integral as the physical segments; to six plywood boxes constructed at an angle that seems to produce an optical illusion, taunting you to step inside; to narrow, horizontal enameled aluminum wall units in multiple colors that that are sometimes hollow in the center, allowing you to look through them; to Douglas Fir plywood and orange plexiglass pieces that resemble unfinished shelving crying out to be stocked with dry goods.
There is no obvious path to follow as you traverse the exhibition, lending an ease and comfort to how you interact with Judd’s organically infectious objects, offering personal time with each, although the security guard will be quick to warn you if you get too close to anything. In the 1994 documentary Bauhaus, Texas: The American Artist Donald Judd, released the year he died at the age of sixty-five, Judd said, “There is no space as in something that continues throughout everywhere, and that there is no time that goes on and on and on and is something all by itself. They’re made by something happening in them, in the case of time, or by something existing in them, in the case of space. But the time and space in themselves are just the way we feel about it.”
Jonathan Horowitz takes on racism and anti-Semitism in “We Fight to Build a Free World” at the Jewish Museum (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
WE FIGHT TO BUILD A FREE WORLD: AN EXHIBITION BY JONATHAN HOROWITZ
The Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Ave. at Ninety-Second St.
Thursday – Monday through January 24, free through December 31 thejewishmuseum.org
In his introduction to “We Fight to Build a Free World,” which was nearly fully installed prior to the pandemic lockdown, fifty-four-year-old New York multimedia artist and curator Jonathan Horowitz explains, “Today violent acts against Jewish people in the United States are at a historic level. Continuing a trend of the past five years, 2019 represented the highest number of anti-Semitic hate crimes since the Anti-Defamation League began tracking them in 1979. This drastic rise in incidents — and it should be noted that hate crimes are vastly underreported — is not limited to Jewish people. Violence against Black, Muslim, Latinx, and LGBTQ individuals has increased alarmingly over the same period as well, often in acts the government does not designate as hate crimes. For instance, Black people in the United States are killed by police at three times the rate of white people, and 2020 is on pace to have the most police killings of Black people since 2013.
“Clearly, the rise in anti-Semitism is part of a broader political and cultural scourge. Ethno-nationalism has become a dominant political force in the United States, as it has around the globe. The current crop of authoritarian leaders and their xenophobic rhetoric call to mind Europe in the 1930s. It is within this broader context that I chose to think about the show.” The museum added the following note in response to the murder of George Floyd, making an already relevant exhibit that much more timely: “There is an intensifying awareness at this moment of how systemic racism functions at all levels of society. In the wake of these dramatic events, the topics and questions raised by this exhibition are seen in a new light and with ever-greater urgency.”
Named after a painting by Ben Shahn that is part of the exhibit, “We Fight to Build a Free World” features approximately eighty works that deal with social justice, bigotry, fascism, racist violence, slavery, economic inequality, and BIPOC empowerment. It ranges from Gerardus Duyckinck’s 1720–28 portrait of Jewish American painter-craftsman Moses Levy to thirty-six political posters commissioned for the show, making such statements as “Our Planet Can’t Wait,” “Using Sign Language Will Make You a Better Person,” “We Are Ruined by the Things We Kill,” and “Every Age Has Its Own Fascism,” by such artists as Judith Bernstein, Tania Bruguera, Marilyn Minter, Sue Coe, Xaviera Simmons, and Marcel Dzama.
Glenn Ligon repeats “I Do Not Always Feel Colored” over and over on a wooden board until the words become distorted. Gordon Parks’s American Gothic, Washington, D.C. Government Charwoman replaces Grant Wood’s painting of a white midwestern farm couple with the photo of a Black woman standing in front of the American flag and holding a broom and a mop. Robert Colescott reimagines a seminal historical moment in George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook, recalling Saul’s twist on the same subject at the New Museum. Philip Evergood’s The Hundredth Psalm painting of four Klansmen lynching a Black man over a fire takes us right back around to Guston, bringing all of the above exhibitions full circle. (Now if only they would turn down the volume on Horowitz’s #OscarsSoWhite Best Picture two-channel video, which echoes annoyingly and repetitively throughout the floor.)
Horowitz’s show was created as a direct rejoinder to what is happening under the Trump administration — as evidenced by Untitled (August 23, 2017 – February 18, 2018, Charlottesville, VA), a sculpture that purports to be a black tarp covering the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville — but even it can be seen through new eyes in relation to the BLM protests against police brutality and the internal and external hatred and suppression promoted openly by the federal government. One of Horowitz’s 2020 pieces is titled What Am I? Who Are We?; the two-part work consists of an enlarged reproduction of anti-Nazi propagandist Arthur Szyk’s 1946 drawing Pilgrims, which contains a Jewish star, a menorah, two ships, and the Hebrew phrase “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” next to a mirror on which is screenprinted the rest of the quote: “If I am only for myself, what am I?”
As the end of 2020 nears, one of the most challenging years in American history, those are questions that artists, curators, and museumgoers will be asking for a long time to come.
Architectural model for David Hammons’s Day’s End sits outside related exhibition at the Whitney (Catherine Seavitt and Rennie Jones of Guy Nordenson and Associates, 2017 / photograph by Ron Amstutz)
Who: Elena Filipovic, Frances Richard, Judith Rodenbeck, Randal Wilcox, Laura Phipps What: Online discussion about “Around Day’s End: Downtown New York 1970-1986” exhibition Where:Whitney Museum of American Art Zoom When: Thursday, October 15, free with advance RSVP, 6:00; Tuesday, October 27, free with advance RSVP, 6:30 Why: In 1975, land artist and anarchitecture specialist Gordon Matta-Clark deconstructed an abandoned industrial building on Pier 52 on the Manhattan riverfront, cutting into the walls, doors, and floors and turning it into a unique kind of performance art piece, at least until the police shut it down and arrested him. You can watch Matta-Clark’s twenty-three-minute silent film about the project, which he called a “temple to sun and water,” here. American artist David Hammons is revisiting Matta-Clark’s intervention, known as Day’s End, by constructing his own version on the same site for the Whitney, which is right across the street. It is expected to be completed in December; in the meantime, the Whitney is presenting “Around Day’s End: Downtown New York 1970-1986,” a small show in the first-floor gallery that explores art depicting the waterfront area at the time, when it was known as a gay cruising hotspot. Among the photographs, drawings, sculpture, video, and paintings in the exhibition, which continues through November 1, are Dawoud Bey’s David Hammons, Pissed Off performance photos, Christo’s Package on Hand Truck, Joan Jonas’s Songdelay video, Martha Rosler’s The Bowery photo and text series, David Wojnarowicz and Kiki Smith’s Untitled (Psychiatric Clinic: Department of Hospitals), Anton van Dalen’s Street Woman on Car, Peter Hujar’s Canal Street Piers: Fake Men on the Stairs, and Carol Goodden’s documentation of Matta-Clark’s Jacks, in addition to works by Alvin Baltrop, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jimmy Wright, and G. Peter Jemison and a vitrine of proposed projects for Pier 18 from Mel Bochner, Robert Morris, William Wegman, Richard Serra, Harry Shunk, János Kender, and Matta-Clark.
On October 15 at 6:00, the Whitney is hosting a virtual discussion about the exhibit, focusing on Baltrop, Hammons, Jonas, and Matta-Clark, with Elena Filipovic, author of David Hammons: Bliz-aard Ball Sale; Frances Richard, author of Gordon Matta-Clark: Physical Poetics; Judith Rodenbeck, associate professor and chair of media & cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside; and Randal Wilcox, who worked with Baltrop and is a trustee of the Alvin Baltrop Trust. The free Zoom talk will be moderated by assistant curator Laura Phipps, who organized the show with senior curatorial assistant Christie Mitchell. Phipps and Mitchell follow that up October 27 at 6:30 with the Zoom discussion “Community Conversation: Around Day’s End,” teaming up with the Hudson River Park Trust, the Meatpacking Business Improvement District, and Manhattan’s Community Board 2 to look at the project from a different angle.
Hans Haacke’s 2014 Gift Horse is starting point for New Museum panel discussion (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Thursday, January 16, $10, 7:00
Exhibition continues through January 26
212-219-1222 www.newmuseum.org
Debate has raged across the country over public statues honoring figures who are now considered by many to be controversial, from Civil War leaders to doctors and presidents. Here in New York, there have been calls to take down James Earle Fraser’s statue of Theodore Roosevelt because of claims that Roosevelt was a white supremacist, and She Built NYC, organized to erect statues of pioneering women, refused to include Mother Frances Cabrini in their final list of subjects even though she garnered the most nominations in a public vote. (Governor Cuomo intervened; a statue of the saint will go up in Battery Park’s South Cove.) On January 16, the New Museum is hosting the panel discussion “The Plinth and Monumentality,” which will examine monument-making from multiple angles. The conversation, featuring artist and curator Kendal Henry of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, artist and Hunter College associate professor Paul Ramírez Jonas (whose “Half-Truths” ran at the museum last year), architect, designer, and educator J. Meejin Yoon, and moderator Andrew An Westover of the New Museum, is being held in conjunction with the museum’s current exhibition “Hans Haacke: All Connected,” a retrospective of the eighty-three-year-old German-born, New York-based artist who has been exploring the sociopolitical links between art and commerce, class, corporations, and the environment through photography, sculpture, and installation for more than half a century.
The centerpiece of the exhibit is Haacke’s 2014 Gift Horse, a large-scale sculpture of the skeleton of a horse mounted on a platform, taking up much of the fourth floor gallery space. An electronic bow around its frontal thighbone transmits a live digital printout of the FTSE 100 ticker of the New York Stock Exchange. Also on view is DER BEVÖLKERUNG [TO THE POPULATION], a provocative public project Haacke proposed for the Bundestag. In a catalog interview, Haacke notes, “I consider how the public might understand a work and whether it would, indeed, promote openness and democratic values or — to put it in French revolutionary terms — liberté, égalité, fraternité.”
Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort St.
Through January 5 (adults $25, eighteen and under free whitney.org
Atop his official website, Jason Moran identifies himself simply as “Musician.” As his retrospective at the Whitney reveals, he is much more than that. Born in Houston in January 1975, jazz pianist and composer Moran released his debut album, Soundtrack to Human Motion, twenty years ago and has expanded his horizons significantly since then. In addition to recording such discs as Facing Left, Same Mother, Artist in Residence, Bangs, and Looks of a Lot, many with his group, the Bandwagon, consisting of bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits, he collaborates with a bevy of visual artists, creates large-scale installations, and makes eye-catching drawings.
Jason Moran’s music-inspired drawings are a highlight of multidisciplinary show at the Whitney (photograph by Ron Amstutz)
The show, simply titled “Jason Moran,” is an eye-opening exploration of a multitalented artist, one of the most surprisingly delightful exhibits of the year. Upon entering the eighth floor, you encounter Moran’s “Run,” an ongoing series of works in which Moran tapes a sheet of paper, often a vintage player piano roll, over his piano, caps his fingers in charcoal and dry pigment of different colors, and plays the keyboard, resulting in horizontal abstract images that he gives such titles as Black and Blue Gravity and Two Wings 2. Screening on a loop in the far corner is Glenn Ligon’s The Death of Tom, what was supposed to be a re-creation of the final scene from Edison/Porter’s 1903 silent movie Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which white actors played the main characters in blackface, but it turned into something very different because Ligon improperly loaded the film, resulting in what he called “blurry, fluttery, burnt-out black-and-white images, all light and shadows.” Moran improvised the score based on Bert Williams and Alex Rogers’s 1905 song “Nobody,” a hit for the black vaudeville team of Williams and George Walker, who fought racism on the road and stereotypes in their live performances. The Death of Tom might not have been the film Ligon set out to make, but it still takes on the same ideas.
Jason Moran exhibition features room of large-scale installations and three-channel videos (photograph by Ron Amstutz)
The main room of the exhibit is a beaut, featuring a trio of sculptural installations inspired by the stages of historic New York City jazz clubs, Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, Midtown’s Three Deuces, and the Lower East Side’s Slugs’ Saloon. Three large screens show behind-the-scenes footage and/or full short films from ten of Moran’s collaborations, with such artists as Joan Jonas, Carrie Mae Weems, Adam Pendleton, Julie Mehretu, Ryan Trecartin, Lizzie Fitch, and Theaster Gates. In Lorna Simpson’s three-channel Chess, on two screens the artist plays chess in a mirrored room that makes it look like there are five of her; she’s dressed as a man in one, a woman in the other. Meanwhile, on the third screen, Moran plays the piano in a similarly mirrored space, improvising one of Brahms’s fifty-one exercises for piano. The black-and-white keyboard mimics the black-and-white chess sets as both Moran and Simpson display expert finger control.
Kara Walker’s National Archives Microfilm M999 Roll 34: Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands: Six Miles from Springfield on the Franklin Road is a thirteen-plus-minute full-color video using her trademark cut-paper silhouettes like shadow puppets to tell the story of brutal violence perpetrated against an African American family during the Reconstruction era. (On October 12, Moran and Walker teamed up for the New York premiere of her Katastwóf Karavan, in which he played a steam-powered calliope housed in Walker’s old-fashioned circus wagon adorned with cut-steel silhouettes depicting powerful slave scenes.) In between some of the videos are interludes in which improvisations by Moran emit from a player piano on the “Three Deuces” stage. On January 3 and 4, Tiger Trio, consisting of pianist Myra Melford, bassist Joëlle Léandre, and flutist Nicole Mitchell, will perform at the Whitney as part of the “Jazz on a High Floor in the Afternoon” program.
Finally, around a corner, Stan Douglas’s Luanda-Kinshasa brings together Jason Moran and a group of other musicians in a fictitious recording session in a reconstruction of Columbia’s 30th Street Studio, known as the Church, where between 1949 and 1981 such artists as Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Vladimir Horowitz, Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, and Miles Davis made albums. Inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s Rolling Stones concert film Sympathy for the Devil, Douglas films the band over two days in a 1970s-style setting, improvising as if this is a follow-up to Miles Davis’s 1971 album Live-Evil, part of which was recorded at the Church. Douglas himself improvises through the editing process, ending up with a six-hour jam session. Be sure to allow plenty of time to experience “Jason Moran,” an artistic jam session you won’t soon forget.
Whitney Museum of American Art
Pamella and Daniel DeVos Family Largo
99 Gansevoort St.
Saturday, October 12, free, 1:00 – 6:30 whitney.org www.karawalkerstudio.com
Two years ago, Kara Walker’s site-specific Katastwóf Karavan nearly didn’t make it to New Orleans’ Prospect.4 Triennial: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp because of disagreements over shipping costs. But it ultimately took its place on Algiers Point, and now the completely fabricated wagon will be pulling into the Pamella and Daniel DeVos Family Largo outside the Whitney, where it will perform for free from 1:00 to 6:30 on Saturday. The California-born, New York-based artist was inspired to construct the wagon after reading an insufficient, small historical plaque (see below) at Algiers Point identifying the location where enslaved Africans were “held before being ferried across the river to the Slave Auctions” as well as after hearing calliope music coming from the Natchez riverboat, a steamboat reminiscent of the kind used to transport the slaves. The four-wheeled, four-ton circus-style wagon features Walker’s trademark silhouette figures of slaves being abused by masters on all four sides in water-cut steel, with a loud, thirty-eight-note steam-powered calliope inside, custom made by Kenneth Griffard. The presentation is taking place in conjunction with jazz musician Jason Moran’s solo show at the Whitney, which continues through January 5; Texas native Moran will play the calliope at 6:00 on Saturday.
In the Prospect.4 performance handout, Walker, whose My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love ran at the Whitney in 2007-8, explained, “I was thinking a lot about music as the bearer of our emotional history, and about the way Jazz and gospel and African American Music are testaments to survival of our culture in the face of unrelenting, nihilistic ‘Progress’ and how it’s regarded as a monument in American History etc. But also thinking about how the Industrial Revolution, the Steam Engine and Cotton Gin were pivotal in usurping and grinding up the bodies of laborers and how much of that action, John Henry style, occurs today, with Humans fighting uphill battles to prove themselves against the latest technology. Steam engines are quaint things of the past, but industry presses on without us. The Machines have changed, but the action stays the same. How would it be if the old steam engines that ate us, swallowed too, our songs and pain, and what if, when its time was done, and slated for the scrapheap, the Steam Engine sang out in solidarity?”
Incorporating the Haitian Creole word for “catastrophe” in its name, Katastwóf Karavan — “We simply say ‘Slavery’ as if that were a legitimate job instead of what it was, a Catastrophe for millions,” Walker explains — will also play such civil-rights-era, celebratory, and protest songs as “We Shall Overcome,” Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?” Walker, whose Fons Americanus is currently wowing visitors at the Tate Modern and whose Domino Sugar Factory installation A Subtlety caused a sensation in New York five years ago, holds nothing back in her work, confronting racial prejudice and inadequate histories head-on. “Forgetting is preferable to remembering, as remembering stirs action,” she writes in the handout.
