Deana Lawson solo show at MoMA PS1 continues through September 5 (photo by Steven Paneccasio)
DEANA LAWSON
MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Ave. at 46th Ave.
Through September 5, $5-$10
718-784-2084
www.momaps1.org
One of the most powerful painting exhibitions I’ve seen in the last few years was Jordan Casteel’s “Within Reach” at the New Museum, which comprised more than three dozen large-scale portraits of BIPOC men, women, and children, each made as realistically as possible from a photograph. Deana Lawson’s eponymously titled solo show at MoMA PS1 recalls Casteel’s canvases in more than fifty large-scale, carefully staged photographs of acquaintances and strangers she has met in Africa and across the African diaspora, in what the Rochester-born artist calls “a mirror of everyday life.”
Deana Lawson, Roxie and Raquel, New Orleans, Louisiana, pigment print, 2010 (courtesy the artist, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., and David Kordansky, Los Angeles / © Deana Lawson)
In Black Gold (“Earth turns to gold, in the hands of the wise,” Rumi), a man stands in a dark alley, holding out several crosses on chains, a projection of a sharecropper behind him. In Coulson Family, a mother and her two sons pose in front of a small Christmas tree, one child looking away from the camera, smiling at an unseen source. In Nation, a pair of shirtless men, one pointing at the camera, the other heavily tattooed and wearing a complex facial piercing, sit on a brown leather couch. And in Uncle Mack, a man with a scar down his stomach and holding a rifle stands in the corner of a room, under a picture of his family. Meanwhile, in a corner at PS1, Lawson has arranged more than a hundred small, unframed photographs. She has also placed crystal assemblages throughout the space.
Deana Lawson adds special bonuses in many of the corners of MoMA PS1 solo show (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
“It’s about setting a different standard of values and saying that everyday Black lives, everyday experiences, are beautiful, and powerful, and intelligent,” Lawson has said, depicting “the majesty of Black life, a nuanced Black life, one that is by far more complex, deep, beautiful, celebratory, tragic, weird, strange.” It’s a stunning show, on view through September 5.