featured

FREE UPTOWN SHAKESPEARE IN THE PARK: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
Classical Theatre of Harlem
Richard Rodgers Amphitheater, Marcus Garvey Park
18 Mt. Morris Park W.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 28, free (advance RSVP recommended), 8:30
www.cthnyc.org

The Classical Theatre of Harlem (CTH) celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary with a rip-roaring adaptation of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, at the Richard Rodgers Amphitheater in Marcus Garvey Park through July 28.

The action shifts between a glitzy two-level club during the Harlem Renaissance and a fairy woodland that feels right at home in the park, amid the setting sun, the wind blowing through the trees, the sounds of the birds and insects, and, the evening I went, a few minutes of light rain that felt like fairy dust.

In the club setting, Theseus (Victor Williams), the duke of Athens, is preparing to wed Hippolyta (Jesmille Darbouze), the queen of the Amazons. He is approached by a nobleman, Egeus (Allen Gilmore), who has promised his daughter, Hermia (Ra’Mya Latiah Aikens), to Demetrius (Brandon Carter), but Hermia is in love with Lysander (Hiram Delgado); at the same time, Helena (Noah Michal) pines for Demetrius, who spurns her. Egeus invokes an ancient law in which Hermia either marries Demetrius or is put to death; Theseus attempts to circumvent that potential fate, with no success.

“Relent, sweet Hermia: and, Lysander, yield / Thy crazed title to my certain right,” Demetrius declares, but Lysander, taking the argument lightly, responds, “You have her father’s love, Demetrius; / Let me have Hermia’s: why not marry him?”

Ultimately, Theseus, against his personal preference, rules in favor of Egeus, giving Hermia three options: accept Demetrius’s hand, be exiled as a nun, or suffer execution. “Then I will die if these are my choices, / But I will never consent to marry a man I love not,” she concludes.

Hermia and Lysander decide to run away together; they share their plan with Helena, who betrays them, believing, “My love for Demetrius is so strong it makes me weak! / And in the woods my true love I will seek!”

In those very woods, a troupe of amateur actors known as the rude mechanicals are rehearsing a play they will be putting on for the duke and queen’s wedding, the tale of doomed lovers Pyramus and Thisbe from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The cast features weaver Nick Bottom (Jaylen D. Eashmond) as Pyramus, bellows-mender Francis Flute (León Tak) as Thisbe, joiner Snug (Olivia London) as the lion, tinker Tom Snout (Carson Elrod) as the wall, and tailor Robin Starveling (Deidre Staples) as Moonshine, directed by carpenter Peter Quince (Allen Gilmore). All serve as comic relief, as their rehearsals do not go very smoothly.

Meanwhile, Oberon (Williams) and Titania (Darbouze), the king and the queen of the fairies, are looking forward to attending the wedding but they are in the middle of a fight over a young boy (Langston Cofield) they have taken in.

Oberon has his hobgoblin, the sprite Puck (Mykal Gilmore), fetch a purple flower whose juices, when dripped on a sleeping creature’s eyes, make them fall in love with the first living thing they see when they awaken. To prank his wife, Oberon does so with Titania and orders Puck to drizzle the juice on the eyes of Demetrius so he will love Helena, but Puck makes a mistake, and soon Lysander is mad for Helena, Titania is cuddling with a donkey-headed Bottom, and there is chaos everywhere.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream was previously performed by CTH at the Richard Rodgers Amphitheater in 2013; this new production sparkles under the direction of Carl Cofield. The club scenes include fanciful dancing expertly choreographed by Dell Howlett, using both levels of Christopher and Justin Swader’s glittering set, lit with excitement by Alan C. Edwards; a large ensemble, dressed in Mika Eubanks’s colorful period costumes, shakes and bakes to the Jazz Age score. (The hot sound and music are by Frederick Kennedy, with projections of the moon, forest, and other elements by Brittany Bland.)

Cofield focuses on the importance of eyes in Shakespeare’s romantic comedy. Early on, Hermia says, “I would my father looked but with my eyes,” to which Theseus replies, “Rather your eyes must see things as your father sees them!” Helena opines, “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; / And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.” In the play-within-the-play, Pyramus, upon encountering something that does not please him, cries, “What dreadful sorrow is here! / Eyes, do you see?” And Bottom, waiting for a cue, says, “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.” When Oberon and Puck use the flower juice, there are giant projections of eyes.

The nightclub scenes burst with life, and everything involving the four lovers is spirited fun. Aikens, Delgado, Michal, and Carter are a formidable quartet, Gilmore is a delightful Puck (and revels master Philostrate), and Williams and Darbouze bring a regal posture to the proceedings. However, the rude mechanicals cannot maintain the pace, occasionally dragging down the momentum. Several scenes go on too long, and the acting is more scattershot, led by an over-the-top, repetitive performance by Eashmond, who alternates as Bottom with comedian Russell Peters. But there is more than enough merriment to make that a minor quibble.

This Midsummer Night’s Dream is just the right play to set your eyes upon to make an already lovely midsummer night that much more dreamy.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

LEGENDS & LEGACIES: ELEVENTH ANNUAL STooPS BED-STUY ART CRAWL AND BLOCK PARTY

STooPS 2024 SUMMER FESTIVAL
Stuyvesant Ave. & Decatur St., Brooklyn
Saturday, July 27, free (advance registration recommended), 1:00 – 7:00
www.stoopsbedstuy.org
www.eventbrite.com

The eleventh annual STooPS Arts Crawl and Block Party takes place July 27 from 1:00 to 7:00, with live music and dance, spoken word, workshops, theater, and visual art on the stoops and shared spaces of Bedford–Stuyvesant. This year’s theme is “Legends & Legacies,” honoring the history of the community. Among the legacies participants are textile artist Aaliyah Maya, singer-songwriters Amma Whatt and YahZarah, poets Carmin Wong, Kai Diata Giovanni, and Keys Will, storyteller Christine Sloan Stoddard, musicians BSTFRND, DJ Toni B, and Zardon Za’, dancer-choreographer Kendra J. Bostock, healer Renee Kimberly Smith, and artists Ladie Ovila Lemon (Mūt’ Sun) and Shanna Sabio. Representing the legends are Black Girl Magic Row; Monique Greenwood of Akwaaba Mansion; Sincerely, Tommy founders Kai Avent-deLeon, Mama Jelani deLeon, and Ms. Doreen deLeon; Chief Baba Neil Clarke; Ms. Cathy Suarez of the Decatur St. Block Association; and organizer and educator Lumumba Akinwole-Bandele of the East.

“STooPS is a living legacy — the bridge that connects the artists, movements, organizations, and neighbors who transformed Bed-Stuy into a Black Cultural Hub with the new artists, residents, and visitors in order to forge the future of this neighborhood and Black culture,” STooPS founding director Bostock said in a statement. “For our 2024 annual summer festival we honor the national and hyperlocal hero/sheros and imagine and inspire their posterity with our theme, Bed-Stuy: Legends and Legacies.“

The festivities begin at 1:00 with a block party lasting all afternoon, including a Kiddie Korner; there will be art crawls at 1:30 and 4:30, led by playwright and poet Wong. All events are free but advance registration is recommended.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

PAM TANOWITZ DANCE: DAY FOR NIGHT

Three-part Day for Night goes from daylight to dusk to evening (photo by Liz Devine)

DAY FOR NIGHT
The Amph at Little Island
Pier 55, Hudson River Park at West Thirteenth St.
July 17-21, $15 standing room, $25 seats sold out, 8:30
littleisland.org
www.pamtanowitzdance.org

Little Island’s inaugural season of site-specific commissions continues with Bronx-born choreographer Pam Tanowitz’s Day for Night, which blends beautifully with the surroundings of the outdoor Amph theater. As the audience makes its way past the grassy green hills that leads to the venue, the dancers are scattered along the path, offering a prologue, clad in diaphanous green costumes. As the audience is being seated in the Amph’s wooden rows, the sun is setting over the Hudson, a golden glow that evokes the title of the show, the term used when a film is shooting a nighttime scene during the day.

The sixty-minute piece was inspired by François Truffaut’s 1973 film, Day for Night, which goes behind the scenes of the making of a movie, featuring a British actress (Jacqueline Bisset) who has recently suffered a nervous breakdown, an aging French star (Jean-Pierre Aumont), an Italian diva (Valentina Cortese), and a young French actor (Jean-Pierre Léaud); Truffaut portrays the harried director.

The dance begins with Lindsey Jones, Marc Crousillat, and Maile Okamura forming an extended pony-stepping trio in which various emotions boil to the surface, including jealousy, power, and revenge. They are later joined by Morgan Amirah and Brian Lawson, who peer out over the river, in addition to Sarah Elizabeth Miele and Victor Lozano. In all black, Melissa Toogood delivers an impressive solo, looking serious and concerned.

The dancers move up the aisles, climb to a pair of scaffold balconies, and rest on the first row of benches, which is covered in fake green grass. They jump, run around in a circle, and lie down on the empty stage. The soundtrack features gentle tones as well as harsher drones, accompanied by recordings of the natural environment of Little Island, from birds and wind to lapping waves, human murmurings, and traffic. When the BBC’s Shipping Forecast plays over the sound system, I initially thought it was coming from a boat passing in the distance. (The immersive sound and music are by Justin Ellington.)

Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung’s costumes come in multiple colors echoing the environs, with loose-fitting tops and tighter bottoms; old-fashioned striped swimming trunks provide contrast to the vertical picket fence bordering the water. Lighting designer Davison Scandrett blasts out red, orange, yellow, blue, green, and almost blinding white.

Tanowitz, who has previously choreographed such works as I Was Waiting for the Echo of a Better Day, Law of Mosaics, and Four Quartets, for such companies as New York City Ballet, the Royal Ballet, Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, Ballet Austin, and her own Pam Tanowitz Dance, teases the audience with a series of false endings and bows before everyone moves over to the Glade, where Toogood, in silver sequins, dances a forceful epilogue to Caroline Shaw and Sö Percussion’s slow, elegiac cover of ABBA’s “Lay All Your Love on Me,” in which Shaw nearly whispers, “Don’t go wasting your emotion / Lay all your love on me / Don’t go sharing your devotion / Lay all your love on me.”

“Cinema is king!” Truffaut’s character says in Day for Night. On Little Island right now, it’s dance that rules.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

MODERNISM, INC.: THE ELIOT NOYES DESIGN STORY

Modernism, Inc. subject Eliot Noyes is hard at work in his New Canaan office (courtesy of the Pedro Guerrero Estate)

MODERNISM, INC. (Jason Cohn, 2023)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, July 19
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

“Good design is good business” was the mantra employed by architect Eliot Noyes, who, with IBM CEO Tom Watson Jr., helped rebrand the company through its public image from top to bottom, from its logo to the look of its products, creating a legacy that is still in evidence today.

Noyes’s career is detailed in Jason Cohn’s documentary Modernism, Inc., opening July 19 at IFC Center, with Cohn on hand for Q&As on Friday and Saturday night at the 6:50 screening.

The eighty-minute film skips over Noyes’s childhood, beginning with his disgruntlement with the old-fashioned ideas taught at Harvard in the 1930s. In 1937, he started studying with German American architect and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and never looked back. Noyes wanted to incorporate the reality of modern life, including social and economic problems, into his work. “Gropius pushed Noyes to see the continuity between art, architecture, and the design of everyday objects, what Gropius called the total theory of design,” narrator and French actor Sebastian Roché explains.

In 1939, Noyes, who was born in Boston in 1910, was hired as the first director of industrial design at the Museum of Modern Art, where he staged the important 1941 exhibition “Organic Design in Home Furnishings.” He enlisted in the Army Air Force during WWII, exploring the efficacy of using gliders in battle. He espoused his theory of design on the television program Omnibus. From 1947 to 1960, he wrote an influential column for Consumer Reports called “The Shape of Things.”

In 1956, one of his colleagues on the Pentagon’s glider project, Watson, brought him over to IBM to remake its corporate culture; Noyes refused to become a full-time employee, instead accepting the position of consultant director of design, working from his home in New Canaan, Connecticut, where he and his wife, Molly Weed, who contributed to many of his designs, raised four children: Eli, Fred, Meridee, and Derry. New Canaan became a hub for designers, as Marcel Breuer, Philip Johnson, Joe Johansen, and others soon moved into the exclusive suburb.

Eliot Noyes was IBM’s consultant director of design from 1954 to 1977 (courtesy of the Eliot Noyes Family)

“Eliot Noyes had quite a curious view of Modernism, a deep-seated belief that design could be at the core of building a future society,” design historian Alice Twemlow says in the film. Noyes’s designs, from the conversation chair, IBM Selectric, and large computers to logos for such companies as IBM, Mobil, Westinghouse, Pan Am, and Xerox to his unique houses, felt as new as free jazz and abstract expressionism, interweaving form and function. He collaborated with such industry luminaries as Charles Eames and Paul Rand, known as “Matisse on Madison Ave.” Not everything was successful; one notable failure was his bubble house.

Describing what went into constructing a house for her family in 1978, Lyn Chivvis, interviewed in her Noyes-designed kitchen with her husband, Arthur, tells Cohn, “El was able to talk to his clients, my parents and us, and find out, what do you need for your daily life? El developed the open-shelving idea. He actually measured the shelves for me. It doesn’t fit you. It doesn’t fit you, it doesn’t fit anyone else but me.”

Cohn also speaks with IBM design head Katrina Alcorn, Noyes biographer Gordon Bruce, IBM chief archivist Jamie Martin, University of Toronto architecture professor and historian John Harwood, IBM design manager Tom Hardy, design historian Thomas Hine, and Noyes’s children, integrating archival footage, home movies, industrial films, and old advertisements (the film was edited by Kevin Jones), accompanied by a sensitive score by Steven Emerson/Ever Studio.

Noyes’s career trajectory took a turn at the 1970 International Design Conference Aspen, which he headed, when the theme of design fusing with the environment was seized upon by counterculture activists to protest against corporate greed, the Vietnam War, and the misuse of natural resources by design firms. The conference was filmed by his son Eli and director Claudia Weil, who captured intense moments. “I’m not a political guy. I’m interested in making my points through my work,” the elder Noyes tells Oscar-winning graphic designer Saul Bass. (Eli, who died this past March at the age of eighty-one, had been nominated for an Oscar for his 1964 claymation short Clay or the Origin of Species.)

“The designers who were at Aspen, their consciousness was good design can change things. I think Eliot Noyes would profess this,” Chip Lord, the cofounder of the alternative architecture collective Ant Farm and a conference attendee, explains. “Good design makes a good product or a good branding. It is a form of change. But our critique was beyond that because it didn’t matter how well you designed a gigantic SUV if it’s just guzzling fuel.”

The conference changed Noyes; he resigned from the IDCA and spent more time with his family. His children note that they really didn’t get to know their father until his later years, including a particularly memorable trip together.

Noyes died in 1977 at the age of sixty-six; he may not be a household name, but his impact on the visual and architectural history of twentieth-century American culture is still unmistakable in corporations and households around the world.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

THE JOURNALS OF ADAM AND EVE: THE WORLD’S FIRST LOVE STORY

Hal Linden and Marilu Henner play Adam and Eve in new play at Sheen Center (photo by Paul Aphisit)

THE JOURNALS OF ADAM AND EVE
Loreto Theater, the Sheen Center for Thought & Culture
18 Bleecker St. at Elizabeth St.
Wednesday – Sunday through July 28, $39-$99
212-925-2812
www.sheencenter.org

In September 2022, nine-time Emmy-winning writer and producer Ed. Weinberger presented Two Jews, Talking at the Theatre at St. Clement’s, a two-character play in which television icons Hal Linden and Bernie Kopell played a pair of old Jewish men, first in the desert escaping slavery in Egypt, then sitting on a park bench, complaining about the state of the modern world.

Weinberger has followed that up with The Journals of Adam and Eve at the Sheen Center, a two-character play in which television icons Linden and Marilu Henner portray the planet’s first couple. The ninety-minute show is an adaptation of two short stories written by Mark Twain late in his career, 1904’s “Extracts from Adam’s Diary” and 1906’s “Eve’s Diary,” hilariously retold in the style of Borscht Belt comedians (and with a nod to John Milton’s Paradise Lost).

Although it is a staged reading with the actors at music stands, they know most of the lines, allowing them to gesticulate, whether speaking to the audience or to each other. They do regularly refer to the script, but only to pick up a word or phrase. Behind them, a projection of the sky turns from blue skies to clouds to the sun and the moon.

“Much to my amazement, I was born a full-grown man. How old exactly I never knew,” Adam says at the beginning. “But I was made on the sixth day after G-d created everything else in the world. I like to think of myself as G-d’s ‘big finish.’ After me, He rested.”

Discussing being the only man on Earth, Adam explains, “My first day was one damn thing after another. Figuring out what was edible and what was not. Which fruit to eat as is and which fruit I had to open or peel took serious concentration. My first banana almost choked me to death.” He discovers a pleasing herb that gives him the munchies, realizes that the figure looking back at him in a brook is himself, and wonders what the two dangling objects between his legs are for.

He is tasked with naming everything, but he fails miserably. He asks for an assistant, and G-d gives him Eve. “Now, there have been those — poets mostly — who have described our first meeting as ‘love at first sight.’ Nothing could be further from the truth,” he says. Eve responds, “You can say that again.” The gender wars have begun.

Eve is not so willing to accept G-d’s word as sacrosanct; she doesn’t believe that she was made from Adam’s rib, and she refuses to be Adam’s inferior. She declares, “Well, it just so happens that this living thing that ‘moveth’ is not one of your birds, fishes, or any other animal you have dominion over. So maybe you and this G-d ought to have another little talk about who is whoest and what is whateth.”

Eve shows an immediate talent for doling out names, starting with herself, as she recognizes the beauty of the Garden of Eden, but she also wonders what those two dangling objects between Adam’s legs are for. When Adam takes her to the brook, she sees her reflection and opines, “I must do something about my hair,” then asks Adam, “You think this makes me look fat?” In the skillful hands of Linden and Henner, these old jokes still elicit laughter. (Oddly, the joke that fell the flattest is a retread from Two Jews, Talking, where it fell flat as well.)

Weinberger details their initial sexual encounter, which is both romantic and humorous as it explores classic tropes. “Was it as good for you as it was for me?” Adam asks. Eve replies, “Better,” then tells the audience, “I lied.”

But their idyllic existence is turned upside down after Eve is lured by a snake to take a bite of an apple from the Tree of Knowledge, leading to Adam and Eve’s exile from the Garden of Eden. They must make a new life for themselves, experiencing guilt and shame, fighting like husbands and wives do, raising two boys, Cain and Abel, and learning to fear death. But amid it all, Adam tells the world’s first joke.

Director Amy Anders Corcoran (Christmas in Connecticut, Unexpected Joy) gives plenty of space for Bronx-born ninety-three-year-old Tony and Emmy winner Linden (Barney Miller, The Rothschilds) and Chicago-born seventy-two-year-old Henner (Taxi, Madwomen of the West, Gettin’ the Band Back Together) to strut their stuff, delighting in the words of Philly-born seventy-eight-year-old Weinberger (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, The Cosby Show).

Linden, in casual gray slacks and a brown shirt that probably came from his closet, and Henner, in dazzling form-fitting black spandex, have a lovely camaraderie. (In the Los Angeles version of the play earlier this year, two-time Emmy winner Sally Struthers was Eve.) You can feel their warmth as Adam and Eve poke fun at each other, argue, and make love. Their relationship echoes a battle of the sexes that has been going on since, well, creation, especially as depicted in television sitcoms, from Ralph and Alice and Lucy and Ricky to Sam and Diane and Homer and Marge.

Even though the play is at the Sheen Center, a venue “where art and spirituality meet” — the program features a welcome that includes Bible verses — it does not proselytize. Instead, it is a very funny comic look at the ups and downs of life on Earth between men and women, asking eternal questions while (barely) skirting clichés and, most important, making us all laugh, at Adam and Eve and ourselves.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

LITTLE ISLAND: DAY FOR NIGHT

DAY FOR NIGHT
The Amph at Little Island
Pier 55, Hudson River Park at West Thirteenth St.
July 17-21, $15 standing room, $25 seats sold out, 8:30
littleisland.org
www.pamtanowitzdance.org

Bronx-born choreographer Pam Tanowitz turns to a French Nouvelle Vague auteur for her latest evening-length piece, Day for Night, playing only five performances July 17-21 at the Amph on Little Island.

François Truffaut’s 1973 film, Day for Night — the French title is La Nuit américaine, or “The American Night” — goes behind the scenes of a movie being shot on location in Nice. Cast and crew members intertwine in all sorts of ways as a British actress (Jacqueline Bisset) who has recently suffered a nervous breakdown, aging French star Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Aumont), Italian diva Séverine (Valentina Cortese), and young French actor Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Léaud) spend a lot of time doing everything except making a film, upsetting the director, played by Truffaut himself. The title comes from the technique in which nighttime shots are made during the day.

The Little Island commission will be danced by Morgan Amirah, Marc Crousillat, Lindsey Jones, Brian Lawson, Sarah Elizabeth Miele, Maile Okamura, and Melissa Toogood, with costumes by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, lighting by Davison Scandrett, and sound and music by Justin Ellington. Tanowitz has previously choreographed such works as I Was Waiting for the Echo of a Better Day, Law of Mosaics, and Four Quartets, for such companies as New York City Ballet, the Royal Ballet, Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, Ballet Austin, and her own Pam Tanowitz Dance.

“I make my dances in response to everything contained in the frame, like a film still, turning things over and over to discover what I haven’t yet found,” Guggenheim fellow and Bessie winner Tanowitz said in a statement. “Little Island is the exact right place for me to examine the way something can be seen and re-seen. When we look at something long enough it reveals what’s been forgotten, or taken for granted, or not yet noticed, and rewards us with new discoveries.”

As a bonus reward, Toogood will perform a short epilogue several times each night beginning at 9:30 in the cozy Glade; admission is free, first-come, first-served.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

KÄTHE KOLLWITZ

Käthe Kollwitz, Female Nude, from Behind, on Green Cloth (Weiblicher Rückenakt auf grünem Tuch), crayon and brush lithograph with scraping needle, printed in two colors on brown paper, 1903 (Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden / © Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden / photo by Herbert Boswank)

KÄTHE KOLLWITZ
MoMA, the Edward Steichen Galleries, third floor south
11 West Fifty-Third St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through July 20, $17-$30
www.moma.org

“My art serves a purpose. I want to exert an influence in my own time, in which human beings are so helpless and destitute,” artist Käthe Kollwitz said. The depiction of the helpless and destitute were central to Kollwitz, who was born in Prussia in 1867, spent almost fifty years based in Berlin, and died in Saxony in 1945, experiencing two world wars and a global depression. Kollwitz’s dark world view is on display in the poignant and powerful MoMA exhibition simply titled “Käthe Kollwitz,” consisting of approximately 120 prints, drawings, and sculptures that envelop museumgoers in a haunting atmosphere.

Käthe Kollwitz, War (Krieg), portfolio of seven woodcuts, 1922 (the Museum of Modern Art, New York / Gift of the Arnhold Family in memory of Sigrid Edwards / photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Divided into six sections, “Asserting Herself,” “Forging an Art of Social Purpose,” “Her Creative Process,” “Love and Grief,” “War and Its Aftermath,” and “Maternal Protection,” the show focuses on the struggles of the working class and mothers’ desperate attempts to safeguard their children. Kollwitz was married to a doctor who cared for the poor; they had two sons, one a soldier who was killed during WWI. Using charcoal, black ink, crayon, graphite, and chalk along with etchings, bronzes, woodcuts, and lithographs, she rendered the horrors of the “Peasants’ War,” unemployment, sacrifice, lamentation, and death. The titles alone tell only part of the story: Call of Death, Storming the Gate — Attack, The Downtrodden, Dance around the Guillotine, Death Seizes the Children, and multiple versions of Woman with Dead Child. Even works called Uprising, Charge, Inspiration, Love Scene, The Lovers, and The Survivors are bleak and ghostly.

In the large bronze sculpture Mother with Two Children, a woman clutches her two kids as if in the midst of terrible danger. In The People, skeletal faces are barely visible in the blackness. In Home Worker, Asleep at the Table, a woman has draped her head on a table, overwhelmed with exhaustion, looking as if she never wants to get up again. In Love Scene I, a man and a woman hold tight to each other as if barely clinging to life. In The Mothers, a group of women are huddled in a circle, forming a kind of human shield. And in self-portraits dating from 1890 to 1934, Kollwitz looks directly at the viewer in an almost accusatory manner, demanding we take action; the portraits continue until she is old and forlorn, as if it’s too late.

Käthe Kollwitz, The Mothers (Mütter), line etching, sandpaper, needle bundle, and soft ground with the imprint of laid paper overworked with black ink, opaque white, charcoal, and pencil, 1918 (collection Ute Kahl, Cologne. Fuis Photographie)

“I have no right to withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate,” Kollwitz wrote. “It is my duty to voice the sufferings of men, the never-ending sufferings heaped mountain-high.”

This stunning exhibition captures all that and more — and, sadly, serves today as a frightening warning.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]