twi-ny recommended events

HUMAN FLOW

Ai Weiwei takes a close look at the international refugee crisis in Human Flow

HUMAN FLOW (Ai Weiwei, 2017)
Angelika Film Center, 18 West Houston St. at Mercer St., 212-995-2570
Landmark at 57 West, 657 West 57th St. at 12th Ave.
Opens Friday, October 13
www.humanflow.com

This past fall, Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei had several concurrent exhibitions in New York City that dealt with the international refugee crisis. At Deitch Projects in SoHo, “Laundromat” included racks of clothing that had been worn by Syrian refugees at the Idomeni refugee camp in Iraq, all freshly cleaned and pressed, as if ready to give the migrant men, women, and children a new lease on life. Among other items, the gallery show also featured several monitors playing footage that Ai had shot in various refugee camps, film that has now been turned into the stunning documentary Human Flow. In 2016, Ai and his crew traveled to twenty-three countries, visiting dozens of camps in a year in which it was estimated that there were as many as 65 million displaced people around the world, fleeing war, poverty, famine, and persecution. In his first full-length documentary, Ai moves from macro to micro, shooting at a variety of scales. He uses drones to photograph tent cities in the desert from high above — reminiscent of the photography of Edward Burtynsky, turning individual items into parts of a vast pattern — along with gorgeous scenes of deserts and seascapes and intimate cell-phone footage and handheld camera shots that put viewers right in the middle of these makeshift villages, where some families live for decades. Ai, with his scruffy gray beard and in a hoodie, is often shown not only taking cell-phone videos but helping out and mingling with the refugees as dinghies arrive on the shores of Lesbos, Greece, or playfully trading passports with a refugee. Throughout the film, men and women stand proudly, often in traditional dress, looking directly at the camera for extended lengths of time, establishing their unique individuality, putting faces to what is most often seen in news clips as swaths of people struggling to survive. As Ai travels to each successive camp, he posts relevant quotes from writers and philosophers from that nation, from Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, the Dhammapada Buddhist scripture, and Persian poet Baba Tahir to Kurdish poet Sherko Bekas, Syrian poet Adonis, and U.S. president John F. Kennedy. Details about the situations are sometimes delivered news-crawl-style, along the bottom of the screen.

Ai Weiwei gets deeply involved in situation in Human Flow

In addition to giving voice to the refugees themselves — “Where am I supposed to start my new life?” one woman asks — Ai speaks with crisis workers on the ground and United Nations officials and other experts, such as UNHCR Communications Officer Boris Cheshirkov, Princess Dana Firas of Jordan, Human Rights Watch Emergencies Director Peter Bouckaert, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi, UNHCR Pakistan Senior Operation Coordinator Marin Din Kajdomcaj, UNICEF Lebanon representative Tanya Chapuisat, former Syrian astronaut Mohammad Fares, Dr. Cem Terzi of the Association of Bridging Peoples, and Dr. Kemal Kirişci, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who gets right to the point, explaining, “It’s going to be a big challenge to recognize that the world is shrinking, and people from different religions, different cultures, are going to have to learn to live with each other.” The powerful, immersive film was edited by Niels Pagh Andersen, who worked on Joshua Oppenheimer’s searing The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, from nine hundred hours of footage, with a score by Karsten Fundal and a dozen cinematographers, among them Ai, Christopher Doyle, Zhang Zanbo, Konstantinos Koukoulis, and Johannes Waltermann. “The more immune you are to people suffering, that’s very, very dangerous. It’s critical for us to maintain this humanity,” one woman says, and that gets right to the heart of the film. Human Flow is very personal to Ai, whose own battles with Chinese authorities and exile — he spent much of his childhood in a hard labor camp in the Gobi Desert because his father, a poet and intellectual, was part of a revolutionary group, and as an adult Ai has been imprisoned, placed under house arrest, and beaten for his activism — were detailed in the Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry. A masterful Conceptualist whose work explores sociocultural elements through a historical lens, Ai has always believed that artists have a responsibility to reveal the truth, and that’s precisely what he does in Human Flow, with a determined fearlessness to do what’s right.

In one of the film’s most heart-wrenching moments, thirteen thousand refugees, mostly from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, walk through the Greek countryside toward the Macedonian border, only to find that a fence has been erected and the entrance is now closed, leaving them with nowhere to go. It’s a harrowing scene, but Ai is no mere doomsayer. There are many shots in the film that show children running about and playing, laughing and smiling for the camera, still filled with hope for a better life. It’s the rest of the world’s job to make that happen, and as Ai exemplifies, every one of us can make a difference. Human Flow opens at the Angelika and the Landmark at 57 West on October 13; Ai will participate in Q&As following the 7:00 screening at the Landmark on October 13 and after the 1:50 show on October 14 at the Angelika. The film is being released in conjunction with the Public Art Fund project “Ai Weiwei: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors,” consisting of dozens of installations and interventions in all five boroughs: at Doris C. Freedman Plaza, the Washington Square Arch, the Unisphere, Essex Street Market, the Cooper Union, bus shelters, lampposts, newsstand kiosks, and other locations, furthering Ai’s artistic ideas about immigrant bans and the treatment of refugees, spread across a city he called home in the 1980s.

THY FATHER’S CHAIR

A cleaning crew has its work cut out for it in Alex Lora and Antonio Tibaldi’s Thy Father’s Chair

THY FATHER’S CHAIR (Alex Lora & Antonio Tibaldi, 2015)
Village East Cinema
181-189 Second Ave. at 12th St.
Opens Friday, October 13
212-529-6998
www.citycinemas.com

Directors Antonio Tibaldi and Alex Lora put the viewer right in the middle of twin brothers Abraham and Shraga’s desperately crowded and traumatic situation in the compulsively watchable observational documentary Thy Father’s Chair. After their parents died, the slovenly, unmarried Jewish scholars just plain stopped cleaning up after themselves, allowing newspapers, magazines, food, garbage, kitty litter, and myriad other items to pile up around them. They were not collectors hoarding valuable possessions or personal mementos; they were simply unable to organize anything or throw stuff away in their Brooklyn apartment. Only when their upstairs tenant stopped paying rent in protest, demanding they clean their place — the tenants had to deal not only with bad odors from the brothers’ apartment but with vermin as well — do they seek out assistance, hiring an Israeli man named Hanan of Home Clean Home to come and make their apartment safe and livable again. But it’s no easy task, as Abraham watches Hanan and his hazmat-suited team very carefully, continually trying to talk them out of tossing away certain items HCH insists must go; meanwhile, Shraga just moans on and on as he downs bottles of wine. (One of the only ways to tell the identical twins apart is by the wine stains on Shraga’s white shirt.)

“What the hell! Nobody’s helping me,” Abraham cries out. “We are here to help you!” Hanan says. “You’re not going to help me. You’re going to tell me what to do,” Abraham replies. Later, Abraham tells Hanan, “What is it, a punishment?” Hanan responds, “It’s not punishment. I’m trying to help you; you’re not working with me.” Abraham just can’t bear to get rid of what is clearly mostly junk and garbage, including vastly outdated electronic equipment and canned food. The only item that the brothers search for that is indeed worth keeping is their megillah scroll, but that is the exception. Abraham also agonizes over his father’s favorite chair, not wanting Hanan to take it yet debating whether he is even worthy enough to sit in it. “The Torah wants everything to be clean, but unfortunately we veered from it,” he concedes. The brothers actually do understand what is going on, that their hoarding is patently absurd and dangerous, but they are powerless to stop it.

Documentary focuses on Brooklyn twin brothers who have serious hoarding problem

Director and cinematographer Tibaldi and director and editor Lora cast no judgment on the two men; the filmmakers work, much like the Maysles brothers did, like flies on the wall, recording the crazy things going on in this railroad apartment in Midwood for eight days. Complicating matters, Tibaldi couldn’t always get the kinds of shots he wanted, as he was physically limited as to where he could stand because of the mounds of filth. There’s no back story; we find out almost nothing about who Abraham and Shraga are and what they have done with their lives, what their hopes and dreams might have been, other than what little they reveal of themselves onscreen, which is dominated by an overwhelming fear of things being taken away from them. There are also no talking heads offering expert opinions or psychological evaluations about the brothers and their situation.

Both melancholic and absurdly funny, the twins’ predicament is sort of what would happen if the Beale women of Grey Gardens had mated with Homer Lusk Collyer and Langley Wakeman Collyer, the famous hoarding brothers who died less than two weeks apart in their Harlem brownstone, no longer able to survive their suffocating surroundings. Bjarke Kolerus and Simon Don Eriksen’s gentle music also doesn’t comment on the ridiculousness of it all, instead treating it with understanding. “I feel sorry and sad to see you sad,” Hannan tells Abraham, who replies, “I feel bad about the stuff that’s being thrown out, but it has to be done,” trying to convince himself that it’s all going to be okay. The Father’s Chair, which is dedicated to Chantal Akerman, opens Friday, October 13, at the Village East and will be preceded by Artemis Shaw and Alexander Lewis’s 2016 short Single Room Occupancy.

NYFF55 SPOTLIGHT ON DOCUMENTARY: THE VENERABLE W.

Megalomaniacal monk spouts his extremist views in Barbet Schroeder’s The Venerable W.

THE VENERABLE W. (Barbet Schroeder, 2017)
New York Film Festival, Film Society of Lincoln Center
Friday, October 13, Walter Reade Theater, $25, 6:00
Saturday, October 14, Francesca Beale Theater, $25, 1:00
Festival runs September 28 – October 15
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.org
www.filmsdulosange.fr/en

According to long-standing traditions and beliefs, Buddhists have empathy and compassion for all sentient beings. For example, in the recently released documentary The Last Dalai Lama?, His Holiness expressed such feelings even for the Chinese military and government that have waged war on the Tibetan people for more than fifty years and have decided that they will select the next Dalai Lama. So when Iranian-born Swiss-French director Barbet Schroeder heard about Ashin Wirathu, a Buddhist monk in Myanmar advocating violence against a Muslim minority known as the Rohingyas, he headed to the country, formerly known as Burma, where he was so shocked and disturbed by what he saw that he can still barely say the monk’s name in interviews. Nor could he bring himself to use it in the title of his film about the controversial figure, The Venerable W., which is screening at the New York Film Festival on October 13 and 14, followed by Q&As with the director. With the documentary, Schroeder, who is best known for such works as Barfly, Reversal of Fortune, and Single White Female, concludes his Trilogy of Evil, which began with General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait in 1974, about the Ugandan dictator, and continued in 2007 with Terror’s Advocate, about lawyer Jacques Vergès, who has defended such clients as a former Nazi, a Khmer Rouge leader, and a Holocaust denier. The Venerable W. consists of archival footage and new interviews with Wirathu, as Schroeder essentially lets the leader speak his mind, in sermons to his rabid followers, at public events, and in his monastery, where he espouses his beliefs to the filmmaker. “The main features of the African catfish are that: They grow very fast. They breed very fast too. And they’re violent. They eat their own species and destroy their natural resources. The Muslims are exactly like these fish,” Wirathu, who was born in Kyaukse near Mandalay in 1968, says with a sly smile. He regularly boasts of his accomplishments in subduing the Rohingyas, whom he often refers to using a slur that is the equivalent of the N-word in America.

The Venerable Wirathu walks among his faithful minions in shocking documentary

A megalomaniacal nationalist with extremist positions on patriotism, protectionism, and border crossings and a clever manipulator of social media, Wirathu, inspired by the 1997 book In Fear of Our Race Disappearing, also makes extravagant, debunked claims using false statistics, from declaring that he started the 2007 Saffron Revolution to arguing that the Rohingyas are burning down their own villages so they can blame the Buddhists. Much of what he is saying sounds eerily familiar, evoking racist, nationalist sentiments that are gaining ground around the world, particularly in France, England, and America. “In the USA, if the people want to maintain peace and security, they have to choose Donald Trump,” Wirathu says. Schroeder also speaks with seven men who share their views about Wirathu: W.’s master, U. Zanitar; investigative magazine editor Kyaw Zayar Htun; Saffron Revolution monk U. Kaylar Sa; Fortify Rights creator Matthew Smith; Muslim political candidate Abdul Rasheed; Spanish journalist Carlos Sardiña Galache; and highly revered monk U. Galonni. Together they paint a portrait of a dangerous fanatic who is fomenting bitter hatred that has led to extensive episodes of rape, violence, and murder while the military and the government, headed by Aung San Suu Kyi, either support what Wirathu’s doing or merely look the other way. In numerous voiceovers, Portuguese actress Maria de Medeiros recites quotations from Buddhist texts, including the Metta Sutta, and states various sociopolitical facts. “The Buddha is often above good and evil, but his words should help us limit the mechanics of evil,” she narrates. Meanwhile, Wirathu, who was declared “the Face of Buddhist Terror” in a June 2013 Time magazine cover story, insists he is doing the right thing for his country. “I help people who have been persecuted by Muslims,” he says. “The threat against Buddhism has reached alert level.” It’s a brutal film to watch, infuriating and frightening, as Schroeder and editor Nelly Quettier clearly and concisely present the facts, without judgment, including scenes of people on fire and being viciously beaten; the director might not make any grand statements against what Wirathu and his flock are doing — he lets the monk take care of that by himself — but the film is a clarion call for us all to be aware of what is happening around the world, as well as in our own backyard. Both screenings of The Venerable W. will be preceded by the short film What Are You Up to, Barbet Schroeder?, which goes behind the scenes of his decision to tell Wirathu’s story.

INSPIRING WONDERSTRUCK: THE WIND

Letty Mason (Lillian Gish) is being driven crazy by internal and external sources in The Wind

THE WIND (Victor Sjöström, 1928)
Museum of the Moving Image, Redstone Theater
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Sunday, October 15, $15, 2:00
Series runs October 13-22
718-777-6888
www.movingimage.us

Author Brian Selznick’s 2007 book The Invention of Hugo Cabret proved to be movie magic; it was turned into the film Hugo by Martin Scorsese, which garnered eleven Oscar nominations and won four. In conjunction with the theatrical release of the latest movie based on a Selznick book, Todd Haynes’s adaptation of Selznick’s 2011Wonderstruck, the Museum of the Moving Image is hosting the series “Inspiring Wonderstruck,” consisting of nine films that influenced and inspired the author. One of the most direct influences was Victor Sjöström’s 1928 now-classic silent film The Wind, starring Lillian Gish as Letty Mason, a young woman traveling from Virginia to Texas to live with her cousin Beverly (Edward Earle). Traveling from the cultured, civilized East to what was still the wild West, the uncertain Letty must confront the fierceness of nature head-on — both human nature and the harsh natural environment. On the train, she is wooed by cattleman Wirt Roddy (Montagu Love), but her fears grow as she first sees the vicious wind howling outside the train window the closer she gets to her destination. Once in Sweetwater, she is picked up by her cousin’s neighbors, the handsome Lige Hightower (Lars Hanson) and his goofy sidekick, Sourdough (William Orlamond). Both men take a quick liking to Letty, who seems most attracted to Wirt. Soon Beverly’s wife, Cora (Dorothy Cumming, in her next-to-last film before retiring), becomes jealous of Letty’s closeness with her husband and kids and kicks her out, leaving a desperate Letty to make choices she might not be ready for as the wind outside becomes fiercer and ever-more dangerous. The Wind is a tour de force for Gish in her last silent movie, not only because of her emotionally gripping portrayal of Letty but because she put the entire production together, obtaining the rights to the novel by Dorothy Scarborough, hiring the Swedish director and star Hanson, and arguing over the ending with the producers and Irving Thalberg. (Unfortunately, she lost on that account, just about the only thing that did not go the way she wanted.)

Letty Mason (Lillian Gish) and Lige Hightower (Lars Hanson) have some tough decisions to make in Victor Sjöström’s silent classic

Sjöström (The Phantom Carriage, The Divine Woman), who played Professor Isak Borg in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, and cinematographer John Arnold create some dazzling effects as a twister threatens and Letty battles both inside and outside; she is regularly shot from the side, at the door of the shack where she lives, not knowing if she’d be safer inside or outside as the wind and sand blast over her. The film, an early look at climate change, was shot in the Mojave Desert in difficult circumstances; to get the wind to swirl, the crew used propellers from eight airplanes. Dialogue is sparse, and the story is told primarily in taut visuals. “Lillian Gish [is] at the height of her powers, fighting the wind and insanity nonstop for the entire movie,” Selznick says of The Wind. “A silent film made just after the silent era ended, the film is now recognized as one of Gish’s greats. The character of Lillian Mayhew, played by Julianne Moore in Wonderstruck, is directly inspired by Gish, and the fictional movie within a movie, Daughter of the Wind, is exactly that, an offspring of this very movie.” A restored 35mm print of The Wind with the original music and effects soundtrack is screening October 15 at 2:00 at the Museum of the Moving Image. “Inspiring Wonderstruck” runs October 13-22 and also includes, among others, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, Haynes’s I’m Not There and Poison, Diane Garey and Lawrence Hott’s Through Deaf Eyes, Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird, and Hal Ashby’s Being There as well as a preview screening of Wonderstruck, followed by a Q&A with Selznick, production designer Mark Friedberg, and costume designer Sandy Powell and a book signing with Selznick.

THE INTIMACY EFFECT

Things get intimate in Jeff Tabnick’s The Intimacy Effect at Vital Joint

Vital Joint
109 Meserole St.
October 12-14, $20 (RSVP to info@vitaljoint.xyz), 8:00
www.facebook.com/VitalJoint

Playwright Jeff Tabnick tells an intimate story in an intimate venue with The Intimacy Effect, continuing at the basement theater at Vital Joint in Brooklyn October 12-14. The play, which explores such issues as parenting, sexual scandals, and fidelity while blurring the lines between the personal and the political, is set in the Appel family apartment, where Matt, a stay-at-home dad, and his wife, Amy, have invited his brother, Doug, and sister-in-law, Merrily, over for a small party. Against Amy’s better judgment, Matt gets quite involved telling a story about a pregnant woman who had suddenly shown up at the apartment the day before, a tale that impacts everyone there in unique ways. The cast, who all get their moment in the spotlight, features James Ball, Sarah Doudna, Jennifer O’Donnell, Richard Lovejoy, and Ruth Nightengale; the seventy-five-minute play is directed by Eric Nightengale (Anthropological Theatricals, Concrete Temple Theatre, the Acme Corporation, and Ruth’s husband). Tabnick’s previous works include I Found Her Tied to My Bed, Something Truly Monstrous, and An Idiot.

PERFORMA 17 BIENNIAL

Multiple venues
November 1-19, free – $40
17.performa-arts.org

The seventh Performa biennial takes place November 1-19 in multiple venues around the city, featuring an impressive roster of international artists pushing the limits of what live performance can be. This year’s lineup includes ten Performa commissions and dozens of events, from film, poetry, and dance to architecture, music, and comedy, arranged in such categories as Performa Projects, Performa Premieres, and Pavilion without Walls. In addition to the below recommendations for this always exciting festival, there will be presentations by Kendell Geers, Xavier Cha, Yto Barrada, Brian Belott, Flo Kasearu, Jimmy Robert, Mohau Modisakeng, Kelly Nipper, Kemang Wa Lehulere, Nicolas Hlobo, Kris Lemsalu with Kyp Malone, the Marching Cobras of New York, and others at such venues as Abrons Arts Center, BAM, the Met, White Box Arts Center, Marcus Garvey Park, the Connelly Theater, St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, Harlem Parish, and the Glass House in New Canaan.

Thursday, November 2, 7:00
Friday, November 3, 7:00 & 9:00
Saturday, November 4, 7:00
Teju Cole: Black Paper, BKLYN Studio at City Point, 445 Albee Square West, $15-$25

Thursday, November 2, 9, 16
Barbara Kruger: The Drop, Performa 17 Hub, 47 Walker St., $5, 4:00 – 8:00

Sunday, November 5
Monday, November 6
William Kentridge: Ursonate, Harlem Parish, 258 West 118th St., $25-$40, 7:00

Sunday, November 5, 12, 19
Eiko Otake: A Body in Places, Metropolitan Museum of Art, free with museum admission, 10:30 am

Wednesday, November 8
Estonian Pavilion Symposium: Call for Action — Key Moments of Estonian Performance Art, lecture and screening with curators Anu Allas and Maria Arusoo, free, Performa 17 Hub, 47 Walker St., 5:00

Thursday, November 9
Friday, November 10
Saturday, November 11
The Tracey Rose Show in Collaboration with Performa 17 and Afroglossia Presents: The Good Ship Jesus vs The Black Star Line Hitching a Ride with Die Alibama [Working Title], the Black Lady Theatre, 750 Nostrand Ave., $15-$25, 7:30

Friday, November 10
Zanele Muholi on Visual Activism, grand finale of two weeks of meetings, performances, discussions, and art-making, the Bronx Museum, 1040 Grand Concourse, free, 7:00

Friday, November 10
through
Sunday, November 19
Alex Schweder and Ward Shelley: The Newcomers, with Lena Kouvela and Sarah Burns, 28 Liberty Plaza, free, all day

Saturday, November 11
Architecture Conference, with Giovana Borasi, Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco, Yve Laris Cohen, Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe), and Elizabeth Diller, Performa 17 Hub, 47 Walker St., free, 2:00 – 6:00

Monday, November 13
Tuesday, November 14
Wangechi Mutu: Banana Stroke, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, free with museum admission, 7:00

Monday, November 13
through
Friday, November 17
Kwani Trust: Everyone Is Radicalizing, multimedia installation and public programs, Performa 17 Hub, 47 Walker St., free, 12 noon – 6:00 pm

Wednesday, November 15
Thursday, November 16
Friday, November 17
Anu Vahtra: Open House Closing. A Walk, Performa 17 Hub, 47 Walker St., free, 5:00

Thursday, November 16
Julie Mehretu and Jason Moran: MASS (HOWL, eon), Harlem Parish, 258 West 118th St,, $25-$40, 7:00 & 9:00

Thursday, November 16
Friday, November 17
Saturday, November 18
Gillian Walsh: Moon Fate Sin, Danspace Project, St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, 131 East Tenth St., $22-$25, 8:00

SIKKEMA JENKINS AND CO. IS COMPELLED TO PRESENT THE MOST ASTOUNDING AND IMPORTANT PAINTING SHOW OF THE FALL ART SHOW VIEWING SEASON!

Kara Walker, “Slaughter of the Innocents (They Might Be Guilty of Something),” cut paper on canvas, 2017 (Photo: © Kara Walker / Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York)

Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
530 West 22nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through October 15, free
212-929-2262
sikkemajenkinsco.com

In the summer of 2014, California-born, New York City–based multidisciplinary artist Kara Walker entered the public consciousness in a big way with “A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby: an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant,” her massive white-sugar sculpture of a Sphinx-like “mammy” in the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, shortly before the factory was torn down. While the piece worked magnificently on many levels, including artistically, historically, and politically, many visitors entertained themselves by taking selfies and posting photos in which they made fun of various parts of the figure’s body, leading Walker to question the ways people, especially of different races, look at and experience such work. In fact, throughout her career, her oeuvre has been misunderstood and/or taken at face value; her cut-out silhouettes in particular can seem adorable and playful until one zeroes in on their harrowing portraits of Civil War–era rape, violence, child abuse, and more perpetrated by white plantation owners and their families on black slaves. Walker attempts to preempt any such critical or popular misunderstandings or misreadings in her major follow-up exhibition, essentially titled, “Sikkema Jenkins and Co. is Compelled to present The most Astounding and Important Painting show of the fall Art Show viewing season!,” a timely collection of new paintings, drawings, and collages that closely examine the state of race relations from slavery to the present time, when the president of the United States has declared that some white supremacists are “very fine people,” the media is under attack, and the country is arguing over patriotism and flags that represent different things to different ethnicities.

Kara Walker, “Christ’s Entry into Journalism,” Sumi ink and collage on paper, 2017 (Photo: © Kara Walker / Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York)

In fact, Donald Trump makes an appearance in the centerpiece of the new exhibit, Walker’s grand “Christ’s Entry into Journalism,” a reimagining of James Ensor’s “Christ’s Entry into Brussels,” complete with depictions of James Brown, a Confederate soldier, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Trayvon Martin, a mummy, black stereotypes, and a wilting flag. Flags also appear in the watercolors “Rebel Flag (with Ghosts)” and “Rebel Flag (with Bows)” and “Libertine Alighting the World,” with a partially undressed, flaming Lady Liberty, a mixed-race couple, and a black female centurion burning the Confederate flag, and “U.S.A. Idioms,” with characters in a winding tree, a stump and a freshly dug grave below. Graves play a role as well in “The (Private) Memorial Garden of Grandison Harris” and “Dredging the Quagmire (Bottomless Pit),” death ever present. But some semblance of life emerges in the cut-paper, black-and-white “Slaughter of the Innocents (They Might Be Guilty of Something),” with images of eggs and birth alongside snakes and demons.

Kara Walker, “Paradox of the Negro Burial Ground,” oil stick, collage, and mixed media on paper, 2017 (Photo: © Kara Walker / Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York)

Walker takes on colonialism in the oil-stick “Brand X (Slave Market Painting),” references classical paintings of Judith holding the head of Holofernes in “Scraps,” takes a shot at French academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme and colonialism in “A Piece of Furniture for Jean Leon Gerome,” and shows a black child proudly raising his left fist in the air, his right hand on his heart, in “A Spectacle,” paying no attention to the white man with the lasso near him. This is heavy stuff that demands extended attention, reveling in not only the allegorical and true-to-life scenes but also the majestic skill displayed by Walker, who takes a giant step with her use of paint, oil stick, and cut-outs.

The official press release was prepared for all kinds of reactions, from critics and the public:

“Collectors of Fine Art will Flock to see the latest Kara Walker offerings, and what is she offering but the Finest Selection of artworks by an African-American Living Woman Artist this side of the Mississippi. Modest collectors will find her prices reasonable, those of a heartier disposition will recognize Bargains! Scholars will study and debate the Historical Value and Intellectual Merits of Miss Walker’s Diversionary Tactics. Art Historians will wonder whether the work represents a Departure or a Continuum. Students of Color will eye her work suspiciously and exercise their free right to Culturally Annihilate her on social media. Parents will cover the eyes of innocent children. School Teachers will reexamine their art history curricula. Prestigious Academic Societies will withdraw their support, former husbands and former lovers will recoil in abject terror. Critics will shake their heads in bemused silence. Gallery Directors will wring their hands at the sight of throngs of the gallery-curious flooding the pavement outside. The Final President of the United States will visibly wince. Empires will fall, although which ones, only time will tell.”

Kara Walker, “Dredging the Quagmire (Bottomless Pit),” triptych, oil stick and Sumi ink on paper collaged on linen, 2017 (Photo: © Kara Walker / Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York)

Meanwhile, in her artist’s statement, Walker makes her purpose very clear:

“I don’t really feel the need to write a statement about a painting show. I know what you all expect from me and I have complied up to a point. But frankly I am tired, tired of standing up, being counted, tired of ‘having a voice’ or worse ‘being a role model.’ Tired, true, of being a featured member of my racial group and/or my gender niche. It’s too much, and I write this knowing full well that my right, my capacity to live in this Godforsaken country as a (proudly) raced and (urgently) gendered person is under threat by random groups of white (male) supremacist goons who flaunt a kind of patched together notion of race purity with flags and torches and impressive displays of perpetrator-as-victim sociopathy. I roll my eyes, fold my arms and wait. How many ways can a person say racism is the real bread and butter of our American mythology, and in how many ways will the racists among our countrymen act out their Turner Diaries race war fantasy combination Nazi Germany and Antebellum South — states which, incidentally, lost the wars they started, and always will, precisely because there is no way those white racisms can survive the earth without the rest of us types upholding humanity’s best, keeping the motor running on civilization, being good, and preserving nature and all the stuff worth working and living for?”

Alive, not Dead, 2017 Sumi ink and collage on paper

Kara Walker, “Alive, not Dead,” Sumi ink and collage on paper, 2017 (Photo: © Kara Walker / Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York)

Walker’s show at Sikkema Jenkins is bold and in-your-face, daring viewers to feel deeply no matter what part of the political spectrum they find themselves on. It’s both threatening and thrilling, offering little comfort as it lays bare the ills of contemporary society in fearless ways. When I visited the show on a crowded Saturday afternoon, there were a lot of people, black, white, and brown, taking photos, but nobody posing stupidly or making fun of the artwork. Does that mean we have made progress since “A Subtlety”? Just roll your eyes, fold your arms, and wait.