this week in art

GERHARD RICHTER: PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS

Installation view, Gerhard Richter, “941-1 Abstraktes Bild,” oil on canvas, 2015 (photo courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery)

Marian Goodman Gallery
24 West 57th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through June 25, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-977-7160
www.mariangoodman.com
www.gerhard-richter.com

In 1985, Gerhard Richter wrote, “When I paint an abstract picture (the problem is very much the same in other cases), I neither know in advance what it is meant to look like nor, during the painting process, what I am aiming at and what to do about getting there. Painting is consequently an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless, in totally incomprehensible surroundings — like that of a person who possesses a given set of tools, materials and abilities and has the urgent desire to build something useful which is not allowed to be a house or a chair or anything else that has a name; who therefore hacks away in the vague hope that by working in a proper, professional way he will ultimately turn out something proper and meaningful.” Well, the German artist has turned out something proper and meaningful yet again, reinventing painting for the umpteenth time in his latest stirring cycle, 2014-15’s “Abstraktes Bild,” twenty spectacular examples of which are on view at Marian Goodman Gallery through June 25. Comprising ten large-scale oil-on-canvas works and ten smaller pieces (on canvas, wood, or aluminum mounted on wood), the series is utterly breathtaking, a deluge of color and abstract form that nearly jumps out of each work and envelops you with its physicality. Richter, who turned eighty-four earlier this year, built up layers of paint on each canvas, letting them dry and scratching and scraping at them until arriving at the finished work. Since 2010, Richter, who was profiled in the excellent 2011 documentary Gerhard Richter Painting, has been focusing on “initiatives directed towards recasting painting,” Dieter Schwarz explains in the catalog, “in various ways, in order to return to it in the end.” Don’t rush through these paintings; instead, take your time and inhale their supreme beauty. The exhibition also includes five of Richter’s lacquer-behind-glass Aladin pieces; fourteen photographs that Richter partially painted over, melding the real and the surreal, fact and fiction in primarily outdoor scenes; and forty pencil drawings lined up at eye level across the rear space, works that Schwarz writes are “not preparatory studies for paintings but rather a kind of finale, which can be understood in relation with the introduction, crescendo, development, and conclusion of the painting sequence.” And what a sequence it is.

RIVER TO RIVER FESTIVAL: NIGHT AT THE MUSEUMS

The African Burial Ground is one of fifteen downtown institutions offering free programs during Night at the Museums, part of the River to River Festival (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

NIGHT AT THE MUSEUMS
Multiple downtown locations
Tuesday, June 21, free, 4:00 – 8:00
lmcc.net

Last Tuesday, the Museum Mile Festival offered free admission to seven institutions along Fifth Ave. between 82nd and 105th Sts. On the following Tuesday, June 18, fifteen downtown organizations will open their doors for free. As part of the River to River Festival, which includes experimental dance, theater, music, and more through June 26, people are invited inside to see exhibitions and special programs as well as join walking tours. In addition, there will be live music along the way in conjunction with the tenth annual Make Music New York. The participating organizations (with current exhibitions) are the African Burial Ground, the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, Federal Hall, Fraunces Tavern Museum (“Dunsmore: Illustrating the American Revolutionary War”), the Museum of American Finance (“Worth Its Weight: Gold from the Ground Up”), the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust (“Stitching History from the Holocaust,” “Seeking Justice: The Leo Frank Case Revisited”), the National Archives at New York City, the National Museum of the American Indian (“Unbound: Narrative Art of the Plains,” “Circle of Dance”), the National September 11 Memorial Museum, the NYC Municipal Archives, the 9/11 Tribute Center, Poets House (“The Poets’ Rebellion: Poetry, Memory, and the Easter Rising,” “Metamorphosis: The Collaboration of Poet Barbara Guest & Artist Fay Lansner”), the Skyscraper Museum (“Garden City | Mega City”), the South Street Seaport Museum, and Wall Street Walks.

OF THE PEOPLE

Esteban del Valle installation at Smack Mellon imagines a postapocalyptic political future (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Smack Mellon
92 Plymouth St. at Washington St.
Opening reception: June 18, free, 5:00 – 8:00
Wednesday – Sunday through July 31, free, 12 noon – 6:00
718-834-8761
smackmellon.org

On June 17, Alicia Grullon kicked off the new political exhibit at Smack Mellon with a full reenactment of Bernie Sanders’s 2010 eight-and-a-half-hour Bush tax cuts filibuster, setting the stage for what will be happening at the Dumbo gallery over the next six weeks. Through July 31, Smack Mellon will be home to “Of the people,” a multidisciplinary show curated by Erin Donnelly that examines the current state of political discourse in America as presumptive presidential nominees Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump prepare to do battle, both under the threat of contested conventions. Sheryl Oring’s “I Wish to Say” consists of hundreds of index cards and Polaroids for which ordinary citizens have dictated brief personal letters to the presidential candidates. Daniel Bejar’s “Rec-elections (Let’s Make America Great Again, Isabel González)” are lenticular campaign buttons promoting the Puerto Rican activist. Ben Pinder IV’s small pamphlet “A Brief and Mythic History of Super PACs” turns the birth of the super PACs into comic-book legend. Leah Wolff’s “Political Buttons” declare “Don’t Do It” and are not for the taking.

Sheryl Oring’s “I Wish to Say” gives voice to the people (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Brittany M. Powell’s “Debt Portraits” detail the stories of four Americans, photographed in their homes, facing serious financial problems. Guy Ben-Ari’s “Oval Office Interior” painting imagines the White House room taken over by women. On Saturdays and Sundays (and July 7 evening), anyone can come to Smack Mellon and present their own case to be president in Jeremy D. Olson’s multimedia “Campaign Office.” Esteban del Valle’s untitled corner installation depicts a kind of postapocalyptic scenario with black balloons, a falling presidential podium, and a bull rising in the background. Peggy Diggs’s “Heirloom” includes a large-scale “Ideal Ballot” you can take home The show also features works by Isabella Cruz-Chong, Emily Greenberg, Brooklyn Hi-Art Machine (Mildred Beltre and Oasa DuVerney), Kate Sopko, and Lauren Frances Adams. On July 27 at 7:00, Hrag Vartanian, Miriam M. Basilio, and Bejar will participate in a panel discussion on propaganda; on July 28 at 5:30, Brooklyn Hi-Art Machine will present a silkscreen workshop in which attendees can make their own political posters; on July 30-31, t.Rutt will display Trump’s actual old campaign bus, which they bought late last year on Craiglist; and on July 31, Martha Wilson will be at Smack Mellon for “Martha Wilson as Donald Trump — Politics and Performance Art Are One and the Same,” followed by the panel discussion “Community Practices: Art and Intervention” with Cruz-Chong, Oring, and Sopko, moderated by Donnelly. The exhibition also has information on all of the registered political parties in New York State, useful websites, and voter registration forms, so you have no excuse not to get involved in this rather vitriolic and critically important election year.

MUSEUM MILE FESTIVAL 2016

Crowds take to the streets for annual Museum Mile Festival, beginning at the Met

Multiple locations on Fifth Ave. between 82nd & 105th Sts.
Tuesday, June 14, 6:00 – 9:00 pm
Admission: free
www.museummilefestival.org

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, now known as the Met Fifth Avenue with the addition of the Met Breuer in the old Whitney space, is the host of the thirty-ninth annual Museum Mile Festival, in which seven arts institutions along Fifth Avenue between 82nd and 105th Sts. open their doors for free between 6:00 and 9:00. (Met prez Daniel H. Weiss will deliver his opening remarks at 5:45.) There will be live outdoor performances by Dusan Tynek Dance Theatre, DJ Mickey Perez, Sammie & Trudie’s Imagination Playhouse, Mariachi Flor de Toloache, Silly Billy the Very Funny Clown, Miss 360, Alsarah and the Nubatones, Magic Brian, Kim David Smith, and Justin Weber Yo Yo in addition to face painting, art workshops, chalk drawing, and more. The participating museums (with at least one of their current shows listed here) are El Museo del Barrio (“Antonio Lopez: Future Funk Fashion”), the Museum of the City of New York (“Roz Chast: Cartoon Memoirs”), the Jewish Museum (“Isaac Mizrahi: An Unruly History,” “The Television Project: Some of My Best Friends”), the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum (“Beauty — Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial,” “Pixar: The Story of Design”), the Guggenheim (“Moholy-Nagy: Future Present”), the Neue Galerie (“Munch and Expressionism”), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (“Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology,” “Court and Cosmos: The Great Age of the Seljuqs”), along with presentations by the New York Academy of Medicine, the 92nd St. Y, and Asia Society. Don’t try to do too much, because it can get rather crowded; just pick one or two exhibitions in one or two museums and enjoy.

DUKE RILEY: FLY BY NIGHT

Pigeons swirl across the night sky over Brooklyn Navy Yard (photo by Tod Seelie)

Brooklyn Navy Yard
Sands St. at Navy St.
Friday through Sunday through June 19, free with advance RSVP
creativetime.org
www.dukeriley.info

Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a pigeon! It’s . . . two thousand pigeons with lights swirling in the Brooklyn dusk like dancing constellations? In winter 2013-14, Boston-born, Brooklyn-based artist Duke Riley sent camera-carrying homing pigeons from Cuba to Key West, transporting illegal cigars. Now Riley, who in 2012 restaged a centuries-old boat race featuring zodiac animals on a canal in Zhujiajiao, China, and in 2007 reenacted the Revolutionary War mission of the one-manned primitive submarine known as the Turtle in New York harbor, has trained two thousand pigeons, each fitted with a remote-controlled LED light strapped to one of its legs, to soar through the sky above the Brooklyn Navy Yard every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night shortly past sunset. Attendees first follow a winding path through the fascinating navy yard, where military ships were built from 1806 to 1966, leading to the water, where the pigeons reside on the Baylander, a decommissioned Vietnam-era Navy ship now outfitted with eighty feet of coops. People take seats on the bleachers — the higher the better — or stand by the ship as Nick Cave music plays and the pigeons start to gather atop the Baylander.

As the sun sets over the East River waterfront, the music fades and sounds of live cooing rise, and then three operatives start waving flags that signal a wide variety of pigeons, from Homers, Egyptian Swifts, Satinettes, German Beauties, and Russian High Flyers to Tipplers, Damascenes, Fantails, Roller/Tumblers, and New York Flights, to head up into the air, where they perform an improvisational dance, flying in groups in seemingly choreographed patterns, soaring east, then west, or taking off on a solo trip, like a lost balloon floating away. (Don’t worry; they all eventually return to their individual lofts aboard the ship.) It’s utterly thrilling watching them billowing above, a torrent of shooting stars, looking like they’re having at least as much fun as the audience. Occasionally one of the pigeons might actually take a break and dive-bomb into the crowd, soliciting shrieks and cheers. We suggest trying to set your eyes on one — perhaps Tofu, Goldee Hawn, the Red Baron, Lucifer, Saturday Night Fever, or Pablo Escobar — and follow it like it’s a snowflake floating down from the heavens. After about forty-five minutes, the birds are called back to the Baylander, returning home to the sounds of, what else, Prince’s “When Doves Cry.” Presented by the outstanding nonprofit arts agency Creative Time, whose previous projects include Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby” at the Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg and “Drifting in Daylight” in Central Park, “Fly by Night” is an exhilarating experience that will make you think twice about these pervasive urban creatures.

MUNCH AND EXPRESSIONISM

Edvard Munch, “Puberty,” oil on canvas, 1914-16 (the Munch Museum, Oslo)

Neue Galerie
1048 Fifth Ave. at 86th St.
Through June 13 (closed Tuesday & Wednesday)
212-628-6200
www.neuegalerie.org

In 2007, Neue Galerie New York presented “Van Gogh and Expressionism,” which examined the influence Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh had on German and Austrian Expressionism. Now the curator of that exhibit, Dr. Jill Lloyd, has teamed up with Dr. Reinhold Heller for a fascinating follow-up, “Munch and Expressionism,” creating a compelling back-and-forth dialogue between works by Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944) with such German artists as Max Beckmann, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Gabriele Münter, and Emile Nolde and such Austrian artists as Richard Gerstl, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele. “The radical qualities of Edvard Munch’s work — his extreme originality and inventiveness — have frequently led to him being linked to the art of the future,” Dr. Lloyd writes in her catalog essay “Edvard Munch and the Expressionists: Influence and Affinity.” She adds, “But whereas van Gogh . . . is justly deemed a precursor or ‘father’ of Expressionism, Munch, by contrast, both inspired and participated in the movement.” The splendidly curated exhibition groups a pair of Munch self-portraits, 1906’s “Self-Portrait with a Bottle of Wine” and 1923-24’s “The Night Wanderer,” with Beckmann’s 1938 “Self-Portrait with Horn” and Gerstl’s 1907 “Self-Portrait in Front of a Stove,” as if the men have come together for a chat. Munch landscapes “Winter, Elgersburg” and “White Night” feel right at home with Münter’s “The Blue Gable” and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s “Footpath,” in both color and abstraction. Munch’s glorious “Puberty,” seen in both an 1894 drawing and an exciting 1914-16 oil painting, takes on added meaning alongside Heckel’s “Standing Child”; the apparent communication continues through Heckel’s “Bathers in a Pond” and a quartet of bathing paintings by Munch, including the bold, extraordinary “Standing Nude Against Blue Background.”

Edvard Munch, “The Artist and His Model,” oil on canvas, 1919-21 (the Munch Museum, Oslo)

A small room is dedicated to Munch’s most iconic work, “The Scream,” with its spectacular color palette and powerful emotion. The 1895 favorite is joined by several print editions as well as a trio of self-portraits by Schiele and Heckel’s woodcut “Man in the Forest.” Other standout groupings include Munch’s “Mountain Road” with Kirchner’s “Women on Potsdamer Platz,” Munch’s “The Book Family” with Kirchner’s “Street, Dresden, 1908,” and Munch’s “Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones)” with Schiele’s “Man and Woman I (Lovers I).” An exploration of Munch’s printmaking methods is another aspect of this show, with multiple woodcuts of “Towards the Forest II,” “Angst,” “The Kiss,” “Evening. Melancholy,” “Old Fisherman,” and “Madonna,” echoed by Nolde’s “Young Danish Woman,” Hermann Max Pechstein’s “Lovers,” and Kirchner’s “Head of a Sick Man.” However, the dialogue occurred only in their art and not in person. “There is plenty of evidence that the Brücke artists sought out Munch, inviting him, for example, to send work to their group exhibitions in 1906, 1908, and 1909, although Munch carefully sidestepped these overtures,” Dr. Lloyd notes in her essay. “Nolde and the Brücke artists apparently confronted a brick wall when they tried to enlist Munch to their cause, despite his stated admiration for their work.” Even if these artists from Norway, Germany, and Austria never broke bread together or sat down and discussed art, this exhibit creates quite an intriguing visual conversation between them.

FIRST SATURDAY: PRIDE AND AGITPROP!

LJ Roberts, “Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves,” Jacquard-woven cotton and Lurex, hand-dyed fabric, crank-knit yarn, thread, 2011 (photo by Mario Gallucci)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, June 4, free, 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

Pride Month is the centerpiece of the Brooklyn Museum’s June edition of its vastly popular free First Saturday program. The evening will feature live performances by New York City Gay Men’s Chorus and DJ Mursi Layne; storytelling by Queer Memoir; screenings of Jake Witzenfeld’s Oriented, followed by a talkback with Tarab NYC, and Asurf Oluseyi’s Hell or High Water, followed by a talkback with activists Kehinde Bademosi, Noni Salma Lawal, Ekene Okuwegbunam, and Adejoke Tugbiyele; a movement workshop inspired by domestic workers, by Studio REV-; pop-up gallery talks on “Disguise: Masks and Global African Art”; a hands-on workshop in which participants can make their own Pride-based iron-on patch; a curator talk by Catherine J. Morris and Stephanie Weissberg on “Agitprop!”; the talk “Women, Art, AIDS, and Activism,” with Joy Episalla, Kia Labeija, Jessica Whitbread, Egyptt Labeija, Sue Schaffner, and Carrie Moyer, hosted by Visual AIDS and moderated by LJ Roberts; a printmaking workshop about immigration and undocumented youth; and outdoor projections by the Illuminator. In addition, you can check out such other exhibitions as “This Place,” “Tom Sachs: Boombox Retrospective, 1999–2016,” and “Stephen Powers: Coney Island Is Still Dreamland (to a Seagull).”