this week in art

ERNESTO NETO: SLOW IIS GOOD

Ernesto Neto, “The Sun Lits Life, Let the Son,” polypropylene and polyester rope, plastic balls, plants, terra cotta, black pepper, turmeric, cumin, and cloves, 2012 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
521 West 21st St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Through May 25, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-414-4144
www.tanyabonakdargallery.com
slow iis good slideshow

Brazilian mixed-media artist Ernesto Neto, who filled the Park Ave. Armory three years ago with the giant exoskeleton “Anthropodino,” has created another organic treat for the senses, “Slow iis good, with my back to the world!” On view at Tanya Bonakdar through Saturday, “Slow iis good” consists of two floors of colorful crocheted polypropylene and polyester cord works highlighted by several pieces that invite visitors inside, engaging their senses of sight, smell, touch, and hearing. On the first floor, the sonic “SoundWay” (be sure to shake the sides) leads to “The Island Bird,” which resembles the lower half of an enormous body, with the extended feet serving as an entrance to a playful central area that dangles from the ceiling. With your shoes off, you can follow the unsteady path as you walk over plastic black balls and relax in a cushioned rest stop. While inside, you not only merge with the piece, becoming part of it, but you can look out and see other smaller works, such as “Grub” and “Sorry, I Don’t Know Exactly Where to Go,” hanging on the walls and residing on the floor, offering a different perspective from the usual gallery experience. Upstairs you are greeted by the cozy “Labor,” where you can sit down and examine one of the spinning machines used to do the heavily detailed and time-consuming crocheting. Next, in a small gallery off to the side, you can take a load off in “Blue Hammock” or “Green Hammock,” which are as comfortable as they appear. The last room holds another surprise, “The Sun Lits Life, Let the Son,” a bridgelike structure with rocks and more plastic balls, surrounded by hanging plants and spices, the scents of black pepper, turmeric, cumin, cloves, and greenery combining with the feeling of antigravity to lift you into another dimension. As the title says, “Slow iis good”; take your time making your way through the works, which are certainly fun but also disorienting, as you have to be careful to maintain your balance in the two larger pieces, but it’s well worth it.

LORRAINE O’GRADY: NEW WORLDS

Lorraine O’Grady discusses her latest exhibit at Alexander Gray Associates (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Alexander Gray Associates
508 West 26th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves., #215
Tuesday – Saturday through May 25, free
212-399-2636
www.alexandergray.com
lorraineogrady.com

For more than thirty years, Lorraine O’Grady has been exploring the African diaspora and the African American art world itself through such multidisciplinary exhibitions, series, and performances as “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire,” “Miscegenated Family Album,” and “Flowers of Evil and Good.” In her seminal 1990s text “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” the Boston-born, Manhattan-based visual artist wrote, “What happened to the girl who was abducted from her village, then shipped here in chains? What happened to her descendants? . . . Perhaps they have internalized and are cooperating with the West’s construction of not-white women as not-to-be-seen.” The African American body is central to her latest exhibition, “New Worlds,” on view at Alexander Gray Associates through May 25. The centerpiece of the show is the nineteen-minute video Landscape (Western Hemisphere), which consists of extreme close-ups of O’Grady’s hair, accompanied by a soundtrack that includes rustling wind and animal noises. The abstract images are mesmerizing, impossible to identify on their own, a combination of beauty, mystery, and fear. Landscape (Western Hemisphere) is joined by a pair of revisited photomontages from O’Grady’s 1991 “BodyGround” series. In “The Fir-Palm,” a hybrid Caribbean palm / New England fir rises out of the body of a naked black woman, representative of O’Grady herself, whose parents were West Indian. O’Grady gets overtly political in the diptych “Body/Ground (The Clearing: or Cortez and La Malinche. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N. and Me),” which depicts, on the left, a white man and a black woman making love as they float above the Clearing at O’Grady’s alma mater, Wellesley, with two children playiing beneath them, while on the right a clothed man with a skeleton head sexually touches a naked black woman feigning death. It’s a powerful image about slavery, colonialism, interracial relationships, and one of O’Grady’s core concerns, hybridity. “In The Strange Taxi: From Africa to Jamaica to Boston in 200 Years, where the subject was hybridism itself, my literal ancestresses, who to some may have looked white, sprouted from a European mansion rolling on wheels down the African woman’s back,” O’Grady wrote in “Olympia’s Maid.” “Although they may have been controversial, I liked the questions those beautifully dressed, proudly erect, ca. World War I women raised, not least of which was how the products of rape could be so self-confident, so poised.” Those issues and more are explored in this fascinating show.

SONGS FOR PEOPLE I WILL NEVER SEE AGAIN

Lucy Foley will debut her new multimedia show May 24 at apexart (photo by Lucy Foley)

apexart
291 Church St.
Thursday, May 24, free, 6:30
212-431-5270
www.apexart.org

New York–based Irish singer and photographer Lucy Foley will be presenting her latest multimedia work, Songs for People I Will Never See Again, on Thursday night at 6:30 at apexart on Church St. The free performance will consist of live music and stories by Foley, with Ross Bonadonna on guitar and laptops, Gavin Smith on accordion, synths, and steel drum, Andy Mattina on bass, and Tom Pope on drums, accompanied by projected images. The tales are inspired by real-life unique individuals she has come upon, “people frozen in the moment of their appearance and of their disappearance,” Foley explains on her website. The show will consist of new songs as well as new arrangements of all the tracks from her 2010 debut album, Copenhagen, on which she also collaborated with Bonadonna. “Your life sprang a leak and out I flew / Along came a song and moved into your home with her / So we went out into the street / And we all fell apart together,” Foley sings on the record’s “Kiss You Free.” Foley will also be playing next month at Freddy’s Bloomsday Party on June 16 for Katie Welty’s art opening, along with the Highland Shatners, Plastic Beast, ScriptBreaker, and Cancion Franklin.

THE STEINS COLLECT: MATISSE, PICASSO, AND THE PARISIAN AVANT-GARDE

Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Tisch Galleries, second floor
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 3, $25
212-570-3949
www.metmuseum.org

Like last year’s “Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters: The Cone Sisters of Baltimore” exhibition at the Jewish Museum, the Met’s “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde” does an extraordinary job revealing the fascinating life of a family dedicated to the love of art. In the first decade of the twentieth century, siblings Leo, Gertrude, and Michael Stein, along with Michael’s wife, Sarah, moved to Paris, where they became entranced by the work of such artists as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard, Odilon Redon, and Edgar Degas. Although not wealthy, the upper-middle-class Steins had some extra money from the family’s old clothing business and real estate holdings, so they decided to spend whatever they could on up-and-coming artists whose work they could afford. Soon they were showing off paintings by the relatively little-known Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, hosting Saturday salons, and counting among their friends Claribel and Etta Cone, art dealer Ambroise Vollard, art historian Bernard Berenson, and such artists as Henri Manguin and Picasso and Matisse, whom they famously introduced to each other in 1905-6. The Met exhibit ranges from works that are known to have directly influenced the Steins to want to start collecting art to the many paintings that ended up hanging on their walls, complete with photographs and a site-specific video projection that shows exactly where they were hung in their Paris apartments. Leo, at one time an aspiring artist, and Gertrude, who became a famous and controversial writer, wrote often about their adventures in the art world, so the accompanying text is filled with delightful quotes that display the likes and dislikes of the siblings. “All our recent accessions are unfortunately by people you never heard of so there’s no use trying to describe them,” Leo Stein wrote in 1905, “except that one of those out of the salon [Matisse’s ‘Woman with a Hat’] made everybody laugh except a few who got mad about it and two other pictures are by a young Spaniard named Picasso whom I consider a genius of very great magnitude.”

But Leo grew unhappy later on with the direction Picasso was taking, at the same time that he was not thrilled with Gertrude’s growing relationship with Alice B. Toklas. “Both [Picasso] & Gertrude are using their intellects, which they ain’t got, to do what would need the finest critical tact, which they ain’t got neither,” he wrote in 1913, “and they are in my belief turning out the most go’almighty rubbish that is to be found.” In the 1930s, Gertrude admitted, “It is very difficult now that everybody is accustomed to everything to give some idea of the uneasiness once felt when one first looked at all these pictures on the walls.” And what pictures they are hanging on the walls of the Met in a smartly curated display, highlighted by Matisse’s revolutionary “Woman with a Hat,” Picasso’s justly famous portrait of Gertrude Stein, Cézanne’s “Bathers,” and three versions of “La Coiffure” by Manguin, Matisse, and Picasso. The exhibition also includes Jo Davidson’s sculpture of Gertrude Stein (another cast of which sits in Bryant Park), family photographs, a painting by Leo Stein and drawings by Sarah Stein, a clip from the 1934 opera Four Saints in Three Acts by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson, home movies of Sarah and Michael Stein at their villa designed by Le Corbusier, and Gertrude’s handwritten will. In conjunction with “The Steins Collect,” the Met will be screening a series of related films, including Perry Miller Adato’s Paris the Luminous Years on May 29 at 2:00 and Jill Godmilow and Linda Bassett’s Waiting for the Moon, about the relationship between Gertrude Stein and Toklas, on May 31 at 2:00.

BELLA GAIA

Art and science converge in multimedia BELLA GAIA

BEAUTIFUL EARTH: A POETIC VISION OF EARTH FROM SPACE
Eyebeam Art & Technology Center
540 West 21st St. between 10th & 11th Aves.
May 15-16, $25-$30, 8:00
www.bellagaia.com
eyebeam.org

Composer, director, and violinist Kenji Williams has been touring the world with Bella Gaia: A Poetic Vision of Earth from Space an immersive multimedia exploration of the planet as seen by astronauts. Produced in association with NASA, Bella Gaia, which translates as “Beautiful Earth,” features an eight-piece ensemble performing live in front of a large-screen backdrop showing views of Earth, with Deep Singh on tabla, vocals, and percussion, Yumi Kurosawa on koto, Lety Ellaggar on nay and sax, Kristin Hoffmann on vocals and keyboards, and Williams on violin and laptop, with dance by Irina Akulenko, Lale Sayoko, and Kaeshi Chai. Bella Gaia comes to Eyebeam Art & Technology Center for two shows on May 15 and 16 at 8:00, taking viewers on a fantastical and environmental journey across land, sea, and sky, a “living atlas” that travels from the Amazon to the Arctic, revealing natural beauty and man-made wonders as the Anthropocene continues. “Bella Gaia shows you how humans and nature are connected, and how art and science are connected,” Williams explains. “Itʼs an exploration of the relationship between human civilization and our ecosystem.”

SUNDAY SESSIONS: TARYN SIMON

Taryn Simon examines her new photography installation at MoMA and will discuss it on May 13 at MoMA PS1 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

A LIVING MAN DEAD AND OTHER CHAPTERS I-XVIII
MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Ave. at 46th Ave.
Sunday, May 14, $10, 12 noon – 6:00
718-784-2084
www.ps1.org

As it prepares for its summer Warm Up series, MoMA PS1’s final Sunday Sessions program will be held on May 13. In addition to your last chance to see the exhibitions “Darren Bader: Images” and “Kraftwerk ― Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8,” both of which close on Monday, legendary DJ Afrika Bambaataa will pay tribute to the German electronic music pioneers from 3:00 to 6:00 in the Performance Dome. Also at 3:00, artbook @ moma ps1 will host the book discussion group “A Short Course on Resistance.” Food will be available from Long Island City favorites M. Wells, and the exhibitions “Lara Favaretto: Just Knocked Out,” “Max Brand: no solid footing ― (trained) duck fighting a crow,” “Rania Stephan,” and “Frances Stark: My Best Thing” will also be open. We’re most looking forward to the 2:00 conversation between native New York artist Taryn Simon and MoMA PS1 associate curator Jenny Schlenzka on the occasion of the publication of Simon’s A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, I-XVIII, the catalog to the exhibition currently on view in MoMA’s photography wing. Native New Yorker Simon, whose “Contraband” filled the Lever House lobby in late 2010 with thousands of photos of items that were confiscated at JFK International Airport, has now turned her attention on bloodlines, cataloging families from around the world, organizing them in very specific order, accompanied by photos of documents and other paraphernalia relating to their story. Nine of the chapters can be seen at MoMA, including the Indian Yadav clan, which is fighting to regain land they lost when Shivdutt Yadav was wrongly listed as being deceased; the Ondijos of Kenya, where HIV/AIDS doctor Joseph Nyamwanda Jura Ondijo has nine wives, thirty-two children, and sixty-three grandchildren; the sadly small Mehićs and Nukićs of Bosnia and Herzegovina, victims of genocide; the Chinese family of Su Qijian, declared by China’s State Council Information Office as the best representative of multigenerational Chinese bloodlines; and a large group of children living in a Ukrainian orphanage. Simon also spends one chapter depicting dozens of Australian rabbits used for experimentation that ultimately died during the tests or were later euthanized. A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, which continues at MoMA through September 3, is a fascinating, involving collection of photographs of life and death, of science and politics, of the known and the unknown, intricately organized and arranged to create a complex, compelling visual narrative.

PORTRAIT OF WALLY

Egon Schiele masterpiece is at the heart of new documentary

PORTRAIT OF WALLY (Andrew Shea, 2012)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St.
Opens Friday, May 11
212-255-2243
www.quadcinema.com
portraitofwally.com

An exciting, fast-paced documentary set in the high-stakes art world, Andrew Shea’s Portrait of Wally is a gripping real-life legal thriller, complete with international intrigue, love and death, class warfare, lies and deception, and Nazis. In 1912, Austrian artist Egon Schiele painted a small portrait of his mistress, Walburga (“Wally”) Neuzil, in addition to a companion self-portrait. In 1939, the painting of Wally was stolen from art dealer Lea Bondi’s personal collection by Friedrich Welz, a Nazi who had also taken over Bondi’s gallery because she was Jewish. When the painting suddenly showed up in New York City in 1997 as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s “Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection” exhibition, a furious, angry thirteen-year battle ensued over ownership of the work, involving Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau; MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry; Sharon Cohen Levin, chief of the Asset Forfeiture Unit of the U.S. Attorney’s Office; investigator Willi Korte of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project; Schiele-obsessed art collector Rudolf Leopold; and the Bondi family. Other major museums sided with MoMA in a concerted effort to prevent the government from returning the painting to the Bondis, claiming that it would seriously damage the ability of art institutions to bring works on loan for exhibition in the United States; interestingly, Lowry and MoMA chairman Ronald S. Lauder, who is also the head of the Commission for Art Recovery and displays many of Schiele’s paintings and drawings at his Neue Galerie in New York City, opted not to speak with Shea, but the filmmaker did meet with Morgenthau, Levin, André Bondi, New York Times reporter Judith Dobrzynski, 60 Minutes journalist Morley Safer, Galerie St. Etienne owner and Schiele expert Jane Kallir, and others who share fascinating details about the personal and professional history of Schiele and the painting as well as the inner workings of the art world. Mixing archival footage with new interviews, Shea and his wife, editor Melissa Shea, tell a compelling tale of global importance filled with powerful emotion that, in many ways, evokes the feeling one gets when looking closely at a master work of art. But Portrait of Wally is about a lot more than just art; it is also about memory, about family, about responsibility, and about justice.