this week in art

FUTURES

DubbleX discusses Future Fears at Fountain House Gallery opening (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

FUTURES
Fountain House Gallery
702 Ninth Ave. at Forty-Eighth St.
Tuesday – Saturday through March 2, free, 12:00 – 6:00
212-262-2756
www.fountainhousegallery.org
www.artsy.net

In the nonprofit Art at a Time Like This, cofounders and independent curators Anne Verhallen and Barbara Pollack focus on twenty-first-century art that explores current events and the vast changes being experienced around the world every day. Pollack, author of Brand New Art from China: A Generation on the Rise and The Wild, Wild East: An American Art Critic’s Adventures in China, looks to what’s next in “Futures,” continuing at Fountain House Gallery through March 2. The show features painting, sculpture, and installation by more than twenty artists living with mental illness. The works range from bright and hopeful to dark and foreboding. Alyson Vega’s fabric collage Dear Future… contains such phrases as “Our bad” and “Left a bit of a mess.” In Spirit of 2076, Issa Ibrahim reimagines Archibald M. Willard’s iconic Yankee Doodle (Spirit of ’76) painting of two drummers and a fife player in front of the American flag during the Revolutionary War as Wonder Woman, Superman, and Batman marching for the United States of McDonald’s. Susan Spangenberg is represented by three pieces: Mister Doomsday, in which a strange creature is holding a coffee cup that says “Have a Nice Day” and a sign that declares “The End Is Near”; Octomission, a colorful octopus blasting off; and the large-scale map of the moon, Space Farce, a collaboration with Ibrahim that includes familiar quotes and logos placed on the moon.

Boo Lynn Walsh shares her thoughts on the future in collage Chaos: History Repeats (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

“Post-2020, predicting the future is perhaps an antiquated game, given how the sudden onset of the pandemic surprised all prognosticators,” Pollack said in a statement. “Combining boundless imagination with low-tech materials, the artists of ‘Futures’ create a new way of dealing with our hopes, fears, and anxieties, conjuring visions that cannot be seen through telescopes or crystal balls. From apocalyptic nightmares to over-the-rainbow fantasies, the artworks in this exhibition underscore the limits of politicians, scientists, and astrologers to find a new way of envisioning imminent change. Only artists, like these, seem capable of creating images that are dynamic and capture the diversity of the future, or, more accurately, ‘futures,’ since this holds a different meaning for each.”

At the opening, several artists were on hand to discuss their work. Vermilion put on her blue Ceremonial Helmet, which gallery visitors cannot do, but you can spin her Compass, both of which are made of found materials; Boo Lynn Walsh offered everyone a chance to peer into her electronic wall sculpture Oracle of Artificial Enlightenment, and Ray Lopez talked about the sci-fi influences behind his watercolor Confessions into Another Porthole, in which a woman looks through a black hole in a blue circle, searching for something else. Most of the works are available for sale (some have already been sold), with prices ranging from $90 to $4,500.

GALERIE LELONG — DIALOGUES: ETEL ADNAN’S DISCOVERY OF IMMEDIACY

Etel Adnan, Découverte de l’immédiat 16, oil on canvas, 2021 (photo courtesy Galerie Lelong)

Who: Carla Chammas, Dawn Chan, Jina Khayyer, Mary Sabbatino
What: Live, virtual discussion about artist Etel Adnan
Where: Galerie Lelong & Co. online
When: Saturday, February 12, free with advance RSVP, noon
Why: In the summer of 2021, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed artists and longtime partners Etel Adnan and Simone Fattal at their summer home in Erquy, France, prior to their upcoming shows at Art Basel. At one point Adnan, who was born in 1925 in Beirut, said, “My last book [Shifting the Silence] is about realizing that I am going to die. It’s different to know and to feel it, and it’s as if life happens in silence. There is behind the noise of daily life a silence that we hear, another noise, a shifting silence. This silence has changed the focus of consciousness. That’s my last book.” Adnan, who had continued working through the pandemic and was a celebrated poet as well as a visual artist, passed away that November at the age of ninety-six. Her extraordinary career will be the focus of the latest free “Galerie Lelong: Dialogues” virtual discussion, taking place February 12 at 12:30; the talk features gallerist and curator Carla Chammas, art critic and writer Dawn Chan, and writer, poet, and journalist Jina Khayyer; Galerie Lelong vice president/partner Mary Sabbatino will moderate the conversation.

Etel Adnan, Erquy the Edge, India ink on booklet, 2021 (photo courtesy Galerie Lelong)

The gallery’s New York City and Paris locations are currently showing “Discovery of Immediacy,” on view in Chelsea through February 19. The exhibition consists of new black-and-white oil paintings and leporello, folded paper works. “The leporello is a journey,” Adnan told Obrist. “When you start a leporello, it’s like getting on a boat — you have a journey in front of you and that’s what’s beautiful. In the middle of a leporello you are afraid of making a mistake because you would have to throw everything away. You have to invest in the work and you have to keep a tension. It’s like composing music, [maintaining] a rhythm — that’s the work of the leporello, not to fall into a hole, to continue like when you are surfing, to hold the wave.” The colorful Guggenheim retrospective “Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure,” which included color paintings and a bonus of several films, recently closed, but it is sure to come up as well as we all try to hold the wave.

THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES — EDMUND de WAAL AND E. RANDOL SCHOENBERG IN CONVERSATION

Edmund de Waal will talk about his book and accompanying exhibition in free, virtual Jewish Museum program (photo by Iwan Baan)

Who: Edmund de Waal, E. Randol Schoenberg
What: Live virtual discussion about book and exhibit
Where: JewishGen Talks online
When: Wednesday, February 9, free with advance RSVP (donations accepted), 2:00
Why: “It is not just things that carry stories with them. Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina,” Edmund de Waal writes in his 2010 memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance. When ceramicist de Waal inherited his family’s netsuke collection, consisting of hundreds of miniature objects, he did a deep dive into the history of the Ephrussi clan, turning it into a bestselling book. Now the story behind his family and the netsuke is on view at the Jewish Museum through May 15. The fabulous show features paintings, letters, photographs, personal documents, keepsakes, and several vitrines containing hundreds of tiny items made of wood, ivory, or bronze, ranging from mice, monkeys, fish, rats, and nuts to spirits, demon catchers, gods, masks, and bottles. A woman takes a bath. A boy exposes himself. A snake wraps around a lotus leaf. A sea woman suckles an octopus. An eji stretches.

“The Hare with Amber Eyes” is on view at the Jewish Museum through May 15 (photo by Iwan Baan)

On the audio guide, de Waal quotes from the prologue, “I want to know what the relationship has been between this wooden object that I am rolling between my fingers — hard and tricky and Japanese — and where it has been. I want to be able to reach to the handle of the door and turn it and feel it open. I want to walk into each room where this object has lived, to feel the volume of the space, to know what pictures were on the walls, how the light fell from the windows. And I want to know whose hands it has been in, and what they felt about it and thought about it — if they thought about it at all. I want to know what it has witnessed.”

On February 9 at 2:00, de Waal will discuss the book, his family history, and the exhibit with attorney, philanthropist, and genealogist E. Randol Schoenberg; the free, virtual event is sponsored by the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, the Jewish Museum, and the Leo Baeck Institute. You can check out an earlier Jewish Museum conversation between de Waal and Adam Gopnik, about de Waal’s 2021 book, Letters to Camondo, here.

DAVID BYRNE AND JOHN WILSON — HOW WE LEARNED ABOUT NON-RATIONAL LOGIC: A CONVERSATION ON HUMOR AND BOOKMAKING

John Wilson talks with David Byrne about his latest Pace show and new book on February 7

Who: David Byrne, John Wilson
What: Live virtual discussion
Where: Pace Gallery, 540 West Twenty-Fifth St., Pace Gallery YouTube
When: Monday, February 7, free (online), 7:00
Why: In his endlessly creative and fun HBO docuseries How To with John Wilson, Astoria native John Wilson uses footage shot all around New York City to delve into such issues as small talk, scaffolding, memory improvement, finding a parking spot, and making the perfect risotto. In his endlessly creative and fun career, British-born musician, singer, playwright, and visual artist David Byrne has made albums (solo and with Talking Heads), given concerts, directed films, and had gallery shows; currently, his brilliant American Utopia continues on Broadway at the St. James Theatre through April 3, and his latest exhibition, “How I Learned About Non-Rational Logic,” is running at Pace’s Twenty-Fifth St. space through March 19. The show consists of several series of drawings Byrne has done over the last twenty years, including his unusual depictions of dingbats sketched during the pandemic. (He describes his fascination with dingbats here.)

Byrne and Wilson have previously collaborated on the 2015 true crime concert documentary Temporary Color; they now will sit down together for a discussion at Pace in conjunction with the publication of Byrne’s new book, A History of the World (in Dingbats) (Phaidon, March 9, $39.95). “How We Learned About Non-Rational Logic: A Conversation on Humor and Bookmaking” takes place in person at Pace, where attendees will receive a signed copy of the book; the event will also be streamed for free over YouTube. “This idea of non-rational logic was not something I made up, but I realized that it kind of resonated with both the fact that I make music and the fact that these drawings follow a kind of logic that isn’t kind of based on logical or rational thinking,” Byrne notes in the above behind-the-scenes video. There should be plenty of such non-rational logic in what promises to be a very funny and illuminating talk.

VIRTUAL SYMPOSIUM: SURREALISM BEYOND BORDERS

Koga Harue, Umi (The Sea), oil on canvas, 1929 (The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo / photo courtesy MOMAT/DNPartcom)

Who: MetSpeaks
What: Two-day virtual symposium on Met exhibition “Surrealism Beyond Borders”
Where: Metropolitan Museum of Art Zoom
When: Thursday, January 20, 1:00–5:30; Friday, January 21, 10:00 am – 1:00 pm, free with advance RSVP
Why: While walking through the Met’s must-see “Surrealism Beyond Borders” exhibit, which continues through January 30, I bumped into an old friend of mine who was not impressed by the show, disappointed that it was lacking in big-name familiar works. However, that’s part of the point. While the exhibition does feature works by Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Leonora Carrington, Wifredo Lam, Dorothea Tanning, and Joan Miró, it explores the development of surrealism around the world, from Belgrade, Mexico City, the Netherlands, Haiti, South Korea, and Portugal to Egypt, England, Colombia, South America, Cuba, and Canada, where surrealism was often part of sociocultural movements toward freedom and justice.

Divided into such sections as “Collective Identities,” “The Work of Dreams,” “Beyond Reason,” “Thoughts in Transition,” “The Fantasy and Phallacy of Elsewhere,” “Bodies of Desire,” and “Automatism,” the show finds commonalities in different cultures in painting and sculpture and broadens the idea of what qualifies as surreal. Marcel Jean’s oil on wood Armoire surréaliste (Surrealist Wardrobe), made while the French artist was living in exile with his wife in Budapest, welcomes visitors with open doors. Koga Harue’s Umi (The Sea) prefigures Thomas Hart Benton. Ramses Younan’s 1939 untitled painting of a twisted Nut, the goddess of the sky, was a direct response to Magritte and Dalí. Ithell Colquhoun called her double-phallic Scylla “a pictorial pun.” There’s also an experimental film by Maya Deren, Cage by Alberto Giacometti, a copy of the 1941 Martinique arts journal Tropiques, Pierre Alechinsky’s depiction of Central Park, and a corner dedicated to surrealism in Chicago in the 1960s, with protest posters, manifestos, and blues music by Elmore James, Buddy Guy, and others. “Surrealism fights for the TOTAL LIBERATION OF MAN!” the Chicago Surrealist Group declared in 1971. The show indeed goes well beyond borders.

In conjunction with the final days of the show, MetSpeaks is hosting a two-day free virtual symposium consisting of four panel discussions with professors, publishers, artists, and art historians exploring various aspects of surrealism, focusing on time and place. Admission is free with RSVP; below is the schedule.

Thursday, January 20
Surrealism and Place, with Lori Cole, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Talinn Grigor, fahima ife, and Mark Polizzotti, moderated by Joan Kee, 1:00 – 3:00

On Black, Brown, & Beige, with Robin D. G. Kelley and Fred Moten, moderated by Zita Cristina Nunes, 4:00 – 5:30

Friday, January 21
Surrealism and Time, with Sam Durant, Marie Mauzé, Partha Mitter, and Michael Stone-Richards, moderated by Dawn Adès, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

Closing Discussion, with Dawn Adès, Joan Kee, and Zita Cristina Nunes, 12:00 – 12:45 pm

A CELEBRATION OF DR. KING

The life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. will be celebrated at BAM on MLK Day (photo courtesy SuperStock)

Who: Dr. Imani Perry, Nona Hendryx, Craig Harris & Tailgaters Tales, Sing Harlem, Kyle Marshall, Reggie Wilson, others
What: Thirty-Sixth Annual Brooklyn Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Where: BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Harvey Theater at BAM Strong, BAM Rose Cinemas, and online
When: Monday, January 17, free with RSVP, 10:30 am
Why: No one pays tribute every year to the life and legacy of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. quite the way BAM does on MLK Day. On January 17, the Brooklyn institution will be hosting another impressive gathering, both in person and online, featuring a keynote address by Dr. Imani Perry, author and professor of African American studies at Princeton, entitled “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community”; live performances by Nona Hendryx with Craig Harris & Tailgaters Tales and Sing Harlem; and the eight-minute video King, a recording of a solo by dancer and choreographer Kyle Marshall that incorporates text from Dr. King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, delivered on April 3, 1968, the day before his assassination.

Kyle Marshall’s King is part of BAM MLK tribute (photo by Steven Speliotis)

“We’re thrilled to welcome the community back as we uplift one another and unite in celebration of Dr. King’s enduring legacy and its relevance today,” BAM co-interim resident Coco Killingsworth said in a statement. ”Brooklyn’s beloved tradition was established a year after Dr. King’s birthday was recognized as a national holiday, and thirty-six years later, his convictions remain an indelible force for equality, dignity, and justice. This year we are expanding our celebration to include more programs and events at a moment when we so deeply need to channel Dr. King’s legacy, leadership, and lessons.”

The day also includes a 1:00 screening in BAM Rose Cinemas of Stanley Nelson and Traci A. Curry’s 2021 documentary Attica, about the 1971 uprising at the prison; a 3:00 community presentation at the Harvey Theater at BAM Strong of Reggie Wilson’s Power, a dance that explores the world of the Black Shakers; the BAMkids workshop “Heroes of Color HQ” for children five to eleven, focusing on underrepresented historical figures; and a digital billboard showing “Salvation: A State of Being,” with contributions by seven Black visual artists (Adama Delphine Fawundu, Genevieve Gaignard, Jamel Shabazz, Frank Stewart, Roscoè B. Thické III, Deborah Willis, and Joshua Woods) honoring author and activist bell hooks, who passed away on December 15 at the age of sixty-nine.

As Dr. King said on April 3, 1968: “Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee — the cry is always the same: ‘We want to be free.’ And another reason that I’m happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we are going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn’t force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.”

WHO IS QUEEN? READING GROUP AND DIALOGUES PODCAST

WHO IS QUEEN? READING GROUP
January 12, 19, 25, free with advance RSVP, 6:00
Exhibition continues through February 21 at MoMA
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Donald and Catherine Marron Family Atrium
www.moma.org

“It has been said that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, but what about the people the master treated as tools?” Adam Pendleton writes in his 2017 Black Dada Reader. “That is, the ‘tools’ that were themselves capable of practicing abstraction, those three-fifths? Before the question about tools can be asked, there must already be an understanding about what a tool is and what it is not. . . . One day there are masters and tools, and the next, only people.”

Pendleton’s multimedia installation, Who Is Queen?, on view in MoMA’s Donald and Catherine Marron Family Atrium through February 21, is a unique neighborhood built of various tools, where visitors walk in the middle of three five-story black scaffold towers made of timber, laden with paintings, drawings, text, graffiti-style screenprints, speakers, and a large screen that shows new and archival footage involving the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, Virginia (the city where Pendleton was born in 1984); Resurrection City, a forty-two-day encampment protest on the National Mall in 1968 that was part of the Poor People’s Campaign for civil rights; and So We Moved: A Portrait of Jack Halberstam, a film about author, professor, and gender theorist Jack Halberstam, the latest in a series by Pendleton that follows works about Kyle Abraham, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Lorraine O’Grady, and Yvonne Rainer. Among the text that can be made out on the canvases are such phrases as “But now I am,” “We are not,” “Everything,” and “They will love us all,” accompanied by a sound collage that includes American violinist Hahn Rowe’s “Yellow Smile,” a poem read by Amiri Baraka, excerpts from the 2014 Ferguson solidarity protest in New York City, and music by Jace Clayton, Julius Eastman, Laura Rivers, Frederic Rzewski, Linda and Sonny Sharrock, and Hildegard Westerkamp.

Adam Pendleton’s Who Is Queen? includes sculpture, painting, film, drawing, sound, and text (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The scaffolding resembles fire escape ladders with platforms, but the public is not permitted to walk up and get closer to some of the pieces, which can reach sixty feet high. You might also have trouble making out all the words on the lower works as a parade of museumgoers pose in front of them foor pictures without even reading what they say about politics, race, inequality, gender, and the social contract. Pendleton has previously explored those concepts in such exhibitions as “what a day was this” at Lever House, detailing his manifesto, and his lobby piece As Heavy as Sculpture welcoming visitors to the New Museum’s instantly seminal “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America” show.

Adam Pendleton uses black-and-white text and imagery in multimedia MoMA installation (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

“Who Is Queen? is undergirded by a kind of Afro-optimism balanced by an abiding Afro-pessimism,” Pendleton explained in a statement. “It is optimistic in a deeply American sense of the word, and pessimistic along those same lines. That is to say, it is not black or white, and locates each within the other. It articulates the ways in which we simultaneously possess and are possessed by contradictory ideals and ideas.” The articulation of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which has been ten years in the making, expands with a series of livestreamed Zoom reading groups and recorded podcast dialogues that are all free; snippets of the conversations will be added to the overall sound collage in the atrium.

Wednesday, January 12, 6:00
Reading Group with Harmony Holiday and Jasmine Sanders, inspired by Adam Pendleton’s idea of “poetic research” and focusing on Amiri Baraka’s poem “Black Dada Nihilismus” and an interview between Ornette Coleman and Jacques Derrida, “The Other’s Language”

Wednesday, January 19, 6:00
Reading Group with Che Gossett and Jules Gill-Peterson, focusing on a 2011 interview between cultural theorist Lauren Berlant and political philosopher Michael Hardt, “No One Is Sovereign in Love”

Tuesday, January 25, 6:00
Reading Group with Jace Clayton and Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, focusing on “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture” by James A. Snead

Adam Pendleton installation reaches sixty feet high in MoMA atrium (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Dialogues Podcast:

Episode One
Wild: A Conversation with Jack Halberstam and Lynne Tillman

Episode Two
We: A Conversation with Michael Hardt and Joshua Chambers-Letson

Episode Three
Souls: A Conversation with Simone White and Ruby Sales

Episode Four
Heard: A Conversation with Susan Howe and Alexis Pauline Gumbs