this week in art

KUSAMA: COSMIC NATURE

Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room — Illusion Inside the Heart sits like a UFO in a grassy field at NYBG (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

KUSAMA: COSMIC NATURE
The New York Botanical Garden
2900 Southern Blvd., Bronx
April 10 – October 31, $15 children two to twelve, $35 adults, $10 for Infinity Room, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
718-817-8700
www.nybg.org
online slideshow

“How vast and boundless the provisions of nature!” Yayoi Kusama has declared. The ninety-two-year-old Japanese artist has been attracted to the natural world since she was a little girl, when her grandmother ran a plant nursery in Nagano, and she later studied the nihonga style of painting, dating back to the Meiji Period, which depicts scenes from nature through a contemporary artistic lens. Kusama’s fascination with living things is on display in the endlessly fun exhibition “Kusama: Cosmic Nature,” which continues at the New York Botanical Garden through October 31.

Hymn of Life — Tulips emerge out of the Conservatory Courtyard Hardy Pool (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The show, comprising drawing, painting, sculpture, video, and installation, opened in April, but it has taken a distinct turn this fall, adapting its focus to pumpkins and chrysanthemums. “My pumpkins, beloved of all the plants in the world,” Kusama said. “When I see pumpkins, I cannot efface the joy of them being my everything, nor the awe I hold them in.” For the final month, the garden has brought in hundreds of real gourds, lining the flights of steps leading to the LuEsther T. Mertz Library Building and the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory; in addition, three enormous real pumpkins are on plinths outside the conservatory, each weighing more than a ton.

Starry Pumpkin occupies the place of honor in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Several of Kusama’s small and large-scale pumpkins are scattered throughout the 250-acre Bronx oasis. Starry Pumpkin (2015) has the place of honor in the center of the conservatory, a glittering object surrounded by red, white, and yellow chrysanthemums in arrangements based on Kusama’s 2014 painting Alone, Buried in a Flower Garden (which is on view in the library), along with sections inspired by the Kengai (Cascade) style that resembles flowers hanging over a cliff, and the kiku method of Shino-tsukuri (Driving Rain) that gives the plants a windblown appearance. Inside the library are also the acrylic and felt pen on canvas Pumpkin TWOTOEL (2004) and soft sculptures of pumpkins from 2016 entitled The Sun Has Gone Down, I Am Scared as Much as Being Alone and Suppressing the Burning Desire for Death, which give an indication of Kusama’s longtime exploration of life and death and the often unusual names she gives her works.

Visitors are allowed to walk under Kusama’s Dancing Pumpkin (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Near the conservatory is the monumental Dancing Pumpkin (2020), a black and yellow creature you can walk under that resembles one of Louise Bourgeois’s spiders, while Pumpkins Screaming About Love Beyond Infinity (2017) lights up and creates mirrored views that seem to go on forever in the Visitor Center Gallery. “What appealed to me most was the pumpkin’s generous unpretentiousness,” Kusama has explained. “That and its solid spiritual balance . . . its fat belly and unadorned features . . . its burly, psychological power.”

My Soul Blooms Forever welcome people inside the conservatory (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

But “Kusama: Cosmic Nature” is a lot more than just pumpkins. The longest line is for Infinity Mirrored Room — Illusion Inside the Heart (2020), which sits in the middle of a field of tall grass and in between two small gardens, like a UFO landing in the country; holes in the exterior change the inside lighting and allow you to peer inside, where you will see your own face on the other side. I Want to Fly to the Universe (2020) is a smiling red, white, and blue star residing in the reflecting pool outside the Visitor Center. For Narcissus Garden (1966/2021), Kusama has placed 1,400 stainless-steel shiny balls bobbing atop a pond in the Native Plant Garden. Ascension of Polka Dots on the Trees (2002/2021) consists of trees wrapped in red polyester covered in white polka dots. Hymn of Life — Tulips (2007) features three large, colorful, childlike flowers in the Conservatory Courtyard Hardy Pool. The five waterbound urethane-painted stainless-steel flowers of My Soul Blooms Forever welcome people inside the conservatory. The exhibit also includes the obliteration greenhouse Flower Obsession (2017/2021), complete with household items and plastic stickers. Inside the Ross Gallery is a timeline and the multiscreen Walking Piece (1966/2021) composed of stills from one of Kusama’s most well known performances, wandering through New York City in a kimono and under an umbrella.

Chrysanthemum arrangements are inspired by the Kengai (Cascade) style that resembles flowers hanging over a cliff (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

“I am happy that I have painted flowers. . . . There are no objects more interesting,” Kusama, who has voluntarily lived in a Tokyo psychological institute since 1977 and still works every day in her nearby studio, has stated. As “Kusama: Cosmic Nature” reveals, Kusama has created a lot of other parts of the living world, all pieces of an endless universe that exists beyond death, in her deeply personal futuristic environment that is filled with abounding wonder.

CROSSING THE LINE FESTIVAL 2021

CROSSING THE LINE FESTIVAL
FIAF and other locations
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
October 20 – November 6, free – $25
212-355-6100
fiaf.org

Igbo-Nigerian American multidisciplinary artist Okwui Okpokwasili has not let the pandemic lockdown slow her down. After appearing in the Public’s outstanding revival of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf in the late fall of 2019, Okpokwasili has taken part in Danspace Project’s Platform series, the New Museum exhibition “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” and numerous online discussions and special presentations. Her 2017 film, Bronx Gothic, was screened virtually by BAM. In June, she led a procession through Battery Park City for the River to River Festival. And in May, I caught her captivating project On the way, undone, in which she and a group of performers walked across the High Line wearing futuristic head gear made of light and mirrors, vocalizing as they headed toward Simone Leigh’s Brick House sculpture.

Okpokwasili is now the centerpiece of FIAF’s 2021 Crossing the Line Festival, taking place at multiple locations from October 20 to November 6. Throughout the festival, her video installation Before the whisper becomes the word, made with her regular collaborator, director, and husband, Peter Born, will be on view in the FIAF Gallery, exploring remembrance, community mourning, and history. On October 20 at 7:00, she will speak with festival curator Claude Grunitzky in the FIAF Skyroom about the show. “This installation is a crossroads, a midpoint, a caesura. A place caught between worlds,” she said in a statement. “Can we remember what came before while imagining the shape of a future landscape? We enter mid-song, a song that marks a singular moment in time while also expressing an entire lineage. The song is a container for an unreliable memory. From whose mouth is history born? Whose words are trusted when it comes to the telling of what happened? If the history we learn is that which is spoken aloud, what is learned by listening to the whispers that have not been written?”

Christopher Myers’s Fire in the Head will make its world premiere at FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival

Okpokwasili will also be presenting On the way, undone at the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn October 21-23 ($25). In a High Line video, she says about the work, “I hope it’s a kind of medicine . . . an architecture of sound, light, that is in some way trying to imagine a portal, an opening through space and time, and it’s imagining a woman’s future self, a young girl’s future self singing back to her.”

In addition, the festival includes nora chipaumire’s Nehanda, an opera that was excerpted for River to River at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center and for FIAF will be broadcast in two cycles both online ($15) and in person ($25) at FIAF’s Tinker Auditorium, divided into eight “days”: natives, whites, pungwe, thinkers, komuredhi judhas nemajekenisheni, white verdict, killings, and manifesting, with an artist talk on October 30 at 5:00; a concert by Grammy nominee Somi in Florence Gould Hall on October 28 ($25); Christopher Myers’s Fire in the Head, a tribute to Vaslav Nijinsky with shadow puppets taking place October 29 and 30 ($25, 7:30) at the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association; and Kaneza Schaal’s work-in-progress KLII, November 4-6 in Florence Gould Hall ($25), an exorcism of colonialism and the ghost of King Leopold II, incorporating archival footage and texts by Mark Twain and Patrice Lumumba.

MoMA SCULPTURE GARDEN: AUTOMANIA

Four classy cars will be parked in MoMA’s sculpture garden through October 15 as part of “Automania” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

AUTOMANIA
Museum of Modern Art
The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden
West 54th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through October 15
www.moma.org
online slideshow

You better rev it up and go if you want to catch the part of MoMA’s current “Automania” exhibition that is parked in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, as it will be pulling out at the end of the week.

In 1998, the Guggenheim presented “The Art of the Motorcycle,” a survey of the history of two-wheeled motorized transport, a show that was greeted with a significant amount of disdain for elevating a vehicle into the realm of fine art. On July 4, MoMA opened “Automania,” which includes nine cars and an Airstream in addition to lithographs, posters, photographs, signs, books, paintings, short films, and other ephemera. Four of the cars are on view through October 15 in the sculpture garden, alongside Henri Matisse’s The Back I-IV, Aristide Maillol’s The River, Alexander Calder’s Man-Eater with Pennants, and Isa Genzken’s Rose II.

“Automania” features such colorful vehicles as a 2002 Smart Car Coupé (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Joining those familiar works are a 2002 Smart Car Coupé, a 1973 Citroën DS 23 Sedan, a 1953 Jeep M-38A1 Utility Truck, a 1965 Porsche 911 Coupé, and a 1968 Fiat 500f City Car. Just outside the entrance to the garden is a 1990 Ferrari Formula 1 Racing Car. Each vehicle is accompanied by a label and audio guide entry detailing its creation and use. “Commonly referred to as the Cincquecento, the Nuova 500 is a compact, rear-engine city car that helped make automobile ownership attainable for an Italian public recovering from the economic devastation of World War II,” the text for the Fiat explains. On the third floor you’ll find a 1963 Airstream Bambi Travel Trailer, a 1946 Cisitalia 202 GT Car, a 1963 E-Type Roadster, and a 1959 Volkswagen Type 1 Sedan.

While making your way through the exhibit, you can listen to “I’m in Love with My Car: An Automania Driving Mix” a playlist that includes songs by Grace Jones, Yo La Tengo, Chuck Berry, War, the Beach Boys, Tracy Chapman, Prince, Buzzcocks, the Beatles, Public Enemy, Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, and others.

HERSTORY OF THE UNIVERSE@GOVERNORS ISLAND

PeiJu Chien-Pott performs Amaterasu, part of site-specific dance presentation on Governors Island (photo by Slobodan Randjelović)

Who: Richard Move and MoveOpolis!
What: Site-specific dance performances
Where: Governors Island
When: Saturday, October 9 & 16, free with advance RSVP, 1:00 – 4:00
Why: Governors Island is an oasis in New York City, a historic area initially settled by the Lenape before being stolen by the Dutch and later taken over by the British and the United States. It was home to a fort and a castle that held Confederate prisoners during the Civil War and served as headquarters for the army and the coast guard prior to opening to the public in 2003 as a park. On October 9 and 16, the island will host its first-ever performance commission, the site-specific Herstory of the Universe@Governors Island by Richard Move and MoveOpolis! The three-hour show will move across the island, making six fifteen-minute stops, at Nolan Park, Hammock Grove, Outlook Hill, and Rachel Whiteread’s Cabin sculpture, among other locations. Robyn Cascio, Megumi Eda, Lisa Giobbi, Celeste Hastings, PeiJu Chien-Pott, Natasha M. Diamond-Walker, and Gabrielle Willis will perform such pieces as Demolition Angels, Ascent, and Amaterasu, making use of the trees, the buildings, the grass, the rocks, and other natural and manufactured elements of the beautiful island, celebrating its unique ecosystem, storied past, and outstanding views.

Gabrielle Wills and Natasha Diamond Walker rehearse Demolition Angels on Governors Island (photo by Slobodan Randjelović)

Commissioned by the Trust for Governors Island, Herstory invites the audience to follow along with a special keepsake map designed by Connie Fleming, which can be picked up at the Climate Museum in Nolan Park Building 18. A dancer, teacher, choreographer, and filmmaker, Move has previously created site-specific works for the European Capitol of Culture in France, the Guggenheim in New York, the Parrish Art Museum on Long Island, the Cannes Film Festival, the Asian Civilizations Museum in Singapore, and the LMCC Sitelines Festival as well as at a bus station in Sao Paulo. If you haven’t been to Governors Island in a while, Herstory provides an excellent opportunity to refamiliarize yourself with its majesty, which currently also includes installations by Duke Riley, Mark Handforth, Beam Camp City, NYC Audubon, Pratt Gaud, West Harlem Art Fund, the Endangered Language Alliance, American Indian Community House, Harvestworks, Flux Factory, the Swale Floating Food Forest, and others, all free.

MOVEMENT WITHOUT BORDERS: A DAY OF PERFORMANCE TO CELEBRATE NEW YORK IMMIGRATION COALITION, UNLOCAL, AND GENTE UNIDA

Wladimiro Politano, The Expression of the Soul XLIX, 2010

Who: Mariana Valencia, Jimena Paz, Shamel Pitts, Francesca Harper, Francisco Cordova, Ernesto Breton/Rudy Perez, Edivaldo Ernesto, Horacio Macuacua, Emilio Rojas, Claudia Rankine, Margo Jefferson, Antonio Sánchez Band, Jonathan Mendoza, Gina Belafonte, Xaviera Simmons, Enrique Morones, Roger H. Brown, Raoul Roach, Adelita-Husni-Bey, Reverend Micah Bucey
What: Dance, poetry, music, film, and activism at historic location
Where: Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South between Thompson & Sullivan Sts.
When: Saturday, October 2, free with RSVP (suggested donation $20), 11:00 am – 6:30 pm; ninety-minute recorded version the next day at the Jersey City Theater Center
Why: An all-star lineup of artists and activists are coming together October 2 at Judson Memorial Church for “Movement without Borders: A Day of Performance to Celebrate New York Immigration Coalition, UnLocal, and Gente Unida,” honoring three organizations fighting for immigration rights. From 11:00 am to 6:30 pm, dancers and choreographers, musicians, poets, authors, visual artists, and more will honor the work being done by New York Immigration Coalition, UnLocal, and Gente Unida. Among the presenters are dancer/choreographers Mariana Valencia, Ernesto Breton/Rudy Perez, Jimena Paz, Francisco Cordova, Horacio Macuacua, Francesca Harper, Edivaldo Ernesto, and Shamel Pitts/TRIBE, multidisciplinary artist Emilio Rojas, the Antonio Sánchez Band (with Sánchez, Thana Alexa, Jordan Peters, Carmen Staaf, Noam Wiesenberg), Adelita Husni-Bey (who will screen her film Chiron), visual artist Xaviera Simmons, poets Jonathan Mendoza and Claudia Rankine, Gente Unida founder and director Enrique Morones, Sankofa executive director Gina Belafonte, music producer and activist Raoul Roach, and others. Conceived, directed, and produced by Richard Colton, “Movement without Borders” will also be available in a ninety-minute recorded version on October 3 at the Jersey City Theater Center as part of the third annual Voices International Theater Festival.

THE GREAT ARIA THROWDOWN #2 – LES EDITION

LUNGS HARVEST ARTS FESTIVAL
Multiple locations
Daily through October 3, free
“The Great Aria Throwdown #2 — LES Edition”
Campos Community Garden, 640-644 East Twelfth St. at Ave. C
Friday, October 1, 6:30
www.lungsnyc.org

In 2011, community gardens in Loisaida, the Lower East Side, and the East Village came together and formed LUNGS, the Loisaida United Neighborhood Gardens; its mission is “to promote, protect, and preserve gardening and greening through cooperation, coordination, and communication.” The group is now hosting its tenth annual LUNGS Harvest Arts Festival, which runs through October 3 with free music and dance, knitting, activism, art exhibits, yoga, a dominos tournament, interactive workshops, classes, a treasure hunt, and more, in such locations as Green Oasis, Carmen’s Garden, LaGuardia Corner Gardens, Orchard Alley Community Garden, Creative Little Garden, La Plaza Cultural de Armando Perez, 6BC Botanical Garden, and other lovely oases.

One of the highlights is “The Great Aria Throwdown #2 — LES Edition,” taking place October 1 at 6:30 in Campos Community Garden on Twelfth St. & Ave. C. Presented by dell’Arte Opera Ensemble (dAOE), the evening features sopranos Bahati Barton and Diana Charlop, mezzo-soprano Perri di Christina, countertenor Jeffrey Mandelbaum, and pianist Pablo Zinger performing works by Bellini, Donizetti, Mozart, Purcell, and others.

“Dell’Arte Opera Ensemble is a bridge for emerging opera singers to work with accomplished professionals in the field,” dAOE executive director Marianna Mott Newirth explains. “‘The Great Aria Throwdown’ is a fun and free event that gives ‘stage’ to three sopranos and an outstanding countertenor singing with widely acclaimed pianist Pablo Zinger, producing a growing garden of sound on East Twelfth St. From Bellini to Monteverdi, we’re bringing opera to the LES! Campos Garden even has a chandelier they plan to raise just as the show begins — a nod to the new season starting at the Met after a year of darkness.” Below is the full program.

Diana Charlop: “Quel guardo il cavaliere” from Don Pasquale (Bellini)
Perri di Christina: “Deh, non voler costringere” from Anna Bolena (Donizetti)
Bahati Barton: “Ruhe Sanft” from Zaide (Mozart)
Jeffrey Mandelbaum: “If Music Be the Food of Love” (Purcell, Third Version)

Diana Charlop: “Padre germani addio” from Idomeneo (Mozart)
Perri di Christina: “Voi che sapete” from Le nozze di Figaro (Mozart)
Jeffrey Mandelbaum: “Sprezzami quanto sai” from L’incoronazione di Poppea (Monteverdi)

Perri di Christina: “Faites-lui mes aveux” from Faust (Gounod)
Bahati Barton: “Think of Me” from The Phantom of the Opera (Lloyd Webber)
Diana Charlop: “Obéissons quand leur voix appelle” from Manon (Massenet)
Jeffrey Mandelbaum: “Fra tempeste” from Rodelinda (Handel)

WONG PING: YOUR SILENT NEIGHBOR / THE GREAT TANTALIZER

“Wong Ping: Your Silent Neighbor” continues at the New Museum through October 3 (photo by Dario Lasagni)

WONG PING: YOUR SILENT NEIGHBOR
New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 3, $12-$18
www.newmuseum.org

WONG PING: THE GREAT TANTALIZER
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
521 West 21st St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through October 23, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
www.tanyabonakdargallery.com

Multimedia artist Wong Ping’s current shows at the New Museum in SoHo and Tanya Bonakdar in Chelsea are filled with lovable animated pandas, colorful cartoons, a retelling of Pinocchio, and playful sculpture and installation. But you might want to think twice before bringing the kids, as Wong’s work tackles income inequality, sexual repression and expression, police corruption, dating and desire, climate change, and sociopolitical aspects of contemporary life, particularly in his native Hong Kong as its battles with Mainland China since the 1997 handover from the British grow ever-more dangerous, all told in a DIY style inspired by video games and narrated by Wong himself.

At the New Museum, An Emo Nose (2015) reimagines Pinocchio’s proboscis, resembling both a heart and a penis, as its own sentient being, reacting to the protagonist’s negative thoughts by stretching out and going off on its own, depicting humanity’s vulnerability of both mind and body. In the two-channel The Other Side (2015), projected onto a screen and a small television monitor in front of it, the narrator journeys across treacherous terrain, has soup with Granny Meng (forgetfulness goddess Meng Po), and ponders his future, a parable of emigration from Hong Kong filtered through the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. A 3-D printed text panel relates self-affirmations in tiny letters, including “I am the last drop of period blood before menopause” and “I am the last rebellious punk.”

The retrospective is centered by four videos projected onto four screens on all sides of one large room; visitors sit on comfy beanbag chairs or a round couch as they rotate to watch the short films, which total forty-three minutes. In Jungle of Desire (2015), an impotent man is powerless when his wife becomes a prostitute to satisfy her sexual desire and is exploited by a cop. In Who’s the Daddy? (2017), a man considers himself an outcast because his penis is straight, not bending to the left or right, and confuses politics and sex as things go wrong with a woman he hooked up with on a dating app. “People even deny its existence,” he opines about his member.

Wong Ping’s Fables 2 (2019) follows the trials and tribulations of a special cow and three conjoined rabbit siblings attempting to make their own way in life. And in Sorry for the Late Reply (2021), commissioned for this show, a fisherman becomes obsessed with an elderly saleswoman’s varicose veins. “If you’ve ever stepped into the supernatural world during a hike, or have gotten lost in the parking lot and couldn’t find the exit, or have stared into the eyes of a black chicken standing outside your door through the peephole late at night, then you would know how I feel,” he says.

Wong Ping is a curator researching the Great Tantalizer in show at Tanya Bonakdar

Over at Tanya Bonakdar, Wong’s “The Great Tantalizer” is a multimedia installation structured around a mockumentary about a scientist who had been determined to increase sexual desire in pandas and bring that information on their mating techniques to humans, particularly in China, given its former one-child policy and overall preference for boys. The relentless drive to tantalize may be commenting as well on the current tangping movement, or “lying flat,” in which many younger Chinese have opted out of the pressures of modern life by declining to engage in the endless competition for personal and professional success, a high-quality education, a good job, a happy marriage, a beautiful home, and lovely children.

The gallery has been reimagined as the Great Tantalizer’s abandoned laboratory, with a stack of white plastic chairs and a labcoat, an exhibition poster and bamboo pole that declare, “EAT.SLEEP.POOOOOP.DIE,” and The Tender Rider, a cute old kiddie vehicle with a panda head that now serves as a projector, beaming highly sexualized images onto the walls in a back room. It’s all organized around a screen showing a Zoom-like panel discussion featuring Wong in a panda outfit, hosting the virtual talk with the GT’s former laboratory staff, one-night stand, and main competitor, whose identities are disguised. Visitors can sit on rolls of bound bamboo sticks as Wong explores who the GT was and what his legacy is.

The thirty-seven-year-old Wong is quickly building up an impressive legacy of his own with these presentations at the New Museum and Tanya Bonakdar, expanding his breadth with his distinctive approach to exposing society’s ills.