You Are Here takes place across the Lincoln Center campus July 14-30 (photo by Justin Chao)
YOU ARE HERE
The Isabel and Peter Malkin Stage, Josie Robertson Plaza, Hearst Plaza, Paul Milstein Pool and Terrace, Lincoln Center campus
Installation: July 14-23, free
Live performances: July 24-30, free two weeks in advance through TodayTix lottery, 7:00 www.lincolncenter.org
Lincoln Center continues its free Restart Stages program with You Are Here, a multidisciplinary audio and performance installation on Josie Robertson Plaza and Hearst Plaza. From July 13 to 23, the work, conceived by Andrea Miller, the founder and artistic director of the Brooklyn-based Gallim dance company, will be open to the public, who can make their way through a series of sculptures featuring audio portraits of twenty-five New Yorkers affiliated with Lincoln Center and its arts and education community partners. Sharing their experiences over the last sixteen months is a diverse group of individuals, including Bruce Adolphe of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Kiri Avelar of Ballet Hispánico, Anthony Roth Costanzo of the Metropolitan Opera, Alphonso Horne of Jazz at Lincoln Center, Egyptt LaBeija of BAAD! Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, Cassie Mey of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Muriel Miguel of Spiderwoman Theater, Hahn Dae Soo of Korean Cultural Center New York, Taylor Stanley of the New York City Ballet, Gabriela Torres of Juilliard, and Valarie Wong of NewYork-Presbyterian. Other participants are Dietrice Bolden, Jessica Chen, Ryan Dobrin, Jermaine Greaves, Milosz Grzywacz, Lila Lomax, Ryan Opalanietet, Elijah Schreiner, Alexandra Siladi, Paul Smithyman, Jen Suragiat, KJ Takahashi, Fatou Thiam, and Susan Thomasson of Lincoln Center Security, Film at Lincoln Center, the Asian American Arts Alliance, the School of American Ballet, Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School, and other institutions and organizations. The sound sculptures are by Tony-winning scenic designer Mimi Lien, spread across an aural garden created by composer Justin Hicks; costumes are by Oana Botezan, with choreography by Miller and direction by Miller and Lynsey Peisinger.
From July 24 to 30 at 7:00, the audio portraits will be replaced by live performances in and around the Paul Milstein Pool and Terrace that are free through a TodayTix lottery available two weeks in advance; activating the space will be Gallim dancers Lauryn Hayes, Christopher Kinsey, Nouhoum Koita, Misa Lucyshyn, Gary Reagan, Connor Speetjens, Taylor Stanley, Haley Sung, Georgia Usborne, and Amadi Washington. (The audio sculptures will be open to ticket holders at 6:00.) In addition, on July 22 at 6:00, Miller will host the latest edition of the virtual Gallim Happy Hour, a livestreamed discussion with Stanley and Mey about You Are Here, taking place over Zoom and Facebook Live.
Who: Dawoud Bey, Torkwase Dyson, Elisabeth Sherman What: Live online discussion Where:Whitney Museum Zoom When: Thursday, July 8, free with advance RSVP, 6:00 (exhibit continues through October 3) Why: One of the many pleasures of “Dawoud Bey: An American Project,” the exemplary survey of the work of Queens-born photographer Dawoud Bey, is listening to him describe his process on the audio guide. The sixty-eight-year-old artist and Columbia College Chicago professor shares detailed aspects of his career while discussing numerous photos and series. You can hear more from Bey on July 8 at 6:00 when he participates in the Zoom talk “Narrative Materiality” with interdisciplinary artist Torkwase Dyson, moderated by exhibition cocurator Elisabeth Sherman.
On the audio guide, Bey talks about about his series “Night Coming Tenderly, Black,” a 2017 commission for the Front Triennial in Cleveland consisting of photos taken along what was the Underground Railroad in Ohio, dark shots of houses, trees, and the sea without people, “Of necessity, those locations, most of them were never known. They couldn’t be. They weren’t supposed to be. So there is that layer of invisibility built into the history. And so what I did was through research finding a few sites that are in fact known to be related to the Underground Railroad and then began to look at the landscape around those sites imagining a fugitive African American moving through that landscape, what that landscape might have looked like and felt like.”
In her catalog essay “Black Compositional Thought: Black Hauntology, Plantationscene, and Paradoxical Form,” Dyson writes, “Blackness will swallow the whole of terror to be free. It will move across distances, molecules, units — through atmospheres and concrete, in magic and bloodstreams to self-liberate. To image and imagine movements and geographies of freedom, known and unknown, is to regard this space as irreducible, or to regard black spatial geography as irreducible. ‘Night Coming Tenderly, Black’ is attuned to the irreducible place of black liberation inside terror. Each photograph makes manifest in the viewer a full-body, ongoing refusal to belong to a nation, land, person, or state under a system of terror, as conditioned by architecture, agriculture, modernity, or industrialized white supremacy. The process of freeing a full black body from spatial terror while black flesh holds and is seen as material and terror is liberation.”
Bey continues, “They’re all about the imagination. Looking closely at a piece of the land and noticing all of these thorns that certainly make the landscape so much more threatening if one had to move through it. So when I thought about it through that particular narrative, the landscape became for me a very transformed space. And that’s the space and place that I want the viewer to think about when they look at that work. I want them to completely forget about the present. This work is not about the present, which is why those photographs are all so large. I wanted to create a physical space for the viewer to enter into that, allow them just to be in that landscape.”
Named after a quote from Langston Hughes’s poem “Dream Variation” — “Rest at pale evening. . . . / A tall, slim tree. . . . / Night coming tenderly / Black like me.” — the series is notable in that there are no people in these dark, mysterious photographs, which more than hint at the ghosts of those who escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad as well as their descendants. These large-scale works demand and reward intense viewing, beautiful in and of themselves while imbued with the narrative of this country’s original sin.
“Night Coming Tenderly, Black” is one of only several powerful series in the show, which continues on the first and eighth floors of the Whitney through October 3. Bey’s 2012 “Birmingham Project,” which was included in the New Museum’s recently closed “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” features black-and-white diptychs that pair a photo of a child the same age as one of the four Black girls (Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley) killed in the 1963 KKK bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Alabama and the two boys (Johnny Robinson, Virgil Ware) murdered in the aftermath with an image of a grown woman or man the age the victims would have been in 2012 had they lived. It’s a brutal reminder of what racism continues to take away, evoking the missing men, women, and children in “Night Coming Tenderly, Black.”
Bey’s first series, “Harlem, USA,” invites viewers into the Harlem of the mid- to late-1970s, with 35mm black-and-white photographs of Deas McNeil in his barbershop, two girls having fun posing in front of a local restaurant, three well-dressed women leaning on a “Police Line” barrier during a parade, and a dapper old man wearing a white bowtie and a black bowler.
In the 1980s, Bey headed upstate to Syracuse, where he again focused on the Black community in its natural surroundings. “It was a deliberate choice to foreground the Black subject in those photographs, giving them a place not only in my pictures . . . but on the wall[s] of galleries and museums when that work was exhibited,” Bey notes. He moved from the 35mm wide-angle-lens camera to a tripod-mounted 4 × 5-inch-format camera for his Polaroid street portraits of strangers he met, including a boy eating a Foxy Pop, a young man and woman hugging in Prospect Park, and a young man on an exercise bicycle in Amityville, all looking directly at the camera. Bey would give the instant Polaroid picture to his subjects, then print them later from the negative; for this exhibit, they can now be seen nearly life-size.
In 1991, Bey turned to a two-hundred-pound, six-foot-tall, five-foot wide Polaroid camera to photograph friends and such fellow artists as Lorna Simpson, putting together two, three, and as many as six exposures for each, the edges of the Polaroids visible, letting us inside his process as he emphasizes the complexities of the people in these color images.
Another room is dedicated to Bey’s “Class Pictures,” color photos of marginalized teenagers whose words are seen alongside the pictures. “Sometimes I wonder what color my soul is. I hope that it’s the color of heaven,” Omar says. Kevin admits, “Thanks to the death of my father I grew up much too fast and never learned how to ask anyone for help. I carry my own burdens . . . alone. This is my curse.”
Bey returned to Harlem in 2014–17 for “Harlem Redux,” pigmented inkjet prints that focus on place rather than people in a changing neighborhood that is very different from the Harlem he photographed four decades earlier, best exemplified by Girls, Ornaments, and Vacant Lot, NY, which depicts two hair advertisements of smiling Black girls next to an abandoned, litter-strewn, fenced-in area. “One of the things that was beginning to happen in Harlem was that there were these, as I called them, spaces where something used to be,” Bey says on the audio guide. “And when those places are completely obliterated, when they’re torn down and you end up with a vacant lot, there’s a kind of disruption of place memory. Because at some point, even if you know the community well, you can’t quite remember what used to be there. And that to me was a profound experience.” A visit to the Whitney to see “Dawoud Bey: An American Project” is a profound experience itself, reminding us of what was, and projecting what might be.
Min Sanchez, Kenny Scharf, and Oliver Sanchez pose in front of Scharf’s artwork in Bahia, Brazil (photo by Tereza Scharf)
KENNY SCHARF: WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE (Malia Scharf & Max Basch, 2020)
Available on demand www.kennyscharfmovie.com
“I have a balancing act between being a responsible adult and the Peter Pan syndrome because I just feel like life is so much about the moment, so I want every moment fun and beautiful,” Kenny Scharf says in the new documentary Kenny Scharf: When Worlds Collide. “It’s not reality.” Codirectors Max Basch and Malia Scharf — one of the artist’s daughters — try to make every moment of the film, now streaming on demand, fun and beautiful, often reaching that goal.
Shot over a period of eleven years, When Worlds Collide follows Scharf, who was born in 1958 in Los Angeles and moved to Manhattan to attend SVA, from his early days as a graffiti artist and muralist, when he met and became great friends with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat and hung out with Andy Warhol at the Factory, to his vast popularity creating fantastical, colorful creatures in paintings and sculptures, from the lean years to his current obsession with recycling. “Use everything,” he says, extolling us to ”not waste precious plastic when you can turn it into bathroom sculpture” as he adds a plastic cup and straw to an ever-evolving work above his toilet.
Scharf and Basch, who also served as editor and one of the cinematographers, speak with former Ferus Gallery owner Irving Blum, art collector Peter Brant, gallerists Jeffrey Deitch and Tony Shafrazi, writer and poet Carter Ratcliff, art historian Richard Marshall, Whitney curator Jane Panetta, former Scharf assistant Min Sanchez, author and psychologist Gabor Maté, collectors Andy and Christine Hall, real estate developer Tony Goldman, and curator Dan Cameron, who all offer unique perspectives on Scharf as a person and an artist. “There’s no separation between Kenny and his art,” his friend and fellow artist Kitty Brophy says. There are also old and new interviews with such artists as Bruno Schmidt, Ed Ruscha, Samantha McEwen, Robert Williams, Marilyn Minter, KAWS, Dennis Hopper, and Yoko Ono as well as Scharf’s mother, Rose; wife, Tereza; daughters, Zena and Malia; and grandkids Jet and Lua, who share their thoughts and are seen in home movie footage.
“He just created a family where we felt we were understood and accepted for who we are,” actress and performance artist Ann Magnuson says. “The main way to communicate was to get out on the street, and the message got out there and of course the attention came, and then it started to unravel a bit when the success, the money, the fame, and the uptown world started paying attention to the downtown world. Some of that wonderful, naïve idealism was lost.”
The film doesn’t shy away from the devastation of the AIDS crisis or Scharf’s dry periods, when his style of surreal Pop art was out of favor, but he continues to create and is a fan favorite at international art fairs with his eye-catching work. He gets tearful when talking about Haring, shares his love of nature and cartoons (especially The Flintstones and The Jetsons), collects trash on the beach, remembers the influential Club 57, discusses his breakthrough painting, 1984’s When the Worlds Collide, and describes his penchant for pareidolia, seeing faces everywhere. It’s fascinating to watch him stand in front of a canvas, painting right from his imagination, without preparatory sketches. He comes off as a driven artist and dedicated family man who can be an endearing mensch. “Many people think I’m crazy, and I think that’s okay,” he says with a laugh.
“Open Call” features eleven immersive installations by emerging NYC-based artists (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
OPEN CALL
The Shed
545 West 30th St. at Eleventh Ave.
Thursday – Sunday through August 1, free with advance RSVP, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
646-455-3494 theshed.org
In December 2020, I saw Aisha Amin’s Friday, a short film about a historic Brooklyn mosque, as part of the BAM virtual series “Programmers’ Notebook: New York Lives.” Its reinvention as the immersive installation The Earth Has Been Made a Place of Prayer for the fourth iteration of the Shed’s “Open Call” group show is emblematic of the current exhibition, which focuses on works by early-career New York City–based artists that explore ritual, diverse communities of color, and coming together as we emerge from the Covid-19 crisis. Amin’s film is projected on four screens hanging from the ceiling, forming a large “X,” and viewers are encouraged to watch it while sitting on one of thirty-two red and white prayer rugs that face Mecca, as if we’re all members of Masjid At-Taqwa in Bed-Stuy. “My film documents a communal prayer that happens every Friday afternoon in a confined space. It takes place in a room that is small for the amount of people who come to pray,” Amin says in a Shed interview with fellow “Open Call” artist Cindy Tran. “So, I’ve been thinking, too, about what it means to be in such close corners with people. For the audio, I had placed a recorder in the mosque to capture the two-hour prayer, and the amount of coughing and throat-clearing and sniffling and chatter I recorded. . . . Now, it would be a terrifying experience to go there if you didn’t have a mask and weren’t vaccinated, but there’s also something so nice about the closeness of the people in that space.” After I sat down, several other people joined me as we formed our own temporary community.
The exhibition features eleven installations in addition to thirteen live performances that have just concluded, chosen from approximately fifteen hundred applications, dealing with grief, loss, and mourning as well as joy, hope, and public congregation. Ayanna Dozier’s Cities of the Dead is a compelling faux documentary that details Solomon Riley’s (Ricky Goldman) dream of creating “Negro Coney Island” on Hart Island, which was scheduled to open July 4, 1924, before the city stepped in and halted the project. Hart Island was later used as a potters field for victims of AIDS and Covid-19, which disproportionately affected people of color. Kenneth Tam’s video sculpture The Crane and the Snake explores Asian American hazing and assimilation.
Aisha Amin reimagines her film Friday for Shed exhibit (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Simon Liu invites viewers into a partially enclosed circular space to experience Devil’s Peak, a multichannel audiovisual journey into the troubled city of Hong Kong, a flurry of images with hidden bonuses just outside in one corner. Pauline Shaw’s stunning The Tomb-Sweeper’s Mosquito Bite uses MRI scans, science, memory, and the idea of diaspora in a large, hanging tapestry counterbalanced by objects encased in hand-blown glass vessels. “Autobiographical memory relies very much on the dormant network, so it’s really hard to separate what is happening in your daily life and what is happening in your memory,” she explains in a Shed talk with Liu. “Our notions of self, memory, and everyday experience are completely intertwined. Those are the intricate, scientific details of the MRI process. I’m translating the images that resulted into felt.”
Pauline Shaw explores memory and the diaspora in The Tomb-Sweeper’s Mosquito Bite (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Emilie Gossiaux takes on anti-disability and anti-animal prejudices and celebrates her relationship with her seeing-eye dog in True Love Will Find You in the End, a pair of life-size sculptures that exhibit both human and canine characteristics shown holding hands. Stand in the middle of Tajh Rust’s Passages to read a quote from Caribbean philosopher Édouard Glissant, “I made an attempt to communicate with this absence,” stenciled repeatedly on two freestanding partially mirrored glass panels, evoking colonialism and migration. You’re encouraged to walk through Anne Wu’s A Patterned Universe, a kind of architectural playground with decorative elements representative of Flushing’s Chinese immigrant neighborhood. Esteban Jefferson pays tribute to a friend who passed away in 2019 with We Love You Devra Freelander, a pair of paintings documenting the passing of one year. Caroline Garcia mourns the loss of her mother in The Headless Headhunt, incorporating the Indigenous Filipino practice of headhunting related to grief, here enhanced with augmented reality.
And Le’Andra LeSeur’s There is no movement without rhythm, consisting of five rectangular screens arranged in a circle so people can stand in the middle, was inspired by jazz and blues and Gnawa male-dominated ceremonial traditions that LeSeur commandeers by filming herself holding objects and grasping her naked body. “I love the idea of thinking about what’s happening right now in this time and how we as artists are really processing and pushing forward with creation as a framework for healing,” LeSeur tells Open Call artist AnAkA in a conversation that gets to the heart of the exhibition as a whole. “And I’m also interested to hear you talk about this kind of collective movement. I think right now, in this time, it’s not necessarily about self, it’s about we and community, how we’re doing things not just for now but for the future. Even if we don’t have the opportunity to celebrate what we’re reclaiming, we’re creating a space for the future to have this opportunity to celebrate. And the beauty in that is really profound.”
David Hammons’s Day’s End pays homage to Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1975 deconstruction of an abandoned warehouse (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Who: Adrienne Edwards, Elisabeth Sussman What: Live virtual discussion about David Hammons, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Day’s End Where:Whitney Zoom When: Wednesday, June 30, free with RSVP, 6:30 Why: The Whitney’s “Ask a Curator” series continues June 30 with “David Hammons and Gordon Matta-Clark in the Whitney’s Collection,” a live Zoom discussion about Hammons’s recently installed permanent work, Day’s End, an homage to Matta-Clark’s 1975 similarly named intervention in an abandoned industrial building on Pier 52 at the southern edge of Gansevoort Peninsula. Whitney curators Adrienne Edwards and Elisabeth Sussman will also explore other works in the museum’s collection by the two artists, some of which were on display last fall in “Around Day’s End: Downtown New York, 1970–1986.”
The Whitney and Hudson River Park collaborated on David Hammons’s Day’s End (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Over the course of seven years, Hammons created a 325-foot-long brushed-steel outline of the warehouse, placed in its exact same former location, a ghostly reminder of what — and who — is no longer there, a reference to the gay community that congregated in the area in the 1970s and 1980s until the AIDS crisis took so many lives. “I look at it as a statue because I’ve seen so many statues in the city and they’re all about memories,” Hammons says in a Whitney video of the dedication ceremony, which he chose not to attend. Half on land and half in the water, it’s a powerful work — officially part of Hudson River Park, not the Whitney — filled with mystery that draws the attention of passersby, many of whom may think it is the skeleton of a new building, especially since there is construction under way right next to it. Down the pier is Little Island, Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg’s lovely oasis, and across the street is the Whitney itself. (The Diller-von Fürstenberg Family Foundation was one of many donors who helped fund Hammons’s piece as well.) Admission is free with advance RSVP; Edwards and Sussman will be taking questions from the audience during the event.
“Immersive Van Gogh” features three rooms of music and large-scale projections (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
IMMERSIVE VAN GOGH EXHIBIT NEW YORK
Pier 36, 299 South St.
Daily through September 6, $29.99-$99.99 (return engagement November 17 – January 2) www.vangoghnyc.com
VAN GOGH: THE IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE
Skylight on Vesey, 300 Vesey St.
Daily through September, $49.90 vangoghexpo.com/new-york
Discussing the success of a 1935–36 eponymously titled Vincent van Gogh exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, a MoMA press release explained, “In the opinion of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Director of the Museum, van Gogh’s popularity is just what the artist himself would most passionately have desired. ‘Again and again,’ said Mr. Barr, ‘van Gogh wrote of his desire to make pictures for laborers, peasants, miners, weavers, fishermen, postmen, seamen, and shopkeepers — in short, for the great aesthetically naive public. It is the central miracle of van Gogh’s artistic career that with such an evangelical desire for popularity he never for a single moment compromised with the popular taste of his time — which was then even more lazy, conventional, and unadventurous than it is now.’ . . . van Gogh’s work itself is the cause of his popularity — and the interest aroused in the tragic life of the artist due more to the appeal of his art than vice versa.”
Over the last several decades, van Gogh exhibitions at MoMA and the Met have deservedly been hugely popular, must-see events that draw long lines and come with a certain cache. When I posted on social media about my visit to one of two concurrent shows in New York City right now that re-create van Gogh’s work using immersive technology, I was surprised by how many of my friends, from across the socioeconomic and political spectrum, had already purchased tickets (primarily between $30 and $60) to at least one of the exhibits, well in advance of their openings. It is impossible to know what van Gogh or Barr would have thought of the idolizing demand; I can only tell you what I think about what turns out to be a pair of Instagram-friendly presentations that are not necessarily worth the price of admission. I suggest instead taking the money and going to a real museum, with real art, although you might not end up with such awesomely cool photos and videos to share online.
Mirrored sculptures offer Instagram-friendly opportunities at van Gogh show at Pier 36 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
At Pier 36 on South St., “Immersive Van Gogh,” designed by creator Massimiliano Siccardi and New York City creative director David Korins, consists of three rooms, each larger than the previous, boasting more than half a million square feet of animated projections of the artist’s work. You enter through a narrow hallway lined with very basic facts about the painter’s life and career, along with brief audio narration. As you enter the first room, you are bombarded with a curiously random score consisting of familiar tunes as well as new music composed and curated by Luca Longobardi, echoing through the full venue, including Thom Yorke’s “Dawn Chorus,” Edith Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien,” and Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition: The Great Gate of Kiev,” as dozens of van Gogh’s paintings come to life on four walls and the floor. Irises and sunflowers bloom, clouds swirl and stars dance, crows and cicadas soar, trees and wheat grow, and self-portraits emerge.
The songs are timed to each individual painting — Starry Night, The Potato Eaters, Bedroom at Arles, Café Terrace at Night — evoking the feeling of watching fireworks with the radio simulcast; one blast ends, and you wait with anticipation for the next flurry. It’s hunky-dory and all, silly fun, but it’s primarily a grand gimmick. Each room has mirrored sculptures that are not exactly organic to van Gogh in any way, instead merely offering the opportunity to take swell pictures of the works distorted in the reflections, along with selfies of you and your friends. Good luck trying to take a picture or video without someone else taking a picture or video in yours.
Lobby at Pier 36 installation includes oversized reproduction of van Gogh self-portrait (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The third and largest room features an observation platform and benches to sit on and take it all in; putting away your camera and relaxing for a while, letting it flow over you, is not unpleasant, but so much of the animation is arbitrary and frivolous that it becomes tiresome. In the lobby and enormous gift shop, there is also a ceiling constructed of nearly eight thousand paintbrushes re-creating Starry Night, a Pocket Gallery where paint splotches explode off canvases and become famous van Gogh paintings using AR, an interactive sculpture in which visitors can ask a question and get a letter from Vincent, and a walk-in circular installation of ten booths that uses color, light, and sound to deliver a “chromesthesia experience” inspired by the possibility that van Gogh had a form of synesthesia, allowing him to hear color and see sound. Oh, I almost left out the fashion show in the exit hallway, a seeming afterthought in which mannequins are adorned with clothing inspired by van Gogh’s imagery. Or something like that. There are also jokes on signs using the pronunciation “van go,” which would confuse Diane Keaton’s character in Woody Allen’s Manhattan, who pronounces the artist’s name as “van gokh.”
Meanwhile, on the third floor space known as Skylight on Vesey, near Brookfield Place, the competing “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience” offers a somewhat different trip into the work of the Dutch master, with a greater appreciation and understanding of Vincent as an artist, although not the kind of deep dive you’d get in a museum or gallery. You first make your way through several rooms that detail the influence Japanese prints had on him, his friendship with onetime roommate Paul Gauguin, his vase paintings (projected in 3D), his relationship with his brother, Theo, and his stay at the Saint-Paul de Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy, complete with a nifty (but necessary?) re-creation of his bedroom at Arles. Digital reproductions of seminal works are hung on the walls (and are available in the gift shop). Quotes abound, both in the labels and on the soundtrack, narrated by an unnamed man who sounds like Jeremy Irons: “The way to know life is to love many things,” “I put my heart and my soul into the work and have lost my mind in the process,” “I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.”
In the central two-story, twenty-thousand-square-foot room, comfy beach chairs with Starry Night on them allow you to sit and watch a thirty-five-minute massive projection display on four walls and the floor as paintings come to life against architectural backgrounds. Rows of Van Gogh’s self-portraits, landscapes, flowers, and other works appear and disappear, sometimes with animation that makes it look like the canvas itself falls to the ground, revealing new works underneath. As opposed to the Pier 36 show, the one on Vesey St. concentrates more on van Gogh’s actual paintings; the works are usually seen within their frames, not busting dramatically out of nowhere, although a few do.
Skylight on Vesey van Gogh show has different perspectives that Pier 36 presentation (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The bony figure in Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette takes a drag off his butt, smoke from a train envelops the space, vehicles move in Landscape with Carriage and Train and farm scenes, pages flip in Still Life with Bible, and a windmill turns in Le Moulin de la Galette, to the sounds of gentle classical music.
A series of self-portraits leads to an interactive workshop where you can draw your own van Gogh, followed by a virtual reality room where you are taken on a colorful 360-degree VR adventure through eight of van Gogh’s most important paintings, displayed in frames as you meander through nature and toward the sea in Arles, as if you are seeing the world as van Gogh saw it, and then painted it. Finally, the gift shop is tiny, which is a relief after the grandiosity of the competing exhibit’s extensive merch.
Vesey St. van Gogh show includes 3D reproduction of van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
“Success is sometimes the outcome of a whole string of failures,” van Gogh said. While the artist did not make much money from his art during his lifetime — the only recorded sale was of The Red Vineyard at Arles — his 1890 Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold for $163.4 million a century later. Now people around the world — these immersive experiences are being held in more than fifteen US cities and half a dozen countries — are paying upwards of $99 for VIP access to watch digital manipulations of his work that will look great on social media, but the experience is fleeting. Better to spend your money on immersing yourself in the real thing at the Met or MoMA, losing yourself in actual van Gogh canvases that will take you to another place, the crows and cicadas, irises and sunflowers, portraits and self-portraits, and wheatfields and starry nights invigorating your mind and penetrating into your heart and soul.
The collaborative Harlem Air Shaft features art, dance, music, spoken word, and activism
Who: James Brandon Lewis, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Kwami Coleman, Todd Bryant Weeks, Bianca Cosentino, Dolores Sanchez, Emily Tellier, Omari Wiles What:Experimental multidisciplinary street performance ritual exploring links between jazz and memory in Harlem Where: 126th & 125th Sts. between Fifth & Madison Aves. When: Thursday, June 24, free, 5:00 Why: Conceived by new media artist Justin Randolph Thompson, choreographer Stefanie Nelson, and visual artist Bradly Dever Treadaway, Harlem Air Shaft takes place on June 24 at 5:00, a forty-minute live performance that recalls the rent parties of the 1930s and 1940s. Melding jazz and memory through ritual, the improvisatory, immersive piece features dancers Bianca Cosentino, Dolores Sanchez, Emily Tellier, and Omari Wiles, saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, poet Thomas Sayers Ellis, musicologist Kwami Coleman, and jazz union representative Todd Bryant Weeks, paying tribute to the community and local jazz history, including Duke Ellington (whose 1940 composition lends its name to the work), in the neighborhood where Art Kane took his famous “A Great Day in Harlem” photo.
“With Harlem Air Shaft, I continue the work that started with Friskin’ the Whiskers – a performance project I initiated in 2014 which focuses on bringing together people connected to the jazz community to highlight the economic realities in which jazz musicians have to function,” Thompson said in a statement. “Jazz and economy have a long and complicated history where strategies for developing new systems of community support have always been prevalent. The pandemic made evident to all what many of us already knew. To me, the various forms of cultural production as represented by practitioners from different fields in this piece speaks to the constant need for reminding ourselves about art’s inherent social dimension.” Nelson added, “I have a longstanding interest in the fleeting nature of memory, which I have been exploring in numerous projects with my dance ensemble. Justin, who has been my collaborator over the years, gave me an idea of presenting this concept in the context of jazz and the history of this unique neighborhood. We would like for this piece to inspire the memory of Harlem’s resilient past for a more hopeful, community-driven, creative future.” Admission is free, with no RSVP required.
