Who: Branjae, John Fullbright, David Amram, Red Dirt Rangers, Deana McCloud What: Livestreamed concert from the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa Where:Morgan Library & Museum online When: Wednesday, April 6, free, 7:00 Why: The Morgan Library exhibition “Woody Guthrie: People Are the Song” takes visitors on a deep dive into the life and career of Oklahoma-born singer-songwriter Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie, the folk music legend who fought for everyday Americans through his staunch activism and protest songs. The outstanding show, continuing through May 22, features hundreds of items, from Woody’s instruments, records, letters, and notebooks to photographs, postcards, lyrics, and artworks, including a rare painting. The audioguide is narrated by country folk rock troubadour Steve Earle and features snippets of songs and archival interviews with Guthrie. Talking about moving to the West Coast, Guthrie says, “They called us ‘dust bowl refugees.’ But then there’s more than one kind of a refugee. There’s refugees that take refuge under railroad bridges, and there is refugees that take refugee and . . . take refuge in public office. But when we was out in California, all that the native sons and daughters called us was just ‘dust bowl refugees.’”
Guthrie, who was born in the small town of Okemah on July 14, 1912, and died of Huntington’s disease on October 3, 1967, in Coney Island, left behind a legacy that reaches around the world, impacting such musicians as Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg, Wilco, John Mellencamp, Pete Seeger, and so many others. On April 6 at 7:00, the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa will present the live concert “Oklahoma Sings Woody!,” with performances by Branjae, John Fullbright, David Amram, and Red Dirt Rangers, playing three songs each, their own as well as Woody’s. While the in-person show is sold out, the event will be livestreamed for free by the Morgan, supplemented with a brief virtual tour of the center by founding executive director and chief curator Deana McCloud. Throughout his too-short career, Guthrie revealed the power that music can have on politics and the populace; as he famously carved into a guitar, “This machine kills fascists.” Yes, people are the song.
Dancer Kayla Hamilton is not about to let visual impairment get in the way of her career in Vision Portraits (photo by Kjerstin Rossi)
Who:Moving Body — Moving Image What:ScreenDance Film Festival Where: Barnard College Department of Dance Movement Lab, Glicker Milstein Theatre in the Diana Center, 3009 Broadway at 116th St., and online When: Sunday, April 3, free with advance RSVP, noon – 6:00 pm (festival continues through April 11) Why: The Moving Body — Moving Image Biennale Festival was founded in 2018 by choreographer, dancer, teacher, filmmaker, and curator Gabri Christa to “give voice to social and social justice themes,” two years before dance films began reaching new heights of creativity during the pandemic lockdown, with a concerted focus also on social justice. The third iteration, “The Moving Body with Disabilities,” is underway now at Barnard College, with an international collection of six installation films, eight shorts, one feature, and three online-only works. On Sunday, April 3, Barnard’s Glicker Milstein Theatre will host a full in-person afternoon at its Morningside Heights home, with screenings of all films in addition to a panel discussion. “We are stunned by how much demand there was for the festival films among the global audiences,” Christa, whose now-wheelchair-bound mother was a special ed teacher, said in a statement. “Also, I hope that the pandemic isolation brought greater awareness around social inequity and perhaps more understanding of racism, ageism, and ableism.” The themes of the previous festivals were “Moving Brown Body” in 2018 and “Aging & Othering” in 2020.
The festival begins at noon with welcome remarks, followed by two shorts programs, at 12:30 and 2:00. Part I consists of Robert Dekkers’s Flutter (with AXIS Dance Company and others), Stephen Featherstone’s Stopgap in Stop Motion (with Stopgap Dance Company), Katrina MacPherson’s Uath Lochans (with Marc Brew), and Karina Epperlein’s Phoenix Dance (with Homer Avila, Andrea Flores, and choreographer Alonzo King). The second program comprises Ralph Klisiewicz’s Moods in Three Movements (with Kris Lenzo), Pioneer Winter’s Gimp Gait (with Marjorie Burnett and Pioneer Winter), Alison Ferrao’s From Me (with the Dancer Development Course at Magpie Dance), and Katherine Helen Fisher’s One + One Makes Three (with Jerron Herman, Laurel Lawson, Brandon Kazen-Maddox, Catherine Nelson, and choreographer Alice Sheppard). The feature presentation at 3:00 is Rodney Evans’s 2019 documentary, Vision Portraits, about three artists with vision impairment, made by the blind Evans. Admission is free with advance registration. If you can’t make it to Barnard, all of the films and events will be available online through April 11, including Anna-Lena Ponath’s Eudaimonia, Yannis Bletas’s How to Train an Antihero, and Alexandros Chantzis’s Who Is Honorine Platzer?
Filmmaker Rodney Evans explores his increasing blindness in Vision Portraits (photo by Kjerstin Rossi)
VISION PORTRAITS (Rodney Evans, 2019)
Barnard College, Glicker Milstein Theatre in the Diana Center, 3009 Broadway at 116th St.
Sunday, April 3, free with advance RSVP, 3:00 www.thefilmcollaborative.org
“In a lot of ways, I feel like I’m just looking for guidance in how to be a blind artist,” filmmaker Rodney Evans says in Vision Portraits, his remarkable documentary. Evans follows three artists as they deal with severe visual impairment but refuse to give up on their dreams as he seeks experimental treatment for his retinitis pigmentosa. Manhattan photographer John Dugdale lost most of his eyesight from CMV retinitis when he was thirty-two but is using his supposed disability to his advantage, taking stunning photos bathed in blue, inspired by the aurora borealis he sees when he closes his eyes. “Proving to myself that I could still function in a way that was not expected of a blind person was really gonna be the thing,” he says. “It’s fun to live in this bliss.” Bronx dancer Kayla Hamilton was born with no vision in one eye and developed iritis and glaucoma in the other, but she is shown working on a new piece called Nearly Sighted that incorporates the audience into her story. “How can I use my art form as a way of sharing what it is that I’m experiencing?” she asks.
Canadian writer Ryan Knighton lost his eyesight on his eighteenth birthday due to retinitis pigmentosa, but he teaches at a college and presents short stories about his condition at literary gatherings. “I had that moment where I had a point of view now, like, I realized blindness is a point of view on the world; it’s not something I should avoid, it’s something I should look from, and I should make it my writerly point of view,” Knighton explains. Meanwhile, Evans heads to the Restore Vision Clinic in Berlin to see if Dr. Anton Fedorov can stop or reverse his visual impairment, which is getting worse.
Vision Portraits is an intimate, honest look at eyesight and art and how people adapt to what could have been devastating situations. Evans, who wrote and directed the narrative features Brother to Brother and The Happy Sad, also includes animated segments that attempt to replicate what the subjects see, from slivers of light to star-laden alternate universes. The Moving Body — Moving Image screening at Barnard will be followed by a discussion with Evans and Hamilton.
Who: Patricia G. Berman, MaryClaire Pappas, Edward Gallagher What: Live virtual discussion and exhibition tour Where: Scandinavia House YouTube When: Saturday, April 2, free, 1:00 (exhibition continues at 58 Park Ave. at 38th St. through June 4) Why: Norwegian painter and sculptor Edvard Munch “seems to have been one of the first artists in history to take ‘selfies,’” notes the introductory wall text to the Scandinavia House exhibition “The Experimental Self: Edvard Munch’s Photography.” As the free show — which has been brought back, with some wonderful design changes that provide deeper perspective, for an encore run extended through June 4 — reveals, that statement does not just refer to Munch’s penchant for self-portraiture, as demonstrated in the 2018 Met exhibit “Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed,” which included a detailed look at Munch’s depiction of himself over the years. “Munch painted self-portraits throughout his career, but with increased intensity and frequency after 1900,” Gary Garrels, Jon-Ove Steihaug, and Sheena Wagstaff write in the introduction to the Met catalog. “These ‘self-scrutinies,’ as he called them, provide insight into his perceptions of his role as an artist, as a man in society, and as a protagonist in his relationships with others, especially women. . . . Using himself as subject but always allowing technique to influence effect, Munch was able to powerfully investigate the interplay between depicting external reality and meditating on painterly means.”
Edvard Munch, “Self-Portrait at the Breakfast Table at Dr. Jacobson’s Clinic,” gelatin silver contact print, 1908-09 (courtesy of Munch Museum)
At Scandinavia House, this is evident in his fascination with photography, which he took up during two periods of his life that were fraught with physical and health issues. Munch snapped photographs between 1902 and 1910, after his lover, Tulla Larsen, shot him in the left finger, and again from 1927 to the mid-1930s, suffering a hemorrhage in his right eye in 1930. He also took home movies with a camera in 1927. As in his paintings and particularly his prints, Munch experimented with photographic images, playing with exposure length, camera angles, movement, and shadows for his Fatal Destiny portfolio and individual works. He is purposely blurry in “Self-Portrait in Profile Indoors in Åsgårdstrand,” “Self-Portrait at the Breakfast Table at Dr. Jacobson’s Clinic,” and “Self-Portrait ‘à la Marat,’ Beside a Bathtub at Dr. Jacobson’s Clinic.” He is completely naked, holding a sword in 1903’s “Edvard Munch Posing Nude in Åsgårdstrand,” a kind of companion piece to 1907’s “Self-Portrait on Beach with Brushes and Palette in Warnemünde,” in which he holds a paintbrush. The woman in “Nurse in Black, Jacobson’s Clinic,” from 1908-09, has a lot in common with Munch’s 1891 oil painting, “Lady in Black.” There are multiple, ghostly images of both subjects in 1907’s “Edvard Munch and Rosa Meissner in Warnemünde,” evoking the phantasmic bodies in several prints on view, including “Moonlight II.”
On April 2, American-Scandinavian Foundation president Edward Gallagher will moderate a special live, online presentation with curator Patricia G. Berman giving an up-close look at several photographs in the show, ASF Research Fellow MaryClaire Pappas talking about Munch’s self-portraiture, and a panel discussion on Munch’s relevance to twenty-first-century photography. You can check out the exhibit from home using the new virtual tour here.
Edvard Munch, “Self-Portrait on Beach with Brushes and Palette in Warnemünde,” Collodion contact print, 1907 (courtesy of Munch Museum)
In the Met catalog, in her essay “The Untimely Face of Munch,” Allison Morehead explains, “‘He is not attached to any school or any direction,’ wrote the Norwegian critic and art historian Jappe Nilssen in 1916, ‘because he himself is one of those who advances and creates his own school and forges his own direction.’ Surely with Munch’s complicity, Nilssen described his friend as both stereotypical avant-garde outsider and chronological anomaly, as an art history unto himself, his own school, his own doctrine, and his own teleology. Perhaps then it is little wonder that Munch made so many self-portraits from the beginning to the end of his career, regularly depicting himself in paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs, and also little wonder that art historians have found them so preoccupying.’”
The Scandinavia House show, which has added a case of vintage camera equipment and a short video by Berman and is divided into such sections as “Landscape of Healing,” “Munch’s Selfies,” and “The Amateur Photographer,” concludes with a short compilation of home movies Munch shot with a Pathé-Baby camera, in which the artist once again focuses on himself as his subject. “I have an old camera with which I have taken countless pictures of myself, often with amazing results,” he said in 1930. “Some day when I am old, and I have nothing better to do than write my autobiography, all my self-portraits will see the light of day again.” It’s fascinating to consider just what Munch, who died in 1944 at the age of eighty, would have thought of contemporary social media and the selfie, offering new opportunities to shine a light on himself.
Spiders and their webs are at the center of Tomás Saraceno’s immersive, multimedia exhibitions at the Shed and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
TOMÁS SARACENO: PARTICULAR MATTER(S)
The Shed
545 West 30th St. at Eleventh Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 17
Upper level + gallery: $42; lower level + gallery: $35; gallery exhibition only: $12
646-455-3494 theshed.org studiotomassaraceno.org
The integration of art, technology, nature, and the environment is central to Argentina-born artist Tomás Saraceno’s discipline, currently on display in a pair of complex immersive exhibitions in the city. In “Silent Autumn” at Tanya Bonakdar in Chelsea and “Particular Matter(s)” at the Shed in Hudson Yards, Saraceno investigates toxic air and water, the reuse of plastic bags, rampant consumerism, and, most of all, spiders though collaborations with MIT and NASA, among others, attempting to find ways to fix a broken planet in this out-of-control Capitalocene era.
In a 2014 lecture he gave at MIT, Saraceno discussed the “sociability” of spiders. “It’s very similar to humans,” he said. “Spiders are social because they have enough space and food. But if you put a lot of social spiders in a very tiny space, they are not social. They eat each other. They’re pretty much like humans. There are forty-three thousand species of spider and only twenty are social. Knowing that sociability is a big trend for the survival of the planet, no one really understands this. What we do is try to make [the spiders] operate and work, one with the other, the solitary and the social.” It sounds all too close as humanity emerges from a global pandemic.
Continuing through April 17, “Particular Matter(s)” leads visitors on an audiovisual journey through the kingdom of the spiders. Webs of At-tent(s)ion consists of seven encased hybrid spider webs, hanging in midair and lit so it appears that they’re glowing in the dark. Each case is like its own universe, with different species of spider building on what others started, resulting in magical architectural structures made of spider silk and carbon fibers.
Radio Galena turns a crystal into a wireless radio receptor. Printed Matter(s) reproduces cosmic dust from 1982 in a series of ten photos printed using black carbon PM2.5 pollution extracted from the air in Mumbai; they are arranged loosely on a wall, as if they might blow away and break up into shreds, like the atmosphere being destroyed by pollution. Particular Matter(s) is a light beam that reveals how much dust is in the air that we breathe, poisoned by the burning of fossil fuels.
Arachnomancy features a deck of thirty-three tarot-like meteorological “oracle” cards, printed on carbon-footprint-neutral paper, spread out across a table, based on the beliefs of the spider diviners of Somié, Cameroon, who make cards out of leaves, forecasting weather events. The cards include images of maps, plants, human figures, and webs, with such titles as “Bad News,” “Planetary Drift,” “Invertebrate Rights,” “Entanglement,” and “Fortunate Webbing.” Dangling above the table is a web built by two Cyrtophora citricola spiders that looks like you could rip it apart with a soft breath.
Inspired by the writings of science journalist Harriet A. Washington,We Do Not All Breathe the Same Air uses black carbon, soot, and PM2.5 and PM10 to reveal how pollution impacts air quality in different parts of the country, adversely affecting BIPOC and poorer areas. A red sliding sheet laser brings spider webs to life in a long horizontal window in How to entangle the universe in a spider/web,? which resembles a trip through the human circulatory system or into a far-off galaxy. The concept of spider ballooning and visitors’ movement combine to create music in Sounding the Air, an installation in which five threads of spider silk form an aeolian instrument that emits sonic frequencies when it encounters heat, wind, body movement, and other elements.
A Thermodynamic Imaginary is a room filled with many wonders of Saraceno’s oeuvre, a fantasy world comprising sculpture, projected video (Tata Inti and Living at the bottom of the ocean of air), shadows, reflections, large bubbles, and more, like its own galaxy in what the artist calls the Aerocene: “a stateless state, both tethered and free floating; a community, an open source initiative; a name for change, and an era to live and breathe in.”
On the fourth floor, you have to remove your shoes to walk into Museo Aero Solar, devised by Saraceno and Alberto Pesavento in 2007, an ecological balloon composed of plastic bags sewn together, their brands and trademarks visible, seeking to eventually eliminate the use of fossil fuels by providing sustainable, free-floating options. The gallery also includes documentation of the project and such items as an Aerocene Backpack and flight starter kits.
The centerpiece of “Particular Matter(s)” is Free the Air: How to hear the universe in a spider/web, a live eight-minute concert held in an almost blindingly white two-level, ninety-five-foot diameter floating sculpture, commissioned by the Shed for this exhibition. The limited audience gets misted as they enter the foggy space, which contains 450,000 cubic feet of air and features a large-scale net made of steel and thick wire that evokes a giant spider web on which people lie down; it’s a rather tenuous trampoline with gaps in it, so if you jump, it will affect not only your balance but others’ as well, so don’t play around too much. If you’re on the lower level, you can look up to see the people above you, almost walking on air.
Darkness ensues and the concert in four movements begins, prerecorded sound waves and vibrations of spiders interacting with their webs that are impacted by the audience’s presence, incorporating Sounding the Air,Webs of At-tent(s)ion, and other items in “Particular Matter(s).” It’s a welcoming atmosphere of interspecies communion and coexistence that plots a course for ways to save our increasingly fragile planet using our innate spider-sense and expanding our idea of what home is.
Advance tickets are necessary for the special experience and sell out quickly, so act fast. As part of the Shed program “Matter(s) for Conversation and Action,” on March 30 at 6:00 there will be a free Zoom panel discussion, “Invention, Experimentation, and Radical Imagination,” with MIT professor Caroline A. Jones, climate scientist Dr. Kate Marvel, and Vassar professor Molly Nesbit, moderated by designer, teacher, and entrepreneur Sandra Goldmark, followed on April 13 at noon by “Rights of Nature, Activism, and Change” with lawyer Alicia Chalabe, Dartmouth professor N. Bruce Duthu, and sociologist and writer Maristella Svampa, moderated by Columbia Law School professor Michael B. Gerrard.
Tomás Saraceno gallery show at Tanya Bonakdar complements Shed exhibition (photo courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery)
TOMÁS SARACENO: SILENT AUTUMN
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
521 West 21st St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through March 26, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm www.tanyabonakdargallery.com
In conjunction with the Shed show, Tanya Bonakdar is presenting “Silent Autumn” through March 26. The title plays off Rachel Carson’s seminal 1962 book, Silent Spring, a “fable for tomorrow” that called for the elimination of such chemicals as DDT in order to maintain a living, breathing Earth. The exhibit begins with An Open Letter for Invertebrate Rights, in which Spider/Webs explain, “Do not be afraid. Let us move from arachnophobia to arachnophilia by sensing new threads of connectivity, or else face the eternal silence of extinction.”
Visitors must put booties over their shoes in order to enter Algo-r(h)i(y)thms, a musical instrument comprising a vast network of webs, the strings of which make warming sounds when plucked. You can either create your own solo or work in tandem with others for a more ornate score. Surrounding the instrument are Arachne’s handwoven Spider/Web Map of Andrómeda, with a duet of Nephila inaurata — four weeks and ensemble of Cyrtophora citricola — three weeks and Cosmic Filaments, intricate black-and-white architectural drawings of web universes.
The title diptychs (and one triptych) pair framed leaves glued to inkjet paper next to framed photographs of the leaves; the two works initially look identical, but over time the real leaves will fade and disintegrate while the picture endures. Silent Spring comprises four panels of pressed poppy flowers from contaminated soil near Saraceno’s Berlin-Rummelsburg studio, with shutters that protect them from the sun, although they too will fade; the dirt was polluted by a photographic film and dye manufacturer, so the piece is very much part of Saraceno’s personalized mission of recycling and sustainability.
In the same room, three stainless-steel and wood sculptures hang from the ceiling at different heights, evoking the much larger structures Saraceno installed on the Met roof for “Cloud City” in 2012 as well as the Silent Autumn framed leaves. In a smaller room, the blown glass pieces Pneuma,Aeolus,Aeroscale, and Aerosolar Serpens probe breathing, physical presence, and the brittleness of existence. Other works continue Saraceno’s exploration of overconsumption, pollution, climate change, and the future of life on the planet — and throughout the universe.
Saraceno is a genius at bringing us into his world by creating fascinating objects that are ravishing to look at, then hitting us with the heavily researched science behind it all as he attempts to save the world. But he can only do it with our help.
Marina Abramović, The Artist Is Present, MoMA performance, 2010 (photo by Marco Anelli / courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives)
Who: Marina Abramović, Glenn Lowry, Marco Anelli What: Livestreamed discussions in conjunction with new gallery show, “Performative” Where:Sean Kelly Gallery YouTube,MoMA online When: Tuesday, March 15, free with RSVP, 6:15 [now postponed]; Thursday, March 24, free with RSVP, 7:30 Why: In 2010, MoMA staged the widely hailed immersive exhibition “Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present,” a chronological career survey highlighted by the re-creation of many of the Belgrade-born artist’s performance pieces, centered by the title work, in which she and a visitor sat across from one another, staring into each other’ eyes for as long as possible as the audience watched. In conjunction with the new Sean Kelly exhibit “Marina Abramović: Performative,” which explores four key turning points in Abramović’s oeuvre, the gallery is presenting a pair of live discussions between and Abramović and special guests, sitting down together but most likely not having a staring contest.
On March 15 at 6:15, Abramović will be at Sean Kelly with Glenn Lowry, the longtime MoMA director who oversaw the 2010 show; the livestream will be available on YouTube. [ed note: This event has been postponed because of the knife attack at MoMA over the weekend.] On March 24 at 7:30, Abramović will be at MoMA for a virtual conversation with Italian photographer Marco Anelli. “Performative,” consisting of photographs, video, objects, and ephemera, is on view at Sean Kelly Gallery at 475 Tenth Ave. through April 16, featuring looks at Abramović’s Rhythm 10,The Artist Is Present, the participatory Transitory Objects, and Seven Deaths.
A DAYLONG CELEBRATION
Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Sunday, March 13, free with museum admission, 11:00 am – 4:00 pm
212-535-7710 www.metmuseum.org
In November, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened a new period room, the spectacular Afrofuturist Before Yesterday We Could Fly, an homage to the nineteenth-century Seneca Village, a thriving African American community, including Black landowners, that was taken away by the city in order to build Central Park. Named after Virginia Hamilton’s 1985 children’s book, The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales, the installation features more than six dozen objects, including bowls, vases, cups, plates, chairs, jars, boxes, paintings, sculpture, and more by such artists as Robert Lugo, Zizipho Poswa, Atang Tshikare, Elizabeth Catlett, William Henry Johnson, Magdalene Odundo, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby. The room is instilled with a spiritual energy that is intoxicating, melding past and present with the future.
“I think for a lot of us, when we were kids, our ability to envision a future that was different than some of the things that we didn’t like that we were seeing around us was to escape into a fantasy and envision a future that’s more akin to a superhero comic book than it is to actual reality — and I think that comes through in my work and a lot of the people that express visions in an Afrofuture,” Swiss industrial designer and artist Ini Archibong says in a Met video; Archibong contributed two Atlas Chairs, an Orion Table, and the Vernus 3 chandelier to the room.
“The Black imagination and manifestation of freedom is really what I was aiming at. And my feeling that roots, magic is really at the center of our strength and identity, and is something that has always helped direct us into the future and given us strength in the present,” Haitian-born, Brooklyn-based conceptual artist Fabiola Jean-Louis says in another Met video; her ornately designed Justice of Ezili corset dress, a tribute to Vodou loa (spirit) Ezili Dantor, is a highlight of the room.
Also be on the lookout for Henry Taylor’s Andrea Motley Crabtree, the first, a portrait of the first woman and Black woman army deep-sea diver; Willie Cole’s Shine, a mask made of high-heeled leather shoes equating soles and souls; Tourmaline’s photographic self-portraits Summer Azure and Morning Cloak; Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s Thriving and Potential, Displaced (Again and Again and…), wallpaper that merges a Seneca Village map with images from the African diaspora; Andile Dyalvane’s Umwonyo, a pot that collapsed when he danced in his studio; Roberto Lugo’s Digable Underground, a porcelain sculpture with images of Harriet Tubman and Erykah Badu, in a place of honor on a glass plinth within an open brick tower; and Jenn Nkiru’s Out/Side of Time, a mysterious photo made specifically for the period room.
On March 13, the Met will host an all-day celebration of the installation, running from 11:00 am to 4:00 pm, consisting of art workshops in which participants can make tech-y accessories and social justice pottery; gallery chats with curators and researchers Sarah Lawrence, Ian Alteveer, and Ana Matisse Donefer-Hickie; the panel discussion “In the Parlor” with Rena Anakwe, Dyalvane, Jean-Louis, and Tourmaline; storytelling; and more. All events are free with museum admission; some require advance registration.
D. Max Moerman will lead a virtual walkthrough of Japan Society exhibition on March 8
Who: D. Max Moerman, Ramona Handel-Bajema, PhD What: Virtual discussion and walkthrough of “Shikō Munakata: A Way of Seeing,” on view at Japan Society through March 20 Where:Japan Society YouTube When: Tuesday, March 8, free with RSVP (suggested donation $5-$20), 6:00 Why: On March 8 at 6:00, Barnard College professor and Columbia University Seminar in Buddhist Studies cochair D. Max Moerman will give the online lecture “Sacred Screens and Scrolls: Decoding Buddhist Symbols in Shikō Munakata’s Prints,” a deep dive into the current Japan Society exhibition “Shikō Munakata: A Way of Seeing.” Joined in conversation by Japan Society chief program officer Ramona Handel-Bajema, PhD, Moerman will walk through the show, which features nearly one hundred works by Munakata (1903-75), comprising woodblock prints, calligraphy, sumi ink paintings, watercolors, lithography, and ceramics.
“How does the artist breathe life into his work? By summoning the spirit of the art that lives inside him. . . . Power comes from the artist’s spirit, warmth from his tenderness, and serenity from his prayers,” Munakata explained in Hanga no Hanashi in 1954. Five years later, he came to New York City as a fellow in Japan Society’s Print Artists Program; several of the pieces he created for the institution are also part of the show. Moerman will focus on religious aspects of Munakata’s work, including the six-panel screen Eulogy to Shōkei and the twelve-set hanging scrolls The Ten Great Disciples of Buddha. The exhibit, which will have extended days and hours because of its popularity, also is highlighted by the newly rediscovered Tōkaidō Series from 1964, arranged at Japan Society to evoke the coastal road between Kyoto and Tokyo.
