this week in art

A CONVERSATION WITH DARA BIRNBAUM: SCREENING AND LIVE Q&A

Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry (still), 1979. Dara Birnbaum (American, born 1946). Color video, sound; 6:50 min. Courtesy of the artist and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

Dara Birnbaum, Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry, still, color video, sound, 1979 (courtesy of the artist and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York)

Who: Dara Birnbaum, Alex Kitnick, Asad Raza, Marianna Simnett
What: Special streaming and live conversation with Q&A
Where: Marian Goodman Gallery Zoom
When: Thursday, July 23, free with registration, 2:00
Why: New York native Dara Birnbaum has been making video and installation art since the 1970s, at the cutting edge of the emerging discipline. On July 23, Marian Goodman Gallery will host a screening of the pioneer’s breakthrough five-minute 1978-79 video, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, which welcomed visitors to the contemporary galleries at the new MoMA prior to the pandemic lockdown (it was initially displayed in a SoHo storefront), and Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry, a seven-minute video from 1979 in which Birnbaum uses clips from the popular Hollywood Squares game show to explore coded gestures, pop culture imagery, and gender representation. (The setup for the show is like a modern-day Zoom meeting come to life in three dimensions.) The screening will be followed by a live conversation and audience Q&A with Birnbaum, art historian Alex Kitnick, and artists Asad Raza and Marianna Simnett.

VIRTUAL BOOK LAUNCH EVENT: RAPHAEL MONTAÑEZ ORTIZ

El Museo del Barrio will celebrate the publication of Raphael Montañez Ortiz’s first monograph on July 22

Who: Javier Rivero Ramos, Chon Noriega, Kevin Hatch, Ana Perry, Marcos Dimas, Pedro Reyes, Juan Sanchez
What: Virtual book launch of Raphael Montañez Ortiz monograph with conversation and live Q&A
Where: El Museo en Tu Casa Zoom
When: Wednesday, July 22, free with RSVP, 7:00
Why: In 1969, Brooklyn-born artist and educator Raphael Montañez Ortiz founded and became the first director of El Museo del Barrio. “The cultural disenfranchisement I experience as a Puerto Rican has prompted me to seek a practical alternative to the orthodox museum, which fails to meet my needs for an authentic ethnic experience. To afford me and others the opportunity to establish living connections with my own culture, I founded El Museo del Barrio,” he said. In 2014, El Museo honored Ortiz with the exhibition “Museum Starter Kit: Open with Care”; on July 22, they’ll pay tribute to the eighty-six-year-old Nuyorican multidisciplinary deconstructionist with a virtual launch party for his first monograph, featuring a live conversation on Zoom, followed by a Q&A; among the participants are monograph editor Javier Rivero Ramos, contributors Chon Noriega, Kevin Hatch, and Ana Perry, and artists Marcos Dimas, Pedro Reyes, and Juan Sanchez.

“One of the most radical creators and pioneers of his generation, Raphael Montañez Ortiz offers El Museo del Barrio an opportunity to push the boundaries of identities, showcase moments of harmony and tension in our lived history as a museum, and challenge and expand limited visual art narratives. Entropy speaks about the need for transformation, about the irreversible changes that are generated within complex systems. This spirit is evidenced in El Museo del Barrio today and for years to come,” El Museo executive director Patrick Charpenel said in a statement. Ramos added, “For far too long, canonical art history devoted to American art of the second half of the twentieth century neglected one of its most innovative artists. Premised on the Eurocentric myth of the homo faber, it failed to comprehend the trailblazing character of Raphael Montañez Ortiz and his lifelong endeavor to harness the human condition’s primal energies. At once a painter, performance artist, sculptor, filmmaker, teacher, community organizer, and writer, the work of Raphael Montañez Ortiz defies disciplinary categorization. This publication offers for the first time a panoramic view of a prolific career spanning more than six decades.”

CARMEN ARGOTE’S LAST LIGHT SCREENING AND Q&A

Carmen Argote goes for a haunting walk in new short film Last Light

Who: Carmen Argote, Erin Christovale
What: Livestream premiere and live Q&A
Where: The Hammer Museum at UCLA
When: Tuesday, July 21, free with RSVP, 9:00 EDT
Why: Mexican-born, LA-based multidisciplinary artist Carmen Argote was scheduled to open her latest exhibition, “Hand Dog Glove,” at Clockshop in Los Angeles, but the Covid-19 pandemic has put that on hold. In the interim, Argote, the gallery, and the Hammer Museum at UCLA have teamed up to present the livestream premiere of Argote’s haunting twelve-minute film, Last Light, which she started making just before the lockdown and continued during the crisis. “Is this fear so paralyzing?” she asks as she walks through the emptying streets of her city, considering ideas of loneliness, childhood, and demolition. “I feel like I’m not made to last; I’m not the one who’s gonna make it.” Argote, who was hospitalized early in the crisis for a non-cornonavirus-related illness, takes walks as part of her discipline. In her artist statement she explains, “I explore notions of home and place. I respond to architecture and site to reflect on personal histories and on my own immigrant experience. My practice uses the act of inhabiting as a starting point, working within a space and its cultural, economic, and personal context as a material. I work at a human scale and in relationship to how my body inhabits space.” The premiere will be livestreamed on July 21 at 9:00, followed by a Q&A with Argote and Hammer associate curator Erin Christovale. (Click on the above photo to watch the trailer.)

GALERIE LELONG CONVERSATIONS: JAUME PLENSA WITH MARY SABBATINO

Jaume Plensa is back in his Barcelona studio, where he will take part in the inaugural “Galerie Lelong Conversation” (photo courtesy Galerie Lelong)

Who: Jaume Plensa, Mary Sabbatino
What: Artist talk inaugurating “Galerie Lelong Conversations”
Where: Galerie Lelong Zoom
When: Thursday, July 9, free with advance registration, 2:00
Why: “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.” So begins T. S. Eliot’s epic 1922 poem, “The Waste Land.” Spanish artist Jaume Plensa uses that quote for the title of his new online exhibition, “Jaume Plensa: April is the cruelest month,” which continues on Galerie Lelong’s website through July 10. The show consists of drawings on Super Alfa Guarro paper from his new “STILL” series, created during the month of April, when Plensa was sheltering in place at home, unable to get to his studio. Each of the works contains letters, either arranged randomly, in the shape of a heart, or forming such words as panic, dementia, suicide, insomnia, and anxiety on the fingers of a hand. In the exhibition text, gallery vice president and partner Mary Sabbatino explains, “Language is not the only means to communicate and can sometimes work against comprehension. ‘We are best when together,’ says Plensa. In the contemplation of these drawings, we see a world both intimate and expansive, expressive of shared human experience during a time when the world was ‘still.’”

On July 9 at 2:00, in conjunction with the closing of the exhibition the next day, Sabbatino will host a live Zoom “Galerie Lelong Conversation” with Plensa, who is back in his Barcelona studio. Plensa is best known in New York City for his large-scale works Echo in Madison Square Park and Behind the Walls at Rockefeller Center; for more on the artist, check out the trailer for Pedro Ballesteros’s new documentary, Jaume Plensa: Can You Hear Me? The next “Galerie Lelong Conversation” will take place in August with Brooklyn-based artist Leonardo Drew, who had a solo show at the gallery last year. And as Eliot also wrote in “The Waste Land”: “There is shadow under this red rock, / (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), / And I will show you something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

INSIDER INSIGHTS: GERHARD RICHTER PAINTING

Gerhard Richter reveals his creative process in fascinating documentary (photo courtesy of Kino Lorber)

Who: Brinda Kumar, Corinna Belz
What: Livestreamed prerecorded discussion
Where: MetMuseum Facebook and YouTube
When: Tuesday, June 23, free, 6:00
Why: In conjunction with the expansive Met Breuer exhibition “Gerhard Richter: Painting After All,” which opened March 4 for a brief run before the pandemic lockdown and hopefully will continue once the crisis is over, the Met’s “Insider Insights” series will examine Corinna Belz’s 2011 documentary, Gerhard Richter Painting. [Ed. note: It was announced on June 22 that the Met Breuer will be closing for good, so the exhibition will not be coming back.] On June 23 at 6:00, writer-director Belz will be joined by Met Modern and Contemporary Art assistant curator Brinda Kumar for a prerecorded interview discussing the making of the film, which can be streamed for free through July 31 here.

There’s nothing abstract about the title of Belz’s documentary on the German artist, no missing words or punctuation marks. Gerhard Richter Painting is primarily just that: Ninety-seven minutes of Gerhard Richter painting as he prepares for several exhibitions, including a 2009 show at the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York City. In 2007, Belz got a rare chance to capture Richter on camera, making a short film focusing on the stained-glass window he designed for the Cologne Cathedral. Two years later, the shy, reserved Richter, who prefers to have his art speak for itself, invited Belz into his studio, giving her remarkable access inside his creative process, which revealingly relies so much on chance and accident. Belz films Richter as he works on two large-scale canvases on which he first slathers yellow paint, adds other colors, then takes a large squeegee and drags it across the surface, changing everything. It’s fascinating to watch Richter study the pieces, never quite knowing when they are done, unsure of whether they are any good. It’s also painful to see him take what looks like an extraordinary painting and then run the squeegee over it yet again, destroying what he had in order to see if he can make it still better. “They do what they want,” he says of the paintings. “I planned something totally different.”

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About halfway through the film, a deeply concerned Richter starts regretting his decision to allow the camera into his studio. “It won’t work,” he says. “At the moment it seems hopeless. I don’t think I can do this, painting under observation. That’s the worst thing there is.” But continue he does, for Belz’s and our benefit. Belz (Life After Microsoft, Peter Handke: In the Woods, Might Be Late) even gets Richter to talk a little about his family while looking at some old photos, offering intriguing tidbits about his early life and his escape to Düsseldorf just before the Berlin Wall went up. Belz also includes clips from 1966 and 1976 interviews with Richter, and she attends a meeting he has with Goodman about his upcoming show, lending yet more insight into the rather eclectic artist. “To talk about painting is not only difficult but perhaps pointless, too,” Richter, who turned eighty-eight in February, says in the 1966 clip. However, watching Gerhard Richter Painting is far from pointless; Belz has made a compelling documentary about one of the great, most elusive artists of our time. “Man, this is fun,” Richter says at one point, and indeed it is; watching the masterful artist at work is, well, a whole lot more fun than watching paint dry.

SANFORD BIGGERS IN CONVERSATION WITH ROSELEE GOLDBERG: THE SOMETHIN’ SUITE

Sanford Biggers will talk to Performa head RoseLee Goldberg about The Somethin’ Suite and more on Juneteenth

Who: Sanford Biggers, RoseLee Goldberg
What: Talk and screening surrounding The Somethin’ Suite
Where: Performa Instagram Live and Performa website
When: Talk: Friday, June 19, free, noon; screening: June 18 & 19, free, 7:00
Why: In honor of Juneteenth, the anniversary of the end of the Civil War and slavery, Performa chief curator RoseLee Goldberg will discuss art, politics, systemic racism, and more with New York City-based multidisciplinary artist Sanford Biggers. The talk will take place on Instagram Live at noon, in conjunction with screenings on June 18 and 19 of Biggers’s 2007 Performa commission, The Somethin’ Suite, what he called “a post minstrel cycle” and “a darke xperiment.” The twenty-five-minute performance, held at the Box, featured Martin Luther, Saul Williams, Esthero, Shae Fiol, Imani Uzuri, DJ Dahi Sundance, CX KidTRONiK, and Freedome Bradley as a wide range of characters staging a minstrel show, using spoken word, song, music, dance, and film to bring to stark light historical aspects of racism.

In a 2007 interview, Biggers, who was raised in Los Angeles, told Goldberg, “The whole institution of our popular cultural media, which started with minstrel shows and has now become the hip hop music industry — one of the most lucrative entertainment industries worldwide — originated with making a mockery of blacks. So I’m interested in how much and how little has changed in these last 150 years. We’re at a crucial moment in race relations in America right now, with a lot of old wounds being reopened and reexamined. With the ‘PC’ ethos of the ’90s having passed, and a black man being seriously considered for the US presidency, we cannot afford to not develop a more sophisticated understanding of ‘race’ and ‘otherness.’ So I thought it was a perfect time to really look at the history of how we’ve been imagining ourselves, as African Americans, how white people have projected their stereotypes onto us, and how we’ve reflected their obsession by projecting some of those stereotypes back, because neither party is solely guilty — there’s a complicity.” Given what is happening right now in America, from George Floyd to Aunt Jemima, this program could not be any more timely.

VIRTUAL MUSEUM MILE FESTIVAL

virtual museum mile

Who: Eight arts institutions along upper Fifth Ave..
What: Virtual Museum Mile Festival
Where: Individual websites, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook
When: Tuesday, June 9, free 9:00 am – 9:00 pm
Why: For forty-one years, New Yorkers have crowded onto Fifth Ave. between 82nd and 105th Sts. for the annual Museum Mile Festival, in which eight popular arts institutions open their doors for free, providing access to exhibitions and hosting live performances, workshops, panel discussions, and more between 6:00 and 9:00. With the pandemic lockdown still in place for museums, the festival goes virtual for 2020, taking place all day instead of just three hours, offering exhibition tours, curator and artist talks, family-friendly activities, and other special programs that people can experience from the comfort of their home. The live and prerecorded events are scheduled for 9:00 am to 9:00 pm on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook; follow #VirtualMuseumMile for specific info. Below are some of the highlights.

The Africa Center
“African/American: Making the Nation’s Table,” prerecorded videos with Ezra Wube, livestreamed conversation at 5:00 between culinary historian and exhibition’s curator Jessica B. Harris and exhibit advisor and Teranga executive chef and co-owner Pierre Thiam

Museum of the City of New York
“Curators from the Couch: Who We Are,” with chief curator and deputy director Sarah Henry, information designer Giorgia Lupi, and artist and computer scientist Brian Foo; MCNY Live, with cartoonist Roz Chast and novelist and Hugo Award winner N. K. Jemisin

El Museo del Barrio
Prerecorded interviews with artists, including iliana emilia garcia and Hiram Maristany; Collection-ary, with curators Rodrigo Moura and Susanna Temkin and artists Elia Alba and Scherezade García, 6:00; “¡Muevete!” with Nina Sky, free with advance RSVP, 8:00

The Jewish Museum
At-home art projects for families; audio tours with Isaac Mizrahi, Kehinde Wiley, Alex and Maira Kalman, Ross Bleckner and Deborah Kass, and others; “Movies That Matter: Teens Confront Segregation in America,” with artist and filmmaker Gillian Laub; interview with artist Rachel Feinstein about the exhibition “Rachel Feinstein: Maiden, Mother, Crone”; discussion with artists Rachel Feinstein and Lisa Yuskavage, filmmaker Tamara Jenkins, and curator Kelly Taxter; performance for families from the Paper Bag Players at Home

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
Virtual tour of the exhibition “Contemporary Muslim Fashions”; video art-making lessons, including potato stamp pattern making inspired by Eva Zeisel; design talk “Exploring A.I.: Data Portraits,” with curator Ellen Lupton and artists R. Luke DuBois, Jessica Helfand, and Zachary Lieberman

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Virtual Stroller tour/talk for young children, 3:00; Guggenheim at Large, with curators talking about the collection; “Sketch with Jeff,” a hands-on activity for families with teaching artist Jeff Hopkins; a self-directed audio/visual experience via the Guggenheim Digital Audio Guide

Neue Galerie New York
Virtual tour of “Madame d’Or” with exhibition curator Dr. Monika Faber; a hands-on arts and crafts activity “Making Hats: Use What You Have,” with Deborah Rapoport; “Baking Linzer Cookies: A Recipe from Café Sabarsky”

The Metropolitan Museum of Art – Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube
Virtual tours of “Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shores of the Sahara” and “Gerhard Richter: Painting After All”; prerecorded interview with artist Wangechi Mutu; design your own puppet and banjo using recycled materials; flower crown making; streaming of 2019 MetLiveArts dance performance by Silas Farley filmed in museum galleries