this week in art

GARRY WINOGRAND: ALL THINGS ARE PHOTOGRAPHABLE

Portrait of Garry Winogrand. Credit: Judy Teller

New documentary paints a fascinating portrait of street photographer Garry Winogrand (photo by Judy Teller)

GARRY WINOGRAND: ALL THINGS ARE PHOTOGRAPHABLE (Sasha Waters Freyer, 2018)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Wednesday, September 19
212-727-8110
www.winograndmovie.com
filmforum.org

There’s an intrinsic challenge about making a documentary about a photographer: How to portray the artist’s work, silent, still pictures of a moment in time, in a medium based on sound and movement. In Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable, producer, director, and editor Sasha Waters Freyer attacks that issue by delving deep into many of Winogrand’s photographs, lingering on them as friends, relatives, and colleagues rave about his glorious images. “Well, what is a photograph? I’ll tell you what a photograph is. It’s the illusion of a literal description of how a camera saw a piece of time in space,” Winogrand said in a 1975 lecture at the University of Texas Austin, later adding, “All it is is light on surface.” Of course, in Winogrand’s case, it is much more than that; the black-and-white pictures he took with his trusted Leica M4 inhale and exhale at the exciting pace of real life. “It’s this observation of human behavior, of human activity, human gesture, the relationships between people, whether they know each other or not, how we behave in the world,” curator Susan Kismaric says. Writer Geoff Dyer calls Winogrand’s work a “psychogestural ballet,” while photographer Matt Stuart looks at photo after photo, pointing out “the dance” in each one. “When things move, I get interested. I know that much,” Winogrand, who passed away in 1984 at the age of fifty-six, says in his gruff voice. “He had no ambition for fame or celebrity. He was totally obsessed and possessed by photography,” his good friend, photographer Tod Papageorge, says. “It was work work work work work.”

“New York, 1968” [laughing woman with ice cream] (photographs by Garry Winogrand, Collection Center for Creative Photography, the University of Arizona. © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco)

Freyer traces the life of “a city hick from the Bronx,” from his boyhood, when he had polio, through three marriages and three children, from his fear of nuclear war to his love of the female form, from the streets of New York City to California and Texas. She weaves in audio and video from lectures and interviews, filmed and taped conversations with photographer Jay Maisel, and photos and home movies of Winogrand and his family. Freyer speaks with photographers Thomas Roma, Jeffrey Henson Scales, Leo Rubinfien, Laurie Simmons, and Michael Ernest Sweet, curator Erin O’Toole, gallery owner Jeffrey Fraenkel (who compares Winogrand to Norman Mailer), Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, historian and critic Shelley Rice, and two of Winogrand’s ex-wives, Adrienne Lubeau and Judy Teller. There are also extensive quotes from legendary MoMA photography curator John Szarkowski. The film explores several turning points in his career, both good and bad, including the “New Documents” show with Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus; his seminal work in 1964; “The Animals,” a series shot at the Central Park Zoo, where he would go with his kids; his color work; Public Relations, in which he examined the role and effect of the mass media; and his controversial Women Are Beautiful book, which was labeled as sexist and misogynistic.

Influenced by such photographers as Robert Frank, Walker Evans, and Dan Weiner, Winogrand could not stop taking pictures. He took so many — the thought of his working in the digital age is both thrilling and frightening — that he didn’t even develop thousands of rolls, leaving behind a treasure trove of material that Roma explains was misinterpreted by critics. “I would like not to exist,” Winogrand said. It’s a good thing for the rest of us that he did, sharing his unique view of the world, incorporating the chaos of his personal life into his remarkable pictures. Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable, which features original music by Winogrand’s son, Ethan, and animation by Kelly Gallagher, opens September 19 at Film Forum, with Freyer participating in Q&As following the 7:00 shows on September 19 and 21. In her director’s statement, the Brooklyn-born Freyer writes, “In looking at Winogrand in all his multidimensional human complexity, I take aim at the ‘bad dad’ and ‘bad husband’ tropes in artist biography, seeking to undermine these as sources of triumph or artistic necessity. Winogrand was an artist whose rise and fall — from the 1950s to the mid-1980s — in acclaim mirrors not only that of American power and credibility in the second half of the twentieth century but also a vision of American masculinity whose limitations, toxicity, and inheritance we still struggle, culturally, to comprehend. The film ultimately invites a deeper consideration of Winogrand not only as a ‘man of his time,’ in the words of MoMA photography curator Susan Kismaric, but also as a man struggling to define himself simultaneously as an artist and a parent (as so many of us do).”

BARBARA POLLACK — BRAND NEW ART FROM CHINA: A GENERATION ON THE RISE

Who: Barbara Pollack
What: Conversation, gallery talk, book signing in conjunction with publication of Brand New Art from China: A Generation on the Rise (Tauris, $25, September 2018)
Where: James Cohan Gallery, 291 Grand St.; Pace Gallery, 537 West Twenty-Fourth St.; Asia Society, 725 Park Ave. at 70th St.
When: Thursday, September 20, free, 6:00; Tuesday, September 25, free, 6:00; Monday, December 3, $20, 6:30
Why: In 2010, when twi-ny interviewed art critic, curator, teacher, and writer Barbara Pollack about her book The Wild, Wild East: An American Art Critic’s Adventures in China, she said, “In New York, I am just another person trying to make a living by writing about art. But in China, I get treated like a star critic with a certain degree of power.” Pollack’s well-deserved prominence is evident in her follow-up, Brand New Art from China: A Generation on the Rise, which features a quote on the front from Ai Weiwei, who says, “Frank, honest, and full of passion. . . . a rare and precise insight.” A good friend of twi-ny’s, Pollack herself is certainly frank, honest, and full of passion. (Full disclosure: Pollack’s literary agent is also twi-ny’s business manager.) Pollack is indeed a superstar in China, where artists clamor for her to write about their work. The new book explores such Chinese artists as Cao Fei, Chen Tianzhuo, Chen Zhou, Gao Ling, Guan Xiao, Jin Shan, Li Liao, Liu Wei, Qiu Xiafoei, Zhang Xiaogang, and Xu Zhen, in such chapters as “The Last Chinese Artists,” “The Me Generation,” and “Post-Truth.” Here’s a brief excerpt about Xu:

There are many occasions when Xu Zhen has eschewed references to Chinese culture entirely or mixed up symbols so seamlessly that the only reaction could be total confusion. At one of MadeIn’s first exhibitions, the company produced an entire survey of “art from the Middle East,” combining aesthetic strategies from conceptual art practices with just enough stereotypes of the war-torn, Islamic-dominated region to evoke a Middle Eastern identity. There were mosques made of Styrofoam and Charlie Hebdo political cartoons woven into tapestries. There were sculptures made of barbed wire and a field of broken bricks set on an invisible waterbed, so the ground seemed to move like a silent earthquake. When these works were shown at James Cohan Gallery in New York in 2009—with the title “Lonely Miracle: Art from the Middle East”—most visitors had no choice but to assume these were products of a collective of Arab artists, which was exactly the point. In this globally driven art world, it is easy to fake ethnicity. All it takes is a bit of irony and just enough cultural references to add locality to the mix.

Ai Weiwei supplied a quote for Barbara Pollack’s latest book on Chinese art (photo by Joe Gaffney)

Pollack will be at James Cohan Gallery on September 20 at 6:00, in conversation with Xiaoyu Weng, the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation associate curator of Chinese art at the Guggenheim, followed by a book signing. On September 25 at 6:00, she will lead the gallery talk “Zhang Xiaogang & the Future of Chinese Art” at Pace in Chelsea, where “Zhang Xiaogang: Recent Works” is on view through October 20. To get a taste of Pollack’s thoughts on Zhang’s earlier work, here’s another excerpt from the book:

So, Zhang Xiaogang’s emphasis on a Chinese identity is not the result of isolation and ignorance of Western art practices but a reaction to his initial embrace of those trends. In Europe, he faced his crisis head-on by seeing the masterpieces of Western art history and feeling as if there was nothing more he could add to that legacy. Back in China, however, he was surrounded by a new cultural experience that could not be captured through Western iconography and symbols. His rejection of the West was not total. Instead, he embraced an approach that allowed for innovation in both Western and Chinese traditions for art.

On December 3 at 6:30, Pollack will be at Asia Society for a Meet the Author program, consisting of a PowerPoint presentation, a conversation with senior curator of modern and contemporary art Michelle Yun, and a book signing. If you can’t make it to the talk, you can follow the live webcast here. Pollack recently broke her foot, but as she declared on social media, “Nothing is keeping me away from this event!”

WAYNE THIEBAUD, DRAFTSMAN

Nine Jelly Apples, 1964, watercolor and graphite. Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of George Hopper Fitch, B.A. 1932. Photography by Tony De Camillo. © Wayne Thiebaud/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Wayne Thiebaud, “Nine Jelly Apples,” watercolor and graphite, 1964 (Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of George Hopper Fitch, B.A. 1932. Photography by Tony De Camillo. © Wayne Thiebaud/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY)

Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Ave. at 36th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 23, $13-$20 (free Fridays 7:00 to 9:00)
212-685-0008
www.themorgan.org

You might be surprised to find out that from 2005 to 2015, Wayne Thiebaud was sixth on the list of top-selling living American artists at auction, totaling more than $163 million in aggregated sales (trailing Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, and Jasper Johns and ahead of Robert Ryman, Frank Stella, Robert Indiana, and Cindy Sherman). Or maybe that’s not surprising at all, given how his oeuvre is so viscerally pleasing while also technically adroit, as revealed in the lovely exhibition “Wayne Thiebaud, Draftsman,” continuing at the Morgan through September 23. Now ninety-seven and still working, the Arizona-born, California-raised artist is best known for his luscious paintings of pies, jelly apples, ice-cream cones, and other tasty treats, but the show reveals him to be an expert draftsman through drawings and sketches not only of desserts but of cityscapes and landscapes. His influences range from Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Giorgio Morandi, Edgar Degas, and Pierre-Paul Prudh’hon to Krazy Kat cartoonist George Herriman and time spent in trade school and the military and as a commercial artist, window dresser, and graphic designer for Rexall Drugs and Universal Studios. “One day [printer] Kathan [Brown] brought down lunch, which was a cheese sandwich, a couple of olives, and a beer, and I said, ‘Before we eat this, I think I’ll draw it,’” Thiebaud is quoted as saying in the exhibition catalog.

Self Portrait, ca. 1970, graphite. From the artist’s studio. © Wayne Thiebaud/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Wayne Thiebaud, “Self Portrait,” graphite, ca. 1970 (From the artist’s studio. © Wayne Thiebaud/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY)

The show, the first extensive museum survey of Thiebaud’s works on paper, is a panoply of delights, from the 1964 watercolor and graphite “Nine Jelly Apples,” in which the sweet jelly seems to be dripping down the wall, to the 1983 charcoal “Three Roads,” an imaginative rendering of San Francisco streets, from a circa-1970 graphite self-portrait of Thiebaud looking serious to the 1960s-1970s “Page of Sketches with Ties,” four rectangular depictions of numerous ties, from the 1964 brush and ink “Hamburgers,” three rows of the all-American food, to the fantastical 1967-68 “Ridge with Clouds.” Thiebaud is not making any grand statements about consumption or hunger; the self-effacing artist and teacher is merely using his impressive skill to explore various subjects and styles. He also seems to have a penchant for drawing items in multiples of three, although he claims that is not on purpose and has no secret meaning. “Learning to draw is just learning to see more clearly and more organized,” he told curator Isabelle Dervaux in an illustrated talk at the Morgan. “That’s another side benefit of learning to draw. You’re going to learn to see a lot better and a lot deeper.”

Wayne Thiebaud, “Diagonal City,” graphite, 1978 (Collection of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson. © Wayne Thiebaud/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY)

Thiebaud’s works have a way of getting inside your head, offering up sweet memories. Walking through the exhibit, I was like, well, a kid in a candy store. I thought of the first hamburger I had at Wetson’s, of the candy store down the street from my elementary school, of how rarely I saw my father wearing a tie, of a cake my aunt used to make for my birthday, the first time I licked an ice-cream cone and the ice cream dripped onto my hand, of a childhood friend’s dog, and of getting lost while wandering through parts of San Francisco and New York City. Dervaux has done a marvelous job laying out the show, dividing it into such themes as “Foodstuff,” “Tradition,” “Early Drawings,” and “Cityscapes and Landscapes,” creating compelling juxtapositions that tell us yet more about Thiebaud and his methods. It’s a joy to experience these works, many of which have never before been shown publicly. “Most of these are private drawings — to find out something, to make notations, or just to experiment,” Thiebaud has said. “You want to feel that these are things that will never be seen.”

B. WURTZ: KITCHEN TREES / PUBLIC ART FUND TALK

B. Wurtz will talk about City Hall Park installation “Kitchen Trees” and more at New School event on September 17 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The New School, Tishman Auditorium
63 Fifth Ave. between 13th & 14th Sts.
Monday, September 17, $10, 6:30
Exhibition continues in City Hall Park through December 7
www.publicartfund.org
kitchen trees slideshow

California-born, New York-based artist B. Wurtz will be at the New School on September 17 to give a talk about his latest project, the Public Art Fund installation “Kitchen Trees,” in City Hall Park through December 7. The whimsical site-specific show surrounding the fountain features five arboreal found-object sculptures made of colanders, each totemlike work a different color of the rainbow — red, orange, yellow, green, blue — topped with plastic fruits and vegetables (apples, bananas, corn, cucumbers, potatoes, pears, plums, peppers) hanging from upside-down pots and pans. Curated by Daniel S. Palmer, it’s a vibrant celebration of the mundane and the everyday, and it might very well make you hungry for a home-cooked meal. “With my work, I’m just looking at the world and exactly what it is, not wishing it were something else but trying to make something hopefully positive using ordinary things,” Wurtz says in a Public Art Fund video.

B. Wurtz will talk about City Hall Park installation “Kitchen Trees” and more at New School event on September 17 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

“Kitchen Trees” consists of found objects transformed into monumental arboreal sculptures in City Hall Park (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

“He will look at something in a way that’s very different from just simply its function,” Palmer adds. Palmer will moderate the talk, which will explore Wurtz’s fifty-year career. The artist, who studied with John Baldessari and Barbara Kruger, has created assemblages with plastic bags, dish towels, socks, buttons, and other household materials to investigate his central themes of food, clothing, and shelter, but this is his first installation of monumental works. In conjunction with “Kitchen Trees,” “Domestic Space,” part of his Photo/Object series, continues at Metro Pictures in Chelsea through October 20. Don’t search for grand statements in any of Wurtz’s work. “I don’t have to tack on meaning later. It’s already built in,” he explains in the short video, which also uses his music for the soundtrack.

GIACOMETTI

Albert Giacometti, “The Chariot,” bronze, 1950 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Friday – Wednesday through September 12, $25 (pay-what-you-wish Saturday 5:00-7:45)
212-423-3587
www.guggenheim.org

In his catalog essay “The Quest for the Absolute” for Alberto Giacometti’s 1948 solo show at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, Jean-Paul Sartre began, “I know no one else so sensitive as he is to the magic of faces and gestures. He views them with a passionate desire, as though he were from some other realm. But at times, tiring of the struggle, he has sought to mineralize his fellow human beings: he saw crowds advancing blindly toward him, rolling down the avenues like rocks in an avalanche. So each of his obsessions remained a piece of work, an experiment, a way of experiencing space.” Humanness and space are key to the Guggenheim’s outstanding current retrospective, simply titled “Giacometti,” where large crowds are expected in its final days; the exhibition ends September 12. Although Giacometti, who was born in Switzerland in 1901, spent most of his working life in Paris, and died in 1966, came to New York only once, for a MoMA show in 1965, he has had a long and important relationship with the city.

Two versions of “Spoon Woman” (1927) are side by side, bronze in black, plaster in white (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Following gallery shows at Pierre Matisse and Julien Levy, Giacometti was given a major exhibition at the Guggenheim’s temporary space in 1955, and nineteen years later the institution mounted a posthumous retrospective in its Frank Lloyd Wright building. The new show is beautifully curated by the museum’s Megan Fontanella and Fondation Giacometti director Catherine Grenier and smartly installed by Derek DeLuco, with the artist’s large and small bronze and plaster sculptures, paintings, drawings, notebooks, and more unfolding chronologically up the Guggenheim’s spiral pathway, revealing a fascinating array of humanity and artistic styles (Surrealism, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, Egyptian and African), with plenty of room for both the visitor and the work to breathe.

A group of small busts line one bay at the Guggenheim (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The High Gallery provides a kind of amuse-bouche, a tantalizing look at Giacometti’s designs for an unrealized 1958 project at the Chase Manhattan Bank plaza downtown. Back on the ramp, bays feature black bronze and white plaster versions of the abstract “Spoon Woman,” an early gestation of the more familiar sculptures to come. “Suspended Ball” is a piece of Surrealist illusion. “Woman with Her Throat Cut” and “Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object)” offer compelling narratives. “Very Small Figurine” is just that, not even two inches tall, in contrast to, for example, “Man Pointing,” which reaches nearly six feet. (If it looks like the man’s left arm is cradling a missing figure, that’s because it is; Giacometti destroyed it, preferring to have the man be more lonely, particularly in the aftermath of WWII.) “City Square” brings together a handful of eight-inch figures that form a little community, while “Four Women on a Base” comprises a quartet of narrow figures who are so thin they nearly disappear. “In the street people astound and interest me more than any sculpture and painting,” Giacometti said. “They form and re-form living compositions in unbelievable complexity. It’s the totality of this life that I want to reproduce in everything I do.”

Guggenheim retrospective begins with Giacometti’s 1962 oil painting of his wife, titled “Black Annette” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

In “The Nose,” the lengthy proboscis of a figure in an open box pokes outside the plane. “Figurine Between Two Houses” resembles a man in a console television set. A woman stands tall on a small platform with two large wheels in “The Chariot,” which casts stunning shadows below it. Oil paintings such as “Standing Nude,” “Black Annette,” “Diego Standing in the Living Room in Stampa” (Diego was his brother and longtime model as well as a sculptor and designer), and “Jean Genet” prove Giacometti’s intense skill with canvas. The show is so well laid out that a visitor eagerly looks forward to what awaits in the next bay rather than tiring of so many elongated figures; they can seem like a sequence of musical notes, rising and falling as one proceeds through the show. “In space, there is too much,” Sartre quotes Giacometti, but that is not true of this thrilling, must-see retrospective.

KUSAMA: INFINITY

Documentary explores fascinating life and career of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (photo © Tokyo Lee Productions, Inc. / courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)

KUSAMA: INFINITY (Heather Lenz, 2018)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, September 7
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
www.kusamamovie.com

I remember the buzz in the room back in July 2012 at the press preview for the “Yayoi Kusama” retrospective at the old Whitney. Even among all the jaded art critics, there was palpable excitement at the rumor that Kusama herself might be attending the event. Alas, it was not to be. But now everyone can feel like they’re in the same room as the iconoclastic Japanese artist when watching Heather Lenz’s infinitely entertaining documentary, Kusama: Infinity, opening September 7 at Film Forum. Over the course of her seven-decade career, Kusama has explored the concepts of infinity and eternity through painting, sculpture, performance art, film, and installation, highlighted by an obsession with endless circles and mirrored reflections. “I convert the energy of life into dots of the universe. And that energy along with love flies into the sky,” she explains. Traumatic childhood experiences deeply influenced her life and art; she began painting when she was eight years old in rural Matsumoto City, where her unhappy parents ran a wholesale seed business (and her mother would tear up her drawings). Now eighty-nine, she still works every day, going from the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill, where she has lived voluntarily since 1977, to her studio, which is filled with her captivating works-in-progress. Lenz zooms in for extreme close-ups of the artist surrounded by canvases, as if she is the biggest dot (or seed?) in her universe. “So much of Kusama’s art seeks to re-create that [childhood] experience in one form or another,” notes Alexandra Munroe, senior curator of Asian Art at the Guggenheim. “It is literally an experience of being lost into her physical environment, of losing her selfhood in this space that is moving rapidly, and expanding rapidly.”

Artist Yayoi Kusama in the Orez Gallery in the Hague, Netherlands (1965) in KUSAMA - INFINITY. Photo credit: Harrie Verstappen. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

Artist Yayoi Kusama poses in the Orez Gallery in the Hague in 1965 (photo by Harrie Verstappen / courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)

Kusama was determined to be successful and to stand out from the crowd, as shown in dozens of color and black-and-white photographs of her in various kimono, dot-covered outfits, revealing apparel, and great hats, always sporting that unique bang hairstyle. “I promised myself that I would conquer New York and make my name in the world with my passion for the arts and my creative energy,” she explains. She was not about to let anything stop her, least of all her gender and her heritage. She was angry when it appeared that such artists as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and Lucas Samaras copied specific aspects of her work and gained greater notice for it. She sought advice from Georgia O’Keeffe. She got involved in an odd relationship with reclusive artist Joseph Cornell. She was shunned in her home country because of her penchant for nudity. She occasionally gets teary looking back at her life. The film features sensational archival video and photographs from some of Kusama’s seminal happenings and exhibitions, from “Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show” to “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective” at CICA, from her “Narcissus Garden” intervention at the 1966 Venice Biennale, where she was selling individual mirror balls she had arranged on a lawn, to 1969’s “Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead,” in which the fiercely antiwar artist read “Thoughts on the Mausoleum of Modern Art” as eight participants ran around naked in MoMA’s sculpture garden. (This summer, Kusama brought “Narcissus Garden” to New York for MoMA PS1’s biannual Rockaway! show.) There are also clips from the revolutionary 1967 psychedelic art film Kusama’s Self-Obliteration, made by Jud Yalkut and Kusama.

Portrait of Yayoi Kusama in her studio. Image © Yayoi Kusama. Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York; Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore/Shanghai; Victoria Miro, London; YAYOI KUSAMA Inc.

At the age of eighty-nine, Yayoi Kusama still works in her studio every day (Image © Yayoi Kusama / courtesy of David Zwirner, New York; Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore/Shanghai; Victoria Miro, London; YAYOI KUSAMA Inc.)

Lenz, who will participate in a Q&A at Film Forum on September 7 after the 7:45 screening, talks to a wide range of people who provide intriguing perspectives on the artist and her work, including Kusama dancer Jeanette Hart Coriddi, former Matsumoto City mayor Tadashi Aruga, David Zwirner director Hanna Schouwink, psychoanalyst and art collector Judith E. Vida, MD, longtime best friend Akira Iinuma, artists Carolee Schneemann, Ed Clark, and Frank Stella, curators Marie Laurberg and Lynn Zelevansky, Joshua Light Show founder Joshua White, and Yayoi Kusama Museum director Akira Tatehata. CUNY Kingsborough art history professor Midori Yamamura says, “Her diagnosis is of obsessive-compulsive neuroses. Once something enters into her mind, she cannot get rid of it.” Former art dealer Beatrice Perry of the Gres Gallery adds of Kusama’s Infinity Net series, “I’d never seen anything like it. They had some kind of magic. You couldn’t stop looking at them, and you didn’t know where they were going. They were hypnotic.” And gallery owner Richard Castellane remembers, “She was taking away your ability to focus, breaking all boundaries of space. . . . This was the great breaking point in art. No longer are you the viewer the master; she’s the master.” Kusama’s mastery is still evident today, as prices paid for her artwork continue to skyrocket — she’s recognized as the top-selling woman artist in the world — and fans wait on long lines for hours and hours to spend thirty seconds inside one of her Infinity Mirrored Rooms. In addition, Lenz has done a masterful job giving us a Kusama we have never seen before. Despite her difficult, challenging life, the extraordinary Kusama declares, “I want to live forever.” And in the very personal, intimate, and infinite world she has created and Lenz has masterfully revealed, who’s to say she won’t?

STEINUNN THORARINSDOTTIR: ARMORS

Medieval figures have escaped from the Cloisters and gathered in nearby park (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Cloisters Lawn, Fort Tryon Park
Daily through September 13, free
www.forttryonparktrust.org
armors slideshow

The Met Cloisters in Upper Manhattan is one of three locations displaying the breathtaking exhibition “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” a spectacular collection of haute couture inspired by Roman Catholicism; other parts of the show are also on view on the first floor of the Met Fifth Ave. as well as in the Costume Institute. But on your way to the Cloisters, be sure to stop off at the Cloisters Lawn in Fort Tryon Park, where Icelandic artist Steinunn Thorarinsdottir’s “Armors” continues through September 13. On the vast grassy area surrounded by trees and a pathway overlooking the Hudson River, Thorarinsdottir has placed three pairs of life-size silver human figures, each consisting of one naked, faceless being and one wearing medieval armor. As people walk around and in between the sculptures, it is as if past, present, and future are coming together. To get the armor just right, Thorarinsdottir, whose previous public works include “Ice in the City” in London, “Places” in Copenhagen, and “Borders” in Chicago in addition to many in her hometown of Reykjavik and the current “Trophies” in Dresden, made 3D scans of suits of armor in the Met’s permanent collection. The androgynous figures appear to be in the midst of conversation, a kind of intriguing intervention in the bucolic park, especially as cars pass by on one side and the now-inescapable selfie-makers create evanescent new groups with the figures, then drift away.