this week in art

TICKET ALERT: THEN A CUNNING VOICE AND A NIGHT WE SPEND GAZING AT STARS

Emily Johnson’s Then a Cunning Voice and a Night We Spend Gazing at Stars will take place overnight on Randall’s Island on August 19 (photo by Chris Cameron)

Who: Emily Johnson / Catalyst
What: All-night outdoor performance gathering
Where: Randall’s Island Park
When: Saturday, August 19, $50, dusk to after sunrise
Why: You don’t just go to a show by Emily Johnson / Catalyst; you become part of an experience. In such presentations as Niicugni and Shore, Johnson builds a sense of community for all involved, including cast, crew, and audience. On August 19, her multiyear project Then a Cunning Voice and a Night We Spend Gazing at Stars reaches its next level on Randall’s Island, where people will gather for an evening of song, dance, storytelling, quilting, ritual, and more under the night sky. The world premiere, presented by Performance Space 122, is directed by three-time Obie winner Ain Gordon (The Family Business, Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell) and features performers Tania Isaac, twelve-year-old Georgia Lucas, and Johnson, with visual design by textile artist Maggie Thompson, lighting by Lenore Doxsee, and quilt construction by volunteers from around the country. The ten-to-twelve-hour piece explores such questions as “What do you want for your well-being? For the well-being of your chosen friends and family? For your neighborhood? For your town, city, reserve, tribal nation, world?” You can participate as much as you want as the audience is led into discussions and programs about engaged citizenship, safety, Indigenous people, and making connections. Four thousand square feet of quilts will serve as home base for performances, resting, and just hanging out. Supper, breakfast, and snacks will be served as well. Johnson is a magnetic personality who cares very deeply about the future of all the people and animals living on this planet, so Then a Cunning Voice and a Night We Spend Gazing at Stars should be a powerful and moving experience, in addition to being a lot of fun. Look for our interview with Johnson about the project coming soon; in the meantime, you can contribute to the Kickstarter campaign to help fund this project here.

BROOKLYN MUSEUM FIRST SATURDAY: CaribBEING IN BROOKLYN

“Doria Dee Johnson at her home in Chicago, Illinois, 2017” (photo by Melissa Bunni Elian for the Equal Justice Initiative)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, August 5, free, 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum starts preparing for the West Indian American Day Carnival events over Labor Day weekend with the August edition of its free First Saturday program. (First Saturdays is skipped in September.) There will be live performances by RIVA & Bohio Music and the Drums and Bugles International Bands Association; the mobile art center caribBEING House, where visitors can share their own stories; a gallery tour of “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85” with Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art curatorial assistant Allie Rickard; pop-up gallery talks of “Life, Death, and Transformation in the Americas” with teen apprentices; a screening of Matt Ruskin’s Sundance Audience Award winner Crown Heights, introduced by actress Natalie Paul and followed by a Q&A with film subject Colin Warner, community activist Rick Jones, and attorney Ames Grawert; a sneak peek of Cori Wapnowska’s documentary Bruk Out!, followed by a talkback with Wapnowska and Dancehall Queen Famous Red, moderated by Hyperallergic editor Seph Rodney; a Book Club event with Oneka LaBennett reading and discussing her new book, She’s Mad Real: Popular Culture and West Indian Girls in Brooklyn, followed by a signing; an Artist’s Eye talk by Melissa Bunni Elian on her contribution to “The Legacy of Lynching: Confronting Racial Terror in America”; a wukkout! movement workshop based on high-energy soca dancing; a hands-on workshop in which participants can make paintings with watercolor and salt; and a Flag Fete in which visitors can bring their own national flag, joined by female-identified Caribbean artists Sol Nova, Young Devyn, and Ting & Ting featuring Kitty Cash and special guests.

PRISMATIC PARK: NETTA YERUSHALMY

Netta Yerushalmy continues her site-specific Paramodernities series in Madison Square Park in conjunction with Josiah McElheny installation (photo by Paula Lobo)

PARAMODERNITIES #5/FOSSE/EXPERIMENTS
Madison Square Park Oval Lawn
Twenty-Fourth St. between Madison & Fifth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday, August 1-13, free, 10:00 am – 9:00 pm
www.madisonsquarepark.org
www.nettay.com

From August 1 to 13, New York City–based dancer and choreographer Netta Yerushalmy will continue her ambitious Paramodernities series in Madison Square Park, inhabiting Josiah McElheny’s “Prismatic Park” installation. In June at the National Museum of the American Indian, Yerushalmy presented the second and third parts of the series, in which she reinterprets classic works of dance in multidisciplinary programs: Paramodernities #2 / Trauma, Interdiction, and Agency in “The House of Pelvic Truth,” collaborating with dancer Taryn Griggs and art historian Carol Ockman and featuring a video of Martha Graham’s Night Journey ballet (with Graham as Jocasta, Bertram Ross as Oedipus, and Paul Taylor as Tiresias), and Paramodernities #3 / Revelations — The Afterlives of Slavery, exploring Alvin Ailey’s classic work, joined by Stanley Gambucci, Jeremy Jae Neal, Nicholas Leichter, and Duke University professor Thomas DeFrantz. “Paramodernities is a series of dance experiments that I generate through systematically deconstructing landmark modern dance choreographies,” Yerushalmy, who was born in South Carolina and raised there and in Israel, explained in a statement. “Performed alongside contributions by scholars from different fields in the humanities, who situate these iconic works within the larger project of modernity, Paramodernities explores foundational tenants of modern discourse — such as sovereignty, race, feminism, and nihilism — and includes public discussions as integral parts of each installment.”

Netta Yerushalmy will inhabit Josiah McElhenys Prismatic Park August 1-13 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Sponsored by Danspace Project, Yerushalmy’s “Prismatic Park” residency will begin each day (starting at different times) with Paramodernities #5, examining the movement in Bob Fosse’s Sweet Charity, with Megan Williams, Michael Blake, Hsiao-Jou Tang, J’nae Simmons, and Joyce Edwards. That will be followed in the late afternoon or early evening by an experimental group dance with Emily Rose Cannon, Marc Crousillat, Brittany Engel-Adams, Maddie Schimmel, and Gambucci that focuses on the choreographers Yerushalmy has researched for Paramodernities so far (Vaslav Nijinsky, Merce Cunningham, Graham, and Ailey). “For this track, I am choosing to inhabit the park in a way that is perhaps more attuned to the modernist gestures of Josiah’s sculptures and to the park as architecture than to the organic matter there. I’ll be thinking of the determined shape of the lawn as the container for a layered dance-object filled with traces of legacy, gesture, culture,” she explained. And on August 12 at 6:00, the park will host the panel discussion “How Many Modernities Are There?” with McElheny, DeFrantz, Ockman, David Kishik, Judy Hussie-Taylor, and others. All events are free and first come, first served. “Prismatic Park,” which comprises an open red vaulted-roof pavilion, a reflective green dance floor, and a blue sound wall, continues with concerts by Shelley Hirsch (August 22-27), Matana Roberts (September 5-10), and Limpe Fuchs with poet Patrick Rosal (October 3-8), dance by Jodi Melnick (September 12-17, 19-24), and poetry by Joshua Bennett (August 15-20), Donna Masini (August 29 – September 3), and Mónica de la Torre (September 26 – October 1).

IRVING PENN: CENTENNIAL

Irving Penn, “Pablo Picasso at La Californie, Cannes, 1957,” platinum-palladium print, 1985 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation / © The Irving Penn Foundation)

Met Fifth Avenue
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gallery 199
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Through July 30, $12-$25
212-535-7710
metmuseum.org
www.irvingpenn.org

One of the twentieth century’s most influential and innovative photographers, Irving Penn would have turned one hundred this past June. The Met more than does justice to his legacy in the sparkling exhibition “Irving Penn: Centennial,” continuing at the Met Fifth Avenue through July 30. Both Irving and his younger brother, Arthur, knew how to tell stories visually; while Penn did it through still photography, Arthur was a successful stage and screen director, helming such films as Bonnie and Clyde and The Miracle Worker and such Broadway productions as Wait Until Dark and Golden Boy. Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, Irving Penn tried his hand at drawing, painting, and designing before making a name for himself as a fashion photographer at Vogue, shooting 165 covers from 1943 to 2009, when he died at the age of ninety-two. In addition to fashion, Penn photographed celebrities and working people, cigarettes and other trash he found on the street, nudes, flowers, vessels, and people from Dahomey, New Guinea, Peru, and Morocco. The Met show features nearly two hundred photos, arranged in series, that reveal the breadth of Penn’s remarkable ability to capture the essence of his subject with exquisite simplicity while treating them all with equal weight, whether a Hollywood star, an Issey Miyake staircase dress, a muddy glove, a naked body, or a shoe. In a 1939 silver gelatin print, Penn, who did not like being the focus of attention himself, rarely giving interviews and spurning self-portraiture, is seen in shadow, taking a photo of the shadows of a key and a gun on a New York City street. In his Corner Portraits, he asked famous subjects to do whatever they wanted in a makeshift tight corner in his studio, resulting in iconic shots of Marcel Duchamp, Joe Louis, Truman Capote, and Elsa Schiaparelli. In “Balenciaga Sleeve,” model Régine Debrise’s face is starkly cut off at the top of the frame, breaking with tradition. In “Rochas Mermaid Dress,” model Lisa Fonssagrives, Penn’s wife of forty-two years, stands just off-center on a backdrop that Penn doesn’t hide; in fact, the backdrop is on view in the exhibit, along with one of Penn’s Rolleiflex cameras. Penn reveals his experimental side with four prints of “Girl Drinking,” taken of Mary Jane Russell in 1949 but not printed until 1960, 1976, 1977, and 2000, each slightly different.

Irving Penn, “Cigarette No. 37, New York, 1972,” platinum-palladium print, 1975 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation / © The Irving Penn Foundation)

As you make your way through the show, you’ll also come upon pictures of men, women, and children from Cuzco, Peru, including a porter, two Quechuan Indians, and a street vendor wearing multiple hats; a spread-eagled Salvador Dalí; a hand in a white glove holding a black shoe; a color still-life of parts of after-dinner games, with a die, playing cards, a chess horse, and a poker chip; a group of fleshy nudes in which the folds of the bodies form abstract shapes, taken in the 1950s but not printed until 1980 because of pornographic concerns; stunning portraits of Richard Burton, Colette, Pablo Picasso, Ingmar Bergman (with his fingers pressing down on his closed eyes), and Audrey Hepburn; a New Guinea tribesman with a large nose disc; covered women from Morocco; a 1986 color print of a mouth with numerous shades of lipstick, shot for a L’Oreal campaign, that seems to prefigure the main advertising image for Jonathan Demme’s 1991 The Silence of the Lambs,; and even a 1999 ink drawing reminiscent of Morandi. The exhibition also includes a rare video taken by Fonssagrives-Penn showing her husband in Morocco in 1971, shooting portraits in his portable studio. Through it all, Penn never complicates the background, instead focusing on the object itself. “A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart, and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it; it is in one word, ‘effective,’” Penn once said. The Met show, held in conjunction with a promised gift of 187 photographs from the Irving Penn Foundation, accomplishes all that and more.

MOCA MIXER: SUMMER JAM

moca mixer summer jam

Museum of Chinese in America
215 Centre St. between Howard & Grand Sts.
Friday, July 28, $30, 6:30
www.mocanyc.org

On July 28, the Museum of Chinese in America is hosting a multidisciplinary Summer Jam, with live music by YouTube ukelele star Nix, singer-songwriters Grace Ming and Jessica Rowboat, and Brooklyn folk duo Heartland Nomads, spoken-word poetry by Edric Huang and Lavinia Liang from Songline, stand-up comedy with Joon Chung, and storytelling from Talkingstick cofounder Master Lee. There will also be a raffle and a sale in the shop benefiting the museum’s educational program, light hors d’oeuvres courtesy of the pulled-noodle experts at the awesome Xi’an Famous Foods, and unlimited Hiro Sake, Tiger Beer, Bruce Cost Ginger Ale, and other alcoholic and nonalcoholic drinks. And as a bonus, attendees will be treated to a preview of MOCA’s upcoming exhibition, “FOLD: Golden Venture Paper Sculptures,” which opens October 5.

LOUISE LAWLER: WHY PICTURES NOW

MoMA, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through July 30, $25
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

Right outside “Louise Lawler: WHY PICTURES NOW” on MoMA’s sixth floor are several benches that seem ideally placed for tired museumgoers ready to take a break before entering the exhibition. Curiously, however, the benches do not face the introductory text, the entrance, or the barely visible projections of various phrases on a wall. And if you do sit on one of the benches, a security guard will immediately tell you to get up, because it is actually part of the show, a collaboration between Lawler and Cameron Rowland called “New York State Unified Court System.” (The legal reference relates to Lawler’s widespread use of appropriation.) It’s a genius way to begin the exhibition, the first major New York museum survey of Lawler’s work, which for forty-five years has focused on how art is presented to and experienced by the viewer. Born in Bronxville in 1947, Lawler is best known for her photographs of paintings and sculptures by other artists, as the works are in the process of being hung or taken down in museums or seen in collectors’ homes and auction houses, often with sly twists. In an untitled 1950–51 silver dye bleach print, an empty bench sits in front of a Joan Miró canvas that is mostly out of the frame of the photo. In “Monogram,” Jasper Johns’s “White Flag” is on the wall behind a bed covered by a monogrammed sheet. In “White Gloves,” an art handler wearing white gloves is carefully unwrapping a portrait by Gerhard Richter, which is staring right back at the viewer. In her paperweights series, such photos as “Reception Area” and “Untitled (Flavin)” are difficult to see (unless you’re rather tall), placed as they are in small paperweights on individual stands. For her “Adjusted to Fit” series, Lawler takes pictures of others’ artworks, then creates large-scale distorted adhesive vinyl prints that she stretches out to fit on gallery walls; in “Big,” Maurizio Cattelan’s “Picasso — Puppet” is being unpacked, the body of the sculpture lying on the floor, the giant head behind it still in plastic, and behind that is Thomas Struth’s “Pergamon Museum IV, Berlin,” a photograph of people milling about a display of Greek friezes and a headless statue. Thus, Lawler challenges the viewer to get their mind around a series of gazes in which they appear to be both subject and object.

Don’t get too comfortable on benches at entrance to “Louise Lawler: WHY PICTURES NOW” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

For her “Tracings” series, Lawler, who was part of the Pictures Generation with Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Barbara Kruger, David Salle, Laurie Simmons, Richard Prince, and others, creates black-and-white drawings of some of her photographs, including “Pollyanna” and “Triangle,” on adhesive vinyl, removing the color and details, leaving behind a large-format blueprint that looks like it was drawn right on the wall. Of particular interest is “Salon Hodler,” which appears in the show as a regular photograph, inside a paperweight, as a digital gif, and as a tracing. There are numerous chairs in this part of the gallery, where visitors are encouraged to sit and study any of the tracings, yet another wry comment from Lawler, giving museumgoers the opportunity to take their time with works that lack the kind of content evident in the other rooms. The show also features postcards, printed matchbooks, announcement cards, envelopes, press releases, and other items Lawler made for various gallery shows, in addition to collaborations with Lawrence Weiner, Sherrie Levine, Allan McCollum, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Andrea Fraser. Finally, out in the Abby Aldrich Sculpture Garden is “Birdcalls,” a seven-minute sound installation recorded and mixed by Terry Wilson in which Lawler chirps and peeps the names of twenty-eight well-known male artists, from Vito Acconci and John Baldessari to Dan Graham and Donald Judd, from Anselm Kiefer and Sol LeWitt to Julian Schnabel and Cy Twombly, not a single woman in the bunch, noting the inherent, primary white male privilege of the international art world. It’s also important to point out that the title of the exhibit, “WHY PICTURES NOW,” purposely does not have a question mark, instead making a firm statement. To cap it all off, Lawler provides us with one last message that we can literally bring home with us: If the artwork on the exhibition poster doesn’t look familiar, that’s because it’s actually not part of the show.

JESÚS “BUBU” NEGRÓN: THE BACK PORTRAIT

the back portrait

On the High Line at 17th St.
July 25-27, free, 2:00 – 7:00
art.thehighline.org
www.jesusbubunegron.com

On streets and in parks all around New York City, tourists pay to get their portraits or caricatures drawn. Puerto Rican sculptor and performance artist Jesús “Bubu” Negrón turns that around, literally and figuratively, in “The Back Portrait,” an ongoing project he conceived in San Juan in 2000 and is coming to the High Line July 25-27. From two o’clock to seven o’clock each day, Negrón will draw, using color markers and crayons, people sitting down with their backs to him. Negrón will give the sitter the original drawing, keeping a photocopy for himself to put on display, calling into question original works of art versus copies. Participation is free and first come, first served. Negrón’s previous work, which often equates “artists” with “artisans,” includes “[Standard memes (campaign for the awareness and activation of the neighborhood)],” in which local residents in San Juan helped revive derelict buildings in their communities via memes, “Honoris Causa,” in which Negrón invited two street vendors to set up their carts inside the Whitney lobby for the 2006 biennial, merging art with a different kind of commerce, and “Banco Marímbula,” a public square bench turned into a musical instrument using parts from a 1957 Victrola.