Tag Archives: Glenn Ligon

THE LEGACY OF LYNCHING: CONFRONTING RACIAL TERROR IN AMERICA

Rashid Johnson (American, born 1977). Thurgood in the House of Chaos, 2009. Photograph: Rashid Johnson/Brooklyn Museum

Rashid Johnson, “Thurgood in the Hour of Chaos,” 2009 (photograph: Rashid Johnson/Brooklyn Museum)

Brooklyn Museum, Robert E. Blum Gallery, first floor
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Through October 8, $10-$16
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org
lynchinginamerica.eji.org

There are only a few more days to see the Brooklyn Museum’s shattering “The Legacy of Lynching: Confronting Racial Terror in America,” a searing, must-see collaboration with the Equal Justice Initiative and Google that looks at the past, present, and future of the lynching of blacks in the United States. The exhibition is built around a series of short EJI videos in which such men and women as Anthony Ray Hinton, Thomas Miles Sr., James Johnson, Mamie Lang Kirkland, Dee Dee Johnson, and Vanessa Croft share their personal stories about how members of their families were lynched, visiting graveyards and the trees from which the innocent victims were hanged as well as making comparisons between lynching and black and brown men who are or were on Death Row despite substantial evidence against their guilt. The oral histories are vividly photographed by Melissa Bunni Elian, Kris Graves, Raymond Thompson, Andre Wagner, Bee Walker, and Rog Walker and are utterly haunting, ending with explanatory notes from EJI founder and executive director Bryan Stevenson. (To further the discussion, EJI will be opening a national monument in Montgomery, Alabama, in 2018 called the Memorial to Peace and Justice.) The exhibition also features related works from the Brooklyn Museum’s collection, including Elizabeth Catlett’s “I Have Special Reservations,” Jacob Lawrence’s “Harlem Street Scene,” Kara Walker’s “Burning African Village Play Set with Big Hour and Lynching,” Rashid Johnson’s “Thurgood in the House of Chaos,” Theaster Gates’s “In Case of Race Riot II,” Jack Whitten’s “Black Monolith II (For Ralph Ellison),” and Titus Kaphar’s “The Jerome Project (My Loss),” which explore slavery, segregation, the civil rights movement, and modern-day racism. A kind of companion piece to such films as Ava DuVernay’s 13th and such books as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, the exhibit is a powerful, gut-wrenching experience that visitors walk through in near-silence — when I went, the only talking was between a white father and his young son, who whispered that he wanted to know what various words and images meant, and the dad told him, thoughtfully and directly. It was a microcosm of what should be happening more today, expanding the conversation about America’s Original Sin.

CRITICAL JUNCTURES: GLENN LIGON

Glenn Ligon and Samora Pinderhughes will be in conversation at YoungArts event at NYLA

Glenn Ligon and Samora Pinderhughes will discuss pivotal moments at YoungArts event at New York Live Arts on March 5

Who: Glenn Ligon, Samora Pinderhughes
What: National YoungArts Foundation Salon Series
Where: New York Live Arts Theater, 219 West 19th St., 212-691-6500
When: Sunday, March 5, $10, 2:00
Why: In 2011, New York City–based visual artist Glenn Ligon had a major midcareer retrospective, “Glenn Ligon: America,” at the Whitney. In 2009, Berkeley high school pianist and composer Samora Pinderhughes was named a YoungArts Winner in Jazz Keyboard. On March 5 at 2:00 at New York Live Arts, the two will take part in the latest edition of the National YoungArts Foundation Salon Series, “Critical Junctures: Glenn Ligon,” as they look at pivotal moments in their creative process while placing it in sociohistorical context. The Salon Series, which “brings together creative alumni voices and offers audiences an opportunity to engage with internationally renowned and emerging artists,” will be back at New York Live Arts on May 14 with “Critical Junctures: Alexei Ratmansky,” in which the Russian-American choreographer will be in conversation with 2011 YoungArts Dance Winner and ABT soloist Cassandra Trenary.

GREATER NEW YORK

Lionel Maunz’s “Fertilize My Mouth” emphasizes feeling of absence at “Greater New York ”show at MoMA PS1 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Ave. at 46th Ave.
Thursday – Monday through March 7, suggested donation $5-$10 (free with MoMA ticket within fourteen days of MoMA visit), 12 noon – 6:00 pm
718-784-2084
momaps1.org

The fourth iteration of MoMA PS1’s quinquennial exhibition, “Greater New York,” is very much about absence and presence, what is not there as well as what is. Instead of focusing primarily on up-and-coming artists, curators Peter Eleey, Douglas Crimp, Thomas J. Lax, Mia Locks, Mark Beasley, and Jenny Schlenzka have included works by nearly 150 artists, more than 60 of whom are over 50 (or would have been if they were still alive), resulting in a wide-ranging look at how New York City and the art market have changed over the last generations. James Nares’s 1976 Super 8 video “Pendulum” shows a wrecking ball ominously swinging in an empty Tribeca alley but not actually knocking anything down — yet. Amy Brener encases such found objects as watches, motherboards, and calculators into colorful resin, foam, glass, and plaster sculptures that harken back to a long-gone era. Alvin Baltrop’s silver gelatin prints remind us what the piers were like prior to renovation and gentrification and what gay life was like before AIDS. Liene Bosquê uses found souvenirs from around the world to construct imaginary cities in “Recollection.” Henry Flynt’s SAMO© Graffiti Portfolio photographs from 1979 reintroduce us to Jean-Michel Basquiat. A large gallery of lifelike sculptures by Tony Matelli, Elizabeth Jaeger, John Ahearn, Judith Shea, and others create a false sense of reality and investigate the human figure and physical relationships. Joy Episalla’s photos of motel bedrooms reflected in television sets fill viewers with personal memories. Fierce Pussy’s “For the Record” features backward text about the AIDS crisis, repeating such sentences as “he would be at this opening if she were alive today” (sic).

Amy Brener repurposes found items into memory sculptures at “Greater New York ”show at MoMA PS1 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Glenn Ligon’s silkscreened “Housing in New York: A Brief History” details the various places he lived between 1960 and 2007 and reveal how the neighborhoods changed. In the boiler room, Lionel Maunz’s cast iron and concrete “Fertilize My Mouth” consists of a pair of disembodied legs standing in front of a tilted slab of concrete on which something bad appears to have happened. Louise Lawler’s “Not Yet Titled (adjusted to fit)” is a stretched photo of Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Bingo” sculpture of a derelict house. And photographs of Matta-Clark’s “Building Cuts” into the walls of PS1 back in 1976 bring the exhibition full circle. Among the other artists in the show are Chantal Akerman, Richard Artschwager, Dara Birnbaum, Mel Bochner, Rudy Burckhardt, John Giorno, William Greaves, Yvonne Rainer, Ugo Rondinone, Lorna Simpson, Kiki Smith, and Sergei Tcherepnin. If you were around in the 1970s, you know that New York City was not exactly a paradise — and “Greater New York” takes us back there while also putting it all in a contemporary now you see it, now you don’t context.

Sound comes and goes in Christine Sun Kim’s visitor-operated “Game of Skill 2.0” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The exhibition will be on view through March 7, and there are still a handful of programs left on the schedule. On February 21 at 4:00, Hayley Aviva Silverman’s live-action “Twister” casts dogs as characters from Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Jan de Bont’s 1996 disaster film, Twister; Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World is being shown February 21-27; on February 25 at 7:00, Fia Backström will perform “Aphasia as a visual shape of speaking – A-production and other language syndromes”; on February 28 at 1:00, Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts New York will host participatory activities; on February 28 at 4:00, Devin Kenny will deliver the performance essay “Love, the Sinner”; short films by Ken Jacobs, Jack Smith, Ira Sachs, and others are screening February 28 through March 7; on March 3 & 4 at 7:00, Geo Wyeth will present “Storm Excellent Salad”; and on March 6, you can catch Stewart Uoo’s “It’s Get Better III” at 3:00 and Angie Keefer’s roundtable “What Is Authority?” at 4:00.

FRED MOTEN ON CHRIS OFILI: BLUETS, BLACK + BLUE, IN LOVELY BLUE

Chris Ofili’s “Blue Rider” paintings is the centerpiece of solo exhibition at the New Museum (© Chris Ofili; photo by Maris Hutchinson/EPW)

Chris Ofili’s “Blue Rider” paintings highlight solo exhibition at the New Museum (© Chris Ofili; photo by Maris Hutchinson/EPW)

CHRIS OFILI: NIGHT AND DAY
New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Thursday, January 29, $10 (includes half-price gallery admission), 7:00
Exhibition continues through Sunday February 1, $16 (pay-what-you-wish Thursday 7:00 – 9:00)
212-219-1222
www.newmuseum.org

Tonight at 7:00, with the revelatory midcareer-redefining exhibit “Chris Ofili: Night and Day” about to begin its final weekend at the New Museum, writer and professor Fred Moten will be at the downtown institution for a special presentation, “Fred Moten on Chris Ofili: Bluets, Black + Blue, in Lovely Blue.” Moten, author of the 2014 National Book Award finalist The Feel Trio, will be discussing Ofili’s influences, historical references, and multidisciplinary trajectories, with a particular focus on the artist’s “Blue Rider” paintings. In 2004, Ofili, who was born in Manchester and moved from London to Trinidad in 2005, began a series of striking large-scale oil-on-linen works, some with charcoal and/or acrylic as well, with varying shades of deep blue over a silver background. At first glance, the paintings appear to be virtually all dark blue, nearly black, with no figuration apparent. Nine of the works are hanging together in a dark room on the third floor of the museum; visitors will benefit from allowing time for their eyes to adjust to the lack of light, moving around and viewing the canvases from different angles to let the paintings’ magic and mystery slowly reveal themselves. When we were there, a woman got angry when people just walked in and out, thinking that there was not much to see; she got down on her hands and knees, examining every detail of the works, imploring others to do the same. The paintings have quite a collection of stories to tell, incorporating elements of slavery, mythology, blues music, the Bible, and modern life. “Ofili’s work suggests a way of seeing where the centrality of the color is taken for granted,” artist Glenn Ligon writes in his catalog essay, “Blue Black.” He continues, “‘Iscariot Blues’ (2006), ‘Blue Riders’ (2006), ‘Blue Steps (fall from grace)’ (2011), ‘Blue Smoke (Pipe Dreams)’ (2011), and ‘Blue Devils’ (2014) use blue as a kind of dark matter, a force not easily quantified but which holds the universes [Ofili] creates on canvas together. Blue is a bitch.” Ofili might be best known for the controversy surrounding his use of elephant dung in “The Holy Virgin Mary” when it was shown as part of the 1999 Brooklyn Museum exhibit “Sensation” and publicly decried by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, so it’s fascinating that there have been no such issues about “Blue Devils,” which is based on symbolic figures during Trinidadian Carnival in Paramin but is essentially about police brutality affiliated with Britain’s “stop and search” program; the powerful piece also evokes the tragedies of Stephen Lawrence, Trayvon Martin, and other black men and women who either died at the hands of the police or had their cases botched by law enforcement.

New Museum survey shows Chris Ofili’s wide range of work (© Chris Ofili; photo by Maris Hutchinson/EPW)

“In choosing ‘Blue Devils’ (2014) as the title of his ominous, dark new painting, Chris Ofili has disturbingly and deliciously subverted that famous Trinidadian Carnival reference, transposing it to the streets of London, Manchester, or New York,” writes lawyer Matthew Ryder in his catalog essay, “Blue Devils.” Ryder, who handles police brutality cases, further explains, “Through this piece, Ofili adds his voice at a timely point to the long-running debate concerning the relationship of black men with the police, both in the United Kingdom and the United States, since it has gained unusual intensity in recent months. . . . ‘Blue Devils,’ with its twisted, interlocked figures barely discernible beneath the deep, overlapping shades of blue, evokes a misconduct occurring in a state of near invisibility. It also captures something much harder to express — the peculiar way that such confrontations between black men and the police are simultaneously intensely crude and unusually subtle.” The nine “Blue Rider” works are harrowing and emotional, but this first major solo museum show for Ofili, which has been extended through February 1 and is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Gary Carrion-Murayari, and Margot Norton, also displays Ofili’s wide range, including his “Afromuse” and “Afro Margin” series, his recent paintings inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and “The Holy Virgin Mary,” one of a roomful of pieces by Ofili that consist of acrylic, oil, polyester resin, glitter, map pins, and elephant dung on linen, many precipitously set on the floor at an angle, with myriad details that require up-close examination, and not just because of their provocative titles: “No Woman, No Cry,” “Foxy Roxy,” “Pimpin’ ain’t easy.” There are also drawings, sculptures, watercolors — but it all leads back to these dark, sociopolitically daring, sensational works. As Ligon concludes, “To approach black through blue, to be in its vicinity but not quite get there, blackness an event horizon, blackness with a ‘u’ instead of an ‘e,’ a ‘state of mind’ not a ‘state,’ something always under construction, subject to revision, is what Ofili’s canvases suggest. In them, he proposes new ways to see blackness, new pathways to travel. For Ofili, blue black is the new black.” It should be fascinating to hear Moten’s take on the subject as well. (The event is sold out, but there will be a standby line beginning at 6:00. You can also watch the event on Livestream. For a conversation between Ofili and Gioni, go here.)

THROUGH A LENS DARKLY: BLACK PHOTOGRAPHERS AND THE EMERGENCE OF A PEOPLE

Brothers Lyle Ashton Harris and Thomas Allen Harris collaborate on a photo of their cousin Peggy in THROUGH A LENS DARKLY

THROUGH A LENS DARKLY: BLACK PHOTOGRAPHERS AND THE EMERGENCE OF A PEOPLE (Thomas Allen Harris, 2014)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
August 27 – September 9
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
www.throughalensdarkly.wordpress.com

Thomas Allen Harris exposes the conflicting relationship between the public and private visual depiction of African Americans in the powerful, if overly idealistic and methodical, Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People. Inspired by Deborah Willis’s 2000 book, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present, the documentary examines how black men, women, and children have been portrayed in advertising and the media and on postcards since the development of the camera and daguerreotypes, depicting them in negative, stereotyped ways as animals, criminals, and, most horrifically, victims of lynchings. Over the course of seven years, the Bronx-born Harris interviewed such photographers and scholars as Carrie Mae Weems, Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, Dawoud Bey, Coco Fusco, Chuck Stewart, and Lyle Ashton Harris (Harris’s brother), as well as Willis (one of the film’s producers) and her son, artist Hank Willis Thomas, exploring how blacks countered these distortions through family photos, where they not only controlled the image but the gaze itself. “How was, is, the photograph used in the battle between two legacies, self-affirmation and negation?” Harris (Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela, É Minha Cara/That’s My Face), the founder and president of Chimpanzee Productions, asks early in the film. “Our salvation as a people, as a culture, depends on salving the wounds of this war, a war of images within the American family album.” Harris and his many talking heads look at the importance of such black photographers as J. P. Ball, James Van Der Zee, Roy DeCarava, Vera Jackson, and Gordon Parks as well as such trailblazers as Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois, who used the camera to their advantage when presenting themselves and their views to the public.

The documentary does get repetitive, and Harris’s personal story occasionally stops the compelling general narrative as he attempts to relate his family history to the bigger picture. But the film is worth seeing just for the amazing archival footage, a marvelous collection of black-and-white and color photographs that show how a people can reclaim their image and validate their culture in the face of extreme prejudice. Winner of the Social Justice Award at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival and Best Diaspora Documentary at the tenth Africa Movie Academy Awards, Through a Lens Darkly is playing August 27 to September 9 at Film Forum, with special events scheduled to follow one screening per day for the first eleven days, including a Q&A with Thomas Allen Harris and producers Deborah Willis, Don Perry, and Ann Bennett on August 27 (7:20), a Salute to Harlem Photographers with Renee Cox, C. Danny Dawson, and John Pinderhughes, moderated by Moikgantsi Kgama, on August 29 (7:20), a Salute to Women Photographers with Willis and Coreen Simpson, moderated by Michaela Angela Davis, on August 30 (2:50), a Q&A with composer Vernon Reid on September 1 (2:50), and a Salute to Brooklyn Photographers with Delphine Fawundu-Buford, Russell Frederick, and Radcliffe Roye, moderated by Dawson, on September 6.

VISUAL AIDS: POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE 2014

Art lovers and collectors crowd in and take notes at VIP preview for sixteenth annual Postcards from the Edge benefit (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Luhring Augustine
531 West 24th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
January 24 preview party: $50 (includes two raffle tickets), 5:00 – 8:00
January 25-26, suggested admission $5 (all works $85)
www.visualaids.org

On your mark, get set . . . The sixteenth annual Visual AIDS Postcards from the Edge benefit sale takes place this weekend, offering art connoisseurs, beginning collectors, and just about anyone else the opportunity to purchase an original piece of art by a major, internationally renowned artist — for a mere eighty-five dineros. On Saturday from 10:00 am to 6:00 pm and Sunday from 12 noon to 4:00, folks will be lining up to get into Luhring Augustine in Chelsea, where upwards of 1,500 postcard-size works of art are expected to be available. The only catch is that you find out who the artist is after you buy the 4×6 drawing, painting, photograph, collage, sculpture, print, etc., as the creator signs the back, not the front, and you need to pay for it before seeing which artist you got. On Saturday, if you buy four, you get a fifth free; on Sunday, every two purchases gain you a free third postcard. Admission is a suggested five dollars on Saturday and Sunday; you can get a sneak peek at the art on Friday night at the VIP Preview, where for fifty bucks you can check out the works on display, write down the numbers of the ones you want, and make a beeline straight to the cashier on Saturday while everyone else is surveying the merchandise and making their choices. (Stay away from #1000, as that one’s ours.) You also get raffle tickets that could get you first pick or allow you to ask one question about any work of art on the wall. (There’s a silent online auction going on right now as well.) Of course, it’s hard to go wrong when the participating artists include Vito Acconci, Catherine Opie, Glenn Ligon, Justin Vivian Bond, Ed Ruscha, Zarina Hashmi, Lorraine O’Grady, Trevor Winkfield, Fred Wilson, Sarah McEneaney, Robert Longo, Penelope Umbrico, Joel Shapiro, Julie Mehretu, John Baldessari, Roger Hiorns, Rob Wynne, Lesley Dill, John Kelly, Kerry James Marshall, William Wegman, Guido Van Der Werve, Matthew Buckingham, Donald Baechler, Jim Hodges, John Waters, Maria Elena Gonzalez, Marcel Dzama, Kiki Smith, Ernesto Pujol, Milton Glaser, Kay Rosen, Lawrence Weiner, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Harmony Hammond, Danh Vo, and Barbara Takenaga. All proceeds go to Visual AIDS, whose mission for more than twenty-five years has been to “utilize art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV+ artists, and preserving a legacy, because AIDS is not over.”

NYC 1993: EXPERIMENTAL JET SET, TRASH AND NO STAR

Charles Ray, “Family Romance,” painted fiberglass and synthetic hair, 1992-93 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Friday – Sunday through May 26, $12-$16
212-219-1222
www.newmuseum.org

Where were you in 1993? Thirty years ago, we were toiling for the Evil Empire, hoping that the Rangers would win their first Stanley Cup in more than half a century, seeing Springsteen on tour without the E Street Band, and looking for a new apartment after having just gotten married. But in general, 1993 found itself in the midst of a rather nondescript decade highlighted by the tempestuous presidency of William Jefferson Clinton and perhaps best exemplified by the Y2K nonproblem. The New Museum turns its attention on that one specific year in “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star.” Taking its name from the 1994 album by legendary New York underground giants Sonic Youth (the album was recorded in 1993), the show gathers together works created around 1993 by a rather distinguished group of artists, including Matthew Barney, Larry Clark, Martin Kippenberger, John Currin, Nan Goldin, David Hammons, Todd Haynes, Derek Jarman, Mike Kelley, Annie Leibovitz, Elizabeth Peyton, Cindy Sherman, Wolfgang Tillmans, Gillian Wearing, and Hannah Wilke. There are many stand-out pieces, from Robert Gober’s “Prison Window,” wonderfully placed near an “Exit” sign, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled (Couple),” a string of lightbulbs dangling from the ceiling, and Lorna Simpson’s “7 Mouths,” consisting of close-ups of seven mouths on photo-linen panels, to Devon Dikeou’s lobby directory boards, Charles Ray’s “Family Romance,” depicting a naked fiberglass family of four, all the same height, and Paul McCarthy’s “Cultural Gothic,” in which a man seems proud that his son is doing a goat. And visitors get to walk on Rudolf Stingel’s carpet on the fourth floor and in the elevators.

Pepón Osorio, “The Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?),” detail, mixed mediums, 1993 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

However, the show is not quite the time capsule curators Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari sought; not all of the work is actually from 1993 (Sarah Lucas’s simple but elegant 1991 “The Old Couple,” Jack Pierson’s 1991 four-letter, multicolored “STAY,” Kiki Smith’s 1992 life-size bronze “Virgin Mary,” Andres Serrano’s 1992 prints from the Morgue series), while others deal with events that occurred prior to 1993 (Lutz Bacher’s “My Penis,” in which William Kennedy Smith repeats that phrase over and over in a six-and-a-half-minute video loop; Glenn Ligon’s “Red Portfolio” references a 1989 direct-mail letter from Pat Robertson). Some of the older works, especially those not by New Yorkers, might have first been shown in New York in 1993, including at the Whitney Biennial, but it doesn’t feel all of a piece, the specific groupings making more sense to art insiders than to the general public. Still, “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star” is a fun sampling of the art of the early ’90s, even if it doesn’t make any grand social, cultural, or political statements.