Our First Saturday went off without a hitch and here’s the photo to prove it! I ran up to join this Nirvana dance party several moments later, but fortunately, I seem to have avoided infamy for now. There’s also a great video of this on the Brooklyn Museum’s flickr photo stream.
Category Archives: Art
Sarah Palin a Foe to Museums
I know the blogosphere has been all abuzz about Sarah Palin, so I thought I’d through my hat into the ring and share a little bit of my feelings about that vomitous “Caribou Barbie.” My friend Wassan, a museum curator, shared this article “Sarah Palin: No Military Experience, But Has Fought Museums” with me from Artinfo about Sarah Palin firing museum and library staff despite a budget surplus. Now, there are very few things that make me more angry than limiting people’s access to information via public institutions like museums and libraries. Read up, people, and (while I still remain skeptical about mainstream politics) vote wisely.
I Clicked!
I just spent the day evaluating photographs for the Brooklyn Museum’s “crowd curated” exhibition Click! I heard a rumor they are keeping it open for evaluators over the holiday weekend, so Click! away people…
Making It Together vs WACK
In the past week I (finally) went to see the related, but very different, shows featuring feminist art from the 1970’s and 80’s, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at PS 1 and “Making It Together” at the Bronx Museum. While WACK! is a and sprawling show taking up two floors of PS1’s rabbit warrens of galleries, Making It Together occupies a small, pink room of the Bronx Museum’s North Building. WACK! has been heavily critiqued since it’s opening in LA last spring and I don’t want to regurgitate those critiques here. My main beef with the show was this: if I came in knowing nothing about feminism or feminist art, I certainly would not leave with any clear idea about what it was, is, or could be. The show feels static and dried out. There are very few wall labels or didactics that discuss who the artists were or the context in which the art was produced. While PS 1 and the LA MOCA had many public programs exploring these themes, there is no evidence of them in the galleries. WACK!’s installation at PS1 has sucked the energy, anger, messiness, collaboration and hope out of feminist art. It is very white and looks, well, very 1970’s. While it was fantastic to see some works in person, the “why” was completely ignored and I left feeling like I might of well have just stayed home and read the catalogue.
By contrast “Making It Together,” curated by Carey Lovelace, explores the moment where feminist artists collaborated to create no only art, but social change. Of course they featured Heresies, Womanhouse, and the founding of galleries such as A.I.R. They also included collectives I did not know about such as Spiderwoman Theatre, the Waitresses (shown here marching), and Judy Baca’s large community mural project in downtown L.A. Each section of the show included a clearly written wall label (in both English and Spanish) and the catalogue was a free, takeaway, so you could take it with you in case you didn’t want to spend your whole time in the gallery reading. While the collective projects features were still overwhelmingly white, the Bronx Museum show did a much better job of contextualizing feminism and feminist art. It showed women responding to pertinent issues of the day (sexism, the wage gap, war, violence against women, racism, poverty, the roles given to women in society, etc…) with creativity, rage and humor. It begs the question what is being done now to continue this legacy. A little bit of an answer is given by the large mural that you see when you enter the museum collectively painted by women graffiti artists including Lady Pink and Too Fly, and behind this, selections from the museums’ permanent collection including work by Adrian Piper, Ana Mendieta, Tania Brugera and Carrie May Weems. The Bronx Museum has done what WACK! did not, which is emphasize that feminism is a living breathing entity, and it, like revolution, must be rooted in community, collaboration and exchange.
Aiko Nakagawa at Joshua Liner Gallery
Aiko Nakgawa is an artist about town (I suppose quite literally, since she is a street artist as well as making works of fine art like the one pictured here). Sometimes I wonder when she has time to paint, especially as she has been having so many awesome shows lately. I was lucky enough to be invited to the opening of the group show she is part of, “Locked and Loaded” at the Joshua Liner Gallery in Chelsea. This is the gallery’s inaugural show and includes work by other artists such as Crash One, Shawn Barber, Kenji Hirata, Jessica Joslin, and Tomokazu Matsuyama. Much of the work in the show was too slick for my tastes (I think Aiko Ishigawa, a new writer friend, called it the “Juxtapoz style” in reference to the magazine). I was quite taken, however, by the acrylic painting “3Rip Horse” by Tomokazu Matsuyama, the delicate yet creepy sculptural constructions of Jessica Joslin, and of course, Aiko’s work. I love how her large canvases look like work that has been put up on the street and had layers of wheatpasted fliers and other artwork put up over it. Her paintings and stencil work has texture that keeps you engaged in looking, while their graphic boldness immediately catches the eye.
Serial Meditations at Nurture Art
Nurture Art is one of my favorite galleries, and yet it has been over two years since I have been there. On Friday I attended the opening of “Serial Meditations” at the new Nurture Art space at the edge of the Williamsburg/Bushwick industrial area. This show was curated by Melissa Messina and Amy Brandt and includes the artists Ju Young, Ban, Judith Braun, Janice Caswell, Richard Garrison, Bridget Lewis, Rita MacDonald, David Pierce, Patrick Schmidt, Tina Schneider and Eliza Stamps. I first met Melissa and Amy in the context of the Brooklyn Museum’s show Global Feminisms, which they both worked on. In contrast to that very in your face, political show, Serial Mediations, as its name implies, is quiet. Most of the pieces are black and white, monochromatic or use color in a very subtle manner. Looking at the work has a calming effect and while they often simply use lines and shapes, I felt like I could continue looking at the works and seeing more in them. This was certainly true of Richard Garrison’s spirograph drawing, which created a thick, black line on creme colored paper. By repeating overlapping circles with a ball point pen Garrison created a texture and depth to the image that almost looked like it was produced by an etching. In contrast, Birdget Lewis’ piece of delicate strings of glue suspended from with silver pins is as much about the shadow it creates on the wall and it’s interaction with the light than the actual object itself. In its tranquility this show is very exciting because instead of leaving feeling nothing, despite the minimal nature of the work, I felt revitalized.
I also posted this on the riffrag blog.
Aiko and Lady Pink at Ad Hoc Gallery
I wrote a review of the “Brick Ladies of NYC” show at Ad Hoc gallery on the riffrag.org blog. The show features individual and collaborative work from Aiko and Lady Pink. You can read the review here:
http://www.riffrag.org/blog/blog.html
There’s also more photos on flickr (and thanks to G for lending me his camera!).
Myths from Outer Space by Marcus Romero
On Friday evening I braved the wind driven rain and the G train for a trip to Long Island City to see Marcus Romero’s new work showing at The Space Gallery. Marcus paints fantastic starscapes and landscapes, which are alternatively based on science and science fiction. If they were less delicately worked I could almost imagine them adorning the cover of a sci-fi paperback. What is evident from looking at the show, which contains both small pieces a few inches across as well as those covering entire walls, is that Marcus is a painter. By that I mean to say that he loves and is comfortable with working with paint as a medium, applying it in layers and reworking his paintings until they have a luminous, almost lacquered quality. The Space Gallery was crowded with artists, friends and well-wishers. For me, who is regularly caught saying that I hate contemporary art, it is always refreshing to see a small gallery mount efforts that really support artists and the work that they create.
“Void” at Magnan Emrich Contemporary
I’ve also decided to start writing more on the riffRAG blog. As an attempt, I wrote a review of Monica Paez and Nicolas Consuegra’s excellent show “void” there. Please check it out here! (http://www.riffrag.org/blog/blog.html)
MACBA, Barcelona
Though the phrase I uttered most often in Barcelona was “unimpressed” (with Modernisme, with the tourists, with the rude bartenders…), I did like the MACBA and the CCCB (Center for Contemporary Culture, Barcelona). The CCCB especially had interesting and provacative exhibitis on Apartheid in South African and it’s ramifications for racism worldwide and on the end of Franco’s rule in Spain. Both the exhibits at the CCCB mixed politics, history and art in a way that I have never seen in an American museum (probably because they can’t get funding to do so) and I found that really exciting.
Killerfemme 