The Met Breuer presents "Kerry James Marshall: Mastry"

Detail, Untitled (Studio), 2014
Kerry James Marshall
(photo: Eva Yaa Asantewaa)

Kerry James Marshall (American, b. 1955). Untitled (Studio), 2014. Acrylic on PVC panels. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation Gift, Acquisitions Fund and The Metropolitan Museum of Art Multicultural Audience Development Initiative Gift, 2015 (2015.366) © Kerry James Marshall

Kerry James Marshall at press preview
for Kerry James Marshall: Mastry at The Met Breuer
(photo: Eva Yaa Asantewaa)

Tomorrow, The Met Breuer opens its first monographic exhibition for a living artist--Alabama-born Kerry James Marshall. Open through January 27, 2017, Kerry James Marshall: Mastry explores over 35 years of the artist's dedication to telling complex stories of Black experience.

Detail, Bang, 1994
Kerry James Marshall
(photo: Eva Yaa Asantewaa)

At a press preview for the show--introduced by Met director and CEO Thomas P. Campbell and exhibition co-curator Ian Alteveer--Marshall spoke of imagery's power to inspire a more expansive sense of possibilities than we generally allow ourselves to imagine. His work positions Black people, for better or for worse, squarely in the fabric of America, just as he joyfully positions himself and his work within the stream of great Western and world art history.

Wall text at the exhibition describes Marshall's "defiant and celebratory assertion of blackness in a medium in which African-Americans have often been invisible." At the preview, he explained that curious word "mastry" as an act of undermining the authority of master over servant. In every work of Marshall's art, you can hear that "e" drop like a mic.

Detail, Memento #5 (2003)
Kerry James Marshall
(photo: Eva Yaa Asantewaa)

Marshall can do what he wants with the word "master" because, in its most positive meaning, it absolutely belongs to him. Large (as many of the paintings are) or small, vibrantly bright or pitch dark, narrative-based or abstract, austere or decorative, each one of his works has a formal and expressive confidence you will come to recognize as pure Marshall.

Overall, he renders skin tones slate black and darker in ways that appear stereotypical only to those too timid to imagine a Blackness that hearty and that sure of itself. I came to call it "royal black"--like royal blue or royal purple. A 2014 work called Untitled (Club People) stands as one of its best examples. It depicts a young couple out on a date, being completely themselves, free of whatever might constrict them at other hours. They are radiantly royal black.

The show also includes 40 works from the Met collection by artists who have interested and influenced Marshall. The list is long, diverse, uniting everyone from Albrecht Dürer to Willem de Kooning, from Andrew Wyeth to an anonymous mask maker of the Dan. But exploring Marshall's work itself with even a layperson's basic exposure to the visual arts can offer enjoyable discoveries.

In De Style (1993), for instance, a neighborhood barber resembles a Renaissance saint with modest halo, open fingers of his left hand raised in a gesture of benediction above his customer's head, the halo's orange lines and the razor's orange surface mirroring each other's life-giving energy. De Style exemplifies Marshall's interplay of illumined iconography and the everyday--mundane items like a trash bucket lined in black plastic; ample coils of hair littered around the barber's chair; snaking electric cords jammed into one overworked plug adapter. In The Lost Boys (1993), Marshall presents his own version of a kabbalistic Tree of Life, dark blue of leaf but bearing strangely glowing (radioactive?) fruit. Each of its seven sephirot reveal a bullet at its core. Other paintings symbolically reference Afro-Atlantic spiritual/magical traditions or evoke histories of oppression or resistance.

He makes space, too, for Black people to participate in leisure, suburban activities, to enjoy nature, to love one another, to float within visions of rose-colored American optimism--just like everybody else. At the press conference, Marshall quoted art scholar W. J. T. Mitchell--author of What Do Pictures Want?--"Images don't only express desires. They teach us how to desire in the first place."

Marshall's desire is to be radically present, to represent presence and to activate presence in others of his race. In person, he is a warm, charming speaker--so clearly reflective of the outgoing, self-assured nature of his art--and an ardent fan pleased to be honored by a museum he has long treasured. His show rewards extended study and will inspire return visits. I'm already checking my calendar for my next chance to go.

Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO
of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and
exhibition co-curator Ian Alteveer (below)
speak to the assembled press at The Met Breuer.

Kerry James Marshall: Mastry runs from October 25-January 27, 2017.  For exhibition and events information, click here. For museum hours and ticket information, click here.

The Met Breuer
3rd and 4th floors
945 Madison Avenue (at 75th Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Viral before Internet: Exhibition on activism through visual arts

Seeing the Power of Political Posters
by Martha Schwendener, The New York Times, July 30, 2015

Photography by Carlos Cruz-Diez at Americas Society

Carlos Cruz-Diez. Los diablos de Yare, San Francisco de Yare, estado de Miranda, Venezuela, 1951. Image courtesy of the artist.

Americas Society (Council of the Americas)

presents

Within the Light Trap: Carlos Cruz-Diez in Black and White

February 4 - March 22

Wednesday-Saturday, 12-6pm

Curated by Gabriela Rangel and assisted by Christina De León

Venezuelan-born, Paris-based artist Carlos Cruz-Diez’s longstanding research in color has won him an international reputation as one of the most important figures of Latin American modernism.
Cruz-Diez’s empirical exploration of photography is further grounded on social preoccupations the artist developed in the 1940s, when he became aware of the rapid demographic and economic transformations caused by modernization in his native Venezuela.

Since then, he has documented everyday life rituals linked to the vernacular, such as local folklore festivities in rural communities and the viral emergence of shantytowns in Caracas. He has portrayed important intellectual figures linked to popular culture and music who were key interlocutors for him and his generation. Cruz-Diez’s interest on local popular culture through photography also laid a foundation for a number of realist paintings that conveyed social concerns he later redefined with the use of color as a participatory element. 

Americas Society (Visual Arts Gallery)
680 Park Avenue (between 68th and 69th Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Carrie Mae Weems retrospective at Guggenheim Museum

Carrie Mae Weems: 
Three Decades of Photography and Video

Guggenheim Museum

January 24-May 14

Carrie Mae Weems
A Broad and Expansive Sky—Ancient Rome (from Roaming), 2006
Chromogenic print, 73 x 61 inches (185.4 x 154.9 cm)
Private collection, Portland, Oregon
© Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems
Untitled (Man and mirror) (from Kitchen Table Series), 1990
Gelatin silver print, 27 1/4 x 27 1/4 inches (69.2 x 69.2 cm)
Collection of Eric and Liz Lefkofsky, promised gift to The Art Institute of Chicago
© Carrie Mae Weems
Photo: © The Art Institute of Chicago

New York Times critic Holland Cotter's otherwise admiring review of Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video (here) chides the Guggenheim Museum for not devoting its central, spiraling rotunda to Weems. Right now, if you visit the Guggenheim, you'll find that sloping spiral roped off in preparation for the upcoming Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe and that show's crates filling much of the ground floor.

The original Weems retrospective, curated by Kathryn Delmez, opened in September 2012 at Nashville's Frist Center for the Visual Arts. According to Cotter, the Guggenheim omits some works included in previous stops along the show's tour, and the exhibition has been broken up into galleries scattered over a few floors. Cotter points out that, for a first New York retrospective of Weems's career, thirty years worth of work, the limited selection and spatial placement give this Black American artist, a 2013 MacArthur Fellow, short shrift. Cotter's argument seems all the more reasonable and urgent once you appreciate Weems's entire mission, which is all about visibility--to underscore and creatively document presence and experience against racist, sexist omissions and erasures.

She has done this, magnificently, in a variety of ways. Often putting her own body--at once, deific and down-to-earth--front and center in her photography and video work is the boldest stroke. Whether facing us head-on and meeting our gaze with her own or, by turning her back to the camera, slipping into iconic anonymity as in her dramatic Roaming series, Weems answers a denying world with defiance as if to say, Without my presence, you could not have come to be what you are.

I took a tip from Frida who from her bed painted incessantly--beautifully while Diego scaled the scaffolds to the very top of the world. -- from Weems's text for Not Manet's Type (1997)

Weems claims space for African and Afro-Atlantic realities, for people of African descent, particularly women, and our families and communities within society and its art.

Weems also exerts an artist's right not just to make new stuff but to appropriate existing objects--say, J. T. Zealy's daguerreotypes of "Negroid types" from slavery days--sealing these excavated memories under glass etched in white text, seizing control of how they will be seen and understood. She brings marginalized history to the table just as, in The Kitchen Table Series, she brings everyday eros to the table. Because she locates herself or others in historical time and in dreamtime and in something eerily combining the two--see her 2008 video Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment--we come to understand that we can do and often do the same.

The Guggenheim show might not have everything it could have or take pride of place in the main gallery, but it does educate and inspire (Guggenheim visitor information). See also Brooklyn Museum's Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey (closing March 9).

Contemporary visual art by Native Americans decolonized

Calling It Art, Not ‘Native American Art’
A Review of ‘Decolonizing the Exhibition’ at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie
by Sylviane Gold, The New York Times, January 17, 2014

Alexis Rockman's drawings for "The Life of Pi" on exhibit

The Drawing Center

presents

Alexis Rockman: Drawings from Life of Pi

 September 27-November 3

Alexis Rockman’s watercolor drawings were the first stage in the development of the fantastical, imaginary world of Life of Pi, the 2012 Academy-Award winning feature film directed by Ang Lee. Lee sought out Rockman’s vision as an artist with a specific commitment to hand drawing to bring a human scale to the project, a sense of the material and the fortuitous that would come, for example, from the random bloom of watercolor pigment on paper. Though most artistic contributions to cinema are dependent on photo-realism or cartoon-like illustration, Rockman’s images are fluid, intimate, and dynamic in a way that only drawing can capture. The exhibition will provide The Drawing Center with a unique opportunity to explore the relationship between visual art—specifically drawing—and commercial filmmaking. 

Curated by Brett Littman and Nova Benway.

The Drawing Center

35 Wooster Street (between Broome and Grand Streets), Manhattan

(map/directions)

*****

RELATED EVENT

CONVERSATION ON LIFE OF PI
Tuesday, October 29, 7pm
Offsite! Pratt Institute
200 Willoughby Avenue, Brooklyn

(map/directions)

Admission: Free

In conjunction with Alexis Rockman: Drawings from Life of Pi, Jean-Christophe Castelli, Associate Producer of Life of Pi; and Brett Littman, Executive Director of The Drawing Center; will join Alexis Rockman in conversation. Moderated by Pratt Institute’s Dean of the School of Art & Design, Leighton Pierce.

Sponsored by Pratt Institute’s Fine Arts, Film & Video and Digital Arts departments.

Women photographers in the news

Photographer Carrie Mae Weems wins a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship:

Syracuse photographer receives prestigious MacArthur Fellowship

by Ken Sturtz, Syracuse.com, September 25, 2013

*****

© Beverly Joubert: National Geographic exhibit “Women of Vision”
“In a hunting game with her mother, a young leopard leaps through tall grass” 

National Geographic

presents

Women of Vision: National Geographic Photographers on Assignment

October 10, 2013–March 9, 2014 

Open daily 10am-6pm

An exhibition of work by eleven award-winning women photojournalists, curated by National Geographic Senior Photo Editor Elizabeth Krist.

“Women of Vision” features nearly 100 photographs, including moving depictions of far–flung cultures, compelling illustrations of conceptual topics such as memory and teenage brain chemistry, and arresting images of social issues like child marriage and 21st–century slavery. In addition to the photographs, visitors will have an opportunity to learn how National Geographic magazine (NGM) picture editors work closely with the photographers to select images and tell a story. Video vignettes will present first–person accounts that reveal the photographers’ individual styles, passions and approaches to their craft.

All the photographers featured in the exhibition will be at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 10, joining journalist Ann Curry for a panel discussion on the power of photography and the many people and places represented in their assignment work. The event will be live–streamed on NationalGeographic.com. Curry also wrote the foreword to the exhibition’s companion book, “Women of Vision: National Geographic Photographers on Assignment,” along with National Geographic magazine Editor–in–Chief Chris Johns. The book will be available in the National Geographic Museum Store.

National Geographic Museum

1145 17th Street, NW (17th and M), Washington, DC

For more information on the exhibition, click here.

For visitor's information, click here.

New York's love affair with flamenco

The New York Public Library 
for the Performing Arts

presents

Flamenco:

100 Years of Flamenco in New York 

March 13 through August 3

The multi-media exhibition is an integral part of collaboration between The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and Flamenco Vivo Carlota Santana. Photographs, costumes and performance regalia, film, oral histories, and the sound of castanets and taconeo will entertain and educate the visitor. Performances, film screenings, panels, and educational programs will continue through the spring and summer in the Library’s Bruno Walter Auditorium.

Free admission

New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center
40 Lincoln Center Plaza, Manhattan

(map/directions)

Quilts tell stories of survival

Survivors’ Stories of Abuse, Sewn Tight
by Tammy La Gorce, The New York Times, February 8, 2013

Surveying Manila's contemporary art scene

Works from Bastards of Misrepresentation

TOPAZ ARTS will participate in presenting Bastards of Misrepresentation: New York Edition, curated by artist Manuel Ocampo, featuring 20 leading contemporary artists from Manila. In addition to the Woodside-based TOPAZ ARTS, hosts for this multi-venue exhibit, on view October 27 to December 30, include:

Queens Museum of Art/Partnership Gallery
Crossing Art in Queens
NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute
Tyler Rollins Fine Art

Bastards of Misrepresentation is a show about the cultural scene happening in the Philippines yet is not a definitive show about Philippine art. The 20 artists included represent the “now” of contemporary art in Manila whose works entice and challenge perceptions. Many of the artists have been recognized by the country’s most prestigious awards from the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Artist Awards and the Ateneo Art Awards, and are establishing reputations in Europe, Australia, and Asia, while locally others are highly visible as performers in the underground art, performance and music scene. With an Asian Cultural Council award for the exhibition, TOPAZ ARTS has invited three of the artists from Manila — Yason Banal, Lena Cobangbang and Maria Jeona Zoleta — to participate as Artists-in-Residence, creating new works, site-specific installations and performances.

Artists

Poklong Anading, Yason Banal, Bea Camacho, Valeria Cavestany, Lena Cobangbang, Maria Cruz, Gaston Damag, Dex Fernandez, Arvin Flores, Dina Gadia, David Griggs, Robert Langenegger, Romeo Lee, Pow Martinez, Jayson Oliveria, Carlo Ricafort, Timo Roter, Gerry Tan, MM Yu, Maria Jeona Zoleta

For complete exhibition details, including artist information and a schedule for each venue, click here.

Martha Swope dance, theater photos on show

Martha Swope Exhibition at the New York Public Library
by Erik Piepenburg, The New York Times, September 20, 2012

ICP celebrates Gordon Parks centennial

International Center of Photography
presents

Gordon Parks: 100 Years

through January 6, 2013

To commemorate the centennial of the birth of photographer, filmmaker, musician, and writer Gordon Parks (1912–2006), the International Center of Photography in cooperation with The Gordon Parks Foundation will present the installation Gordon Parks: 100 Years, including a large-scale photo mural and slideshow of more than 50 photographs he captured throughout his long, illustrious career. The installation was curated by Dr. Maurice Berger.

The 20-foot-by-13-foot photo mural features Emerging Man, one of Parks' iconic images captured in Harlem in 1952. Three video screens will display his stunning images, which explore such issues as urban and rural poverty, racism and prejudice, politics, and the historic Civil Rights Movement.

International Center of Photography
1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street, Manhattan
(map/directions)

Ralph Lemon exhibition to open at SMH

Studio Museum in Harlem presents

Ralph Lemon

1856 Cessna Road

March 29-May 27 

Drawing from an eight-year project by New York-based movement artist Ralph Lemon (b. 1952) in conjunction with Little Yazoo, Mississippi resident Walter Carter (1907–2010), 1856 Cessna Road explores a friendship that evolved into a close collaboration and features digital animation, large-scale color photographs and a film installation.

Studio Museum in Harlem
144 West 125th Street, Manhattan
(map/directions)