Jillian Steinhauer

NEW YORK — I’m inside a room that feels simultaneously clinical and whimsical. Black, white and gray are the dominant colors. Positioned throughout the space are carefully crafted towers, boards, grids and other familiar objects — they look like oversize, slightly haywire versions of games from my childhood, including Connect Four, Battleship, Simon and Jenga. A question mark hangs in the air, though. I no longer know the rules, and new ones haven’t been provided. Doors and cabinets are locked. I’m joined by six other people, and we have 45 minutes — which are ticking away on a countdown clock — to figure out how to play in order to get out.

We are in an escape room, a live-action game where a group of people must solve a series of puzzles to work their way out of a locked room or series of rooms within a given time. In many escape rooms, the backstories are elaborate: You are traveling through a broken space-time continuum. You are trying to avoid being buried alive. You are scrambling to save the world by shrinking yourself to the size of a mouse.

In “The Privilege of Escape,” a new public art project by Risa Puno at Onassis USA, the escape room turns from a high-stakes thriller into a disarming demonstration of social inequality. Whether or not you succeed is largely beyond your control. The experience is still exhilarating, but can also be psychologically uncomfortable.

Puno is the winner of the first open call by Creative Time, which has earned a reputation for its inventive approach to public art. Since the 1970s, the organization’s work has taken the form of performances and parades, banners and billboards — even a selection of photographs of life on Earth etched into a disc and launched into space. And whereas most public art tends to be physically static and stay on ideologically neutral ground, Creative Time has always engaged outright with political and social issues.

That makes Puno’s project, which aims to playfully illuminate the concept of privilege, a good fit. It’s also encouraging to see Creative Time devoting substantial resources to the work of a lesser-known artist. (The open call was aimed at those “who have not yet received a public commission or substantial support from a major cultural institution.”) From 2007 to 2017, under the artistic stewardship of Nato Thompson, the organization leaned toward high-profile commissions by big-name artists like Kara Walker. “The Privilege of Escape” is the first project curated by the new executive director, Justine Ludwig, and it is promising.

The experience at Onassis USA unfolds beneath a big corporate atrium in a building off Fifth Avenue. It’s the perfect place to set a mock, nondescript institute, which is supposedly conducting a study for which I am a subject. When I arrive, an attendant in a lab coat greets me and asks, “Are you here for the test?” After registering the other participants for our session and dividing us into two groups, he brings us into an anodyne entry hall, where he briefs us on the rules.

The institute, he says, is “dedicated to the study of behavioral sciences” and considers “structured gameplay” a philosophical pillar of its work. Each group will enter a different room and have 45 minutes to complete an identical set of puzzles. Our progress will be observed and compared, and at the end we will reconvene for a brief analysis. As we position ourselves near the doors, a countdown rings out. Go!

Before I’ve had time to fully register our surroundings, someone in my group confidently unrolls what looks like a revamped Twister board (she’s clearly an escape room veteran, I think). Someone else picks it up and swiftly locates its proper spot in the room — in the process revealing a code. We try various locks, but they still won’t open. We redirect our attention to a corner with jumbo dice. After a bit of frantic interpreting, we discern another code, and this time it works! We excitedly open a cabinet to find … a set of round discs with symbols and colors on them. What do they mean? It’s fairly obvious where they’re supposed to go, but in what order?

This is how the time elapses: Each puzzle we solve leads to another one, each victory followed by more mystery. Occasionally a chime sounds and a clue from our overseers appears on a screen. The atmosphere is somewhat tense, especially toward the end, but also collaborative and congenial. I don’t know any of my teammates, but we’re riding a wave of adrenaline together.

Forty-one minutes and 13 seconds later, we emerge triumphant. The final code we cracked has gotten us out the door. It’s only when we finish, though, that we realize something is off. (Readers beware: A slight spoiler alert follows.) As we reunite with the second group, we discover that they didn’t escape in time — not because their members lacked skills or intelligence, but because of the room they were in. Simply put, they were forced to play with a major handicap, whose challenges they were unaware of because it was presented as part of the game. (When asked for feedback, someone from that group jokingly called the experience “hell.”) Meanwhile, we had the privilege of perfect conditions, which allowed us to achieve our full potential and escape.

Throughout her career, Puno has used games as a means to consider human relations. In 2008 she built “The Course of Emotions,” a mini-golf course with holes based on negative feelings like jealousy and frustration. Earlier this year, she created “Risk Management,” an original carnival-inspired game that makes its players vulnerable to self-sabotage in their attempts to beat one another and win. For Puno, play spaces offer safe environments for pushing people to confront complex questions about how we interact.

“The Privilege of Escape” continues this inquiry. The project is an observable and ultimately visceral demonstration of something that often goes unrecognized or dismissed because it operates invisibly. Members of dominant social groups tend to believe that society is a meritocracy; what we fail to see is that the playing field was never level to begin with. Puno visualizes this by staging a test that’s always rigged. If you’re placed in the disadvantaged group, it will be harder and more frustrating; if you’re afforded privilege, it will be easier and more fun. And just as with race, class, gender and ability, you don’t get to choose the group to which you belong.

Given the liberal bent of the art-going crowd, this lesson won’t be an epiphany for many participants. But knowing something in theory is different from experiencing it firsthand. Here, in the safe, neutral territory of public art, Puno has created an opportunity to assume different identities and compare and contrast the outcomes with a certain level of dispassion.

My one critique of “The Privilege of Escape,” which is impeccably designed and executed, concerns the decision to reveal the structural inequality at the end of the game. That timing turns it into more of a gotcha moment than a prompt for reflection or action. When I found out that my team had been given an advantage, I felt guilty, as if we had cheated — not an unreasonable reaction, but not a constructive one either, and the facilitated discussion that followed didn’t push me to consider the experience more deeply or critically. This is, I think, a missed opportunity. After all, the most pressing question regarding privilege isn’t “how does it make you feel?” but “what can you do about it?”

Additional Information:

Risa Puno: ‘The Privilege of Escape’

Through Aug. 11 at Onassis USA, 645 Fifth Ave., Manhattan; creativetime.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/arts/design/escape-room-creative-time.html" id="f5b4d2bc-8a69-3715-a6f6-a52dd59be419">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic's Notebook)

An Escape Room Where You Can't Escape Your Privilege

The biennial, no stranger to controversy, is an indicator of currents in the field as well as a career booster for the artists included. Past editions have sparked debates over identity and representation, but this year, before the list of participants was even released, a Chicago-based artist, Michael Rakowitz, pulled out of the exhibition in a protest against a museum vice chairman, Warren Kanders. Kanders is the chief executive of a company that manufactures equipment, including body armor and tear gas, for law enforcement agencies and militaries. The New York Times received a copy of Rakowitz’s letter to the curators, dated Dec. 18, withdrawing from the show.

The exhibition’s curators, Rujeko Hockley and Jane Panetta — both of whom work at the Whitney — said in an interview Sunday that they respected Rakowitz’s decision and regret that he won’t be involved in the biennial’s 79th iteration, for which they tried to bring together “as broad a range of artists as we could in all kind of senses of that word, whether that’s mediumwise, interestwise, geographically, demographically, generationally,” in Hockley’s words.

Indeed, the list of participants, which The Times has previewed, is very diverse. Among the more high-profile names are Nicole Eisenman, Jeffrey Gibson, Barbara Hammer and Wangechi Mutu. People of color are a majority, and it is one of the youngest groups in the biennial’s history, with three-quarters of the participants under the age of 40. Only five have ever exhibited in a Whitney Biennial before.

Hockley explained that these choices were not due to a fascination with all things “hot, young, new,” but rather grew out of traveling around the country and seeing how many artists were facing “an incredible amount of pressure coming from all sides,” including the burden of debt from Master of Fine Arts programs, the collapse of smaller galleries that might help launch their careers and the difficulty of finding and keeping affordable studio space.

For most artists, inclusion in the 2019 Whitney Biennial is not only a tangible milestone but also an affirmation of their work and an encouragement to keep going.

“It’s a huge deal, because it allows me to move forward in a greater way,” said Brendan Fernandes, whose installations and performances combine visual art and dance. For the biennial, Fernandes, a former ballet dancer who is based in Chicago, will present a new version of a piece titled “The Master and Form,” which consists of archaic-looking wooden scaffolding and devices that allow performers to hold the five basic ballet positions for long periods of time. “For me it is a social-political space, a piece that questions the agency of the body, the agency of the dancer and our labor,” Fernandes said.

Los Angeles-based artist Ragen Moss is also concerned with the body and how it functions within society — what she describes as the “beautiful tension that we each experience as this round, awkward, spatial, embodied being that is also inscribed by language." Moss makes hanging, transparent sculptures that she embeds with layers and paints and that are evocative of human forms.

For the Whitney Biennial, she made nine sculptures representing types, including a lawmaker, a laborer and a rule-breaker, that were her answer to the question, “What are the characters or ways of being that our particularized moment are forcing us to reckon with?”

To its curators, the 2019 biennial feels very much like a product of its time, with artists “grappling with questions about race, gender, financial inequality, gentrification, the vulnerability of the body,” Panetta said. But she added that the work in the show mostly strikes a tone that’s less “agitproplike or angry” than one might expect in 2019. “It’s really work that feels more productive, forward looking, with a kind of optimistic and hopeful tenor to it.”

Her hopeful tone is somewhat at odds with the controversy that has been dogging the Whitney in recent months — and that led Rakowitz to pull out of the biennial.

The protests over Kanders’ presence on the Whitney’s board began in November, when Hyperallergic reported that U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents had used Safariland’s tear gas on asylum-seekers at the Mexican border. In response, 95 members of the Whitney staff signed a letter to the museum’s leadership demanding that the board of trustees “consider asking” for Kanders’ resignation and requesting “the development and distribution of a clear policy around trustee participation.” Hockley signed the letter; Panetta did not.

Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, responded with a letter to the staff and trustees that said the museum “cannot right all the ills of an unjust world.” Kanders also wrote a letter defending his company as a manufacturer and supplier of “nonlethal products.”

Rakowitz, who makes conceptual art projects that often focus on vulnerable people and communities, saw the photographs from the border as a disturbingly clear visualization of what he called “toxic philanthropy.”

“I felt like I’d be betraying everything that I’ve ever cared about in the work that I make” had he participated in the exhibition, he said in an interview. “You wouldn’t compromise the integrity of a work on paper by showing it in unsafe conditions. You should not compromise the integrity of an artist and ask them to show with funding and permission from people that make conditions unsafe for others.”

Commissioned for the biennial to create new work for a project re-creating the artifacts and sites destroyed in the Iraq War, Rakowitz said he decided that the best way to support the Whitney’s employees was to withdraw from the show as an act of both protest and solidarity. “I felt like the only way to truly leverage any kind of voice was to say that often times what an artist doesn’t do is more important than what they said they will do,” he explained.

There has been closer scrutiny in recent years of whom museums pick to serve on their boards. In January art-and-labor-focused organization WAGE put out a call inviting artists in the 2019 Whitney Biennial to “put [their] exceptionality to work” by withholding their art from the show until they got paid for their participation and the demands laid out in the Whitney staff letter were met. The Whitney confirmed that participants in the 2019 biennial are being paid. (The Times later learned the amount is $1,500, the fee WAGE suggested.)

Activist movement Decolonize This Place has also been leading protests at the Whitney, beginning with a gathering and burning of sage in the museum’s lobby in December. The following month, the group held a town hall meeting that was attended by more than 200 people, including employees of the Whitney. In an interview, Amin Husain, an organizer with the group, called the Whitney Biennial “a Band-Aid of representation.”

His co-organizer, artist Nitasha Dhillon, said, “What we’re saying is that this structure needs to change, and it needs to begin somewhere."

Asked about the protests, Fernandes said that they had resonated with him, leading him to ask, “What is my responsibility as an artist that’s in this biennial within this museum?” Ultimately, though, he decided he could be most effective by remaining in the exhibition and speaking through this work. “I am an artist that has a political voice, and my voice needs to be heard,” he said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/arts/design/2019-whitney-biennial.html" id="53037114-891e-3621-aa4b-44363069a5bb">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — This year’s Whitney Biennial, considered the country’s most important showcase of contemporary art, has 75 participating artists — and one who has already withdrawn.

For 2019 Whitney Biennial, 75 Artists Are In -- as One Steps Out

They were invited by the first lady.

The figure, made of dark bronze, is a sculpture by artist Kara Walker, titled “Invasive Species (to be placed in your native garden),” and has been put on a small patch of land near the entrance.

The occasion is “She Persists: A Century of Women Artists in New York,” an installation of works by 44 artists and collectives in the public spaces of Gracie Mansion. The show is the largest one to be mounted there and the first to focus exclusively on female and women-identified creators, all of whom have significant connections to New York City. Some are young — like Jordan Casteel, born in 1989, and Kaveri Raina, born in 1990; three are centenarians — Toko Shinoda, born in 1913, Carmen Herrera, born in 1915, and Florence Knoll, born in 1917; and many are no longer living. The subtitle refers to the period from 1919, the year the 19th Amendment, which gave American women the right to vote, was sent to the states for ratification, to today.

“This exhibit is really important at this time, given the #MeToo movement, the centennial anniversary of the suffrage movement, the historic number of women running for office,” the city’s first lady, Chirlane McCray, said in an interview at the Mansion. “And of course, the personal is the political. What I believe is being exercised in my home as well as out there in the world.”

She recalled that when she moved into Gracie Mansion in 2014, when her husband, Mayor Bill de Blasio, took office, she was struck by how few portraits of women hung on the walls; “everything else was men,” she said. (New York City has never had a female mayor, just as New York state has never had a female governor.) The goal of “She Persists,” which will remain on view for a year, bringing with it specialized public tours and a middle-school curriculum, is “to fix that and show women who’ve been unheralded, unseen,” she said.

To curate the installation, the Gracie Mansion Conservancy brought in Jessica Bell Brown, an art historian and Ph.D. candidate at Princeton, who said she was thinking, from the outset, about the question, “How does gender impact our understanding of the world and the ways we bring bias into how we even imagine what an exhibition could look like?”

Brown was tasked with giving shape to a broad proposal. She also needed to contend with the site: a two-story house in the Federal style that was built by Archibald Gracie in 1799 (and expanded by Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. in 1966). Gracie, a shipping merchant, owned slaves whose forced labor helped build the house, a fact that conservancy guides discuss on tours. Brown said that placing Walker’s work at the entrance was a way of acknowledging that history and “this question of monumentality and power.”

Inside, the mansion presents further complications: brightly colored rooms filled with period furniture, ornate light fixtures and other flourishes, all of which threaten to upstage any art that goes on the walls. Yet Brown said that she found the uniqueness of the space liberating, in a way. “Because this isn’t a museum, I felt like I had a lot more freedom to play with art history.”

Rather than attempting to curate a corrective or definitive exhibition of 100 years of women’s art, she decided to work thematically, concentrating on four areas: “contending with history,” “body as battleground,” “picturing people” and “expanding abstraction.” Visual connections emerge in different rooms.

In the parlor, for example, the austere white zigzag in Carmen Herrera’s 1987 painting “Yesterday” echoes the more lyrical waves of Lee Krasner’s 1976 screen print “Free Space.” That room also contains Faith Ringgold’s 1988 story quilt “Tar Beach #2,” which depicts the young Cassie Louise Lightfoot, who dreams of flying over the George Washington Bridge. An angular, modernist photograph of the bridge taken by Berenice Abbott in 1936 hangs nearby.

Among the most notable contributions to the show are several dolls made by Katharine Clarissa Eileen McCray, the first lady’s mother. The elder McCray loved to sew, but spent most of her life working in a factory and supporting her family; like so many female creators, she only got the chance to pursue her passion once she was older. She made hundreds of dolls in black, brown, tan and other colors and gave most of them away. “She taught herself and had so much fun with it,” her daughter said. “When I look at those dolls, I feel like the love that was often hard for her to express just poured into these works of art.”

“She Persists” is the third special art installation that’s been mounted in the mayoral home since the current administration took office. The first, “Windows on the City: Looking Out at Gracie’s New York,” in 2015, set the tone, which Paul Gunther, director of the Gracie Mansion Conservancy, noted was different from the approach taken by prior administrations. The previous style was mostly “lovely pictures of New York,” he said.

By contrast, de Blasio and McCray have taken the mansion’s nickname, “The People’s House,” to heart, by bringing in artworks and artifacts that represent a more populist view of history, including a painting of an Iroquois chief and a postcard showing a freed slave (placed alongside New York state’s Gradual Emancipation Act of 1799).

“People who would not be invited here had their images up on the walls,” said McCray. “I love that.”

Gracie Mansion is not the only place where McCray has made efforts to promote images of historically underrepresented people. Last year, she and Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen launched She Built NYC, an initiative to address the city’s glaring lack of statues of historic women. The first commission will be a sculpture of Shirley Chisholm in Prospect Park, coming in 2020.

A trailblazer, Chisholm was the first African-American woman to serve in the U.S. Congress. She is featured in “She Persists,” in a video by artists Mickalene Thomas and David Antonio Cruz, along with copies of her autobiographies and ephemera from her campaigns. It’s especially poignant to see her represented in a site of power in her home city, knowing she will soon have a permanent public presence.

She Built NYC is part of the de Blasio administration’s larger focus on women’s issues, from the creation of a Domestic Violence Task Force to the passage of a law prohibiting employers from asking prospective hires their salary histories. These have been championed and sometimes spearheaded by McCray, who points out that women make up half of the senior leadership in her husband’s administration (although there has also been a notable pattern of women leaving the administration).

“When you put women in charge, what they do actually helps the movement, because we focus on policies that affect more people — women, children, families — than men are likely to,” said McCray. “I think that sensibility is permeating everything.” She added that “She Persists” is an example, “but in the scheme of things it’s a small example.”

In a way, that type of big-picture thinking represents the de Blasio administration’s approach to the arts: seeing them as one part of New York City’s ecosystem that needs to align with the rest. That means that along with funding comes increased scrutiny over how money is distributed, and efforts to link the future funding of organizations to the diversity of their personnel and board members.

Some are concerned by what they see as a zero-sum game, that the mayor is focused on supporting smaller arts organizations outside Manhattan to the exclusion of the larger institutions — many of which help drive the city’s economy. McCray seemed to bolster this perspective when she said, “There is much more happening in terms of art in New York City than, dare I say, the Met ball.”

But McCray also suggested that all cultural groups are benefiting from the nearly $200 million allotted to the Department of Cultural Affairs for fiscal year 2019, the largest amount in the agency’s history.

And she and the mayor make no bones about being populist-leaning politicians whose primary goal is bringing more culture to more people.

“It’s not a show that’s going to have a big impact on the art world,” mused Lorraine O’Grady, whose photographs from a performance she staged at Harlem’s 1983 African-American Day Parade are part of “She Persists.” But she added, “What the first lady has been doing cumulatively is just having a big effect on the world.”

Event Information:

“She Persists: A Century of Women Artists in New York”

Public tours begin Feb. 4, through December; Gracie Mansion, East End Avenue at 88th Street, 212-676-3060. Tour reservations must be made online at www.nyc.gov/gracietours.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/20/arts/design/art-by-women-at-gracie-mansion.html" id="c74b05d2-7670-3812-a546-a0b68ed48fc5">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — Beginning on Jan. 22, visitors to Gracie Mansion will encounter a disconsolate sight as they approach the residence of the mayor of New York City and his family: a cloaked, faceless figure sitting on the ground behind its own severed feet, a signal that an unusual set of guests has arrived.

Art by Women Graces the People's House

Recent years have brought a range of efforts to balance this trend, from the scholar Deborah Willis’ book “Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present” to the hashtag #BlackGirlMagic. The exhibition “Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite,” organized by the Aperture Foundation and accompanied by a publication of the same title, is the latest — a tribute to a man who captured the soul of a new movement celebrating African American style and identity (and whose achievements are now inspiring pop star Rihanna).

Offering a small sample of a larger oeuvre, “Black Is Beautiful,” at the Skirball Cultural Center here, is the first solo museum show devoted to Brathwaite. It features 41 mostly black-and-white pictures he shot largely in the Bronx and Harlem in the 1950s and ’60s, as well as contemporaneous clothing, jewelry, posters and album covers. The photographs depict dapper black men in suits, congregating at jazz concerts, and black women with natural hairstyles striking elegant poses in African-print clothing. As the exhibition makes clear, though, Brathwaite’s talent for creating images extended far beyond taking pictures. Despite going underrecognized in the years since, he was at the time a social force who helped gather and empower African Americans, rallying them around the slogans “Think black, buy black” and “Black is beautiful.”

Brathwaite, born in Brooklyn in 1938 to Barbadian immigrants, was raised in the Bronx. In 1956, around the time of his high school graduation, he teamed up with his brother Elombe Brath and a group of friends to form what became the African Jazz-Art Society and Studios. (Both the artist and his brother adopted West African names in place of their given ones, and Elombe shortened his last name.) The organization was part social club, part arts collective, part political statement: Brathwaite and his cohort were disciples of Marcus Garvey’s black nationalist, Pan-Africanist teachings.

The society also began organizing jazz concerts, first in the Bronx and then in Harlem. As the popularity of the shows grew, so did the profiles of the musicians and Brathwaite’s own status on the scene: A 1958 photograph captures Miles Davis blowing into a trumpet with his eyes closed and beads of sweat dripping down his face. Some of the strongest shots from this period demonstrate the power of music to bring people together, like a 1962 picture of a group of black teenagers awaiting the arrival of James Brown at an airport. Their signs, grins and raised hands convey an irrepressible energy that evokes Brown even without his physical presence.

In 1963, a protest against the opening of a white-owned wig shop on 125th Street helped catalyze the Black Is Beautiful movement. A photograph by Brathwaite shows a woman in slim heels pacing in front of the store with a sign. She carries herself with such confidence and poise that she could be walking a runway — and, indeed, the protester is Nomsa Brath, the wife of Elombe and one of the Grandassa Models, a group the jazz-arts society started the year before. Although it included members of both genders, women, with their natural hairstyles and brightly patterned, often homemade clothes, were the stars; they were also, as Tanisha C. Ford writes in the show’s accompanying book, the subjects of the most controversy.

In Brathwaite’s photographs, some of which are shot in rich color, the Grandassa Models seem to embody the ideal of empowerment through self-presentation. They smile, gaze and cock their hips with hard-earned confidence and self-possession. In one magnetic image from about 1970, a model looks up through long, carefully articulated lashes. Her semi-nudity gives her sex appeal, but her perfectly rounded Afro and the light blue background also make her look angelic.

Another striking pair of photographs shot outdoors at a public school in 1966 features groups of female and male Grandassa models, facing off as if they were gangs. No one smiles; the women lean back with an air of suspicion, while the men stand with their hands clasped in front of them, as if they were bodyguards. This is as close to militancy as Brathwaite’s subjects get. Their Afros may hint at the Black Power movement, but theirs was a different kind of activism — a politics of body positivity and aesthetic liberation.

It’s fortunate that “Black Is Beautiful” is on view at the same time that the Underground Museum here was showing Roy DeCarava’s intimate photographs of everyday black life, and that the Broad museum is hosting “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983” (through Sept. 1). Brathwaite’s work helps us see the full picture of African-American visual history, which is still coming into focus.

Black Is Beautiful: The Photographs of Kwame Brathwaite: Through Sept. 1 at the Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles; 310-440-4500, skirball.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/03/arts/design/kwame-brathwaite-black-is-beautiful-photography.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Uncovering the soul of the 'Black Is Beautiful' movement

(Art Review): LOS ANGELES — Images of black Americans’ deaths and suffering have been a permanent fixture in our cultural history, while those celebrating black personhood and pleasure have been less widely known and shown.

Chisholm retired from Congress in 1983 and died in 2005. But next year she will once again pave the way, becoming the first female historical figure to have a public monument dedicated to her in Brooklyn — a 40-foot-tall likeness in steel that will rise at the southeast corner of Prospect Park.

Its creators are artists Amanda Williams and Olalekan Jeyifous, who won the inaugural commission for She Built NYC, an initiative introduced by first lady Chirlane McCray, Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen and the Department of Cultural Affairs last summer to correct the gender imbalance in the city’s public art and monuments, nearly all of which are devoted to men.

“Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm’s dynamic leadership and activism continues to inspire all who learn her story, and her service deserves public recognition,” McCray said in a statement. “This artwork will be bright, bold, and makes a statement — just like Chisholm herself.”

The pair’s design, called “Our Destiny, Our Democracy,” selected from five finalists, fuses the congresswoman’s signature portrait with the silhouette of the U.S. Capitol and patterns of vines and leaves, a reference to the vegetation of the park. These images create a multipronged form that would rise to the height of nearby trees, over an amphitheater-style space, whose seats would be inscribed with the names of women who have followed in Chisholm’s footsteps.

“This becomes something that’s occupiable,” explained Williams, who is 44 and based in Chicago. “It allows you to be enveloped in a conversation about interacting and bringing others along. This approach to a monument is that it’s an invitation to participate.”

Kristina Newman-Scott, the president of the local arts organization BRIC and a member of the voting panel for the Chisholm competition, called it “almost like a visual hug.”

“I really feel like her arms are present, and her energy is present, and she is giving love to this community,” she continued.

Williams and Jeyifous — yes, a man is codesigning the first She Built NYC project — have known each other since their undergraduate days at Cornell University. They collaborated years ago and have recently begun doing so again, winning a commission for the National Public Housing Museum in Chicago. Both have made art about and in public space, although their styles are different. Jeyifous’ work, such as “Protest!” (2017), four steel silhouette sculptures of people demonstrating, tends to be bold and bright. Williams’ is more conceptual and somewhat quieter; for “Color(ed) Theory” (2014-17), she painted foreclosed houses in Chicago in hues that were drawn from commercial products marketed to African Americans.

Notably, both studied architecture, not art — a foundation that Jeyifous, who is 41 and lives in Brooklyn, said gave them a “strong background in being very intentional about how one takes any idea and distills it down to a set of simple things that can be translated into a physical experience.”

Their training also helped in another, perhaps more unexpected way — namely, by loosening the grip of traditional sculptural conventions or preconceptions of what a monument should be. Jeyifous said he saw this as an opportunity to “challenge the lone-wolf male figure who sits atop a horse with a sword pointing toward freedom.”

Kendal Henry, director of New York City’s Percent for Art Program, which is commissioning the work, said he was “very excited about having contemporary artists re-evaluate what it is to create a monument.” He added, “And this is just the beginning.”

Last month, the city announced the next four statues in the She Built NYC initiative, with one for each of the other boroughs, costing between $350,000 and $1 million apiece. The Chisholm monument, which is part of a larger capital project being undertaken by the Prospect Park Alliance, is slated for completion by the end of 2020.

In September 2017, Mayor Bill de Blasio convened a commission to review New York’s public art and historical monuments, especially those that have been sources of controversy. Following its recommendations, the city relocated a statue of J. Marion Sims, who developed a surgical gynecological procedure in part by experimenting on enslaved black women who were not given anesthesia, and then held an open call for a new work to fill the void on the perimeter of Central Park.

Williams said she has thought a lot about not just the particulars of Chisholm’s story, but about the significance of making a work dedicated to her right now, when Donald Trump’s presidency has intensified debates over both statues that mark public space and the democratic process. “What does it mean to offer public art in this moment?” she mused.

Receiving the commission has given Williams “the power of knowing that you’re contributing something,” she said. She described it as “a creative outlet to feel like you’re helping people think through” their reactions to the political situation, adding that “it opens and gives permission for any artist to say, ‘How can I contribute?’”

Williams noted that the work is designed so that viewers would see different images from different approaches, with Chisholm and the Capitol so inseparable that neither is ever wholly visible.

“That’s kind of how we feel right now in society, like we can’t quite see democracy,” she said. “So it’s the belief that it’s still there. As opposed to always having to be able to see it.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="eeae7f16-b463-4449-8edc-8fde5c2721db" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/arts/design/shirley-chisholm-monument-prospect-park.html">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — During her long political career, Shirley Chisholm became famous for firsts: In 1968, as the first black woman to serve in Congress, she represented a district that encompassed Bedford-Stuyvesant, the neighborhood where she grew up. Four years later, she ran for president, becoming the first black woman to seek that nomination from either major political party (and the first woman to pursue it among the Democrats).

Chisholm monument finds its designers

<h1>NEW YORK — This year’s Whitney Biennial, considered the country’s most important showcase of contemporary art, has 75 participating artists — and one who has already withdrawn.</h1>

Indeed, the list of participants, which The Times has previewed, is very diverse. Among the more high-profile names are Nicole Eisenman, Jeffrey Gibson, Barbara Hammer and Wangechi Mutu. People of color are a majority, and it’s one of the youngest groups in the biennial’s history, with three-quarters of the participants under the age of 40. Only five have ever exhibited in a Whitney Biennial before.

Hockley explained that these choices weren’t due to a fascination with all things “hot, young, new,” but rather grew out of traveling around the country and seeing how many artists were facing “an incredible amount of pressure coming from all sides,” including the burden of debt from Master of Fine Arts programs, the collapse of smaller galleries that might help launch their careers and the difficulty of finding and keeping affordable studio space.

Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, responded with a letter to the staff and trustees that said the institution “is first and foremost a museum. It cannot right all the ills of an unjust world, nor is that its role.” Kanders also wrote a letter defending his company as a manufacturer and supplier of “nonlethal products.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="080200a4-cf4c-4f32-b0b0-ad2b8b35b903" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/arts/design/2019-whitney-biennial.html">The New York Times</a>.

For 2019 Whitney Biennial, 75 artists are in -- as one steps out

The biennial, no stranger to controversy, is an indicator of currents in the field as well as a career booster for the artists included.

<h1>Just a few months before Donald Trump became the Republican nominee for president, The New York Post published an interview with his first wife, Ivana. Speaking from her seven-story town house on the Upper East Side, the Czech emigrant praised the restrictive immigration policies proposed by her ex-husband, before adding, “As long as you come here legally and get a proper job ... we need immigrants,” she said. “Who’s going to vacuum our living rooms and clean up after us? Americans don’t like to do that.”</h1>

That comment — loaded with both xenophobia and a snippet of truth — took on new relevance this month because of a work of performance art. For the better part of February, artist Jennifer Rubell hired look-alikes of Ivana and Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, to vacuum in a former art gallery in Washington; the piece was titled “Ivanka Vacuuming.” The models put on stilettos and copies of the pale pink dress that Ivanka wore to the Group of 20 summit in 2017, which she attended in her official capacity as an adviser to the president. (The dress is also part of her clothing line.) They did not speak as they vacuumed a small area of pink carpet, occasionally pausing to adjust the cord or sweep back their hair. A mound of crumbs occupied a pedestal in the center of the space, and visitors were invited to throw a handful on the carpet.

It was a striking image: Ivanka, who positions herself as both a feminist and a paragon of heteronormative white femininity, performing stereotypical women’s labor, in contrast with the type of work associated with her class and privilege.

But it wasn’t much more than an image. Although Rubell identifies as a conceptual artist, her work, which usually involves food, tends to traffic in obvious symbols with muddled meanings. This time was no different. Were we supposed to empathize with the Ivanka stand-in for being forced to vacuum? Mock her? Notably, the news release was careful not to position the piece as a critique, calling it “simultaneously a visual celebration of a contemporary feminine icon; a portrait of our own relationship to that figure; and a questioning of our complicity in her role-playing.” Rubell herself called it a “portrait of our time, not a judgment of our time.”

It feels like a missed opportunity. From where I sit, the start of the third year of the Trump presidency is a very good time to make a judgment. Why not offer a critical consideration of Ivanka Trump and the political uses, as well as the historical precedents, of her carefully cultivated image of white womanhood?

The spectacle of “Ivanka Vacuuming” and the media hubbub it spawned — Ivanka Trump weighed in with both self-righteousness and mild indignation — got me thinking about other art I’ve seen starring the Trumps, usually Donald. A lot has appeared over the past few years — Trump as an animatronic fortuneteller, a portrait of Trump made from pornographic images, a presidential double locked in a jail cell (in a Trump hotel) — but little of it has been memorable. I’m grateful that artists are responding creatively to the current moment, but why do so many of their efforts miss the mark?

The answer, I think, has something to do with the difference between art that is political and art that is about politics. Although it’s notoriously hard to define, the first arguably has some kind of political intent, meaning or program embedded in its structure; in her essay “What Is Political Art?” scholar Susan Buck-Morss called this “the continuation of politics by other means.” She cited the practice of Fred Wilson, who mines museum archives to create installations of objects that challenge the colonial narratives of those institutions. By contrast, in art about politics, the subject matter is the primary statement, which means what you see is mostly what you get.

Artist and critic Thomas Micchelli put it another way in a catalog essay for Judith Bernstein’s 2017-18 exhibition at the Drawing Center, identifying a “distinction between a politicized artist and a political one.” An example of the former, Bernstein makes brash, frenetic paintings that use sexual humor to skewer patriarchal American culture. Her new work depicts Trump with a penis for a nose, often surrounded by swastikas or in proximity to Hitler. Her aesthetic is so over the top that sometimes her paintings seem like visual screams. That’s understandable and valuable when you’re caricaturing a man who’s been accused of sexual assault and working in a society that instructs women to suppress their anger.

In his recent show at PPOW gallery, Sandow Birk took a quieter and more classical approach to parodying the president. The artist showed lithographs from a project called “The Horrible &amp; Terrible Deeds &amp; Words of the Very Renowned Trumpagruel,” which was inspired by François Rabelais’ 16th-century Gargantua and Pantagruel, a satirical tale about a pair of giants. Birk renders Trump as an oversize baby who looks at his phone constantly and is spoon-fed by men in suits with paunches and devils’ horns. The prints seem directly descended from the work of 19th-century caricaturist Honoré Daumier, which has the added effect of placing Trump in a long line of historical crooks and bullies.

Despite their divergent styles, a precedent for both Bernstein’s and Birk’s work can be found in Philip Guston’s caricatures of Richard Nixon. The artist started the drawings in 1971, less than a year after he was “excommunicated,” in his words, by the New York art scene for returning to figuration after a long period of making abstract work. Guston’s caricatures, which were shown around the time of the 2016 election at Hauser and Wirth, are often visually spare but unsparing in their criticism of Nixon. They depict the former president with a long, penislike nose and a scrotum for a face, and make him out to be a buffoon as he delivers a speech or visits China. At the same time, an eerie sadness hangs over the images of Nixon alone in bed. They are satire infused with dread.

That may be what’s missing from so much Trump art today — the critical introspection to accompany the laughter. Guston’s drawings and paintings are intimate, as if he were grappling with the reality of Nixon’s existence. The process of making them was fraught, both politically and artistically; only a handful were shown in the following decades (Guston died in 1980). I don’t mean to suggest that contemporary artists like Bernstein and Birk don’t know the stakes of our time — I’m sure they do — but hanging on the white walls of galleries, for the eyes of a largely liberal, self-selecting public, caricatures of Trump feel safe. Creators and viewers alike get validation, rather than a prompt for examination or self-reflection.

Part of the trouble may also be with the form. When you have a president whom many people already view as a caricature, representing him as such loses some of its disruptive power. As with Rubell’s performance, you end up with familiar images and generalized meanings. What would it look like to make art about the Trumps without their likeness? How might it create different aesthetic and political possibilities?

There are answers already out there. Some of them veer closer to propaganda than art, like Robin Bell’s light projections of protest messages on government buildings and Trump hotels. (Bell has a solo show on view at George Washington University.) Badlands Unlimited, the publishing company founded by artist Paul Chan, makes signs that appropriate the language and style of the posters used by the right-wing Westboro Baptist Church: “God Hates Ivanka,” reads one.

Other answers are contained within larger bodies of work. The artist Alexandra Bell researches the role of the media in the perpetuation of racism. Her exhibition last year at Recess Assembly included a blown-up and marked-up reproduction of Donald Trump’s 1989 newspaper ad calling for the execution of the Central Park Five — a searing indictment of the man who’s now president.

Sometimes the answer is only partly the work of artists, as in the case of “HEWILLNOTDIVIDE.US.” In January 2017, Shia LaBeouf, Nastja Sade Ronkko and Luke Turner placed a camera at the Museum of the Moving Image and invited participants to stand before it and speak the title words. The installation was so quickly swarmed by supporters of the president and trolls that the museum removed it within a month. Its rise and fall make for an incisive portrait of the harassment and vitriol that mark the age of President Donald Trump.

None of these works will sway public opinion; art can never be a substitute for action — and indeed, some of the most interesting reactions to Trump’s presidency have been gestures of protest, like Richard Prince’s refunding of the money paid to him for making a painting that depicts Ivanka Trump. But they can refocus our attention, open our eyes a little wider and “make us see things we didn’t know we needed to see until we see them,” as critic Jerry Saltz once described the potency of art. When it comes to the Trumps, we’ve seen plenty already, but there remains much more that we haven’t.

This article originally appeared in <a id="9b3d9330-8829-4618-8f84-6d82dc68bf9c" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/arts/design/president-trump-ivanka-art.html">The New York Times</a>.

Trump Has Inspired Art. That's Not Always a Good Thing.

That comment — loaded with both xenophobia and a snippet of truth — took on new relevance this month because of a work of performance art.

Trump has inspired art, that's not always a good thing

<h1>NEW YORK — Beginning on Jan. 22, visitors to Gracie Mansion will encounter a disconsolate sight as they approach the residence of the mayor of New York City and his family: a cloaked, faceless figure sitting on the ground behind its own severed feet, a signal that an unusual set of guests has arrived.</h1>

Event Information:

This article originally appeared in <a id="55d852b5-3528-42d4-858f-25f5fc0d1496" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/20/arts/design/art-by-women-at-gracie-mansion.html">The New York Times</a>.

The figure, made of dark bronze, is a sculpture by artist Kara Walker, titled “Invasive Species (to be placed in your native garden),” and has been put on a small patch of land near the entrance.

Art by women graces the people's house

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Jillian Steinhauer

Articles written by the author

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For 2019 Whitney Biennial, 75 artists are in -- as one steps out

Trump has inspired art, that's not always a good thing

Art by women graces the people's house