Martha Schwendener

Giant arms and hands aren’t a new thing in public sculpture. Head to Rome and you can see a giant right hand, originally from a 4th-century AD colossal sculpture of the Emperor Constantine. Paris has (finally) Jeff Koons’ 41-foot hand holding a bouquet of tulips, his tribute to the victims of terrorist attacks. Visit Trafalgar Square in London, and you can gaze upon David Shrigley’s “Really Good” (2016), a sculpture of a hand with the thumbs-up gesture — with the thumb grotesquely disproportionate to the hand, suggesting everything might not be supergood in Brexit-era London.

Thomas’ “Unity” is more polite than Shrigley’s sculpture. Muscular and appropriately proportioned, it suggests the arm of an athlete, echoing a smaller sculpture of an arm spinning a basketball on the tip of a finger that Thomas conceived in 2015. That work, called “Liberty,” inspired by a photograph of a Harlem Globetrotter and cast from the arm of one-time NBA All-Star Juwan Howard, is now in the Brooklyn Museum. Over the course of his career, Thomas has created other sculptures of hands and arms, with titles like “Promise” (2016).

Sports and the black body have been in the center of Thomas’ work since he began exhibiting photographs a decade and a half ago that showed shaved heads or chests branded with Nike logos. (He also created series of photographs in the vein of appropriation artists like Richard Prince, who rephotographed advertising imagery). Thomas, who studied photography at New York University and worked in commercial photography and television, brings to attention the way products are marketed to African Americans, as well as the historical lack of representation of black people in the mass media.

Thomas’ move into sculpture, though well-received, has been, to my mind, much less exciting. The sharpness and astuteness of his photography is often absent from three-dimensional objects, particularly the large-scale works that mimic sculptors like Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, who created outdoor installations based on everyday objects. Thomas takes this formula and overlays it with African American motifs, like an Afro-comb stuck in the ground, titled “All Power to the People,” which has appeared in Philadelphia and at Burning Man.

The best project in recent years by Thomas — and one that strives for actual unity — is “For Freedoms,” founded in 2016 with Eric Gottesman as a “platform for civic engagement. ” It produced collaborative exhibitions, installations, public programs, and billboard campaigns across the country. Inspired by Norman Rockwell’s 1940s paintings of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms (freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear), the billboards created through this project utilize Thomas’ photographic and advertising acumen in a smart, productive way. (Thomas lives in Brooklyn and is married to Rujeko Hockley, a co-curator of the last Whitney Biennial).

Politics has often been the point in public sculpture from ancient Rome to Oldenburg’s earliest public works, such as a phallic lipstick wheeled like a tank onto the campus of Yale University during the Vietnam War, to Shrigley’s absurd thumbs up.

“Unity” was originally called “We’re No. #1,” a more assertive title, perhaps recalling the historical competition between the boroughs that reaches back to the 19th century. “Unity” is a traditional and fairly conservative work, accompanied in the official news release by a statement that sounds politician-worthy: “This sculpture is a homage to, and celebration of, the unique and multifaceted character of the borough of Brooklyn,” Thomas says. “The spirit of Brooklyn has always been about upward mobility and connection to roots.”

Perhaps Thomas is saluting the new Brooklyn — the one of rising property values and more anodyne art. A raised fist, like the black power gesture at the 1968 Olympics that inspired and galvanized so many people, appears on the handle of Thomas’s comb sculpture, “All Power to the People.” That bold attitude feels more like the Brooklyn of yore.

Not having walked the Brooklyn Bridge in several years, I decided to cross Saturday after seeing “Unity” installed. When I reached the Manhattan side there were vendors selling tchotchkes, including a sign that said, “No Stupid People Beyond This Point.” As a longtime resident of Brooklyn, I would be perfectly happy to have a 22-foot bronze sign with that message posted at the entrance to Brooklyn.

This article originally appeared in

A Sculpture for Brooklyn's New Golden Age?

NEW YORK — Standing at the newly constructed intersection of Tillary and Adams streets, near the exit from the Brooklyn Bridge, is a new, 22-foot bronze arm with the index finger pointing skyward. Commissioned by New York City’s Percent for Art program, the permanent sculpture was created by Hank Willis Thomas and is titled “Unity” (2019). Is this outstretched arm a new greeting at the threshold of Brooklyn, like the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor?

Several years in, TEFAF is examining its clientele and tweaking its game plan. Among many of its 90 vendors, “cross-collecting,” or assembling private collections of art from different eras and categories, is a trend now, and TEFAF has responded by including seven collaborative booths on its upper floor. Here, modern or contemporary art is displayed alongside ancient artifacts or Renaissance works in jarring, imaginative and sometimes radical ways. (It’s long been a signature of Axel Vervoordt, the antiquarian, designer, and founder of his Belgium-based company.)

France grabbed the world’s attention when Notre-Dame cathedral caught fire in April. Cultural programming feels particularly French-focused this year, with a report on Sunday for plans on rebuilding Notre-Dame; a panel on early 20th-century French fashion; and the American premiere of “Decoding Da Vinci,” a film co-produced by the Louvre Museum commemorating the death of Leonardo 500 years ago — while in the employ of the French court of King Francis I.

For aficionados and collectors of Chinese and Latin American art, these works are the subjects of panels (though not much represented in the fair itself). The educational offerings, titled Tefaf Afternoons and Tefaf Coffee Talks, sound casual, but they are helmed by experts, the same way every object in the fair is vetted by specialists, including other dealers. At $55 per single-entry ticket ($25 for students), TEFAF is an investment, both in time and money, but the assumption is that you can afford it.

Collaborations

The collage aesthetic — juxtapositions of diverse and seemingly unrelated elements — has reached the art fair format. If you don’t mind the mixing of media, millenniums and cultural mindsets, this is a good thing. A standout pairing is the contemporary art dealer Sean Kelly and the antiquities dealer Charles Ede (Booth 210). Among their smart displays are a photograph of the artist Marina Abramovic, her face covered in honey and gold leaf to recreate a Joseph Beuys performance from the 1960s, next to a 2nd or 1st century B.C. Hellenistic head of a man, carved with parted lips and a bulging brow that suggests he was a powerful orator. Next door, Benappi, Mehringer, and Cortesi (Booth 211) are showing mid-20th-century European modern painting with Spanish Renaissance sculpture. The Peruvian-born, Milan-based artist Jorge Eielson (1924-2006), who stretched and tied portions of his canvases into knots, can be found behind a 16th-century walnut sculpture of the hermit Saint Jerome by Juan de Valmaseda, suggesting wildly different approaches to dynamism in art.

Decorative Arts

Originally, TEFAF New York showed contemporary art in the spring and decorative arts in the fall. Contemporary art has clearly infiltrated this edition of TEFAF — a sign of its viral popularity — but furniture, silver and other decorative objects are well represented. A pair of 17th-century Japanese screens at Gregg Baker (Booth 353) feature a fall scene and a cherry tree made of blossoms created from crushed abalone shells. Burzio (Booth 336) has a hulking Italian table made around 1600 for the Alessandri family’s palace in Florence. Lavishly inlaid with coral, lapis lazuli and marble, and with gilt wooden legs, the table is a none-too-subtle display of the family’s wealth and power.

A wrought iron fireplace hood designed in the 1880s by Louis Comfort Tiffany for his East 72nd Street home, and then his Long Island estate — accented with distinct Japanese motifs — is at Lillian Nassau (320), while the French dealer J. Kugel (Booth 301) has a deliciously funky, mid-17th-century vessel by Hans Clauss of Nuremberg from a nautilus shell and gilt silver and featuring the Roman god of the sea, Neptune, grasping a seashell in his hand. Holding down the modern end, Anne-Sophie Duval (Booth 203) has a 1930 cream-colored leather armchair with ebony legs designed by Jean-Michel Frank, who combined raw materials with cool, classical lines to create a new minimal aesthetic.

Visionaries

In an age when fantasy and post-truth serve as refuges from nastier realities, there has been a perceivable spike in visionary art. TEFAF is liberally sprinkled with masterful proponents of this trend, throughout history. A fantastic allegory of “Ignorance, Envy and Jealousy” (1837) by the British Royal Academy painter James Ward is at French &amp; Company (Booth 312). Complete with snakes, monsters, a shimmering rainbow and Truth (a statuesque woman) dressed in white, the canvas, which once belonged to the Royal Shakespeare Company, might have been considered academic kitsch a few decades ago. In our era, however it looks like a deliciously hallucinogenic mashup of William Blake and internet emojis. Dreams and hallucinations were also near and dear to surrealism, and Max Ernst provided some of its strongest images. A 1939 painting by Ernst of poplar trees at Galerie Thomas (Booth 308) makes foliage look like fossilized megaliths.

Notable Women

The hallway at the Armory is lined with color photographs by the Amsterdam-based photographer Carla van de Puttelaar of important women in the art world, including collectors, curators and other luminaries. A couple of female artists — not unknown, but certainly underrecognized — to look out for include the sculptor Germaine Richier at Galerie de la Béraudière (Booth 104) and Agnes Pelton at Bernard Goldberg (Booth 102). Richier’s sculptures somewhat resemble those of Alberto Giacometti. Like him, she was a student of Antoine Bourdelle (who was, in turn, a student of Auguste Rodin). Richier’s 1956 sculpture of a couple at Béraudière shows her technique of displaying brass with no patina, so it looks almost like gold.

In Pelton’s diminutive canvas “French Music” from around 1917 at Goldberg, sprites and spirits swirl through the lower regions. Born to American parents in Stuttgart, Germany, Pelton (1881-1961) could be filed under visionaries: Her abstract paintings, many created in the California desert, tried to fuse color, sound and vision with occult shadings. The little work here serves as an appetizer to a retrospective, organized by the Phoenix Art Museum, that travels to the Whitney Museum of American Art in the spring — when TEFAF arrives again.

Exhibit Information:

Nov. 1-5; Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; tefaf.com.

TEFAF Shakes Things Up With Cross-Collecting

NEW YORK — When The European Fine Art Fair arrived in New York and set up in Park Avenue Armory four years ago, it was enough to be exactly what it was: a fair that boasted European old master paintings and antiquities, and catered to museum curators and high-end connoisseurs.

For the art world, the biggest news coming out of Pittsburgh last year should have been the opening of the 57th edition of the Carnegie International, the oldest survey exhibition of visual art in the United States. Instead, news of that exhibition was eclipsed in October by a shooting at the progressive Tree of Life Synagogue in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, which killed 11 people and wounded six.

Art seems minor in the wake of such events. And yet, as time and history stretch out in the aftermath of trauma, art becomes a prime place where tragedy is acknowledged, memorialized and processed.

Art is an inherently hopeful gesture, and as institutions increasingly become forums (“laboratories,” in the current parlance) for new ideas, not just showcases for wealth or “soft power,” they can be places to heal and ponder how to move forward.

In Pittsburgh — where vast sums of money made relatively quickly during the Industrial Revolution were spent on art — museums and alternative spaces abound, complementing many schools and universities. Contemporary art, with its global ambitions, feels right at home. The city was, historically, a magnet for immigrants and home to indigenous peoples. A recent tour of Pittsburgh showed how the vibrant visual arts community, in many ways, offers a model for diversity and tolerance.

Carnegie International, 57th Edition, 2018

This edition of the Carnegie International, organized by Ingrid Schaffner, includes 32 artists and artist collectives — and very few unfamiliar names. The upside of this approach is that many of the artists here are midcareer and know, from experience, how to operate within the potentially homogenizing context of a large exhibition and create exceptional displays. Several here are outstanding, activating the Carnegie Museum of Art’s collection and making you think differently about art history.

On the outside of the museum, El Anatsui, the Ghanaian sculptor who has become one of the most imitated artists in Africa, has draped the upper facade of the entrance with a work made from his signature found bottle caps and printing plates sourced from a Pittsburgh printing press. The work treats the museum like a kind of body to be dressed with a garment. Inside the galleries, Ulrike Müller and Sarah Crowner use bright tiles, enamel, weaving and canvases sewn together to test the line between art and craft. Nearby, a terrific presentation of portraits by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye with cryptic titles suggests painting as a portal into the everyday lives of her characters, while Dayanita Singh’s installation with lush silver gelatin images bundled in cloth in India questions how history in the form of images is archived and stored.

The boundary between furniture and sculpture is playfully transgressed in Jessi Reaves’ fantastic full-room installation, where art and design blend. You’re encouraged to sit on the sculpture-furniture. If you make the pilgrimage out to Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s “cabin” masterpiece designed for the family of Edgar J. Kaufmann, you can see Reaves’ sculpture on the terrace, made during a residency there: a lanky homemade shelving unit with an iridescent burgundy zip-on mantle that looks like a sadomasochistic vampire’s cape.

Back in the museum, Josiah McElheny, working with curators John Corbett and Jim Dempsey, shows his MacArthur-award mettle with an expertly researched display. Curious musical instruments and documents relate to maverick composers like Harry Partch, Pauline Oliveros and Lucia Dlugoszewski, who created sculptural wooden instruments that are one of the standouts of the installation.

Two artists who engage with the Carnegie’s collection in innovative ways are Karen Kilimnik and Jeremy Deller. Deller has installed tiny video screens in window-size cases in the museum, turning historical displays of upscale living rooms into updated everypersons’ dollhouses. Kilimnik is exhibiting her effusively florid paintings alongside the Carnegie’s decorative arts collection, as if to show how the salon-style hang, created to bring art (and intellectual discourse) to mass audiences in the French salons of the 18th and 19th centuries, could also be a form of aspirational kitsch.

One of the most ambitious presentations here is the terrific show-within-a-show, “Dig Where You Stand,” organized by Cameroon-born Koyo Kouoh, with research contributed by graduate students at the University of Pittsburgh. Drawing from the collections of the Carnegie Museums for what she calls a “visual essay,” she points out that changing language is the taproot of changing ideas. She wants us to rethink “coloniality” — different forms of colonialism and occupation — since Africa, she points out in the guide, is a continent with 54 very different countries; the one thing they all share is that they were colonized.

Throughout the ocher-colored space she has paired objects and images to make you question their origins and messages. African sculptures sit near Mickalene Thomas’s photograph of black women assuming the pose from a famous Manet painting. Screen prints by Kara Walker are juxtaposed with a cutout silhouette of an “honorable” gentleman holding a whip.

Kouoh throws all categories into a quandary. Bernd and Hilla Becher’s black-and-white photographs of outdated industrial structures in Germany — considered landmarks of conceptual art — are shown next to Teenie Harris’ photographs of a 1950s home-appliance fair for African-Americans in Pittsburgh. What defines art history and constitutes a survey museum? What’s included, championed and omitted — and how do those decisions reflect colonial and racist history? The implication is that every encyclopedic museum is probably sitting on a trove of exceptional objects that could be artfully rearranged to promote diversity, inclusion and tolerance, rather than acquisition and power. (Unless, of course, all the art should be “repatriated” and sent back to where it was made, though “home” may no longer exist.)

Through March 25 at Carnegie Museum of Art; 412-622-3131, cmoa.org.

Artists in Residence

The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh’s premier alternative space, housed in a former industrial building and a couple of annexes, has become a mecca for installation art. Here you will find immersive works by pioneering light artist James Turrell and one of Yayoi Kusama’s wildly popular “infinity rooms.” The focus, however, is on the temporary residents at the Mattress Factory and what they produce. The projects by 2018 residents include Brazilian collective OSGEMEOS’ top-floor installation, with large yellow light bulbs sprouting from the floor, altered photographs and paintings that pay homage to cheap portrait studios in Latin America, and a wild zoetrope, a pre-film animation device that winds up a couple of times a day.

Laleh Mehran’s darkened room in the basement relies on viewer-activated digital effects that update the ancient Persian concept of “Boroosh” or “glimmer of light.” In the nearby Monterey Annex, Karina Smigla-Bobinski’s transparent ball, studded with charcoal and inspired by nanobiotechnology and 19th-century computer prototypes, becomes a viewer-activated drawing machine you can bounce off the walls. Christina A. West’s electric apple-hued “Screen” (2018) is like a distorted fun house inspired by photographic green screens. In general, the works at the Mattress Factory are engaging crowd pleasers that challenge how we create and relate to our environments — although sometimes they sacrifice rigor for social-media “likes.”

Through Aug. 4 at the Mattress Factory; 412-231-3169, mattress.org.

‘Paradox: The Body in the Age of AI’

On a university campus and close to research laboratories devoted to information technology, “Paradox: The Body in the Age of AI,” a show of 11 contemporary artists organized by Elizabeth Chodos at Miller ICA, offers a perfect context for considering humans of the future. The title refers to Moravec’s paradox, the discovery that we can teach machines to reason and play chess — but not to master toddler-level sensorimotor skills encoded in the human brain through evolution. Claudia Hart’s installation with a virtual reality headset activates this principle by putting you in a new, disorienting sensorial environment. Jes Fan and Nick Cave create biomorphic sculptures that imagine new life-forms, and Zach Blas’ speculative video envisions a postgender, postcapitalist cyberworld.

Questioning the role of the artist in the age of artificial intelligence, Brian Bress includes his own work-in-progress as one of the illusionistic layers in a video laden with visual trickery, called “Sunset Geometry” (2018). Siebren Versteeg’s algorithmically generated painting machine makes attractive abstractions, suggesting that AI is slowly closing the gap between rational computing and corporeal creativity.

Through Feb. 3 at Miller ICA at Carnegie Mellon University; 412-268-3618, miller-ica.cmu.edu.

‘Devan Shimoyama: Cry, Baby’

In the mid-1970s, Andy Warhol was commissioned by an Italian art dealer to create portraits of drag stars who treated gender — altered through clothing, wigs and makeup — as a medium. “Ladies and Gentlemen” (1974-75) is paradoxically one of Warhol’s largest and yet least-known series. A collaged painting made with glitter, rhinestones and jewelry by Devan Shimoyama, an art professor at Carnegie Mellon University, hangs alongside the “Ladies and Gentlemen” paintings, creating a near-perfect pairing.

On another floor in the Warhol Museum, Shimoyama presents dozens of paintings, sculptures and photographs in which he uses himself as a boundary-testing and stereotype-breaking model, often in the imagined context of the African-American barbershop, a hotbed of heteronormative masculinity. A series of photographs created by Shimoyama during a residency on Fire Island in New York, in 2015, documents private rituals he performed on the beach with driftwood. He made the photographs at a moment when violence against black Americans was, once again, headline news, and began by reading about witchcraft, queer counterculture and chaos magic, photographing his body like a shaman, in the same way Warhol’s subjects performed in various genders to rise above a bleak real world.

Through March 17 at the Andy Warhol Museum; 412-237-8300, warhol.org.

‘Isabelle de Borchgrave: Fashioning Art From Paper’

Belgian artist Isabelle de Borchgrave uses paper to remake historical costumes and dresses in famous museum paintings. Inspired by a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute in the mid-1990s, de Borchgrave’s crumpled, pleated and painted marvels sit perfectly within the Frick’s collection of old masters, imitating the silk, satin, velvet and brocade the artists captured in paint. There are re-creations here of costumes worn by queens and mythical goddesses in masterpieces by Botticelli and other painters, and of fashion designs by Paul Poiret and Jeanne Lanvin. Some of her most stunning works here, however, hang on walls: They re-create Central Asian caftans from the 1700s to the 1800s, which de Borchgrave first encountered in Istanbul. They demonstrate her considerable skill as a painter and expand the Frick’s Western European-inspired collection into the customs and aesthetics of cultures far beyond the aspirations of Pittsburgh’s Gilded Age patrons.

Through Sunday at the Frick Pittsburgh; 412-371-0600, thefrickpittsburgh.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/arts/design/carnegie-international-pittsburgh-art.html" id="d5200b70-8636-3f65-a760-55c7683f840a">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic’s Notebook)

In Pittsburgh, Art to Heal By

On the outside of the museum, El Anatsui, the Ghanaian sculptor who has become one of the most imitated artists in Africa, has draped the upper facade of the entrance with a work made from his signature found bottle caps and printing plates sourced from a Pittsburgh printing press. The work treats the museum like a kind of body to be dressed with a garment. Inside the galleries, Ulrike Müller and Sarah Crowner use bright tiles, enamel, weaving and canvases sewn together to test the line between art and craft. Nearby, a terrific presentation of portraits by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye with cryptic titles suggests painting as a portal into the everyday lives of her characters, while Dayanita Singh's installation with lush silver gelatin images bundled in cloth in India questions how history in the form of images is archived and stored.

Using found materials to make art is a radical, if decadesold, tactic. In the late 1950s, artist Allan Kaprow predicted that artists would use everyday objects, including chairs, food, electric and neon lights, old socks and billboards. Many of these items appear in Ward’s show. And although Ward came up through the art system — he was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome and shows regularly in New York galleries and global biennials — his work also resembles folk art and relates to specific locations, documents and histories.

“We the People” reminds you of street memorials with shoes thrown over tree branches or telephone wires. But who is the “we” in this work? It might apply to everyone covered under the Constitution, since these words come from its preamble — except that we know, historically, that the Constitution hasn’t been applied similarly or equally to people of the African diaspora, like Ward, who was born in Jamaica and moved to the United States when he was 12.

“Amazing Grace” also echoes street art with its room-size installation of baby strollers arranged so that you walk around them on a carpet of fire hoses, in a space lit like a church or mausoleum. Ward found all the abandoned strollers for this work on the streets of Harlem in the early 1990s, at the height of the AIDS crisis and a drug epidemic that disproportionately affected residents there.

Ward’s art practice also harks back to the found-object aesthetic of Robert Rauschenberg, or Californians like John Outterbridge or Noah Purifoy, who tied his junk (or “funk”) practice to the Watts rebellion of 1965.

Ward also adds a newer element in the mass of objects he assembles, which amount to a contemporary version of the sublime, in which you are awed and overwhelmed by the magnitude of stuff gathered in one place. Our ancestors might have experienced something similar, standing on the savanna or the tundra, watching tens of thousands of migrating animals pass before them. Now we are awed by the amount of consumer objects in existence, plastic in the ocean, or the vastness of landfills.

The downside is that this aesthetic has become very familiar — a global trademark employed by artists from Beijing to Berlin and used to relate to a history, a culture, an event or an atrocity. (Ai Weiwei has used this motif so much until it barely registers anymore.) Moreover, we’re experiencing the baby strollers in “Amazing Grace” at both a historical remove and in a very different site from their original location: an abandoned firehouse in Harlem in the early ‘90s. Installation work gains — as Kara Walker’s sugar sphinx a few years ago showed — from its site; some of that is lost in the museum setting. It’s not just site or contemporary historical amnesia but also the exhaustion of a process — too much of a good thing and particularly when it’s triggered by the existential crisis of too-much-ness.

I would love to enter another site-specific work like “Amazing Grace” by Ward. At the New Museum, however, I spent more time with his smaller sculptures, which is where his materials sing. “Trophy” (1993) is a singular baby stroller caked with objects, including sugar and Tropical Fantasy soda pop that function as a gross-out nod to excess — but perhaps a millennial ode to the sugar trade that required bodies and labor and drove the slave trade for centuries. “Savior” (1996) is a shopping cart turned into a tower, like an ad hoc watchtower or minaret or an homage to the homeless who carry their life’s possessions with them.

“Glory” (2004) is an oil barrel turned into a tanning bed with fluorescent lights — a dazzling and deadpan comment on oil’s links to everything from luxury to melanin and the fossil fuel industry in Africa — and “Spellbound” (2015) is a piano covered with used keys, separated from their locations and purposes, and a video that includes footage of a church in Savannah, Georgia, that had breathing holes in its floorboards for escaped slaves hiding there.

One of the works I lingered over longest is also among the simplest. “Den” (1999) is a log that came from a tree growing through a chain-link fence sitting on a faded carpet runner. Attached to the log are the carved wooden feet — or paws, technically, since they mimic those of a lion or panther — from a piece of furniture. Mixing nature and culture, wood from the urban wild and “civilized” furniture, the object is arresting and disturbing, a brilliantly simple and subversive gesture.

There is much more in “We the People”: altered photographs, videos, more installations and immersive environments that relate pointedly and poignantly to the history of black Americans and Harlem in particular. Ward is best as a sculptor, though, one who reminds us that our world is filled with potentially magical objects. We enter museums expecting to be transformed, but if we shift our perspective, look around us, we’ll see that everyday life is really just art waiting to happen.

‘Nari Ward: We the People’

Through May 26 at the New Museum, 235 Bowery, Manhattan; 212-219-1222, newmuseum.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/arts/design/nari-ward-review-new-museum.html" id="47279c22-ab58-3482-a23c-ce0da0b6157a">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — The persistent and liberating message in Nari Ward’s sculpture and room-size installations is that art can be made from virtually anything. In his midcareer retrospective at the New Museum, “We the People,” this means old carpets, plastic bags, bottles, zippers, bed springs, keys and furniture. Hundreds of fold-up baby strollers take up a gallery in “Amazing Grace” (1993), while a canopy of yarn, rope and other found materials are used to create “Hunger Cradle” (1996). “We the Peop...

Nari Ward Shows the Power of Objects at the New Museum

<h1>NEW YORK — A few years ago, a plaza in Paris was named after artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, the Brooklyn-born painter who became a global sensation in the early 1980s and died at 27 of a heroin overdose. No similar honor has been bestowed upon Basquiat by the city of New York.</h1>

However, the opening of the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in the East Village, with an exhibition of nearly 70 works by Basquiat created from 1980 to 1987, serves as a fitting temporary shrine. The Brant in Manhattan is also part of a wave of private museums opening across the country, including the Hill Art Foundation in Chelsea; the expansion of Glenstone in Maryland; and the Marciano and Broad collections in Los Angeles.

But first, Basquiat. The story of this painter of Haitian and Puerto-Rican descent is one of the most documented in contemporary art history. Basquiat moved to Manhattan — partly to escape his strict accountant father — couch-surfed, lived off girlfriends and formed a post-punk band called Gray after “Gray’s Anatomy.” He sprayed poetic, enigmatic graffiti on walls in downtown Manhattan before moving to canvas and starred in an independent film, “Downtown 81.” He dated Madonna before she was famous and made paintings with his hero-turned-friend, Andy Warhol.

Basquiat was also part of a group of neo-expressionists that were largely rejected by critics interested in photography, video and conceptual art — but embraced by a popular audience and a surging art market, where he often felt treated like a faux-primitive genius, which he found racist and demeaning. And yet, this seemed to fuel his work — and the anger in it — toward greater heights, forging a brand of African-American history painting that addressed everything from cultural figures to black policemen. His reputation has grown posthumously, and in 2017 one of his paintings sold at auction for a record $110.5 million to a Japanese billionaire.

The show at the Brant Foundation, organized with the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, where more than half of the works at the Brant were recently on view, fairly represents Basquiat’s contribution. He concentrated on the human figure, and many of the works are grouped for heightened effect. One room is dedicated to paintings of boxers — Sugar Ray Robinson, Joe Louis and Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali) — while another features loosely drawn heads and skulls. And yes, the $110.5 million painting is in the building: a ferocious “Untitled” (1982) skull made with black and colored spray paint and oilstick against a banal blue background.

Other paintings pay homage to jazz greats like Miles Davis and Charlie Parker (Basquiat worked in a similarly improvisatory way), and handwritten text appears everywhere.

Basquiat favored the cutup technique of Beat writer William Burroughs, but he also witnessed the rise of rap and hip-hop music. His words feel eerily poignant today: “debt shrine,” “per capita,” “Hooverville,” “perishable,” “black teeth,” “immortality.” Others relate to histories from the Roman Empire to “Grillo” (1984), which mentions sugar and the West Indies and sports heavy nails like those driven into minkisi power figures in Africa to cast spells or seal contracts. Crossed-out words also recur in his paintings and are weirdly reminiscent of the bracketing or slashing of text in deconstructionist philosophy, to emphasize the cultural and biased nature of language. Funny to realize in retrospect that Basquiat and French philosopher Jacques Derrida were on the same page.

Notable works include “Unbreakable” (1987), a late painting in which the human figure is mostly banished — the work has never been shown in New York. The wry “Hollywood Africans” (1983), on loan from the Whitney Museum, includes text like “gangsterism,” “tax free,” “200 yen” and “sugar cane, inc.,” linking up creativity, race and corruption. A dramatic salon-style wall on the second floor includes a grid of 16 paintings from 1982, on wooden supports constructed by Basquiat’s studio assistant.

So why open the Manhattan branch of the Brant with Basquiat? Peter M. Brant, a newsprint tycoon, was an early collector, and the East Village was Basquiat’s old stamping grounds. The new Brant, an urban outpost of the Greenwich, Connecticut, institution, is in a former Con Edison power substation lavishly remodeled by the architects Gluckman Tang, which was also, for several decades, the home and studio of artist Walter De Maria, who was best known for “The Lightning Field” (1977) in the New Mexico desert.

Gluckman Tang has preserved the “bones” of the building — sturdy beige brick walls and sleek industrial staircases — and opened up rear-facing walls with windows that provide light and spectacular views of the neighborhood. The building includes four floors of exhibition space and a rooftop garden with a reflecting pool visible as a glittering skylight on the fourth floor. Nestled among old tenement buildings, the location feels very similar to Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, a new multistory foundation related to the nearby department store. Both institutions serve as emblems of the gentrification of former working-class neighborhoods, but also the proliferation of a new kind of museum.

Private collections have long histories — for instance, the Frick and the Morgan in New York — but also, at present, carry a double-edged meaning and purpose: They are private exhibition venues but also tax havens for the very rich. Brant was on the forefront of this phenomenon — both the private institution showcasing contemporary art and trouble with the IRS — when his foundation opened a decade ago across the street from his estate in Greenwich.

One of the arguments in support of the East Village space is that it offers free admission to see works that are rarely on view — although you have to make reservations, which are quickly becoming scarce. And the “free” admission to most of these private museums is the ultimate hidden-fee-economy tactic: We are all paying, in a variety of ways, to live in a system that supports colossal disparities of wealth. Museum admission might be free, but health care isn’t.

Interestingly, Basquiat’s work speaks exactly to these issues, but in somewhat coded form. It’s an old, old story: the black artist (or musician) who makes raw, personal work and sells it to a rich white person. There is something that feels almost not right about looking too long at a Basquiat because it’s like looking into an open wound. He didn’t go to art school (except for a few life-drawing classes) to learn this because it’s way beyond art, which is the best kind of art. But the words in Basquiat’s paintings often point to what it’s like to be turned into a masterpiece, a financial instrument, and a trophy.

The show at the Brant doesn’t wade directly into this, but the Guggenheim will, in an exhibition opening in June that focuses on the response of visual artists, including Basquiat, to the death of Michael Stewart, a young graffiti artist who lapsed into a coma while in the custody of New York transit officers in 1983. (The officers were acquitted by a jury). “It could’ve been me,” Basquiat said. Instead, Basquiat continued on, living a bifurcated life in which his work was highly valued but his existence, he even stated, was not.

I stopped trekking up to the Brant Foundation in Greenwich because the program there didn’t reflect the art I wanted to engage with. It was overwhelmingly male, white and approached through the triumph of the market — what’s hot and expensive — rather than a more critical prism. The current show presents Basquiat in a gorgeous, former-industrial space — but there are already dozens of fantastic, adventurous and experimental spaces in the area.

Perhaps one way private and public museums can work together is this: Private ones offer more opportunities to see work that has been highly (or over) valued, rather than stowing it away in free ports or elsewhere, while public institutions do the difficult, scholarly work we expect. (The Brant advertises itself as a “study center,” but it’s not clear yet what is going to be studied.)

How the Brant will coexist with this context remains to be seen. It’s great to see Basquiat in the East Village — although, with its new condominiums, steep rents and expensive restaurants, it barely resembles the neighborhood he inhabited 40 years ago. This exhibition will bring joy to a lot of people. The questions and complications it contains will reach far beyond Sixth Street and the art world.

Event Information:

Through May 15 at the Brant Foundation, Manhattan; 212-777-2297, brantfoundation.org.

This article originally appeared in <a id="924fc441-b7ec-4ca8-a175-b0ed01391e71" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/arts/design/basquiat-brant-foundation.html">The New York Times</a>.

'Jean-Michel Basquiat' at the Brant shows his bifurcated life

However, the opening of the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in the East Village, with an exhibition of nearly 70 works by Basquiat created from 1980 to 1987, serves as a fitting temporary shrine.

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Martha Schwendener

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