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art reviews from around new york

Sometimes it seems that I have spent a lifetime listening to news of war and little but war. Just halfway through is twenties, Nabil Kanso must have felt the same. He spent the rest of his life bringing the news to others in paint.

For Kanso, news of war was always news from home. He fled war in Beirut for the United States, knowing full well that it put him at risk of another. It was 1966, and Vietnam was already tearing apart his adopted country, but to him it must have felt like more of the same. He painted armies, civilians, and a ravaged landscape, because who can look at any of these without seeing pain? He did not live to know war’s return to the Middle East and Ukraine. Yet the news he brings still seems altogether new, at Martos through October 5.

It all blends together, but not to numb the senses. And he did paint Vietnam and the Lebanese Civil War, but a title speaks only of Accumulated Agonies. He worked large, as if to claim for himself the entirety of art history as well. He had seen Disasters of War from Francisco de Goya and Goya’s graphic imagination, and he adopted Goya’s explicit violence and accumulating darkness. Warriors and their weapons take up the foreground, with near horizontals at center for rifles and the barriers they penetrate. Their diagonals give the paintings a kind of architecture while adding to the chaos.

As the poem goes, ignorant armies clash by night. The scale itself calls for heroics and history painting. The paintings would not be out of place in the American wing of the Met, but heroes, too, cry out in cruelty and terror. The scale recalls another kind of heroism as well. Kanso came to New York when Abstract Expressionism was a living memory. Artists had to paint big and messy, with visible brushwork covering every inch.

He has, as far as I know, pretty much dropped off the map, although he himself worked on the business side of art, as a dealer. “All-over painting” was itself out of fashion. So were representation and sentiment, and I do not mean to canonize him now. Something was in the air, though, with the Neo-Expressionism of Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer, who looked back to the Holocaust and World War II. Kanso has something of their earnestness and, conversely, irony. He also knew the demand for color.

Kanso uses color for its own sake and for the horrors of war. It runs to blood red and fiery orange. Deep blue can suggest shadows, discolored flesh, or battle dress, perhaps from the Napoleonic wars. Color can also light up the anonymity of inarticulated faces. They can gather in arcs with red lips or in a crowd. One painting, though, sticks to a smaller canvas for a single face, The Confronting Mother.

Not that you would know its gender. Chalk white sets off large black eyes that speak of forced witness. Black tears drip from wide eyes, and flames run along its chin. Something or someone else intrudes at left, whether or not she can recognize it as hers. Maybe Kanso leaves so little explicit because he did not want to be known as the guy from Beirut. Or maybe he just knew at his death in 2019 that there would always be another war.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Minimalism begged to retire old ways of understanding art. To speak of a mirror or window onto nature seemed to call for something outside art beyond the thing itself. What is nature anyway, and why do you need to know?

At the same time, Minimalism insisted on the painted object in the gallery and on the picture plane. And that introduced a new platitude and a new need to look for rectangles, the grid. And then the revival of painting for the millennium blew that demand out of the water.

Is it ever time to retire an old metaphor? Is it ever time to retire a love of painting for its own sake? Never, I hope, which is what keeps bringing me back to abstract art. “Overflow, Afterglow: Chromatic Abstraction” pleads for richness rather than rigor, while its artists are not all that expansive or abstract. Yto Barrada at the International Center of Photography finds abstraction lying around the darkroom, along with enough trash to call it Pop Art. Hasani Sahlehe and Patrick Wilson, in turn, bring things right back to the grid and the metaphors—and I work this together with recent reports on the first two shows as a longer review and my latest upload.

Sahlehe does not make stripe paintings. So why does his work seem, at least at first, to come down to horizontals with enhancements? The stripes are a bit wide as horizontals go, and he lays them on thickly, in acrylic gel. The medium gives each one the potential to lie flat or to shine. They give direction to fairly large paintings, vertical in format, with no bare canvas showing. Less than half, though, make it all the way across.

They cannot make it because shorter fields of color, close to verticals, get in the way. One could describe them as framing the horizontals, for frames within but refusing to mirror the complete painting. Fields depart from the grid in more subtle ways as well, besides their apparent thickness. They may have slightly curved edges, and which call attention to the overlap. Still, colors are bright, clean, and clear. An old way of painting looks both familiar and new, at Canada through October 5.

In all these ways, a grid becomes a process, and Sahlehe calls the show “Song Ideas,” as if to apologize for a work in progress. I cannot swear that they sing, but try not to ask for too much. A Georgia-based painter is not in the loop regardless, right? Not so fast. He shares the gallery with a group show that includes a hot artist, Xylor Jane, and a survivor, Joan Snyder, with no apologies necessary. The work leaves nothing further to do, other than to make more paintings.

I should be remiss not to credit the gallery. The artists who showed there before moving on would make a good wrap-up of the revival of painting all by themselves. Carrie Moyer, for one, has her latest with another newcomer to Tribeca, Alexander Gray through October 26. I have written about her more than once, with admiration for her fluid colors on a wide-open canvas, so just a quick mention, if I may. This time, seeming biological appendages add a further layer to all-over compositions, also enriched by pumice and ground semi-precious stone. They add to the varied application of paint, like spatters, as much as to its texture.

Speaking (yet again) of painting as mirror or window, Patrick Wilson makes it inescapable. His pale blues with the sheen of a mirror or window pane alone would do so, at Miles McEnery through October 26. He builds on rectangles of translucent color, each framed with a narrower field of the same color. Then he messes up the picture by arranging them in two columns or offset from one another. If a Minimalist would ask that color and the grid alone make a painting, Wilson is fine with that. They keep moving all the same.

This gallery has four spaces in Chelsea alone, and it favors abstraction. Everything looks good, but what stands out? Suzanne Caporael, in the gallery’s original space, takes pains with such familiar geometries. They could go unnoticed, were they not embedded in the indeterminate space of darker fields. Next door, Rico Gatson once again applies checkerboards of the simplest colors to anything from seeming warheads to patterns of radiation. If he is just calling attention to himself, give the credit or blame to painting.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

To wrap up from last time, Jenny Holzer started with something less public and more obscure. Diagrams taken from science and engineering bear not quite appropriate titles.

And then comes something surprising from so talkative an artist, emptiness. The show really does have empty bays. It becomes a collaboration with Frank Lloyd Wright and his museum, just as with Quiñones and countless others, but not without her usual defiance. When she first installed her crawl screen rising up, exhibitions started at the top and worked their way down.

Silence allows voices to linger in memory, and it asks, too, just who gets to speak. Sure enough, when the artist first moved past crawl screens and truisms, it was to censorship. Paintings in oil of official documents have more than just the names blacked out. They run to near uniform blackness. One document duly states that it never mentions George Orwell, but that is after censorship. His file, now “voided,” once voided him.

Holzer’s first New York retrospective had a heavy bias toward recent work, at the time the marks of the censor. So does this one. Blame it if you like on the curator, Lauren Hinkson, but this artist hears living voices, and she wants her work to live in the present as well. She projects more messages on the museum’s façade at sunset early in the show’s run. When she at last returns to lies and clichés, it is to the unchallenged master of both. Trump and his party gild the lies, and so does she in silver and gold leaf.

Trump’s words appear on fragmented metal, ending in a loose pile on the floor, and her own marble lies up the ramp in fragments as well. Now if only he could be so easily consigned to the ash heap of history. One outburst portrays the January 7 uprising as an epic event, and more paintings capture the voices around him the day itself. Trump-appointed judges are determined to see that courtroom testimony comes only after the election, if it takes place at all. Smeared paint may not show Holzer at her best, but it will have to do. When the crawl screen pauses its messaging briefly to flash in red, it could be sounding the alarm.

Text like hers would look good on t-shirts, and one can see their influence on Rirkrit Tiravanija and his freebies reading The Odious Smell of Truth. Never mind his political neutrality and pandering. They parallel, too, John Baldessari and his California irony, but without his glib detachment. They have an echo as well in the terse anger of Glenn Ligon—or the sheer excess of another African American, Adam Pendleton. I leave Holzer’s influence on text art and her 2009 Whitney retrospective to earlier reviews. She has returned earlier to the Guggenheim, too, as curator of its collection, and you can check out the links for a far fuller picture.

The show’s biases raise tough questions. What is the point of a retrospective anyway? How do the certainties and complexities of Postmodernism look today? Holzer’s whole body of work explores biases, and even her squares of gold look like the marks of a censor. Still, the opening overflow of light, text, and color lingers longest and matters most. For once, the museum rotunda talks back.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Jenny Holzer has a way with words. She also has a way with silence.

For a time her crawl screens were seemingly everywhere—speaking for you, standing up to you, and getting under your skin. Text art will never speak so forcefully and so elusively again. It made her not just the voice, but the voices of political and postmodern art. Were they never spoken aloud? It brought her to street posters in the 1970s, for Truisms and Inflammatory Essays, and to the ramp of the Guggenheim in 1989. This is not sound art, although that has its place, but it echoes once again through the museum.

Now she recreates that work, but with additional words, because for her the same old words will never suffice. They ascend on LED along the rim of the ramp, facing outward onto the rotunda, with selected work from over fifty years in the bays by the wall, as “Light Line,” through September 29. It is a retrospective as a work in progress, her first in New York since 2009, and text keeps coming, apart from conspicuous gaps and silences. The empty bays and floors all but empty of art speak loudly, too. They allow her words to echo in the silence, and they bring out how much she refuses to say. As it happens, Joyce Kozloff in paint keeps up with the news, too, with maps, and I work this together with a report earlier this year on Kozloff as a longer review and my latest upload.

You may remember Jenny Holzer for the crawl screens, and you could almost take in her show at the Guggenheim without ever leaving the rotunda. It does not have much in the way of seating, but then her art does not run to creature comforts. You might have to stand and crane your head, but it is hard not to keep looking as the words ascend. They emerge from the lobby wall, come into view, and come into view again as they complete the circle and move on to the next. Their terse messages are instantly memorable—and ever so easy to forget as new messages finish them, contradict them, and supplant them. It says something that a review in The New York Times misquoted one of her best known.

Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise, it goes, and you may have read it yourself on billboards, screen prints, and of course crawl screens. It has such an impact because it, too, may or may not come as a surprise. You are used, you may think, to politics as the abuse of power, and it may have driven you further to the left or to a protest vote for Donald J. Trump. The message can still come as a shock, though, if you expect “abuse of power” to end with something less banal, like a condemnation or an expression of pain. Truisms are often like that—temptingly obvious and temptingly easy to deride. In her hands, they are inflammatory all the same.

Holzer has perfected a voice that combines banality, truth, and lies. Which of the statements are hers? She is not saying, and none are so easy as you may have thought to dismiss. They speak of the need to lie next to someone and of the need to live apart. They veer into family, community, and politics, without distinguishing one from another. They could be personal confessions or the crushing voice of authority.

Her choice of LED works much the same way. It is the medium of advertising in Times Square, where she first took it up on commission in 1972—a medium devoted to gaining your trust and to taking you in. Yet it is also a medium of harsh whites and pixels, with the thrill and detachment of what was then the latest technology. I hope, though, that you will not end your trip in the lobby after all. Holzer got her start in other media, and more lies in store up the ramp. That includes the overflow of voices and silences.

The very year of her Guggenheim installation, she carved her truisms in marble benches and the dark stone of what might be a coffin. Do not expect comfortable seating or reverence for the dead. Media like these may last forever, but they, too, speak of transience. No one settles into park benches for long, and funerals are all about the brevity of life. The truisms began, though, as posters, and the exhibition proper begins with an Inflammatory Wall of them from around 1980. Make that four walls, on the full height of the two-story High Gallery just off the museum lobby.

It has room for nearly a thousand, in clashing colors and clashing messages. How an artist at age thirty accumulated so many in just three years is a marvel to itself. Still, they are not hers alone, regardless of who wrote them. She has invited another artist, Lee Quiñones, to scrawl right over them. It updates her presentation for street art while bringing out a crucial aspect of her work’s anonymity. She is bearing witness and giving voice to others—and I wrap this up next time with more recent work and the rest of her show.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

“My back is scarred by the lash—that I could show you. I would if I could make visible the wounds of this system upon my soul.”

Frederick Douglass made the wounds of slavery visible for a generation of white Americans, starting before the system itself came to an end in the Civil War. Making visible is also the business of art, and Isaac Julien recreates an address by Douglass in all its eloquence, on “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” And what is it, Julien asks implicitly, to African Americans today? The address provides the framework for an intimate look at the speaker’s life as a free man, on video at MoMA. In the exhibition’s title, it poses Lessons of the Hour, through September 28. It asks, too, whether a divided nation can ever escape slavery’s lessons.

This could be Julien’s year. Douglass escaped slavery in at age twenty-one, in 1838, and Lessons of the Hour takes its title from a speech in 1894, a year before his death. Again on video, in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, Julien brings to life the Harlem Renaissance and its leading sculptor. He also curates an exhibition of that sculptor, and I bring together my reviews of that exhibition and Julien’s video as a longer review and my latest upload. As I wrote then, there is nothing savage about the art of Richmond Barthé—and, if there were, he would be the first to tame it. If you have any doubts, head right for Feral Benga, in a gallery retrospective of a thoroughly sophisticated artist.

“I have watched from the wharves,” Douglass said, “the slave ships in the Basin, anchored from the shore, with its cargoes full of human flesh. . . . In the still darkness of midnight, I have been often aroused by the dead heavy footsteps, and the piteous cries of the chained gangs that passed our door.” His words evoke pictures, and so does Isaac Julian, but less painful ones. He opens to trees, to a gentleman’s study and a woman sewing, and to the man himself, slowly leading a horse. He follows Douglass on the train, looking inward and perhaps creating those words in his head. He ends with Douglass standing tall on a mountain’s peak, like the statue of a hero.

He works in film, transferred to video, for the epic clarity of its color. It runs from day into night and from introspection to fireworks on, of course, the Fourth of July. It includes shots of an hourglass marking the hour, if not its lessons. Still, time and history have a way of playing tricks. Day breaks again after the fireworks, on its way to the mountain. The sands of time sometimes flow and sometimes stand still.

Julien hopes to encompass both reality and hope, especially when they collide. A hand picks cotton, but it might almost be picking white flowers for their beauty, with echoes soon after in yellow glistening on a tree. The audience for oratory files into a Methodist church with the bare architecture of an arena today. It includes blacks and whites, men and women—some in the fashion of the day, others in the present. Other clips borrow police surveillance tape of protests against police murder, although I somehow missed them. The video runs just under half an hour, but one can enter as one pleases and, in time, see the loop begin again.

I first encountered the artist, born in England, in London in 2003, already moving in and out of history. Two videos placed him both within a Trinidad community forty years earlier, after a poem by Derek Walcott, and a contemporary city much like Baltimore, where Douglass lived as well. When I caught up with Julien again, with Playtime in 2013, I worried that he fixed all too easily on his heroes and villains. (Do read my review then, for a fuller picture.) Has he finally found the hero he deserves? Has his hero found the response he deserves, in fireworks and, in church, applause?

As Douglass, Ray Fearon makes his character nuanced, steady, personal, and profound (and I wish that the museum took more care to credit him). Then again, I may have sold Julien short all along. Ten Thousand Waves, in 2010, already has many messages and many channels to mess them up. His latest video, a highlight of the Biennial, comes closer still to an installation and a hall of mirrors. It also moves easily in time, back to the Harlem Renaissance. Now MoMA presents Lessons of the Hour, first shown in 2019, as a historical document itself.

Douglass was the most photographed American of his time. And the curators, Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi with Erica DiBenedetto, set out photos, publications, and newspaper clippings, floor to ceiling and in cases. They also include the handwritten text of a speech on the role of images of black and white America. Is blackness once again “going dark,” feared by or invisible to white eyes? For Julien, Douglass speaks forcefully but never gets over his introspection, his memories, and his pain. “Anything, no matter what, to get rid of thinking!”

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Hope springs eternal. Each year the Governors Island Arts Center does its level best to fill the summer doldrums, and one can always hope.

At the top of stairs from the café, flags displays red roses and a message of “Yes,” while a bedsheet beside them shows what I took for a dreamer. Who would dare disturb its sleep, even for art? But then, as the show’s title has it, “Hope Is a Discipline,” just this summer through September 29. Bread and Puppet Theater, which made both works, has been at it now for almost sixty years.

A display case tells its story. It began as a cross between activism and Off-Off-Broadway (or maybe Off-Off-Off Broadway) theater without ever quite ascending to the pantheon of performance art. Books and magazines speak of puppet making, but also justice and a dance of death for the victims of “Assistant Mass Murderer” Antony Blinkin, the secretary of state. I hardly know whether to call it dogmatism or discipline. And still Adama Delphine Fawundu, another contributor, can remember When the Spirits Dance. Twin tapestries drape onto the floor with pigments from Sierra Leone, herbs from Mali, “whispers” from Africa, and shells from Cuba, South Carolina, and Maine.

Africans, she insists “built this place,” which must have taken discipline and persistence. Still, hope for the future can be hard to sustain. Maggie Wong sets out a drafting table, painted an acid red and with a red blanket trailing behind it. It could be her work table, for a work in progress, but newsprint has already filled it with devotion and anger. But then a bedsheet smeared with house paint sounds discomforting enough on its own. Who can ensure that those dreams will not be nightmares?

Hope may envision a future, but the entire show looks back, much like the display case. Suneil Sanzgiri sees his video trilogy as a conversation with his father. And it, too, is cautious when it comes to hope. Grainy footage shows a protest in India, but also seemingly purposeless walks through dim corridors and closed courtyards. A second video, an “experimental documentary” by Kyori Jeon, bears Flesh-Witness. Solitary standing figures could be proud or weary, even as others help their companions onto a platform and wave their banners to those who can see.

Hope may be more evident in a second show sharing the space. When “Tropical Frequencies” looks back, it sees a continuing tradition. It is hardly the first to focus on Caribbean art and the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, nor the most memorable. It does, though, have an insistent interplay between painting and assemblage. It becomes an interplay between African American faces and ephemera as well. Quiara Torres sets a portrait within a pearly lamp or cage, where one can feel the confinement and almost smell an unseen candle.

The portrait has its echoes in flat, earthy reds for a pregnant woman by Bony Ramirez—or a standing figure by Emily Manwaring, both with an overlay of shells. Still more shells hang from chains for Ramirez, along with coconuts. Are they relentlessly optimistic? The Kiss of Protection from Mosie Romney sure sounds reassuring, but Cheyenne Julien dots her figure with small red nails. I exited not by the main entrance, but back down those stairs toward the ferry, leaving the flowers and bedsheet behind. I might have abandoned all hope.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.