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art reviews from around new york

To wrap up from last time on the new Studio Museum in Harlem, you have every reason to make it a favorite, even apart from exhibitions and events. My list would start with the windows frames breaking up the front.

Their grayish brown brings a softness and variety to monumental geometries and materials. It assimilates its Marcel Breuer model without an imitation. After so many museum expansions in flush times, it could be the first original. I in turn have every to stop a review here, without yet having seen the rooftop in season.

Who anyway would review museum architecture for the art? It is no one entity apart from embarrassing exceptions—egotists here and there out to celebrate their taste and their his name. It is not even clear how it will hold up in the face of art. The nook for Tom Lloyd offers limited room. Will future exhibitions take back the fifth floor, where the Studio Museum’s history now crams within? I hate to end a review, though, without acknowledging the collection.

It comes as a relief after the narrow top floors. Modest doorways expand into a space without a single dimension or ungainly compression, by a few rows apiece. Walls are visually flexible but not physically movable. A few platforms to accommodate distinct media are both. No surprises here, but welcome all the same. The extent of a collection may indeed come as a surprise, although individual works are, impressively, mostly not.

You may not have known that the Studio Museum had a collection. While a handful of works belong to early American art, like Henry Oswald Tanner, this is not a proper history. It groups its work by theme, and even there it often defies subject or genre. So, it seems to says, do African America communities and their art. Landscape may mean sugar cane from Zwelethu Mthethwa in South Africa or an older world, and cities may mean urban realism or something else again. Other sections range from nature and spirituality, to color, gold, the body, and sound.

The choices favor artists who feel more than one point of attraction and will not let any of them go. That may includes Jack Whitten, who applies abstract motifs freely, or Karen Davis, who moves easily between abstraction and New York streets. It includes Leonardo Drew, whose tiling finds room for almost anything in its square grid. It places Norman Lewis in a category all to himself, with and a glorious impasto. It certainly includes David Hammons, so malleable and elusive that he has become the collection’s most frequent guest. As Emma Amos describes it in a title, abstraction by its nature is Things You Can’t Tell Just by Looking at Us.

It places familiar divisions in a context of blackness. For Elizabeth Cattlett, a black woman may be a mother and child, a Black Panther, or a mask. Kara Walker carries a white alternative to her own silhouette on her shoulders, as a friend, a burden, or a ghost. A self-portrait of Lyle Ashton Harris becomes a circus performer and a portrait of her race. They are all first and foremost people. What that bodes for the future is up to them all.

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Call it “Divine Egypt” or a delightfully human display, but above all call it business as usual. It could hardly be otherwise, not with some two hundred fifty works and five hundred years of history to make it the norm. More than half the display is from the Met itself.

It follows a show only this past summer and fall, also at the Met, placing African and African American art in context of Egypt’s art and history, just so you get the point. It follows, too, the reopening of the Rockefeller wing for the Third World, now filled with light. Together they continue the correction in art history begun over a generation ago when it comes to “primitivism” in ancient and modern art, with help from “The Art of Africa” at the Guggenheim.

It was museum business in another way, too, for a boy growing up in New York. The Met meant nothing less than a pharaoh’s tomb off the lobby, its enclosure a matter of life and death. A god ushers Tutankhamun into the underworld in statuary at the very start of its new show as well. It sustains a hierarchy on earth and in heaven, with animals as at once divinity and nature. With Re the sun god, Horus the protector of royalty, and Amun the shrouded manifestation of his divinity, the pageant is complete. Never mind that Tut died as still a boy and ordinary humanity could only obey.

I have had my say over the years about “The Art of Africa,” “Flight into Egypt,” the Rockefeller wing, and “primitive discord.” It has not brought me expertise. But then scholars, too, feel their limits when it comes to Egyptian gods. This show keeps the focus on the heavenly players and their drama, through January 19. Here I pare the story back to the little I can add. By all means follow the links for more.

The curators, Diana Craig Patch with Brendan Hainline, open things with that special relationship between gods and kings. The opening section sticks to the very act of godly protection. In statuary, gods and kings stand one behind the other or side by side. They appear together in stelas, slabs that serve for weight and color. Subsequent rooms divide neatly by deity. Before the show is over, it will have turned to coffins and preparations for another life.

Not even a king can sustain a relationship with more than two hundred deities, so there are plenty to go around. Their natural manifestation is not all that natural compared to studies after nature in Europe’s golden age, but rich all the same. It grows all the more welcoming as supernatural beings acquire the heads of animals. Carvings also serve as hand-helds, carved at times from gemstones, so that their protection never leaves. The show becomes a positive zoo of cats, dogs, lions, rams, and baboons. Scale matters, too, and they may appear as miniatures or at the size of their owner, like a gigantic scarab.

They are the first line of defense against serpents or the emotional terrors of life. It becomes a very personal understanding. A god gestures meaningfully with both hands or kneels, without ceding a position of authority. Faces may carry a touch of whimsy or a depth of solemnity. They may deliver too much of either one for modern tastes, but do not sell them short. They may yet outlast even death.

After the opening room, the story takes a giant step back for a comprehensive history of the gods. Deities take things back to the creation of earth, sea, and sky. They give birth to Isis and Osiris, whom the god Seth kills and dismembers, but without taking control. While the narrative is cryptic, its values are altogether theirs. One god, Maat, stands at once for truth and order because the two are inseparable. While the pharaohs were male, gods could easily be men or women.

Or could they be no one at all? One statue is little more than a large slab, pierced again and again by eyes. Divinity stops just short of abstraction. A film lingers halfway through for a festival in Luxor, where ancient authority becomes worldly celebration. I thought of the colossal sphinx in white by Kara Walker in 2014 with a more direct assertion of antiquity, only in sugar. Could Egypt once again win the battle for antiquity?

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Give the Museum of Modern Art credit. When it comes to photography, it is dedicated to covering the globe. If that sounds like a tall order, it takes the task little by little, a year at a time—and I work this together with earlier recent reports on photography by Consuelo Kanaga in Harlem and Sheida Soleimani in Iran as a longer review and my latest upload.

“New Photography 2025” has just eleven photographers in four countries, through January 17. As if to rub in its determination, they reside on four continents as well, a majority are women, and at least two are queer. Politics is the order of the day, and a collective identifies itself as the Nepal Picture Library.

Not that the successor to “New Photography 2013,” “New Photography 2015,” “New Photography 2018,” or “New Photography 2023” has taken an in-depth look at the state of each nation, its allegiances, and its conflicts. Those sharing a country do not share so much as a museum room. They are, though, familiar enough in their political and artistic alliances. You have not seen all of this before, but you have seen a lot more you should. Most work large or with installations. It is provocative but not always enough.

Some simply declare their allegiances and little more. That picture library documents “the public lives of women,” meaning in practice rallies and mass meetings. Sandra Blow papers a wall with “queer joy.” Gabrielle Garcia Steib photographs immigrants who live and work in New Orleans, many of them family, as the “spiritual border to the Caribbean.” Not that documentary and social photography is a dead end. Lindokuhle Sobekwa belongs to the proud tradition of Magnum photos going back to Robert Capa, which to Sobekwa means scraps of legal documents in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Some play on familiar genres and imagery. I felt for Sheelasha Rajbhandari, who treats her work as sculpture, mounting pixilated photographs on hand-made furniture. It demands, ever so earnestly, “To Be Free,” “To Be Fluid,” and “To Feel.” It hardly has room amid the good cheer for The Agony of the New Bed. I shall just have to trust Lebohang Kganye that she evokes her late mother. A boy by Prasiit Sthapit borders on the cutes.

Some, to their credit, play on formula, but deliberately and forcefully. Official sources, they know, make telling use of it to wield dangerous authority. Gabrielle Goliath arranges frontal portraits like mug shots in a long row across two walls, facing miniature pink and blue beds. They are victims of domestic violence. Tania Franco Klein makes a point of dull places, elusively. Her “Subject Studies” include more than a hundred sitters—in cars, diners, bathrooms, and offices.

Some do bring the unexpected and make it their signature. L. Kasimu Harris takes to black-owned lounges, for lively activity and plenty of smiles. Sabelo Mlangeni photographs rural weddings in South Africa, everyone in white and seemingly no one at home. They might be ghosts. Renee Royale sticks to sandy rivers reduced to dirt roads, while Lake Verea (Francisca Rivero-Lake Cortina and Carla Verea Hernández) is still more devoid of life. The duo photograph what might be diners or sheer artifice in Mexico City. Titles speak of Mascarón Dorado and Hojas de Metal (or golden mask and plate-metal leaves).

I tried to think that I had touched the soul of a continent or of art. I tried not to be mostly bored. The real fascination may have come in how often their subjects grew together. Nepal could be as modern as New Orleans and as feminist as New York. Klein’s interiors with in Mexico, all of them peopled, lie beyond glass and behind blinds, for a hot day or a steamy film. It is never easy to encompass the world.

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To pick up from last time on “Sixties Surreal,” Nancy Graves does not seem especially wrapped up in desert secrets, high-brow or low. Nor does she run especially counter to the period’s ethical or artistic standards. A child of the 1960s like me, people assumed, learned from zoos rather than abused animals.

Graves makes good use, too, of artistic standards in a camel’s anatomy and surface texture. She conceives the space of the museum as an oasis as well. If you do not find that right for the hey-day of Walt Disney, look again.

Dan Nadel, Laura Phipps, and Elisabeth Sussman as curators are not alone either in looking back to American Surrealism and Surrealism in painting. Europeans like Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí had emigrated to America and contributed to the birth of Abstract Expressionism. A 1966 show of “The Other Tradition” in Philadelphia, the Whitney argues, lent scholarship and street cred to Pop Art. That said, the Whitney seems little interested in Pop Art as many see it now. Looking for Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselman, Jim Dine, George Segal, Philip Guston, Alex Katz, or Larry Rivers? You will not find them here.

You will, though, find a lot not often linked to Pop Art or Surrealism. Together, they become a near replay of twentieth-century American art—and a total mess. Do not even try to predict what comes next. Raymond Saunders and Joan Semmel stand up for abstraction, the bright and brushy kind, but rooms apart. Video appears with a whole room for Edward Owens, new to me, and memories of his family, I have no idea why.

It is part of a concerted effort to place art in context of the artist’s physical and cultural identity. It gets brutal. The very first room features a painting, poster style, by Jim Nutt in which a woman takes pleasure in the act of castration. Martha Rossler crops a painting of what could be her own flesh, as Hot Meat. Mass culture, she makes it clear, presents women as hot meat every day. Paul Thek makes sculpture in the shape of bone, exposing dripping marrow.

The next full room pictures “Flesh and Bones.” It continues with artists known for the third dimension, like Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, Lee Bontecue, Eva Hesse, and Bruce Nauman. Assemblage here means a frontal physical posture, like folk art for the machine age. It appears with Edward Kienholz, Lucas Samaras, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Marisol. H. C. Westermann, who appears more than any other artist, is their patron saint. It makes perfect sense Claes Oldenburg devotes soft sculpture to a toilet.

In approaching the body, art like this makes good use of deception. Kay Sekimachi and Lynn Hershman Neeson alike depict human hair, but with nylon and feathers. Blond wood frames faux blond hair for Luis Jimenez as well. Rigid materials from Barbara Chase-Riboud descend to the floor in the shape of a soft black dress. Betye Saar has her Ten Mojo Secrets. Alex Hary could fit it all into a large empty pretend paper bag—and I wrap things up next time with the societal context that may be behind it all.

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A camel, Nancy Graves liked to say, should not exist. At the very least, a camel should not introduce American art from the 1960s, a time of abstraction on the one hand and pop culture imagery on the other. Yet Graves herself brings three of the species to the Whitney, through January 19, in sculpture, right out front of “Sixties Surreal.” As the title suggests, they and the art within look just a little surreal, and you may wish for something more like the world you thought you knew.

Graves looks at home, too, with life-size animals twisting gracefully in the desert sun. Come to think of it, the 1960s may have had a soft spot for the desert air. Critics called for rigor in late modern art, and zoologists spared no pains to come up with an evolutionary strategy for desert scarcity. The first public television station had debuted less than a decade before. Meanwhile artists looked to popular entertainment for guidance as never before. Pop Art, or so it seemed, was here to stay.

Sometimes life itself can get just a little surreal. I speak with Trump as president, and it makes “Sixties Surreal” difficult to ignore. It can also make compromise that much more abhorrent, and Pop Art did not simply embrace big media. It called for critical scrutiny as well, and the Whitney tells its story. It just may try way too hard for a second Surrealism. As a postscript, half a century after James Rosenquist, Kennedy Yanko is still chasing big gesture and that PoP Art symbol of American dynamism, the automobile—and I continue the story with more artists and my latest upload, getting the story started seriously next time.

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The International Center of Photography calls just one of its year-end shows “Wanderings,” but all three bring people together who are hanging loosely apart. I cannot swear to the power of Graciela Iturbide, Naima Green, and Sergio Larrain as photographers, but do not cut them short, through January 12.

They belong to three generations and to places as far apart as Central and South America, Europe, and the United States. Iturbide photographs women as shadows with their back to the camera, looming, while the others look to their companions for company. She speaks of her subjects as caught in rituals of celebration and death, but which is which? Women lean forward, arms spread wide like an angel’s, a bat’s, or a demon’s, accompanied by a skull. The may share a desert landscape with dozens of anonymous others—or assume the greater luxury of Oxaca Botanic Gardens and Mexico City, where she learned photography herself. As curated by Carlos Gollonet, this is “Serious Play.”

People here compete to appear as individuals or as symbols of a doomed Mexico. Iturbide has a debt to return to the nation, all the while knowing that what she photographs is gone. Series run through the 1960s and 1970s, including one on the track of Frida Kahlo. She sticks entirely to Kahlo’s bathroom, where a poster of Joseph Stalin remains. It is not welcoming, but then you never can find a bathroom when you need one. She travels to Cuba, Panama, India, and Argentina as well, with support from Fundación MAPFRE.

These photographs see art as political and politics as gendered. Her best-known series, published as Juchitán de las Mujeres, imagines Juchitán, a rural community, as a place of mujeres, or women. Green sticks to women, too, for her subject is pregnancy today. As curated by Elisabeth Sherman of the Museum of the City of New York, she reduces it to the “concept of pregnancy”—evoked, she swears, through, through landscape and self-portrait. I make no promises.

Still, women get their due, like Aunt Dot in her kitchen. Pregnant women pose together, if you can call this posing. They can admit their vulnerability as well. “I multiply, says a photograph,” and “I shatter.” They are vulnerable as well crispness of Green’s colors and a wall-length photo-mural. I Spin Fantasies, a title says.

As for men, you will just have to venture back sixty years to Larrain. His photos are open to adults and children, woman and boys, but above all wanderings. They include series set in London, Paris, Valparaiso, and Peru—and to Vagabond Children. Their subjects may appear in close-up or as distant cousins of Green’s pregnant woman, doing their best to sustain a pose. They are, though, always in motion as Iturbide’s or Green’s will never be. She can do only so much, but it will get you going all the same.

Their photographs leave plenty of room for impulse and for video. They are cousins, too, to rebels and vagabonds in film of those years by Jean-Luc Godard. They hop on and off buses and trains. All of them normally reside in Magnum archives, curated by Agnès Sire, former director of Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson. Does that have you thinking of documentary photography and the decisive moment? All three photographers are just hanging out.

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