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art reviews from around new york

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.

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

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.

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

You could hardly be a German Expressionist were you not a bit on edge. Erich Heckel certainly was. Born in 1882, he has entered museum collections for his woodcuts, media that leave the artist’s physical cuts behind to trap the ink—and that is just for starters. Were his thick, parallel traces not black enough, his brush went literally and figuratively over the top in color. He prints to the very edge with sickly green faces and orange hills. And yet few artists kept his art more insistently under control.

The Neue Galerie has examples of both black and white and color, and it cannot lay the blame for strong emotions entirely on German history. Heckel saw his share of horror as a medical orderly, but the job exists to bring a comfort in time of war. Besides, the show all but ends before World War II begins. It follows him from his formative years in Dresden through his move to Berlin, where he could be less of a footnote to Die Brücke, or the Bridge. Trained as an architect, he helped found the movement in 1905 with a taste for the supposed “primitivism” of African art and a hostility to abstraction. It disbanded in 1913.

The museum sees echoes of Albrecht Dürer in black and white, and what artist had a greater confidence than Dürer in the Renaissance? When it comes to the flatness of work in color, it sees something of Henri Matisse and Fauvism as well—and who in art spread more joy than Matisse? Die Brücke at its peak included Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and later Max Pechstein and Emil Nolde, and Heckel had no apologies for his role. But his favorite subject was himself. He exudes self-command in his raised eyebrows, oversized forehead, and seriously pursed lips. If you want to claim him for the movement as the brains of the operation, he would not object.

He would not object either if you looked way, way back in art. Subjects make a quarter turn around for the high style of a female nude. He was painting those he loved, starting with himself. He devoted his largest work to his fiancée, known as Siddi Riha, a dancer in life and no less stylish. She also sat for a portrait with her brother as the very emblem of intelligence and familial love. Nor was Heckel fading away anytime soon. He lived until 1970.

Not all, to be sure, was sweetness and light. Those raised eyebrows make a disturbing welcome. He captures siblings in a battle for affection or for dominance, one placing his lips uninvited upon another looking away. Solo portraits seem unable to stand without crouching. In self-portraits, he holds both hands against his head in dismay. Roads twist unsteadily into the distance toward a garish sun.

So which was the news, good or bad? A small show has plenty of each, through January 12. Barely thirty-five works cram them into a single room. His black marks and thickly textured brush quickly become the norm. The woman known as Fränzi poses in the nude with a doll who might be manipulating her. Bathers in a Pond could be drowning or relishing a summer day.

Siddi Riha has the center panel of a triptych to herself, as Convalescent Woman. She is at ease behind an orange curtain, or is she? At left, a standing nude brings in a potted plant, unable to keep it from leaning unstably. At right, a second woman’s flesh turns to green, easily herself a work of art. A sunflower beside her looks strangely large. One can only trust that his medical experience will serve him well.

My review last time hardly did justice to Rashid Johnson at the Guggenheim Museum, through January 18. I had already written about him over the years in galleries and museums, so this time I kept to what this midcareer retrospective does differently. Rather than try to sum him up from scratch, then, allow me this post as a mere excerpt from past reviews.

For an artist so often tagged as post-black, Johnson has a clear eye on blackness. And anyone who took time with “The Dead Lecturer” can delight in his obsessions. He has plenty from which to choose at that. The show latches onto real blackness, but also a fully imagined past. It claims to describe “the New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club.” The Harlem Renaissance was never like this, not even for James Van Der Zee and Winold Reiss—but it could have been.

At least in theory, and Johnson mentions more than one relevant theorist. His artist’s statement, like Carol Szymanski, seeks an audience in the language of dating ads: “Must enjoy race mongering, disparate disconnected thoughts, and sunsets (really). Familiarity with the work of Sun Ra, Joseph Beuys, Rosalind Krauss, Richard Pryor, Hans Haacke, Carl Andre, and interest in spelunking the death of identity a plus.” Post-black here means not abandoning or confronting stereotypes, but wearing them lightly. As that classified ad adds, “a sense of humor a must.”

At the start of “Fly Away,” four rows of faces stare out from six large paintings. They blend together as caricatures, somewhere between horrified and grinning. They would look at home in a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Johnson works on tiles much like subway walls. Yet he conceives them as individuals. He thinks of every one of them as “that guy,” even as he pours on a mix of black soap and wax—and then cuts into it before it dries. This is death by a thousand cuts.

Still, he is not just baring his soul, but embracing its place in public art. If a falling man makes you think of the Twin Towers, in an instantly famous photograph, this show opened just in time for the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11. Johnson has often used shea butter, the bright yellow gunk sold on the streets of Harlem and used in Africa for anything from cosmetics to foodstuffs. (His mother is a professor of African history.) Here he lays out a large table of it, fragmented and unsculpted, to expose his materials and his art. That mammoth final installation is an active collaboration with a pianist, Antoine Baldwin, who shows up when he pleases and produces swelling chords out of Keith Jarrett or McCoy Tyner.

Johnson has made a career of riffing on personal associations. He might toss in a space suit out of Sun Ra or a photo of his father, a text in African American literature or a comic novel. It works because he is a consummate riffer—and because his associations speak to others, too. There is no getting around not just street art, race, and politics, but also the grid and monochrome of Minimalism, and who would want to try? Anxious audiences may remember Abstract Expressionism as the “anxious object” for Harold Rosenberg, and those black faces arise from poured paint (or a reasonable substitute) and the artist’s gesture. What began as Anxious Men, at the Drawing Center in 2015, has become Anxious Audiences, including you.

Johnson’s work has an implicit narrative, from anxiety to escape and back again. Do not, though, expect too tidy an ending. An installation, Antoine’s Organ, refuses to wrap up its themes in a neat package. Its books include Native Son but also The End of Blackness, for an artist often associated with “post-black identity” in art, and Sellout, for an artist who has moved to one of Chelsea’s largest, whitest, and wealthiest galleries. It even hides the pianist on a high shelf within. If you spot him, bear witness.

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

Rashid Johnson finds an African American history as yet unwritten. It could hardly be otherwise, for much of that shared history is also his, going back a generation. He could be questioning a shared identity—or claiming multiple identities for the wealth of African American experience.

Black artists everywhere are reclaiming the past and the nation as their own. Johnson may seem to stand apart. A show of “Smoke and Mirrors” in 2009 cited influences from jazz to Minimalism. They and other traces lay in books, photographs, and other objects on makeshift shelving. Still more clung to a black painting that filled the opposite wall. They did not pretend to cohere, no more than a favorite musician of his, Sun Ra.

They also looked forlorn, as if the artist were struggling to hold onto his memories. The occasional potted plant, too, made a small side gallery look too large for its own good, but still not large enough for an always overflowing, always inventive body of work. Is that crusty, black expanse a challenge to formalism, black history, or the viewer? I hardly know whether to call it smoke or a mirror. Still, it had me coming back, happily, to find out. Here and in a separate review, I return to four shows over many years to look for clues—starting here with a mammoth 2025 Guggenheim Museum retrospective through January 18, as just part of a longer review and my latest upload.

What then is left for the Guggenheim to fill the entire ramp? Born in 1977, Johnson could speak for African American art in a new millennium, but how? Before the wax, black soap paintings, and shea butter, before the polygonal shelving, one sees him finding his image, a black man’s image, in the lives of others. Like Isaac Julien, he posed as Frederick Douglass, neatly dressed and commandingly alive. He played another Johnson as well, Jack Johnson, not sparring but lying on the boxer’s grave, a hefty pedestal. The show’s title, “A Poem for Deep Thinkers,” quotes another hero, Amiri Baraka, the late poet and former LeRoi Jones.

But can a black man afford a hero? With Douglass, it takes only hair parted at center and a grim smile to play the part, while Jack Johnson’s idea of public sculpture is unable to get it up. The poet’s line comes with more than its share of doubts, like every bit of the younger man’s art. He sees blackness as the fate of anxious men, while infusing everything with a sly wit that never lets go. A shelf painting pays tribute to Charles Mingus, the jazz musician, but with an LP called Clown. A spray painting reads Stay Black and Die, but it is alive. Call it graffiti or expressionism’s signature, but he is happy to claim both.

Caught between terror and joy? Why choose, and my earlier reviews tease out why. Already, though, one can see all the better how irony itself won out. It did so in slow motion, with video art, like a yoga session on a Persian-accented rug. When Johnson and friends take their exercise to the beach, it seems inflected as much by martial arts as inner peace. When his bookshelves include Bill Cosby on fatherhood, it may reflect his own life stages or Cosby’s sad excuse for a role model.

By the show’s end, Anxious Men have become Lost Souls. They do so with a shift from wax and moisturizer to broken ceramics and mirror. The damage could extend to his own earlier work as well. Yet the bright tile conveys only lightness, and a triptych may have you thinking of a celebration or a game. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. The media may also allude to Jack Whitten, another handy role model, with a retrospective of his own at MoMA.

Even the most penetrating jokes can wear thin, and Johnson has had plenty of exhibitions without this one. The curators, Naomi Beckwith and Andrea Karnes, break the chronology now and then, and I am not sure why. Yet one last step into the present would be worth it for its scale alone. The potted plants of earlier work have become a hanging garden, descending from the Frank Lloyd Wright skylight. Taken together, the ramp’s top level becomes an installation, as Sanguine, with an “embedded” piano. Expect scheduled performances or the one inside your head.

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

Psalms was from its start a work of art. The largest book in the Bible, it belongs to the writings, books that have become neither doctrine, prophecy, nor history but wisdom and poetry. People turn to it for direction and support.

Among the most popular books in the Hebrew Bible, it bears a king’s name—like the Song of Solomon, its author’s. Only the books of Moses can claim the same. With “Sing a New Song,” the Morgan Library presents its lyricism, context, and commands.

The show’s lively title comes from a psalm, through January 4, and it begin by introducing King David, the book’s purported creator. He sits bearing a full-bodied yellow lyre in a painting from the very birth of the Italian Renaissance, by Lorenzo Monaco. This is, as the show’s subtitle has it, “The Psalms in Medieval Art and Life,” but it runs as late as the High Renaissance in Belgium and from much of Europe. It balances paintings with illuminated manuscripts and movable type. Chronology matters less here than function. You may find yourself wondering whether to turn to it for godliness or hope.

The curators, led by Roger S. Wieck, start with David, but not as a notorious sinner. He gets off neither hard nor easy. He just gets the job done, as a bringer of artistry and authority. That opening painting hangs next to the Crusader Bible, so you know that this is serious business. The show’s six sections continue with the Bible in translation into Greek from Saint Jerome and printing from Gutenberg himself. Annotated Bibles bear color codes and psalms in performance bear notes.

Their several uses need not remain all that distinct, and the poems need not remain merely psalms. The show moves through psalters, breviaries, and books of hours. It ends with texts for rituals of remembrance and death. It has space for monks in celebration. It returns often to men and women who conveyed their message to the community, most notably Saint Augustine and Monica, his mother. When the show speaks of the Middle Ages as its point of orientation, believe it.

You may find yourself missing something, a story. The Morgan is not out to march from discovery to discovery. The lack of a progression in purpose or time forbids an obvious progression in style as well. The many kinds of ritual object here may seem to set the psalms themselves aside, and I could quote only a few. The concluding focus on death may come as altogether a surprise. Can the psalms still bring relief?

The museum brought out the Crusader Bible only this spring, amid a tribute to Morgan’s Bibles and an African American woman, Belle da Costa Green. She served as Morgan’s first librarian. Consider the present show as less new and revelatory than a thoughtful continuance. Or maybe think of it as snuggling up with a good book. It will take patience to penetrate the experience in worn samples and shared rituals. It will take more to convey David’s flawed humanity and the Bible’s word.