30 Nov TIO NYC: More DEI in the Arts (and that’s a good thing…)!
With apologies to Buffalo Springfield, something’s happening here. What it is is becoming clear… Call it Synchronicity? Coincidence? Karma?
On recent evening, we attended a reading of Oren Sadie’s “Imminent Domain” at Frances Hill Barlow’s Urban Stages. The plot is simple: Syd and Carrie are a young couple who live in a beach house in Venice, California. Syd’s on the verge of selling a TV pilot to the networks; Carrie’s about to have a baby. Life is full of promise until a giant RV pulls up outside their house and poses an existential threat. As we said, simple plot – but the existential threat? Not so simple. The play is ultimately about reparations or compensating Black Americans for their labor and production that created wealth – but was denied to them in any form due to extreme racial bias.
Just read “James” by Percival Everett, an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. The story, a brilliant, action-packed reimagining of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” both harrowing and darkly humorous, is told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view. In the telling, James/Jim is a brainiac and writer. And “his” book was an instant New York Times bestseller, a Kirkus Prize Winner, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and a National Book Award Winner. Fact is Spielberg is turning this masterpiece into a feature.
Reading now: Best-selling author Damien Lewis’ “Agent Josephine.” Prior to World War II, Josephine Baker was a music-hall diva renowned for her singing and dancing, her beauty and sexuality. She was also the highest paid female performer in Europe. When the Nazis seized her adopted city, Paris, Baker was banned from the stage, along with all “negroes and Jews.” Yet instead of returning to America, she vowed to stay and to fight the Nazi evil. Overnight, the lady went from performer to Resistance spy. And, as a member of the French Nurse paratroopers, a cover for her spying work, Baker participated in numerous clandestine activities, emerging as a formidable spook.. Ultimately she became a hero of the three countries in whose name she served: the US, France, and Britain.
Both the fictional Jim and the very real Josephine have finally gotten what they deserve: recognition, understanding and esteem. And not a moment too soon for the post-election melodrama in play.
And the above are not alone…
Amen.
Black Lives Matter is, at long last, showing up in the best of all possible ways, sucking the limelight all over New York City and not just plays like Safdie’s or in those two laureled works of literature, but also in museums, galleries, in dance and theatre.
And thankfully the resonance from that movement has morphed from tokenism to heartfelt mea culpas and tributes all over town.
We’ve already addressed the monster, no-miss show tributing the singular sensation Alvin Ailey, whose muses and works are on display at The Whitney. Also the superstar athletes in the dance troupe Complexions, a spin-off of Ailey, whose run at The Joyce ends soon. (Go here to read about those shows.)
Hats off also to the breathtaking show of aboriginal art at Asia Society, curated in conjunction with 16 tribal creatives. (Go here for more.)
And the beat goes on. Stories told on the walls of museums and galleries as well as on stages, in addition to honoring Black and Jewish Americans also speak of the sad need to conceal one’s true identity as “Jim” did in the Everett book, as Josephine did in order for the countries she loved to survive, even thrive.
Read on for details… Might help to mitigate the horrific impact of November 5 on all things DEI.
Morgan Library, courtesy Wikipedia.
Morgan Library: “Bella da Costa Greene, A Librarian’s Legacy,” through May 4, 2025
Belle da Cotsa Greene, courtesy NPR.
Belle da Costa Greene. The name might not, well, ring a bell, but New York’s historic Morgan Library and Museum is attempting to pay credit where credit is clearly overdue…
The new exhibit, titled “A Librarian’s Legacy,” opened in November, just in time for the Morgan’s 100th anniversary. The happening traces Greene’s life and lasting influence as the library’s very first director.
“It was an unusually prominent role for a woman at the time — a Black woman who chose to pass as white to survive in a highly segregated America…,” explained NPR.
Toward the end of the 19th century, J. Pierpont Morgan, the Gilded Age’s answer to the Wolf of Wall Street, used some of his extraordinary wealth to amass an equally extraordinary collection of books, manuscripts and fine art. The man soon came to realize it all needed a home – and a skilled caretaker. In 1905, Morgan’s bibliophilic nephew recommended one of his co-workers in the library at Princeton: Belle da Costa Greene.
Summoned to an audience with the financier, Greene impressed Morgan so much, she soon moved into an office in the newly constructed building known as “Mr. Morgan’s Library” in midtown Manhattan. She would remain at its helm for the rest of her life and, after Morgan’s death in 1913, she led the effort to make his vast private collection accessible to all.
Among the many discoveries in the show, we found that Belle had a romantic relationship with the celebrated art critic and historian Bernard Berenson – who hid his identity as a Jew as she hid her as a woman of color.
Go here for more on this long overdue tribute.
Uptown at The Jewish Museum is a show of the work of a young black artist in dialog through their work with celebrated white art titan – and yet another Jew who concealed his identity. Philip Guston’s real name was Phillip Goldstein.
The Jewish Museum, Trenton Doyle Hancock and Philip Guston, through March 30, 2025!
Image, courtesy The Jewish Museum.
Guston, courtesy The Jewish Museum.
“Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston” or “Dialog and Discourse” examines Guston’s influence on the young Hancock and examines how legacies of white supremacism, racism, and antisemitism have impacted the lives of black and Jewish Americans for generations.
Philip Guston (American, b. Canada 1913–1980), was the child of Jewish immigrants from Odessa (present-day Ukraine). Trenton Doyle Hancock (American, b. 1974), is a leading Black contemporary artist based in Houston, Texas.
In the show, Guston, including his now iconic, late satirical Ku Klux Klan paintings, are in dialogue with major works Hancock created in response to his inspirational mentor. The collaboration highlights the duo’s parallel thematic explorations of the nature of evil, self-representation, otherness, and art activism.
Paraphrasing the Museum:
Foregrounding works that depict the Klan, the exhibition demonstrates how both artists engage with and at times even inhabit these hateful figures to explore their own identities and more broadly examine systems of institutionalized power and their feelings of complicity within them. Yet, despite the difficult subject matter and at times violent imagery presented in their work, both Hancock and Guston share an ability to conquer the pain and emotion of their art through humor that is both dark and undeniable, engaging with their shared embrace of the visual language of comics. Philip Guston, whose early social realist and abstract work ultimately evolved into an idiosyncratic form of social satire, is now one of the most revered painters of the twentieth century.
Significant examples of Guston’s buffoonish Klansmen paintings and drawings from the late 1960s and early 1970s, selected by Hancock, are the centerpiece of the exhibition.
Guston’s cartoonish style was used to defy the Klan’s bigotry as racial tensions roiled America—tensions that continue to resonate with renewed urgency today. Guston also used the hooded figure as an alter-ego wrestling with his Jewish identity and his assimilation into American culture. This phenomenon is illustrated especially in Guston’s masterful The Studio (1969), which depicts the artist as a Klansman painting a self-portrait, acknowledging his own complicity with white
supremacy.
For the eclectic artist, cartoonist, and illustrator Trenton Doyle Hancock, Guston’s work has been a consistent source of inspiration for nearly 30 years. His collaged psychedelic canvases similarly draw on the language of comics to challenge and comment upon the American condition…
“Draw Them In, Paint Them Out” builds upon the Jewish Museum’s ongoing commitment to exploring contemporary art in real time, providing a platform for each new generation of artists.
Go here for a detailed review of this important – and timely – show.
Metropolitan Museum: “Flight Into Egypt, Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876 –-Now,” through February 17. 2025
According to The Met:
Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now examines how Black artists and other cultural figures have engaged with ancient Egypt through visual art, sculpture, literature, music, scholarship, religion, politics, and performance. In a multisensory exploration of nearly 150 years of artistic and cultural production – from the 19th century to the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s to the present day – the exhibition includes nearly 200 works of art in a wide range of media.
Thematic sections featuring works from The Met collection and international loans from public and private collections trace subjects including how Black artists and other agents of culture have employed ancient Egyptian imagery to craft a unifying identity, the contributions of Black scholars to the study of ancient Egypt, and the engagement of modern and contemporary Egyptian artists with ancient Egypt…
One objective is the comprehensive show is to set the record straight: Egypt is not part of the Middle East, which is what archaeologists, curators and art historians had long insisted. It is part of Africa.
Works in the show are largely by African American artists hoping to define and thereby reclaim their cultural history after the violent legacy of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which separated people of African origin from their roots.
“…That historical injustice went hand in hand with the denigration of African culture as inferior to the greatness of Europe. For Black artists from the 19th century to today, claiming ancient Egypt as their own has been a way of asserting agency and power…,” said The New York Times.
The comprehensive show is beautiful and includes a live performance. But it is also a bit daunting for those to whom almost all the artists are unfamiliar. Likely requires a second look and time to absorb the creative wonders on display.
Off DEI and on to the Upper East Side.
Salon 94:
Located at 3 East 80th Street, Salon 94 is a New York-based contemporary art gallery owned by Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn – who is blessed with a great eye.
As an artisan in the textile arts of Japan, Mitsuko Asakura moved beyond the craft of dyeing to the art of tapestry weaving, an artistic vision she explains in her book, “Listening to the Thread” (1994). Asakura once said of her eye-dazzling work, redolent of Color Field painting:
“The structure of weaving is comparable to that of pointillism in painting. Colors never really mix together in textile; they keep their distinct colors and fresh transparency under light.”
Asakura is one of eight artists in show titled “The Lady and the Unicorn.”
“‘The Lady and the Unicorn: New Tapestry’ presents eight artists working in disparate parts of the world whose work simultaneously evokes and rejects the spirit, scale, and laborious nature of Old World textile fabrication, creating inventive explorations of material, color, form, and technique that challenge historical, Eurocentric definitions of tapestry,” explains the gallery.
A must if you are trolling the Upper East Side art scene. (Around the corner from Salon 94 is Orphism at the Guggenheim. Go here for more on that exhibition.)
Gagosian at 980 Madison Avenue, “The Street,” through December 18:
Image, Peter Doig, courtesy Gagosian.
According to online sources, Magic Realist Peter Doig went from being an artist whose peers were too embarrassed to show alongside him to possibly the most internationally loved painter of our time. A leading figure in contemporary art’s “return to painting,” Doig is particularly responsible for re-inserting narrative and lyricism into works on canvas today. No big surprise then that his images feature dreamlike landscapes and enigmatic figures.
Doig is also meticulous colorist, using uneasy, disquieting combinations to create simultaneously charming and foreboding landscapes. Similarly he combines seemingly incongruous, disparate reference points in his work, often inserting images from his own lived experience, film, art, and literary histories together in one composition.
For the record, Magical Realism refers to a genre of literature and fine art in which everyday situations are interrupted, or mixed with, supernatural, spiritual, or other unlikely and uncanny events, environments, and characters.
Doig’a Magical Realism paintings have some resonances with Surrealism, however, Doig combines imagery from multiple sources – film, art, and literary references, as well as his own memories to create his hybrids: part-realist, part magical scenes.
So it should come as no big surprise that the show he curated at Gagosian is a blend of those impulses. (See below Balthus, Bacon and De Chirico):
Summing up:
“…Taking as its point of departure Balthus’s remarkable 1933 painting of the same name, generously loaned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the exhibition is a portrait of urban life seen through the eyes of painters.
Featuring important loans from major institutional and private collections in the United States and Europe, including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Saint Louis Art Museum, Tate, and the Rothko family collection, it presents paintings by Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Max Beckmann, Edward Burra, Vija Celmins, Prunella Clough, René Daniëls, Giorgio de Chirico, Beauford Delaney, Denzil Forrester, Jean Hélion, Satoshi Kojima, Lotte Maiwald, Mark Rothko, and Martin Wong, alongside major paintings by Doig himself.
After seeing his project at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris last year, I invited Peter to curate one of the final exhibitions for our 980 Madison Avenue gallery. It is one of several collaborations that we are discussing, and I am very excited to be working with this hugely important and influential artist in this unique way.—Larry Gagosian
This exhibition was born from more than a year of conversations and represents what is for me an exciting opportunity to present a selection of works by painters who I admire for their inventiveness and ability to surprise. Larry immediately recognized the potential for an exhibition informed by the eye of a painter, rather than a curator or gallerist, and is the ideal partner to bring it to fruition.—Peter Doig.
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