03 Oct TIO NYC: Van Herpen at Brooklyn Museum & Fine Art Photography!
Bedazzlement is right around the corner – or a few subway stops to Brooklyn where the Museum is featuring the magical, multi-sensorial world of Iris Van Herpen. The two photography shows, one at the brand spanking new Aperture on Columbus Avenue and the other, Peter Hujar at The Morgan, are very different experiences: quiet, intimate – and equally, though very differently, worth a stop.
“Iris van Herpen: “Sculpting the Senses” features over 140 haute couture pieces, contemporary artworks, and natural history specimens. The show is scheduled to be open through December 6, 2026. (Images are all courtesy Brooklyn Museum.)
“Sculpting the Senses” spans 11 immersive, themed chapters that track the artist’s innovative designs from the microscopic to the telescopic. Major highlights include the glass-bubble encrusted Seijaku dress; pioneering 2010 Crystallization 3D-printed top; and a living algae dress containing 125 million light-emitting cells.
But the whole show is highlight after highlight.
Like the Dior show (2021/22), the Van Herpen was also engendered by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and organized by Matthew Yokobosky, Senior Curator of Fashion and Material Culture. Hence same “house style”: theatrical rooms; mannequins in tableaux settings; lights; music.; action. Or simply couture as spectacle.
Image courtesy Brooklyn Museum. (Yes, a tribute to the iconic Monroe moment.)
Dior, however, was a heritage brand celebrating itself, ie a very very beautiful corporate memory. Van Herpen, on the other hand, is a living, independent designer whose work makes an actual argument for life and art melding. Truth is beauty and beauty is truth kind of happening.
According to the museum, van Herpen’s designs draw on micro-organismic biochemistry, fractal geometry, fluid dynamics, and neuroscience. For her Brooklyn show the artist hand-selected works from the museum’s permanent collection to place in dialogue with her designs, lending the viewing experience more intellectual heft than the Dior.
As it was with the Dior, spectacle once again appears to be the Brooklyn Museums’ default mode. In that context, however, it is important to remind ourselves that each of van Herpen’s garments, however much tech she employs, represent hours upon hours of handwork, visible when we get up close and force ourselves to ignore the insistent, all-pervasive stimulation happening in the rest of any of the many room.
Also we suggest you ignore the “captions” associated with each garment- as-happening. The language is convoluted so not very helpful. Better to let your eyes, ears, heart and mind be your guide.
Of note: The Metropolitan Museum of Art first recognized and showed photography as fine art in 1929. The milestone followed an historic 1928 donation by legendary photographer Alfred Stieglitz, a fierce advocate for the medium. Stieglitz gifted 22 of his photographs to the and The Met put eight of those pieces on display the following year, marking its first official exhibition of photography as fine art.
But the museum’s dedication to the medium reached its peak decades later in 1992, when it officially established an independent Department of Photographs.
Following a series of blockbuster shows over recent years – Brooklyn: Dior, Mugler and now Van Herpen, all within five years. – fashion in general and couture fashion in particular are having a moment.
(And not for nothing, these designer retrospectives are among the best-attended shows museums put on.)
So fair to say fashion has been admitted to the museum on fine art’s terms.
Photography: Aperture & Hujar at Morgan Library:
These two photography shows act as counterweight to the couture blockbusters: small, up close and personal close, human-scale.
Aperture at 380 Columbus.
Aperture, courtesy the foundation.
The photography nonprofit and publisher Aperture opened its permanent home on September 18, a two-floor, 10,000-square-foot space across the street from the American Museum of Natural History. The event marks a homecoming of sorts: Aperture sold its own building in 2005, moved to a rented Chelsea floor, and in 2019 closed its gallery and bookstore. Now it’s back at street level with both and admission is free.
Aperture’s opening installation, “Aperture Loves New York” (through November 1), is curated by executive director Sarah Meister, formerly a MoMA photography curator.
Tyler Mitchell, 2019, courtesy Aperture
The show draws on 24 photographers the organization has long championed, including Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Dawoud Bey, Carrie Mae Weems and Nan Goldin. Iconic city photographs hang beside the Aperture books they appear in.
Meister is known to talk about photography’s “democratic spirit.” The free, open, street-level design twins with that notion.
Hujar: Contact at the Morgan (through October 25).
According to the The Morgan, the venue acquired the 5,783 contact sheets Hujar had at his death, along with his “job books” or recording assignments from 1954 to 1985. The show presents more than 110 contact sheets and 20 enlargements, with each sheet reproducing an entire roll so we the viewers can follow Hujar’s eye frame by frame. A number of these sheets carry the artist’s editing marks for cropping and printing, so we get to see what he chose and what he passed over. (Grab a magnifying glass at the entrance to really see what we are talking about.)
Contact sheet from Hujar show, courtesy The Morgan.
Image, courtesy Morgan Library.
It could be said the Hujar show is “The Odyssey” turned on its head. After all, a contact sheet is the smallest format in photography: tiny frames we have to lean into, with nothing between us and the artist’s choices. The film under discussion here is about the size of a postage stamp, arguably the most intimate art happening in New York right now.
The show underlines the fact Hujar was a great photographer of the vulnerable body, including nudes, portraits of friends and lovers and, in the 1980s, a community being lost to AIDS – which also killed him in 1987.
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