Exhibiting Nature’s Nation

By Alan C. Braddock

JUNE 2019 | Critics Page

Featuring more than 100 works of art from 70 museums, Nature’s Nation explores three centuries of creative activity by diverse makers in a range of media.

"Here Be Dragons"

By David Schmidt

FEB 2020 | Field Notes

The US publishing industry has recently thrown its weight behind a novel about migrants in Mexico: American Dirt (2020) by Jeanine Cummins. American Dirt is a gross misrepresentation of this nation, its culture, and, most importantly, its migrants. The fact that it has been selected by US publishers and publicists to represent the migrant’s story—to the exclusion of hundreds of other books—is deeply revealing.

MELATI SURYODARMO with George Kan

FEB 2020 | Dance

The superstar performance artist, Melati Suryodarmo, returns to New York next month to perform Eins und Eins (2016) at The Armory Show. The piece uses the human body as a metaphor for a nation’s health and involves the spewing of black ink. Having been trained by Marina Abramović and Anzu Furukawa, Suryodarmo combines butoh practices with western performance art, merging her Indonesian origins with her time in Germany.

Oda Jaune: Beyond Gravity

By Nikita Dmitriev

DEC 19-JAN 20 | ArtSeen

The life of Bulgarian painter Michaela Danowska, better known by her pseudonym Oda Jaune, might have formed the basis of a novel by Proust, Sartre, or Nabokov. Coming to Germany in order to study painting 20 years ago, a beautiful high school graduate from a post-communist Balkan nation falls in love with her eminent professor—artist Jörg Immendorff—and has a daughter with him. Soon after, the professor dies prematurely, and the young widow moves to Paris, becoming a darling of the city’s bohème. Told this way, however, the story misses a crucial point: Oda Jaune is not just a stock femme fatale, but also an accomplished neo-classical painter in her own right.