Joyce Beckenstein
Joyce Beckenstein is a writer living in New York.
The menagerie of animal sculptures assembled in The Ark—the fifth annual summer exhibition at The Church in Sag Harbor, New York—bears witness to a crisis, both mythic and urgently contemporary: the Great Flood. Curated by Eric Fischl, this exquisite gathering reimagines the Genesis story as a powerful metaphor for our present moment. Here, it is not just a deluge of water, but of environmental, social, and psychic upheaval.
The eye travels a precarious edge in Born of Fire, a riveting exhibition of work by Iranian-born artist Shirin Neshat. It features three of her acclaimed photographic series: “Women of Allah” (1993–97), “The Book of Kings” (2012), and “Land of Dreams” (2019).
As an artist, Allan Wexler prefers asking questions about architecture, such as “How do the structures we build influence the rituals of daily living?” The twenty-two thoughtfully selected works in Probably True, Wexler’s first solo exhibition at Jane Lombard Gallery, navigate the inflection points of his eclectic thinking.
In her first solo New York exhibition, Snailing (Slippy Slimy Slug Slut), Korean-born German artist Anne Duk Hee Jordan tells the true story of Jeremy, an extraordinary snail. Jeremy’s shell coiled to the left instead of the right, a rare aberration misaligning his sexual organs.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons (b.1959) came of age during an oxymoronic moment in Cuban history, a time when Fidel Castro simultaneously encouraged creativity and supported art education as he vigorously suppressed political criticism.
In The Monument, The Monster and The Maquette, multi-media artist Michael Rakowitz takes the historical monument as his subject, holding our mythologized heroes—and the notable sculptors who cast their personas into public art—accountable for the coverup of historical truth.
Giovanni Bellini, Influences croisées presents an extraordinary selection of Giovanni Bellini’s paintings alongside those of the Venetian master’s mentors and students, Giorgione among them. “It’s a natural project for the museum because Édouard André (1833–1894) and his wife, Nélie Jacquemart (1841–1912), were great fans of Venetian art and bought many paintings, including a Bellini, for the collection,” said Pierre Curie, Chief Heritage Curator at the Jacquemart-André Museum and co-curator of the exhibit.
These are but a few of the ways Vermeer immersed his subjects within timeless, serene settings where, distanced from a world awhirl in conflict, they experience inner peace. And the viewer, in the quietude of Vermeer’s space, can share that sense of peace.
East End Arts in Riverhead, among the organizations supporting the creative community on the North Fork, envisioned more of an arts district rather than a single arts center, one with a broader and more diverse reach, inclusive of emerging and well-practiced artists. Regeneration, Ted Thirlby’s solo exhibition at EEA aptly represents how that effort has enlivened and redefined the future legacy of Long Island’s “other Fork.”
Mel Kendrick: Seeing Things in Things presents a riveting survey of works, from 1983 to 2022, by an artist who absorbed minimalism’s quirky mystique as he unabashedly broke most of its codifying rules.
For Freedoms aspires to engage the arts as a means of helping people reconsider how we as a people view and mete out justice. It’s a huge sweeping mission, but one that the exhibition, Another Justice: US is Them—Hank Willis Thomas & For Freedoms (US refers to the United States) manages to distill to intimate size and scale.
At first glance, this expansive exhibition of fiber and textile-related works heartens the viewer as gently and naturally as a loose button welcomes needle and thread.
As this meticulously curated exhibition introduces us to Glenda León as a well-established media ecumenical whose broad artistic range transports us from a shower stall in Cuba to ethereal constellations in the universe, so does it remind us of the power of art to sustain and guide us through life’s most challenging moments.
Edgar Jerins’s (b. 1958) exhibition of twelve figurative charcoal drawings, most nearly life-size, reinvents American Regionalism through the lens of present-day anguish.
Adam Straus is Still Looking for the Promised Land. A romantic at heart, he’s as humbled by nature’s transcendent beauty as he is unnerved by humanity’s ugly relationship with it.
To date, the museum’s website features 51 videos testifying to artists’ personal reactions to this calamitous pandemic. But Erni’s archival project does much more: the short, sometimes breathless clips in this video montage create a poignant exhibition with explicit themes distilling both the agony and unrelenting resilience of artists as they adapt to change.
Every three years, the Parrish Art Museum curators relinquish their decision-making powers to a team of well-established artists who judge a competition. Artists Choose Artists is an exhibition of works by seven jurors and 21 selectees. For this fourth iteration the jurors—Lillian Ball, Ralph Gibson, Valerie Jaudon, Jill Moser, Alexis Rockman, Lucien Smith, and Allan Wexler—sorted through 300 online portfolios and visited selected studios of artists residing within local zip codes. In prior years this arduous exercise raised the question, “how do artists who are not curators choose?” This year, jurors tended to pick artists whose work resonates with their own styles, their choices and juxtapositions uncannily and unexpectedly raising intriguing and urgent issues.
Glass is a seductive, scary medium: it’s hot, it breaks; it requires artists to toss their creative visions into molten infernos, and to collaborate. Independent curator Julie Courtney felt no hesitation whatsoever when she invited eight visionary artists to play with fire;
Marcuse “Cusie” Pfeifer is a one-of-a-kind phenomenon in a world of multiple editions. When she opened her gallery on Madison Avenue in 1976, she exclusively exhibited photography, aggressively promoted women photographers, and agitated the art world with the first photography exhibition devoted to The Male Nude (1978).
Hockney–Van Gogh: The Joy of Nature is unabashedly a David Hockney (b. 1937) exhibition but with a twist, it winds the modern master's works around his lifelong fascination with Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890).
September 2018ArtSeen
The First Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA): Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More
The former Faculty of Biology at the University of Latvia, today a museum teeming with formaldehyde-preserved creatures and taxidermic wildlife, is an apt venue for a group of artists who mine the Anthropocene epoch for signs of human folly and obsolescence.
Lichtenstein’s comparisons often target the American dream. Julius Shulman’s Case Study House No. 22 (Los Angeles, Calif.) (1960) was intended to advertise affordable post-World War II real estate. Photographed at night, the cantilevered glass home suspended above a view of Los Angeles aglow in the distance, positions two elegantly dressed women seated inside. The surrounding sixties furnishings pitch modernist design as a paradigm of twentieth-century living.
Madeline Schwartzman’s unconventional methodologies—as a scholar, teacher, writer, artist, and curator—navigate intricate webs through art, science, reality, fantasy, logic and absurdity, though they criss-cross with startling ease in both her books.
While the divergences between their works, in genre, medium, and scale are huge, they are inextricably linked by a primal human need to keep alive memories—to say, “I was here and this is the way I remember how things were.”
In 1945, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner purchased an 1879 farmhouse in Easthampton, New York that is today the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center. Here, they created the iconic paintings that helped launch a distinctly American style of Abstract Expressionism.
