Neil Baldwin

Neil Baldwin is Emeritus Professor in the College of the Arts at Montclair State University. His review of the exhibition, Man Ray: When Objects Dream at the Metropolitan Museum of Art appeared in the November 2025 issue of the Brooklyn Rail.

Entering the vast Martha Graham Company studio space quietly, I slide into my customary seat on a church pew beneath arching windows. The dancers, warming up, stretch, torque, and twist, each in their own way. Inward gazes alternate with breath-pauses. Even after more than fifteen years’ observing and writing about the Graham corpus, I remain enthralled. 

Portrait of Martha Graham. Photo: Arnold Eagle.

Anish Kapoor continues to situate a corpus of “singular presences” among all manner of spaces in our quotidian world.

Installation view: Anish Kapoor: Early Works, The Jewish Museum, New York, 2026. © Anish Kapoor. All Rights Reserved, DACS, London/ ARS, NY 2025. Photo: Kris Graves.

The knowing curatorial hands of Stephanie D’Alessandro and Stephen C. Pinson, with the assistance of research associate Micayla Bransfield, were in evidence as I entered Man Ray: When Objects Dream.

Man Ray, Self-Portrait in 31 bis rue Campagne-Première Studio, 1925. Gelatin silver print 6 1/8 × 4 1/2 inches. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bluff Collection. Private collection, San Francisco. Photo: Ian Reeves. © Man Ray 2015 Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris 2025.

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