Tag: Beeler Gallery

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Best Of visual art

Best of 2021 – Visual Art

Aminah Robinson, Raggin’ On, Columbus Museum of Art

Interestingly – and don’t get me wrong, I greatly appreciate the efforts to shift to digital, distanced forms of presentation – the one medium of art I couldn’t really connect with online while we were locked down was visual art. Painting, sculpture, mixed-media all get the lion’s share of their impact on me from being in the room, breathing in the same space, seeing how much weight and density the work has, its presence.  

So, the combination of not being as worried breathing in the same air as my fellow people – though I always took precautions – and the connected relief of being able to travel again, along with reconnecting with my town, meant I saw about 55 exhibits over six cities. These are the 20 that made my heart sing, my blood run cold, or both; that wouldn’t let me go. These are unranked and in chronological order. 

Everything below is in Columbus and any photo is taken by me, unless otherwise noted. 

Anila Quayyum Agha, Cincinnati Museum of Art
  • Various Artists, November (Beeler Gallery) – The Beeler is one of my favorite spaces in Columbus and too often gets left out of the conversation, with consistently provocative commissions and group shows that benefit from the thoughtful combustion of the various works in conversation with themselves, with the CCAD Institution, with Columbus, and the world. Curator Dean Taylor exemplified all these qualities, suffused with a dread and uncertainty created for 2020 and still reverberating into February where my visit, my grappling with these deep feelings, made a sheet of ice crack inside of me. 
  • Anila Quayyum Agha, All The Flowers Are For Me (Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati) – Stil only partially vaccinated, we went to Cincinnati for my birthday, as much outdoor and distant fun as we could muster in late March. Even under some constraints, it felt good to be out of town, dining on patios, and going to a couple of my favorite museums. Of everything Anne and I saw, I mulled over Pakistani-American artist’s meditative, expansive work, a steel-cut cube created to slice light in shadows inspired by Islamic architecture and classical art. 
  • Aminah Robinson, Raggin’ On (Columbus Museum of Art) – Sometimes it’s too easy to take the giants in our midst, the legends we grew up with, for granted. For too much of my youth I bristled at hearing about Aminah Robinson or James Thurber or George Bellows, though I loved their work, because I worried about how Columbus looked under a reductive lens. I’ve gotten over most of that but there are still some lingering “I know all there is to know” feelings. Within five minutes of walking into this gorgeous, immaculately curated (by Carole Genshaft and Deidre Hamlar) retrospective of one of our great artists, I was reminded I was a fucking idiot to even think that. This first retrospective since Robinson’s death hit her principal preoccupations, her recurring themes, and highlighted both the variations, the deep studies of character and place, the chimerical and literary qualities of her work, as well as the consistency of her work, in quality and thematically. I went to this three times and kicked myself for not going a dozen more. In a better world, this would have toured ten cities on three continents – as it is, it’s a stunning testament to the value of donating your estate to your local art museum. 
  • Various Artists, Partially Buried: Land Art in Ohio 1970-Now (Columbus Museum of Art) – Another thing I chafed at through its Ohio ubiquity as a kid? “Indian mounds.” Which I lumped land art in alongside. It took my fine arts major roommate, who idolized Andy Goldsworthy, to not only shake me out of that but show me how lucky we were to have such a tradition of it in Ohio. Anne’s enthusiasm for it later fully unlocked my appreciation, and this synthesized the tradition in a way I came back to soak in more than once. Anna Talarico’s curation drew deep lines from Robert Smithson’s seminal work that gave the exhibit its name to contemporary work like my pal Brian Harnetty’s sound piece “Forest Listening Rooms.” This was a stunning slice of history reminding us of the Faulkner line “The past is never dead, it isn’t even past.” 
Alun Be, CAM Raleigh
  • Alun Be, Perseverance, Pride, Power (CAM, Raleigh) – These enormous photos, in close up, of women by Senegalese photographer Alun Be, knocked the wind right out of my lungs. Taking up whole walls at Raleigh’s Contemporary Art Museum, the June sun filtered by clouds through the giant windows, gave a glimpse of a whole world, whole stories these women inhabit and embody. It made the museum glow like a holy temple and a reminder of how connected we are and how important it is to hold to that connection without falling into some namby-pamby “We’re all alike” bullshit. This was a crucial reminder to respect and understand other people’s differences, their different paths, their different dreams. And a reminder to try to start with love and with a desire to understand. 
  • Kennedi Carter, Flexing/New Realm (CAM, Raleigh) – One of the other two exhibits at CAM, Carter’s work was new to me and hit me almost as hard. Sharing some commonalities with Kehinde Wiley’s paintings linking contemporary black culture with classical portraiture of European royalty, there’s a deeper psychological cant to her photographs I had a hard time looking away from. 
  • Lynn Hershman Leeson, Twisted (New Museum, NYC) – All three exhibits at the New Museum this trip made an impression on me, but Leeson’s mixed media pieces reminded me of all the promise of science fiction growing up, a truly speculative art that centers people. Enraptured by the promise of new discoveries and spectacular frontiers but with an eye toward the way the future can widen and exacerbate pain and inequality, and the entropic tendency of it to do just that if we let the same bastards hold the wheel. 
Alice Neel, Metropolitan Museum
  • Yayoi Kusama, Cosmic Nature (New York Botanical Garden, NYC) – I raved about Kusama a couple years ago in Cleveland, and many years back at the Whitney. She’s the kind of blockbuster, crowd-pleasing artist with so many layers and such a love of things that are messy, are complicated, that there’s always something to unpack. Pairing her work with the Bronx’s beautiful New York Botanical Garden was a perfect fit, the art and the nature vibrating together, feeding each other, giving enough surface for the selfies but enriching for the rest of us. 
  • Alice Neel, People Come First (Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC) – I don’t remember the first time I saw Alice Neel’s work, but my fandom bloomed with Hilton Als’ retrospective focusing on her time in upper Manhattan at David Zwirner a few years ago and hit overdrive when I read the terrific biography by Phoebe Hoban (or did those go in the other order?). This retrospective was exactly what I go to the Met for, the kind of expansive, deep dive I’ve loved since my first trip to this temple of art to see El Greco. Neel’s ability to center people in her art and her life, to make sure her subjects are seen without judgment, is a benchmark I sometimes fuck up but always try to shoot for. And the work is gorgeous beyond reckoning.  
Julie Mehretu, Whitney Museum
  • Julie Mehretu, Julie Mehretu (Whitney Museum, NYC) – I’d seen a couple pieces by Ethiopian artist Julie Mehretu before, but this dazzling retrospective shone light on her unique style of abstraction and her way of viewing the world as a collection, a melange, maps that feel right but don’t draw a linear story. One of the most vital, vibrant abstract painters I’ve been turned onto in many years. 
  • Dawoud Bey, An American Project (Whitney Museum. NYC) – Another vital eye on the current moment, Dawoud Bey’s work struck me as soon as I saw it. This retrospective showed his incisive, open-hearted approach from his ‘70s portraits in Harlem to the mysterious, speculative landscapes evoking underground railroad passages from 2018. Seeing this the day after Alice Neel and these artists decades apart, though they overlapped, finding ways to center humanity in their art, was awe-inspiring. Anne and I posted up at Radio Bar and talked about this for an hour after. 
  • Various Artists, Ashcan School Prints and the American City: 1900-1994 (Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland) – I overloaded on the Ashcan school as a kid, partly because of Columbus native George Bellows’ prominence in it and partly because I was drawn to a level of social realism. Some time away from that let me see this terrific retrospective at the Cleveland Museum with fresh eyes and I was stunned by the breadth and intensity of that work and its uniquely American patina.  
Axis Mundo, MOCA Cleveland
  • Various Artists, Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano LA (MOCA, Cleveland) – This MOCA exhibit made a series of puzzle pieces fall into place in my head. I knew how impactful the Latinx communities were on Los Angeles history and especially that punk scene I grew up idolizing. Until this, I hadn’t seen something that tied the various LA art scenes together so sharply (in the way I’ve seen a million books/exhibits/articles do for New York of the same time period) and emphasizing seeing these scenes through a Chicano lens, immaculately curated by C. Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz. This set my hair on fire. 
  • Danielle Deley and Allison Baker, Home (934 Gallery) – 934 Gallery is one of the Columbus gems and when I stopped at their 934 Fest I had the chance to check out a fantastic exhibit – Home – that placed Danielle Deley’s huge-canvas explorations of her Catholic background in dialogue with Allison Baker’s razor-edged investigations of what we think of as domesticity and women’s work in dialogue with each other and the space. 
Danielle Deley, 934 Gallery
  • Wayne Thiebaud, Wayne Thiebaud at 100: Paintings, Prints, and Drawings (Dixon Gardens and Gallery, Memphis) – In all my trips to Memphis, including repeated visits to the botanical garden, Anne and I hadn’t yet made it to Dixon Gardens and Gallery. We corrected that this trip – it reminded me of a Southern Frick – with a stunning retrospective of Wayne Thiebaud. His looks at urban landscapes, the sensual pleasures of food, and the rapidly changing 20th century struck a particular pleasure center for me I’m not sure any other art did this year. 
  • Mark Selinger, On Christopher Street: Transgender Portraits (Brooks Museum, Memphis) – The Brooks has become one of my favorite museums over repeated treks to Memphis and they’ve got a particularly good eye for photography exhibitions. This year, Selinger’s (whose work I knew from GQ) contemporary look at the storied cobblestones of Christopher Street and its transgender residents and visitors blew me away. A moving look at connection without trying to underplay their differences, another reminder at the powerful capacity for empathy visual art possesses. 
Mark Selinger, Brooks Museum, Memphis
  • Nina Katchadourian, To Feel Something That Was Not Of Our World (Pizzuti Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art) – This fascinating exhibit delved into the survival memoir Survive the Savage Sea, with translations of the book, excerpts, life-size drawings of tortoises and whales, audio recordings, and printed messages exchanged between the artist and the family. It’s a beguiling look at what makes us survive, what keeps people from giving up, and family in the best sense, atomized and displayed in ways I didn’t expect. 
  • Bruce Robinson, Flutterby (Pizzuti Collection of the Columbus Museum Art) – The other exhibit in the Pizzuti Collection was longstanding CCAD professor Bruce Robinson’s work. Motion is at the center of all these pieces, some abstract, and this had an interesting resonance for me with the other people-centered exhibits I saw this year. There’s a special bravery and a special open-heartedness in including your friends, your community, in your work that has to encompass your feelings for them but also stand outside of your specific experience. This helped reinforce all the feelings I grasped for all year. 
Bruce Robinson, Pizzuti Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art
  • Carol Stewart and Janice Lessman-Moss, Still Is Still Moving (Hammond Harkins Gallery) – I don’t stop at Hammond Harkins that often but the sunny Saturday afternoon I popped in wowed me. These two carefully chosen artists, both of whom have histories with the gallery and with Columbus, sparked against each other, leading me on a long, fascinating conversation with the gallery employee/attendant/manager who was there at the time. Lessman-Moss’s textile pieces used metallic thread for contrast in stunning geometric patterns. Stewart’s still lifes actually made the artifice in any still life concrete for me in a way I’m not sure I’ve ever seen – the deliberate placement of everything in the picture frame was done with intention and deliberation but – like Jeff Wall’s photographs – that artifice makes them more intriguing and more full of life, not stiffer. These two approaches, talking to each other across the room, under the banner of the Willie Nelson lyric the show is named for, left me chewing on them for weeks. 
  • Jacqueline Humphries, jHΩ1: ) (Wexner Center) – I went to see this stunning Humphries retrospective four times and I’m still not sure I got it but I loved it. I said to a friend who saw it a different time, “I felt like I was drowning but not in an unpleasant way.” These expansive abstractions of the data and metaphor we’re all swimming in are as messy and as orderly, as intense, as my first impressions of Kusama or Rothko or Agnes Martin. It’s a knockout blow to end the year on. 
Jacqueline Humphries, Wexner Center for the Arts
Categories
"Hey, Fred!" live music theatre visual art

Things I’ve Been Digging – 03/01/2021

Clockwise from top left: Sarah Hollis, Chris Gardner, Naïma Hebrail Kidjo; taken from stream and edited

Iseult et Tristan by Pia Wilson

One of the great landmarks of New York underground experimental theater, La MaMa ETC, continues bringing exciting, vibrant work as it transitions to a digital space. Monday’s entry in the Experiments series was a brilliant example of how classic, almost archetypal stories can be repurposed and still resonate in our shared here and now.

Writer Pia Wilson resurrected the centuries-old love triangle of Iseult (Naïma Hebrail Kidjo), Margot (Sarah Hollis), and Tristan (Chris Gardner). She placed these old-as-time feelings in the milieu of contemporary New York with Iseult as a boxer, fresh out of rehab, under the tutelage of her retired boxer sister and her sister’s man struggling with some issues of his own.

Sympathetically directed by Susan Dalian in this zoom reading, the specifics of the setting hit with the concentrated fury of targeted punches as the characters danced around each other and their own pain. Lines drew blood like Iseult’s devastating “How do you do your life sentence in a cage of skin and blood? I don’t know how to do this life sentence.”

This is still viewable at http://lamama.org/iseult-et-tristan/ for I don’t know how long.

November at CCAD’s Beeler Gallery

My first art exhibit of the year and it felt like the first air in my lungs after being submerged in dark water. All the art institutions here are doing a great job with capacity limits, timed ticketing, contact tracing. Those steps make me feel mostly comfortable doing an activity that gave me the most joy before the pandemic even while I’m not as at ease doing it, always watching to see who is in the room and how close we are to one another. 

For the last several years, the Columbus College of Art and Design’s main exhibition space, Beeler Gallery, has carved out its own vital, unique space in our crowded art world. This multi-artist exhibition, November, was curated by alum Heather Taylor for the uncertainty and challenge of the 2020 election and pushed back due to a record-high wave of cases. 

These works stand up to the different but still present anxiety and tension of the moment because they were built already dealing with the layers of historical rage, sadness, and mistreatment. The unifying thread among these pieces is the sad certainty that what we all went through wasn’t a blip but a coalescence, a locus, a culmination; a clear-eyed desire to understand and respond to move forward.

Each of the artists brought something personal and sharp to this call and Taylor’s curation – and whichever preparators she worked with – shines in the way they speak to one another. Benjamin Willis’ gripping self-portraits in a warm, textured light played with Dawn Kim’s punching layers of The Apprentice soundtrack over a C-Span litany of contenders walking into Trump Tower in early 2017. 

Some of the highlights were full-room installations. Bobby T. Luck’s Drapetomania, or The Disease Causing Negroes to Run Away presented a breathtaking collage knocking the breath out of my lungs. Luck plays with our inability to connect and the sea of media buffeting us at every step and forcing a hard look at who chooses the prevailing images of a group – in this case, specifically black Americans – and why. 

Calista Lyon used old-school overhead projectors to dive into colonialism’s impact on the Crimson Spider Orchid, stitching together history and an almost apocalyptic warning in deep duende, amplified by the nostalgia of that humming light and the pink cast of the walls. 

There’s so much to unpack in this triumphant exhibition and it runs for one more week (through March 6, 2021). For details and to reserve timed tickets, visit https://www.ccad.edu/events/november 

Farewell, Ace of Cups: Muswell Villebillies on 02/27/2021

Anne rightly points out that one key to not losing your mind in this time when we can’t see each other up close is finding ways to mark the things we’d usually get together to celebrate or mourn. The value of that approach was affirmed and its limits tested this Saturday as Marcy Mays said goodbye to her time owning Ace of Cups.

For the last decade, Ace made itself indispensable to the Columbus rock and roll scene, filling a specific gap. We had great clubs since Little Brothers closed but we missed that size of room with a rock-centered booking approach but casting a wide tent (and using the best existing bookers in town) while also being open for bar hours and serving as a central clubhouse for many of us.

Ace of Cups’ greatest successes came from its unshakable faith in and deep love for our shared community – Columbus’s and the larger rock and roll scene. I lost count of the number of birthdays (including Anne’s and her Mom’s) we celebrated, the people we mourned, the out-of-town friends who wanted to come back, and the great times we shared. I also lost count of the number of musicians who wanted to play Ace – sometimes hadn’t been to Columbus in many years – because of their longstanding friendship with Marcy going back to her days in Scrawl.

That sense of community was all over this final show as Ace transitions to a new owner – Conor Stratton who comes highly recommended by every friend of mine involved and with a proven track record including the exciting Yellow Springs Springfest. First, by continuing a long partnership with neighbors Lost Weekend Records, owned by scene stalwart (and the gold standard for stage managers) Kyle Siegrist, for Lost Weekend’s 18th-anniversary celebration.

That community pumped through the veins of this show in the people playing too. The core of two of this town’s favorite cover-bands-for-people-who-hate-cover-bands, The Randys (Dave Vaubel and Jon Beard) and Popgun (Joey Hebdo and Tony McClung) teamed up with guitarist and producer of too many bands to count Andy Harrison in a gloriously fun Kinks tribute act, the Muswell Villebillies, aided by key members of New Basics Brass Band, Tim Perdue on trumpet and Tony Zilinick on trombone and sousaphone, on key tunes.

The players had a great time leaning into some of the great pop songs of the middle of the 20th century and the Kinks’ wide-ranging appetite for fusing disparate, sometimes discarded styles and making something new out of them along with the almost ravenous taste for melancholy in these songs made for an appropriate sendoff to a place we love so much.

That hunger for connection in tunes like “All of My Friends Were There” with its lines about “I’m thinking of the days – I won’t forget a single day, believe me;” “Picture Book;” “Party Line” with its warm paranoia, “I wish I had a more direct connection,” cut deeper than I expected, watching from my couch. 

The set drove home that longing – not being in the room to hug people and give it a proper goodbye as I did with other rooms I loved so much in their last days, Little Brothers and Larry’s here, Lakeside Lounge in New York immediately come to mind – on tunes tailor-made for it, Ray Davies’ wincing look at childhood on “Come Dancing” and a wrenching turn through one of the most beautiful songs of the 20th century, “Waterloo Sunset,” with guest vocals by Mays.

Part of what made this band work so beautifully is the best work of most of these players comes in reconfiguring and enlivening structures. There weren’t a lot of deconstructionist impulses on display and you don’t want it for this kind of repertory band. The key to breathing life into these classic songs is trusting them and loving them on their own terms and the distinct players’ skillsets and ability to find space within both the song and the unit of the band shone brightly.

McClung’s heavy post-Elvin Jones drumming – I’ve compared him to Columbus’ “Tain” Watts a few times – snaps everything into place here, with the supple rhythm section rounded out by Vaubel’s crisp, melodic bass and Beard’s blood-pumping surges on barrelhouse piano, silent-cinema organ, and beer-garden accordion. 

Within that framework, Hebdo leaned into the aggressive affectation of Davies’ phrasing, not making the mistake of trying to make things more natural to our ears, turning over the words and their rhythm as they were set in stone. Harrison’s crackling guitar and gets space to play as the horns lift everything up with punctuation and announcement.

I’ll miss you, Ace. I look forward to seeing what you bring us in the future. And I look forward to catching this band when I can dance with my friends and sing along in the open air.

This is still viewable for an indeterminate length of time: https://youtu.be/-6oNhPm-Yj8 

Categories
Best Of visual art

Best of 2019 – Visual Art

Henry Taylor, Venice Biennale

“If you notice anything,
It leads you to notice
more
and more.”
– Mary Oliver, “The Moths”

In this year – by turns more magnificent than I could hope and immeasurably shitty – visual art continued to be a balm, a lifeline, and a reminder to wake up and try harder. I was lucky enough to catch 75 exhibits over 9 cities in two countries. I left this one ranked – unlike the two performance lists which I put in (mostly) chronological order – we’ll see if I stay comfortable with that.

Everything below is in Columbus unless otherwise noted. All photos have been taken by me for reference for discussion with no claim on the original work, unless otherwise noted.

Natalia Goncharova, Palazzo Strozzi
  1. Various Artists, 2019 Venice Biennale: May You Live in Interesting Times (various locations, Venice) – It’s hard to compete with new – my memories of the first Whitney Biennial I was lucky enough to visit are stronger than my memories of this year’s (for more reasons than one) – so it’s not surprising I was so dazzled by my first Venice Biennale. That said, my eyes almost popped out of my head, from the main exhibit curated by Ralph Rugoff with the best overview of artists grappling with the current shifting, chaotic moment, to the various national pavilions haunting and inspiring, to the satellite exhibitions (a storefront dedicated to Sierra Leone knocked me over), this took me back to the best parts of that childlike state where everything’s new and I’m hungry for all of it.
  2. Barbara Hammer, In This Body (Wexner Center for the Arts) – Barbara Hammer’s work has always fascinated me and the Wex – led by its curator, Film/Video Studio Program Curator Jennifer Lange – outdid themselves with this exhibit put together up to Hammer’s death this year. The kind of grappling with mortality that doesn’t come easy, a fusing of rigor with the sensuality her work reminded us can never been separated from politics and society. I spent hours in the main installation, walking through X-Ray negatives bathed in a haunting film, I even went the day after my stepsister’s funeral, and it comforted and challenged me every time.
  3. Natalia Goncharova, Natalia Goncharova (Palazzo Strozzi, Florence) – This was a happy surprise for my first trip to Florence and a source of immense chagrin that the only thing I know of Goncharova previously was her costumes for Dhagliev. A cornucopia of classic high modernism practiced at a level almost no one could match. Masterpieces in dialogue with all the better known names of her time – Picasso, Chagall – while never feeling like she was trying on techniques. A time that felt like the end of the world mapped out and sung in a voice I couldn’t forget.
Joan Mitchell, David Zwirner
  1. Suzanne Lacy, We Are Here (SFMOMA and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco) – Suzanne Lacy’s a brilliant example of an artist who works directly with society, never content to only let her work be uplifting. This retrospective, spread across downtown San Francisco’s two main institutions, reminded me how vital her work still is and how inspiring her mission).
  2. Joan Mitchell, I Carry My Landscapes Around With Me (David Zwirner, NYC) – Joan Mitchell’s been one of my favorite painters since I first saw her work; some days, she’s easily my favorite of the Abstract Expressionists. This retrospective of her large-scale paintings at David Zwirner was earth-shattering for me; taking that fusion of abstraction and landscape many of us associate with Kandinsky and exploding it into other worlds. A crystallized moment of the 20th century and a reverberation through the foreseeable future.
  3. Jason Moran, Jason Moran (Wexner Center for the Arts) – Moran’s one of my heroes since I first heard Black Stars when I was in college. His appearance with the Bandwagon is one of my all-time top five concert experiences at the Wexner Center. This look at his – often collaborative – visual art was stunning. The detail-rich replicas of key spots from jazz history loom in the middle, heavy with history as tombs but also vibrating to be reactivated. His video work with Carrie Mae Weems and Stan Douglas hinted at secret histories. I had some issues with the selection of the live performance aspects – would have liked more things like the opening Ogun Meji – but I kept visiting and unpacking this.
Jason Moran, Wexner Center
  1. Various Artists, Everything is Rhythm: Mid-Century Music and Art (Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo) – 40s-60s contemporary art and music are obsessions of mine, still, and this multimedia presentation in the always excellent Toledo Museum was the best, most approachable tying-together of those threads I’ve ever seen.
  2. Lorna Simpson, Darkening (Hauser and Wirth, NYC) – I knew Lorna Simpson’s photography work a little but this selection of layered, gripping paintings felt revelatory. The light growing dim so you have to lean in and then the cold opens you up.
  3. Various Artists, Detroit Collects: Selections of African American Art from Private Collections (Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit) – Private collectors in museum contexts are problematic but everything about this warmed me up, members of Detroit’s black community talking about collecting black art and fascinating examples of what draws them to it and keeps them going. A deep dive into the best parts of collection and curation – paying tribute, keeping voices alive, giving you something to pass onto your children.
Anselm Kiefer, German Abstraction After 1950, SFMOMA
  1. Various Artists, Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything (Jewish Museum, NYC) – Various artists taking on Leonard Cohen, one of the most imagistic lyricists of the 20th century made this lifelong Cohen fan’s heart grow three sizes. The variety of work, from an amateur men’s choir doing “I’m Your Man” in multichannel video to an organ that played a word with each key to an installation where “Famous Blue Raincoat” synchronizes with a flood of iconography, there was so much to love here.
  2. Various Artists, Artistic License: Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection (Guggenheim, NYC) – Celebrating an anniversary, the Guggenheim turned to artists to contextualize the parts of the massive modern art collection and it’s the best use of the iconic Frank Lloyd Wright building and the best use of a giant collection of holdings I’ve seen in years.
  3. Various Artists, German Abstraction After 1950 (SFMOMA, San Francisco) – This era – Kiefer, Richter, et al – is a personal favorite of mine and this was an embarassment of riches I couldn’t believe I was seeing all in one place.
Nancy Spero, MoMA PS1
  1. Peter Hujar, The Speed of Life (Wexner Center for the Arts) – I loved the John Waters piece that ran in parallel with Hujar, and I loved seeing the two dialogue with one another but the Hujar wrecked me every damn time. A reminder how potent portraiture can be in letting us see and a reminder to be grateful for our networks and the love around all of us.
  2. Simone Fattal, Works and Days (MoMA PS1, NYC) – An artist I knew nothing about before this trip to PS1 knocked me sidewise. Sculptures and watercolors working through the consequences of archaeology and imperialism, knowledge and the stories we tell ourselves. I needed far more hours than I had to properly appreciate this but it’s still with me.
  3. Walid Raad, Walid Raad (Paula Cooper, NYC) – Walid Raad’s alternate history work reminds us all how science fiction tropes can illuminate real world pain and challenge. His puzzles dare you to tease out the facts from the greater truth and complicate your own feelings as you work through them.
  4. Nancy Spero, Paper Mirror (MoMA PS1, NYC) – Spero’s work benefited from the volume and the jumble of this perfect PS1 show, words coming at the viewer like daggers but so many you can’t focus on any one, you have to give into the flood.
Huma Bhabha, Gagosian Rome
  1. Gordon Parks, The New Tide: Early Work 1940-1950 (Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland) – Gordon Parks’ social realist photography is always a wake up call to being alive and this tight, well-curated collection in Cleveland was exactly what I needed in a summer of too much feeling sorry for myself.
  2. Sondra Perry, A Terrible Thing (MOCA Cleveland, Cleveland) – Perry’s video work dug deep into infrastructure and invisible labor in a biting, potent critique that sung.
  3. Various Artists, arms ache avid aeon (CCAD’s Beeler Gallery) – Jo-ey Tang’s work with the Beeler Gallery is coming into its own; I love his specialty of slow exhibitions that evolve over periods of time and this look back on the fierce pussy collective, capped by a symposium that was the most energized I felt all year, was a dazzling, meditative explosion.
  4. Huma Bhabha, The Company (Gagosian, Rome) – In a trip spent gorging ourselves on old masters and antiquity, Bhabha’s sardonic looks at the modern age was the perfect palate cleanser.