Bobby T Luck – Screen of Distance

What a marvelous year for Visual Art. 125 or so exhibits, over nine cities, giving me peace or disrupting that peace. Leaving me unable to speak or filled with an irrepressible urge to tell someone, everyone, about them, or sometimes both at the same time.

All photos are by me, with no claim made to the underlying rights to the artwork. Everything listed here is in chronological order based on when I saw it (or in some cases, like the Wexner Center, No Place Gallery, and Streetlight Guild shows, based on the first time I went).

Woman in a white turtleneck sweater looking at an array of soundsuits made by the artist Nick Cave on a curved platform. — Nick Cave, Guggenheim

Nick Cave, Forothermore (Guggenheim, NYC) – I was overjoyed that my APAP/Winter Jazzfest/work trip overlapped with the last weeks of this dazzling retrospective of the American artist Nick Cave filling the side galleries of the Guggenheim. There was so much to love in this massive collection showing off the various sides of his work. My favorite part of this was the way it led the audience through the thornier, more jagged pieces of his work before the catharsis of the better-known sound suits which really underlined the sound suits’ beauty and joy as an act of resistance, of asserting his power and dignity.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, S/T (David Zwirner, NYC) – Another more expansive look at an artist I’d been a fan of for a very long time. This retrospective took over three of David Zwirner’s massive gallery spaces, including finally assembling two pieces (both labeled “Untitled” with different subtitles) had had fully planned before his death. Gonzalez-Torres’ ability to transmute the basic objects of our lives, to abstract and expand, has never been as moving for me as it was on this blustery New York afternoon. Just recalling, it clicked through my bones like pins snapping into a lock.
Susan Phillipsz, Separated Strings (Tanya Bonakdar, NYC) – Susan Phillipsz’ film of the story of Pavel Haas, a composer who wrote and performed a piece while in Auschwitz and was killed anyway, played on a two-channel installation and a sound installation isolating the violin part on multiple speakers in a bright room upstairs, floored me. This is what I want from most installation art and only seldom get.

Mixed-media collages of two women on canvases, connected by a large cloth ribbon. — Tiffany Lawson, Streetlight Guild

Tiffany Lawson, Contemporary Colored Deluxe (Streetlight Guild) – Streetlight Guild is killing it in every respect. Music, poetry, education, but especially for visual art: this is the kind of permanent, visible home Columbus’s fertile black art scene hasn’t had for a while, and the crowds, whenever I come, seem to back me up at how much we’ve all missed it. I liked everything I saw here, but this concentrated dose of Tiffany Lawson’s witty, nuanced, narrative-informed-but-never-constrained collage work was one of my favorite discoveries (I know, I know, I should have known more of her work earlier – sometimes I’m slow) of the year.
AK Burns, Of Space we are… (Wexner Center) – All three of the spring exhibits at the Wexner Center worked for me, but the A.K. Burns – showing all four of his Negative Space films and building installations and ephemera around them, situating the storytelling in these moving, chilling environments – just stuck to my ribcage and never quite let go. This as a whole – believe I came back to watch each movie in the galleries – fulfilled the promise I grew up searching for in science fiction and only found fleetingly.
Bobby T. Luck, Was it Your Trigger Finger? (Pizzuti Collection at Columbus Museum of Art) – This two-room installation skewered vintage US military recruiting propaganda, institutional racism, government bureaucracy, and so much else in a way that balanced its wit with tear jerking, landing perfectly placed piledrivers.
Sydney G. James, Girl Raised in Detroit (MOCAD, Detroit) – Another look into the past, both James’ personal past and a wider social and political past, balancing a tear-jerking and nostalgic installation with enormous and unsparing mural-style tributes. Breathtaking and bracing.

Blurry painting of Madonna impersonator on a white gallery wall — Caleb Yono, No Place Gallery

Caleb Yono, Impersonator (No Place Gallery) – Hoisting the torch for uncompromising art in downtown Columbus proper, No Place Gallery put out one stellar exhibit after another. My favorite was this – occasionally blurred – myriad of paintings of Madonna impersonators, drenched in atmosphere and pulsing with energy.
Claude Monet and Joan Mitchell, Monet/Mitchell: Painting the French Landscape (St Louis Art Museum, St Louis) – The scholarship at this spellbinding rapture of an exhibit at one of my favorite US Museums was second only to the rapturous beauty both Monet and Mitchell evoked. The connections between what each artist found in the countryside, far away from Paris and New York, are as intense as the different paths and techniques they deployed in the service of that building.
Faye HeavyShield, Confluences (Pulitzer Art Foundation, St Louis) – The Pulitzer has always had a special place in my St Louis heart, basically, next door to the better-known CAM STL (also great), finding interesting connections to avant-garde artists of different backgrounds, time periods, and media. I had the pleasure of a phenomenal tour led by curator Tamara Schenkenberg, the perfect introduction to an artist I’m ashamed to say I knew nothing about before walking through the door. This wide-ranging retrospective was bursting with wrenching work that used highly modern techniques to get at the power and the pain of Faye HeavyShield’s overlapping histories and color the world in ways I knew but didn’t know and ways I knew but wished weren’t what they are. A show – and conversation – that still haunts me as I look back on this year.

Rounded sculpture, flat on the bottom, in beige, with pointed spines jutting out of its perimeter — Faye HeavyShield, Pulitzer Art Foundation

Various Artists, Irrepressible Soul (Urban Arts Space) – Iyana Hil (creator and co-curator with Dr. Terron Banner, Mario Hairston, and Christopher Hearn) did an astounding job here, bringing together artists whose work I already knew and loved, like William Evans, Cameron A. Grainger, and L’Ouverture Jones with artists I’d never heard of into a tapestry of black and Afro-Diasporic arts. As someone who’s been going to the Urban Arts Space since the building opened, I believe this may be the best single exhibit I’ve ever seen there. Plus – and it’s my eternal regret I didn’t get to the satellite events – tying the work here together with other Columbus black cultural institutions, from the King Arts Complex to Sole Collections, was a wonder.
Juane Quick-To-See Smith, Memory Map (Whitney Museum, NYC) – My first conscious exposure to Juane Quick-to-See-Smith was at one of my favorite public art events anywhere, Counterpublic 2023 in St Louis, so it was even more of a joy to see this enormous retrospective at the Whitney when Anne and I went to New York late summer to see Greg Cartwright play. The playful but deadly serious tones captured an America that was always on the surface for the people being oppressed, but it uses defiance as a path to hope, sunlight cracking through moldering walls.
Sahar Khoury, Umm (Wexner Center) – The Wex’s fall exhibits were also all extremely strong. Still, Khoury’s collaged sculptural and installation pieces inspired by the legendary Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum kept me coming back, always finding something new in the glitter and the scuffs.

Long Gallery room with a chalk drawing with names Hattie McDaniel and Bill Robinson at the end, less visible chalk drawings on the left wall, show flyers on the wall in the room visible to the left. — Gary Simmons, MCA

Gary Simmons, Public Enemy (MCA, Chicago) – A work trip to Chicago let me catch up with some dear friends, have some strategy sessions with coworkers and also catch a couple of astonishing art exhibits on lunch hours – the benefit of being right downtown. The MCA is always more than edifying when I get there – they turned me onto Doris Salcedo and so much more – and this Gary Simmons’ mixed-media grappling with racism and its after-effects, twisting every symbol just artfully enough that it wasn’t the version I expected, landed hit after hit.
Remedios Varo, Science Fictions (Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago) – The Art Institute of Chicago also blew me away with this early surrealist who relocated from Spain to Mexico City with the outbreak of WWII. Exactly the stew of midcentury elements I’ve loved but at an angle, I wasn’t expecting, in the first major museum I ever fell in love with.

A woman and her daughter looking at an arrangement of photographs on a gallery wall. — Various Artists, Columbus Metropolitan Library Main Branch

Various Artists, Columbus Metropolitan Library at 150 (CML Main Branch) – Not just here because our house was in one of the photos taken and selected by Dorian Ham as part of this exhibit, but that was the kind of surprise that won me over. The perfectly chosen artists for this – people I’ve been a big fan of for a while, like April Sunami, Rob W. Jones, and Tera Stockdale, and those whose names I didn’t even know – and the pieces were woven into an evocation of the sense of community I still love about Columbus, even when it pisses me off or lets me down. A flag-planting about the role libraries have played in that and still play.
Various Artists, Black American Portraits (Brooks Museum, Memphis) – The Brooks does astonishing work; over the 10 years I’ve been visiting regularly, it’s become a must-see part of my Memphis trips. This touring exhibition, which originated at LACMA and was curated by Dr. Patricia Daigle and Efe Igor Coleman, took me through thematic rooms to shine a light on a shifting black experience that always rightfully resists being restrained or easily named.

Two large photos on the wall of the Whitney, one three black people arrayed (from left to right) a man in the background, a woman in the middleground, and a man in the foreground. The other, a man wearing a hat that says Hustle Forward and an orange and black striped shirt with a bowl with chopsticks in front of him — Henry Taylor, Whitney Museum

Henry Taylor, B Side (Whitney Museum, NYC) – Another hat tip to the Whitney – in a season where everything was good, from a look at one of my polymath inspirations Harry Smith doing the almost impossible to the finest wide-lens look at Ruth Asawa I’ve ever seen; to a gut-wrenching group show; this deep dive into painter Henry Taylor vibrated every nerve ending in my body.
Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity (Reina Sofia, Madrid) – Most of what we did in Madrid and Barcelona wasn’t new exhibitions; first time in cities of course I’m spending a lot of time in the Prado and looking at Gaudi. But the Reina Sofia is the kind of contemporary art museum – and I love all the US versions, don’t misunderstand – I could really only compare to Centre Pompidou. I was that wowed. And I liked everything on display, but this extensive, almost exhausting, retrospective of Shahn’s work took him out of my previous understanding of his art in Diego Rivera’s slipstream and made it fully formed and three-dimensional in my brain.
Laura Ramírez Palacio, S/T (PlusArtis, Madrid) – Anne and I stumbled here when the other modern art gallery we intended to hit was closed. In a thriving gallery scene, this was the exhibit that wouldn’t let me go. Gone too young, Palacio crafts a mythoautobiography in drawings with clear referents, but I couldn’t ever quite put my finger on it. I staggered out of the gallery, pretty much only wanting to talk about this.

Loosely arranged selection of black and white drawings — Laura Ramirez Palacio, PlusArtis

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