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Best Of live music

Best of 2025: Live Music

In a world that felt even more on fire than usual – by which I mostly mean the fire was closer to me personally – I found a lot to be grateful for: my friends, my partner, my family, my jobs. My most often source for solace was, as it has been since I was a teenager, live music.

Across nine cities, I saw about 150 shows (expect that to be fewer next year; I’m trying to be more intentional and include more deliberate days of rest each week). Unsurprisingly, Dick’s Den was at the top of my list, hitting an average of once every two weeks, with Natalie’s Grandview and Cafe Bourbon Street tied for second place at 12, and Ace and Rumba also tied at 7. Interestingly, the Columbus Museum of Art and the Wex tied at 4 each, and all of which were terrific. Because there was so much good stuff, I interpreted “Festival” a little more liberally, as anything with multiple stages or days.

No way of knowing what’s next, but there are already some shows I’m very excited for in the upcoming year, and choosing to set my eyes with hope rather than leap to despondency.

All photos are by me, everything is in Columbus unless stated otherwise, and the listings are in chronological order

Joy Oladokun at Newport Music Hall

Top 25(ish) Shows

  • Joy Oladokun (Newport Music Hall, 01/21/2025) – Not quite the first show of the year I saw, or even exactly the first touring show (John Calvin Abney, who had a banner this year supporting SG Goodman as well as putting out a stellar EP, did a joint show with Lydia Loveless at Secret Studio a little earlier), but in many ways finally getting to see Joy Oladokun after being a massive fan of her last two records in the room that held so many of my favorite shows of all time (Wilco, Morphine, The Cramps, Sonic Youth, Medeski Martin and Wood/Chocolate Genius, X/The Detroit Cobras) set the tone perfectly and gave me a shot of burning resolve right after the inauguration. I thought the mix of solo acoustic and full-band numbers highlighted both sides of her work in a way I’ve seen a lot of singer-songwriters try but very rarely pull off anywhere nearly as well, and made some of the textures – revealing a surprising (to me) contextual thread between her Observations From a Crowded Room and Don Henley’s Building a Perfect Beast – appear in greater detail and relief.
  • Chuck Prophet and his Cumbia Shoes (Natalie’s Grandview, 02/05/2025) – I’ve never seen a bad Chuck Prophet show – the rare universally acclaimed songwriter who’s every bit as powerful a bandleader – but this flourishing of his merging a couple of members of his longstanding unit Mission Express with Cali cumbia band ¿Qiensave? into Cumbia Shoes hit another level of powerful catharsis, nuance, and unbridled fun.
Chuck Prophet and his Cumbia Shoes at Natalie’s Grandview
  • Joel Ross’s Good Vibes (Wexner Center for the Arts)/Joel Harrison’s Anthems of Unity (Natalie’s Grandview), both 03/06/2025 – Talking to a good friend and stalwart of the NYC and, now, LA, jazz scene about how the touring climate was in town, I brought up this particular evening when I got to see the first set of vibes maestro Joel Ross’s crushing current Sextet (that interplay of Maria Grand on alto and Josh Johnson on tenor in the frontline seared my eyebrows off), an unbroken suite of music blending Ross’s originals and standards that turned my head around then drive 10 minutes and see the astonishing guitarist Joel Harrison do his Anthems of Unity book with two of our local heroes, organist Tony Monaco and drummerr Louis Tsamous. These two approaches to jazz/improvised music/the history of American music, and the way both of these artists approached the canon and the way music can be about the rest of the world instead of being hermetic or closed reverberated hard against each other in my chest.
  • Deli Girls with Deionyx (Cafe Bourbon Street, 04/04/2025) – Over the last couple of years, Bobo has reclaimed the throne as my favorite place to see noisy, edgier rock and roll and one of my favorite places to see more underground-leaning DJs. This show scratched both of those itches hard and deep – NYC’s Deli Girls’ mix of grinding, throbbing rave beats, acid-singed noise, and in-your-face punk and Deionyx’s bleeding edge soulful-at-an-angle set of surprising and powerful records both made my heart incredibly full, as did the room packed full of people 15-25 years younger than I am.
Deli Girls at Cafe Bourbon Street
  • Greater Columbus Community Orchestra with Brian Harnetty, The Visitor (Hilliard Presbyterian Church, 04/06/2025) – Banner year for composer Brian Harnetty, who released a remarkable memoir, Noisy Memory, and put out a gorgeous recording of string quartet and samples The House, and a visual installation This Was Once a Forest, This Was Once a Sea, as well as premiering this rich, sparkling brass ensemble piece with the Greater Columbus Community Orchestra that I’m still feeling vibrate through me.
  • Nikhil P. Yerwadekar and Living Language (Barbes, NYC, 04/11/2025) – Because the sole New York trip this year was to celebrate my 45th birthday with a gang of my favorite people in the world, there were fewer distinct cultural items on the calendar. But this was an extreme highlight: Yerwadekar, whom I last saw backing Hailu Mergia at a Big Ears, leading a ferocious band through Afrobeat classics and originals in a wall-to-wall-packed Barbes back room where no one stopped moving. Made even sweeter as my great friend Andrew Patton’s inaugural visit to one of my temples of music.
Nikhil P. Yerwadekar and Living Language at Barbes
  • The Lilybandits with Two Cow Garage (Natalie’s Grandview, 06/05/2025) – I think anyone who’s read ten lines I’ve written or spent ten minutes in my presence knows I think Todd May’s the greatest songwriter Columbus has ever produced. They culminated an important reissue project of his first mature band, The Lilybandits with At Thirty Three and a Third this year, and lost its drummer and their lifelong friend Keith Smith last year. This extremely rare reunion of the original core members (May, Trent Arnold, Jose Gonzalez, Bob Hite) with longtime friend Keith Hanlon filing in on drums, Bob Ray Starker providing the horn lines he gifted them with on those records, and Smith’s son joining on a few vocals, was probably the biggest reminder of how much I love my town all year, wrapped up in a rock show that made hard to believe they’d only gotten together to run through the songs once. Two Cow Garage, long influenced by the Lilybandits (the first time I ever saw Two Cow, they did a Todd May song and dedicated it to “The genius of Bernie’s”) set the tone with a set of jubilant catharsis.
  • Charles “Wigg” Walker (ACME Feed and Seed, Nashville, 06/14/2025) – My eyebrows shot up when I saw Charles Walker – who I knew from his days with the Dynamites (who the Funkdefy collective, at the time including the above-mentioned Andrew Patton, booked in Columbus more than once, and my great friends in St Louis, at the time including fellow Columbus legend Matt Benz booked at Twangfest – was doing a regular brunch gig when Anne and I already planned to be in Nashville. We juggled our schedule to make sure we were in town in time for this and stayed for two sets: Walker still in perfect voice, backed by a sizzling organ trio led by his longtime Dynamites foil Charles Treadway, going through stone soul classics and gorgeous new originals.
Lilybandits at Natalie’s Grandview
  • Dan Baird and Homemade Sin (Eastside Bowl, Nashville, 06/14/2025) – If the only thing this show gave us was the five minutes of Dan Baird and his killer band opening with the Open All Night highlight “Sheila,” with Baird’s grin and electric presence, it would have justified the six-hours drive each way, the hotel cost, all of it. But it gave us so much more. 45 minutes of blistering rock and roll, led by someone who, at 71, is outplaying and dancing rockers a third of his age. Also, this was a beautiful look in the way other scenes take care of their own, organized by Warner Hodges (Baird’s guitar foil in Homemade Sin, longtime lead player in Jason and the Scorchers), here leading his own band and sitting in with every other set in a benefit for his former Scorchers bandmate Jeff Johnson.
  • Sam Johnson and Noah Demland, Contrary Motion (Wild Goose Creative, 06/20/2025) – The second or third year in what I hope continues as a series exploring the history of Queer chamber music/new music featured new originals from organizers Sam Johnson and Noah Demland, classics of the canon from Pauline Oliveros and John Cage, and contemporary pieces from Caroline Shaw and Leilahua Lanzilotti by a tight ensemble of some of our best players. A brilliant glimpse of where this music is, how it got here, and how relevant it still is.
  • Say She She (Woodlands Tavern, 06/20/2025) – Finally got to see my favorite of the current neo-disco bands, NYC’s Say She She, and they tore the roof off Woodlands in a crowd full of people I mostly didn’t know (besides Anne and my Providence-based friend Daria, maybe we knew two other people in a nearly sold out room) all dancing in a sweaty, delirious mess. The reason I went from the show above to this show, but they got separate listings, is that they felt like very distinct events to me; they didn’t resonate against one another like the couple of shared line items.
Say She She at Woodlands
  • Budos Band with Benny Trokan (Woodward Theatre, Cincinnati, 07/15/2025) – One of the great live bands I’ve seen in 30 years of seeing live music, Budos Band, retained their crown on a gorgeous summer night in a venue I hadn’t made it to in Cincinnati previously. Icing on the cake was Benny Trokan – who Anne introduced me to in his days with Robbers on High Street – with a tight, swinging four-piece going through the lovely smooth soul of his recent solo record.
  • Mike Dillon’s Punkadelick (Dick’s Den, 07/18/2025) – Columbus is lucky to get percussionist Mike Dillon coming through our fair city a decent amount, but what made this show special was the presence of New Orleans drummer Nikki Glaspie, who’s shared the stage with Beyonce, Ivan Neville, Snarky Puppy, and Nth Power. That powerhouse sense of the multiplicity of groove and the emotional content of the song took both sets I stayed for into outer space.
Budos Band at Woodward Theatre, Cincinnati
  • Vandoliers (Rumba Cafe, 08/12/2025) – I’d been a fan of the Vandoliers since their 2019 breakthrough Forever and this year’s Life Behind Bars was a revelation: simultaneously a reminder of what drove me so crazy about the alt.country/Americana scene in my teens and 20s and a broadening in the same sense as their Dallas forebears’ Old 97s’ Fight Songs and Satellite Rides. Similarly, this show was a gleeful, textured statement of purpose, with lead singer Jenni Rose’s songs detailing her coming out the other side of addiction and gender dysmorphia into a brighter place without sugarcoating any of the challenges, and the band – with one exception – having been with her the entire ride and still shouting together. As Anne said, “This is what all protest music should sound like: a party that also makes you want to smash shit.”
  • Mark Lomax II (Streetlight Guild, 08/28/2025) – I was lucky to see a few examples of one of our finest composers and drummers, Mark Lomax, in action this year, including a reunion with Scott Woods and his trio, and also missed a big premiere at the Wexner Center because I lost track of my schedule and didn’t buy before it sold out. But this rare solo drum recital, directly inspired by Tiffany Lawson’s What If I Told You It Was Freedom (look for more on that in my Art Exhibits Best Of) in Streetlight Guild’s smaller upstairs gallery space was a direct injection into my veins of his compositional strategies, his fingerprint-distinct approach to the drums, and about creativity in general as he discussed the pieces and personal history with Lawson and Woods.
Mark Lomax II at Streetlight Guild
  • Etienne Charles and Creole Soul (Wexner Center for the Arts) and Quintron and Ms. Pussycat with DANA (Cafe Bourbon Street), both 09/18/2025 – Two approaches to blending cultures and styles through a distinct lens of a life in art, both made exciting shows on this September night. Trumpeter/composer Etienne Charles led his phenomenal band through a selection of compositions drawing from jazz and funk traditions and his Trinidadian heritage to a rapturous crowd at the Wexner Center Performance space. A five minute drive away – we sadly missed Mutha Funk though I heard great things – Quintron and Ms. Pussycat celebrated their 30th anniversary as a rock-and-roll puppet show with homemade drum machines, greasy organ, and garage-rock hooks that’s had me in its hooks for decades and is still a show like nothing else and one I’ll never miss if I can help it.
  • Kid Congo Powers with Cheater Slicks (Grog Shop, Cleveland, 09/20/2025) – I did a lot of thinking about memory this year – I often do, but at 45 it felt pronounced – and seeing the great Kid Congo, a throughline of so much music I loved play a set bursting with memories of friends and colleagues he’d lost, including “The Boy Had It All,” “Sean DeLear,” “La araña,” “He Walked In,” and songs he’d played with bands many of whose members have slo passed on like The Cramps and The Gun Club, vibrated with those feelings and reminded me that you can carry those people with you in a jubilant way without diminishing how much it hurts. In addition, Cheater Slicks (longtime friends and mutual admirers of Powers) who have been on a streak the last two years, played one of the best sets I’ve seen them do in 30 years of seeing them semi-regularly.
  • Lorette Velvette with Deerfrance (Bar DKDC, Memphis, 09/26/2025) – The best musical side quest we’ve had in over a decade of going to Memphis with Gonerfest as the main course: Panther Burns legend Lorette Velvette on a double-bill with linchpin of John Cale’s Sabotage era Deerfrance in the intimate confines of Bar DKDC. Killing new songs from both artists, excellent bands including members of the Reigning Sound, Panther Burns, and the Memphis Symphony, and a gorgeous clinic of song.
Lorette Velvette at Bar DKDC, Memphis
  • Talisha Holmes and the Stardust (Dick’s Den, 10/03/2025) – I’ve been a fan of Talisha Holmes’ voice since High School and her singing and repertoire for almost 20 years, but the first show with the band she dubbed Stardust felt like a new chapter opening with ecstatic/spiritual jazz and folk textures into the thorny, dense R&B she does better than anyone else in town. It was an eye opening evening that got me extremely excited to see what’s coming next.
  • DANA with Messrs and DJ Adam Scoppa (Ace of Cups, 10/17/2025) – As seen in my records of the year, I thought DANA’s Clean Living was a triumph, and their constant touring schedule honed their most nuanced and powerful set of songs into a ferocious live set. Here, along with a rare reunion set from Columbus’ deconstructed hardcore heroes Messrs (including drummer Mat Bisaro playing like a monster while also going through a grueling round of chemo) and the sweet sounds of Adam Scopp’s Heatwave dance night made one of the most satisfying reminders of what I love about Columbus.
DANA at Ace of Cups
  • Robbie Fulks (Natalie’s Grandview, 10/18/2025) – Robbie Fulks is another artist who is no stranger to anyone who’s read this or talked to me, but what made this appearance at Natalie’s special to me was a return to the four-piece rock band format that made me fall hard in the first place, with drummer Gerald Dowd, bassist KC McDonough, and guitarist Robbie Gjersoe doing a setlist that returned to the first three records – and the excellent new one, Now Then – with one highlight after another.
  • Micah Schnabel and Vanessa Jean Speckman (Rumba Cafe, 10/23/2025) – A valedictory show for two artists who have done so much for Columbus in their performance home, Rumba, and a set that made my heart almost burst out of my chest.
Micah Schnabel and Vanessa Jean Speckman at Rumba Cafe
  • Worthington Chamber Orchestra, Frontiers of Sound (Worthington United Methodist Church, 11/07/2025) – The Worthington Chamber Orchestra has a great series, and they continued to cement their place in the creative firmament of Columbus with commissioning the first violin concerto from Columbus native (now based in New York) Aaron Quinn, played by Devin Copfer (WCO concertmaster, Chamber Brews co-founder, Devi and Liz, Urban Art Ensemble) and the orchestra. The piece planted its flag in a truly American continuum, textures that felt like Ives and Copland, cascading harmonies that recalled some of the sticky synth layers of vintage Detroit techno, and a soulful bluesiness in the central violin line that still had all rigor you’d want to see from classical music.
  • Durand Jones and the Indications with Psycodelics (Newport Music Hall, 11/09/2025) – The smooth soul of Durand Jones had a packed crowd at the Newport eating out of their palms with a sweaty, vibrant show that summed up what so many of us love about the genre while also serving as the entry point for so many younger people. Psycodelics did a muscular, fiery take on vintage sounds like EWF, Sly, and P-Funk that reminded me that music has a long future ahead of it.
Durand Jones and the Indications at Newport Music Hall
  • Minibeast (Cafe Bourbon Street, 11/14/2025) – Peter Prescott’s Minibeast knocked me completely over, with sparking noise and 10,000-league-deep grooves. Also a reminder of how good Bobo sounds these days. Every nuance of that powerful, multifaceted sound washed over everyone in the room.
Vandoliers at Rumba Cafe

Top 20 Festival Sets

Ugly Stick at Natalie’s Grandview
  • Beachland’s 25th Anniversary (Beachland Ballroom and Tavern, Cleveland)
    • Mourning [A] BLKStar
    • Pull Chains
Mourning [A] BLKStar at Beachland Ballroom
  • Lost Weekend Records’ 22nd Anniversary (Natalie’s Grandview)
    • Ugly Stick
    • Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments Featuring Mickey Mocnik
TJSA with Mickey Mocnik at Natalie’s Grandview
  • Big Ears Festival (Various Venues, Knoxville)
    • Kate Soper and Wet Ink Ensemble, Ipsa Dixit (Bijou Theatre)
    • Joy Guidry (The Point)
    • Tyshawn Sorey and DACAMERA, Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) (St. John’s)
Kate Soper and Wet Ink Ensemble, Big Ears
  • Lee Bains III and Lonnie Holley (Barley’s)
  • King Britt/Tyshawn Sorey/Meshell Ndegeocello/Melz (Jackson Terminal)
  • SML (The Standard)
King Britt/Tyshawn Sorey/Meshell Ndegeocello/MELZ at Big Ears
  • Future Salad Days Opening (Blockfort Parking Lot)
    • Juanita and Juan
    • Clickbait
    • Cheater Slicks
Juanita and Juan at Future Salad Days
  • Jazz and Ribs Fest
    • Ron Holmes’ Eclecticism
Ron Holmes Eclecticism, Jazz and Ribs Fest
  • Gonerfest (Wiseacre Brewing, Memphis)
    • Pylon Reenactment Society
    • Lightning Bolt
    • Lothario
    • Cheap Fix
    • Des Demonas
    • TINA!!!
Des Demonas, Gonerfest
Categories
Best Of visual art

Best of 2023 – Visual Art

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
Categories
Best Of visual art

2020 Best Of – Visual Art

Vija Celmins, Met Breuer

This year was a reminder not to wait to do things – tell people you care about them, start on that project, go to that exhibit. With the other three categories I’ve used on these memory exercises for the last 20ish years, there were digital workarounds that gave me a taste of what I was missing, tiding me over. Visual Art didn’t work that way for me.

I sampled, and I’m thrilled so many galleries and museums transitioned to or enhanced their existing online presence, with exciting work from David Zwirner, the Frieze fair, all manner of things in Europe. Still, I had a hard time connecting with it. It was like flipping through Artforum to me, good to know what’s going on that I can’t see, but I never felt like I experienced the pieces.

The impetus of the Available Light motto “don’t wait” came to light. When things shut down, I was glad in ways I can barely articulate that I spent the time and money on a New York trip for APAP and trips to Cleveland and Louisville (neither of which were primarily for visual art but I worked some in) all before March. At the same time, I hesitated a month for the new Wexner exhibits, and the window slammed shut when I wasn’t expecting (and they were things I desperately wanted to see). So, as usual, whenever things open again, don’t wait. Find what you’re interested in and lunge at it.

Everything is in Columbus unless otherwise noted. Photos were taken by me unless otherwise noted.

Selections from Art After Stonewall, Columbus Museum of Art
  • Various Artists, Art After Stonewall (Columbus Museum of Art) – This tracing of the aftershocks of the Stonewall Riot, through early Gay Liberation and the darkest, most enveloping days of the AIDS crisis was a monumental undertaking and the finest use yet of the CMA’s new wing. For me, one of the highlights was the prominent placement of Columbus’s role in the gay art movements being documented here, including a lump-in-my-throat wall of Corbett Reynolds, his busts, and ephemera from his nightclub and his Red parties.
  • Vija Celmins, To Fix The Image in Memory (Met Breuer, NYC) – The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s rental and repurposing of the previous Whitney Museum never quite found its footing but presented some spectacular exhibitions. Maybe my favorite was the last time I’ll ever get to visit – they announced in June the satellite building will not reopen after lockdown – this jaw-dropping retrospective of Vija Celmins. To Fix The Image in Memory took us through luminous renderings of household objects, as though lit from within, to intricate studies of the night sky. Whispered words of apocalypse and hymns to understanding, reminding me again and again of Mary Oliver’s maxim that “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
  • Expanded Museum of Modern Art (NYC)- I’m always skeptical when something I love – even when it has problems I’ve grumblingly come to live with – changes. But my heart sang when that skepticism burned off scant minutes after walking into the reconfigured MoMA. The flow between the collection crackles and sparks conversation in ways it seemed to restrict or calcify before. The various rooms assembled by artists sizzled with panopticon energy (on my visit I especially loved the Amy Sillman). I want to get back to my favorite city for at least 100 reasons but the biggest one is to luxuriate in the new MoMA some more. 
Rachel Feinstein, Jewish Museum
  • LaToya Ruby Frazier, The Last Cruze (Wexner Center for the Arts) – LaToya Ruby Frazier is a shining, fascinating example of how an artist can pay witness, how empathy and a willingness to take a community seriously, always pays off. This look at the Lordstown, Ohio, GM plant and its workers dazzled me. I was touched watching some of the workers documented here walking through the exhibit and thought about how art institutions can serve multiple functions at the same time.
  • Margaret Kilgallen, that’s where the beauty is (MOCA, Cleveland) – My last trip to another city before lockdown found Cleveland as enriching as ever – you’ll also see it on the Live Music list – and this Kilgallen retro exploded her celebration of niche scenes and an endangered love of what’s hand-crafted and unique. A wild party and a thoughtful call to introspection.
  • Rachel Feinstein, Maiden Mother Crone (Jewish Museum, NYC) – This Feinstein survey dug deep into myth, desire, and narrative in ways that repelled easy answers and snap judgments. Huge sculptures and sparkling installations, bouncing their energy off each other and absorbing what the observes walking through the Jewish Museum had to give, then throwing it back at us, reshaped and a little more alive.
Rashid Johnson, Hauser & Wirth
  • Rashid Johnson, The Hikers (Hauser & Wirth, NYC) – Hauser & Wirth rarely disappoints me – even more so with their excellent new cafe and bookshop – and when I entered on a sunny January day for the (very good) Mike Kelley pieces, I was knocked sideways by my first real exposure to Rashid Johnson. These massive tile mosaics and collages, which reminded me a little of Jack Whitten, captured a dread and anxiety in a way I found moving but also somehow uplifting. 
  • Felix Valloton, The Painter of Disquiet (Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC) – Valloton struck me as a cross between Bonnard and Toulouse-Lautrec and it was fitting seeing this look at his work in the same room where I really got Bonnard for the first time. Rich, narrative work, unsparing in its judgment of its characters and their desires but enraptured by them at the same time. I spent most of my time at Bemelmans after walking through this writing about it and trying to make sense of how deeply it spoke to me.
  • Burt Hurley, Loose Nuts: Burt Hurley’s West End Story (Speed Museum, Louisville) – I’m an incredible sucker for genre work before the genre is supposed to have existed. Hurley’s satire of urban Louisville assumed later comic book styles we take for granted and found its own solution to those same storytelling problems in ways I’ve never seen before.
Rachel Harrison, Whitney Museum
  • Rachel Harrison, Life Hack (Whitney, NYC) – I’m ashamed to admit I knew very little of Harrison’s work when I walked into the Whitney trying to squeeze the most into this last day of the trip but these vibrant, brutal surreal pop explosions shook me and reverberated against everything else I saw that Sunday (it makes appearances on both the theatre and music lists).
  • Various Artists, Edith Halpert and the Rise of American Art (Jewish Museum, NYC) – No exaggeration: I cried four or five times doing this. This kind of tracing movements through one or more focal points is a unique speciality of the Jewish museum and this look at how a collector and gallerist can be a focal point in making people sit up and care and a linchpin of a community that didn’t really exist until she stood up and made it exist was a reminder I deeply needed at the moment. And a reminder I always need.
  • Sadie Benning, Pain Thing (Wexner Center for the Arts) – Sadie Benning’s previous exhibit at the Wex is one of my favorite things I’ve ever seen in 25 years of regular patronage and these tiny images, implying film at one minute and suggesting the twists of a kaleidoscope, resisting any simplisticy reduction, beguiled and baffled me. I wished I could have seen this another dozen times.
Selections from The Eastside Canon: Smoky Brown and Friends, Streetlight Guild
  • Various Artists, Songs in the Dark (Tanya Bonakdar, NYC) – Tanya Bonakdar is a gallery I make a point to hit every trip if something’s up and this group show reaffirmed everything I love about its stable of artists and its curatorial practice. A look at the current fraught moment and its complicating factors without – in accordance with Brecht who it references in the title – ever making the viewer despair. Work by artists I already loved like Ernesto Neto, Rivane Neuenschwander, and Olafur Eliasson bumped up against new to me art by Hannah Starkey and Mehschach Gaba.
  • Jessica Segall, 100 Years, All New People (SPACES, Cleveland) – This look at immigration, composed of elements Segall collected at the borders, was a tomb and a monuument to human ingenuity, our ability to rise above anytthing that would hold us down or keep us still, but also an installation drenched in stillness and the terrible price these systems would exact from us.
  • Smoky Brown and Friends, The Eastside Canon (Streetlight Guild) – Streetlight Guild, under the guidance of Scott Woods, has been the most exciting single Columbus art development in the last few years. The gallery exhibits are always worthwhile but this was special. One of the great guiding lights of local art, Smoky Brown, given a museum-quality show of work that was new even to someone like me who grew up here and thought I’d seen a lot of his work. Coupled with a selection of work from his collection. A lesson in valuing what’s around you and appreciating your friends and community.
LaToya Ruby Frazier, Wexner Center

Categories
live music theatre

Things I’ve Been Digging – 09/07/2020

IDLES, screenshot from livestream

Music: IDLES live from Abbey Road.

All praise to Anne for turning me onto London’s IDLES, one of the freshest, most exciting rock bands out there. I was laid up with pneumonia when they first came through Columbus, but I made up for it the next year at Beachland.

For such a live machine, you can sense the palpable frustration in the tour for their record being delayed. These three streamed shows from historical Abbey Road studios gave a potent but tiny glimpse of the power they find in coiled stomps and wild catharsis.

Classic subverted agitprop lines like , “I got new shoes ’cause I mean business” and “Never fight a man with a perm” have the punch of recognizing an old friend. The new tunes painted their kind of righteous fury in new neon colors like the throbbing mutant disco of “Mr. Motivator,” rotating on singer Joe Talbot, snarling “How’d you like those clichés?” in a way that didn’t deflate the previous verse but kicked it like a champion footballer over the stands right into the sun.

They paid tribute to some rock history with a brilliant, glistening dirge take on The Ramones’ “I Want To Be Sedated.”

Barbara Fant, screenshot from livestream of Rhapsody and Refrain

Poetry: Streetlight Guild’s Rhapsody and Refrain, featured reader Barbara Fant.

It’s no surprise to anyone who’s known me – online, in person, or any mix – that Scott Woods has been one of my inspirations for over 20 years, and I’ve been proud to know him for at least 15 – I remember the moment we first talked, at Larry’s on a Monday, but I couldn’t tell you what year it was. When he opened his venue, Streetlight Guild, expectations were high, and he has exceeded them so handily he makes it look easy without ever hiding the amount of work it takes.

So it’s no surprise Woods has made the most out of the moment’s forced pivot to online work. My favorite example of that right now is his sequel series to 2019’s mind-blowing Rhapsody and Refrain series, one poet a month for the 30 days of September. This week, I was lucky enough to catch the great Barbara Fant, whose voice it had been too damn long since I’ve heard.

Her melodious tone – frequently inserting singing – feels like a culmination of all the spoken word artists who made me fall in love with the form as she rained gems that made me with I could stop and play the tape back, spinning out riveting images like “Prayers fall when we open up our mouths like caskets,” or “We have been this magic before.” Melting these deep images into sticky hooks without ever sacrificing the mystery of the form.

If you want a reminder of the phenomenal poetry scene we have and how great we can be if we support people doing that excellent work, you owe it to yourself to check out Rhapsody and Refrain. And if you weren’t tuned in for Fant’s set? See her next time.

Screenshots from WWOZ Virtual Groove Gala livestream. From left: Irma Thomas, John Boutte, Samantha Fish

Music: WWOZ’s Virtual Groove Gala

There’s no shortage of cities I love, but New Orleans is special. New Orleans felt like magic that first moment I stepped off the plane. Even having a stroke at the end of my second trip didn’t diminish my unbridled affection for that town. I was just thinking this year it had been too long and then all travel stopped.

Among the things I’ve directed money toward since there’s no going out includes becoming a supporting member of New Orleans’ phenomenal public radio station WWOZ. That’s paid off with an amazing weekend of archived Jazzfest sets and, Thursday, an online version of their annual gala (additionally bittersweet because of their 40th anniversary this year). At the end of a long day, I’m not sure anything could have been better to cast on my porch.

This stirring cross-section of Nola joy hit generations, genres, and simultaneously stoked my missing the big easy and soothed that longing. Kermit Ruffins and band brought a stripped-down version of their jazz party with tunes like “Sunny Side of the Street.” Amanda Shaw and Rockin’ Dopsie Jr teamed up for a righteous dance party crowned by a fiddle-drenched take on the Hank Williams classic “Jambalaya.”

John Boutté with a silky duo of piano and bass behind him, swooned through a delightful Nat King Cole tribute with “Straighten Up and Fly Right” and “Nature Boy” before leaning into his original “Sisters” like putting a cherry on top of the cake. Samantha Fish’s own sharp, gritty songs like “Bulletproof” hit the back of my skull, but my favorite was the slow-burn blues “Need You More.”

And, of course, the crowning set was the legend Irma Thomas. Accompanied by her pianist, she treated us to a slinky read of her “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is,” a keening “For the Rest of My Life,” and a jaw-dropping, definitive version of one of the great New Orleans songs (high on the biggest Mount Olympus of all American music), Percy Mayfield’s “Please Send Me Someone to Love.”

These institutions are important – those of us who are weathering this better financially should try to support what’s important to them, but that doesn’t let the government off the hook.