Tag: Urban Arts Space

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Best Of live music

Best of 2024 – Shows

Stunning year of shows this time – in the usual suspect cities as well as a more than welcome return to Chicago. As you can probably expect, Dick’s Den featured most prominently in my show-going this year, with 26 as I write this (had to cut it off to give myself a break at year’s end, but I’ll probably be there twice more before the 31st) and Natalie’s coming in second at 20, followed by Cafe Bourbon Street at 14, and Rumba Cafe at 11.

As usual, everything listed is in chronological order, all photos are by me, and everything is in Columbus unless listed otherwise. Openers are listed if they added to my impression as I thought about this list.

The Barbarians Reunion, Radegast, January 2024
  • Tony Barba and Friends, Radegast Hall, NYC – A surfeit of credit card points allowing me to do it on the cheap made for a last-minute trip to Winter Jazz Fest in January 2024. I saw great shit there, as well as theater and exhibits, which I’m going to talk about in the Festivals portion of this wrap up… but the single thing that made me decide, “Fuck it, I’m going,” was a Facebook announcement of a reunion in the Brooklyn beer hall Radegast on Sunday night of one of my all-timers, a band of some of my dearest friends that helped define Brooklyn to me when I was first going there often in the early 2000s: the Tony Barba-led, hook-drenched The Barbarians. I rolled into this dark, cavernous room for two sets, wrapping the vintage Barbarians lineup’s mini-set of five stone-cold classics with older and newer material of Barba’s playing with other friends like Noah Jarrett, Conor Elmes, and Dave Treut that made me get off my stool and dance, that knocked me against the bar, that made me regret having a flight that left five hours after I stumbled out into the street, and that put a flag in the ground that said “This is going to be a good fucking year.”
  • Worthington Chamber Orchestra with Ucelli, Worthington United Methodist Church – I’m on record as thinking Mark Lomax is one of Columbus’s very finest composers and the more of his chamber music I hear the stronger that impression gets. I didn’t even know the Worthington Chamber Orchestra existed until I heard about this Sunday afternoon program themed around the underground railroad’s presence in Worthington (a good reminder in the wake of more recent white supremacist news around this suburb), and I was blown straight back in my seat. Lomax’s concerto used the cello quartet Ucelli at its spine to create a different form of cello concerto than I’d heard and, with the WCO under the baton of Antonie Clark, a wild, shifting, stormy narrative that opened up into these gorgeous sunlight textures. Anne and I talked about this for half an hour over dinner after.
  • Benefit for Dre Peace, Natalie’s Grandview – This show was a reminder of one of the things the Columbus music scene has always done very well: show up for each other. And a sterling reminder of the good work Natalie’s does providing stages to support this showing up. While the discussion from someone else with a kidney transplant at this benefit to get singer Dre Peace a new kidney was the single most moving moment of the evening, I was also gobsmacked by beautiful songs from Talisha Holmes, Ebri Yahloe, Starlit Ways and the Liquid Crystal Project. A Night that made my heart feel a little more full.
From Left: Talisha Homes, Ebri Yahloe, Starlit Ways; Natalie’s Grandview, February 2024
  • Nickel Creek and The Staves, Mershon Auditorium – Only got to the venue in time for a few songs from The Staves but their harmonies and barbed songwriting blew me away. Nickel Creek I was later to the party than other roots fans of my generation – I had to back into it through my love of Chris Thile and Sara Watkins’ later work – so this was the first time I’d seen them as a unit. Cataracts burned off my eyes – this was one of the best, most energetic live bands of any genre I’d ever seen: the beautiful tension and floating quality of encore-closer “Holding Pattern,” where Thile’s high-and-sweet tenor took on a flood of shadows as he sang, “Hold me, darling, while the world burns down,” is still stuck in my throat nine months later.
  • The Sleeveens with Goblin Smut and the Whiteouts, Cafe Bourbon Street – Irish-born Stef Murphy’s Tennessee-based supergroup (featuring members of Sweet Knives and Cheap Time) The Sleeveens blew my mind with catchy, crunchy riffs and grooves that recalled my favorite parts of the Stiff records catalog without feeling like just a throwback. And reminded me of the joyous, snotty power of longtime friends/faves The Whiteouts while turning me onto jubilant Goblin Smut. One of my most satisfying nights of rock and roll all year.
  • Hurray for the Riff Raff with NNAMDI, Skully’s Music Diner – I’ve been a fan of Hurray for the Riff Raff for a while – my fandom solidified with a stunning Twangfest set in 2016 followed by their masterpiece The Navigator (my favorite record of theirs until this year’s record of the year for me, The Past Is Still Alive). This set – with a killer opener from avant-R&B chameleon NNAMDI who also held down the bass chair in Hurray for the Riff Raff – did a couple of things I thought were almost impossible at the same time: doing a set of the entire new record that had come out in the last week or so, with one older tune included, for an artist with such an extensive and deep catalog, and having the crowd eat it up; and a set I didn’t move once during. Not to get another beer, not to talk to someone, not to use the restroom. The rare set that didn’t provoke any restlessness. The moment on “Snakeplant,” hearing a full room cheer as Alynda Segarra sang, “There’s a war on the people, what don’t you understand,” was as powerful a reminder I got of the connection between performer and audience as I had all year. Maybe as powerful as I’ve ever had.
Hurray for the Riff Raff, Skullys, March, 2024
  • Jeff Parker and the New Breed, Wexner Center for the Arts – An hour-plus of music whose seamless transitions and taste for ambience and texture – with an astonishing band including Josh Johnson on sax and keys, Paul Bryan on bass and synth bass, and Jeremy Cunningham on drums and sampler, Parker reaffirmed why he’s one of the great guitarists, composers, and bandleaders of my lifetimes, doing favorites of mine like “Executive Life,” the Steve Reich funk of “Max Brown,” and even dipping into forbears for that kind of elastic, electric group dialogue with a sterling read on Weather Report’s “River People.”
  • Seventh Son Anniversary, Seventh Son Brewery – Another reminder of the beauty of my community. Seventh Son – co-owner Jen has been a friend since I was 20 – open their doors and hearts to a lot of community organizations, artists, projects. Their anniversary this year coincided with Record Store Day and assembled some of my favorite people and acts in this town – including probably my favorite DJ duo The Coming Home, Natural Sway, my first time seeing Big Fat Head, and rare, welcome performances from the full trio version of Scrawl and Envelope that had a crowd of at least 1/3 people I wholeheartedly love singing along with me.
  • Scott Miller and Robbie Fulks, Thunderbird Cafe, Pittsburgh – I’ve been lucky to see these two of my favorite songwriters – and two of my gateway drugs to alt.country (whatever that is) – semi-often in the last few years, but this shared bill was tempting enough to schedule a trip to Pittsburgh around an art exhibit Anne wanted to see to overlap their date. And it didn’t disappoint – both singers, solo acoustic, have what feels like an infinite grasp on the history of American music and a wide, deep catalog to draw from. My heart vibrated like it was going to pound out of my chest from the first notes of Miller’s teenage looking-back-rallying-cry “Freedom is a Stranger” to the last downbeat of their shared Roger Miller encore.
Jeff Parker and the New Breed, Wexner Center, March 2024
  • Chicano Batman with Lido Pimienta, The Bluestone – I was blown away when I first saw LA R&B/rock powerhouse Chicano Batman at A&R bar back in 2017 and they’ve only grown in power – intense grooves and sweet harmonies, a kaleidoscopic sense of melody and an encyclopedic understanding of rhythm made a set I couldn’t stop dancing during. Lido Pimienta accompanied by an astonishing percussionist blew me away with poison-tipped songs and a voice that made my spine straighen.
  • Shannon and the Clams with Tropo Magica, Ace of Cups – Long one of the best live bands in the world, Shannon and the Clams brought their doo-wop tinged soul-rock back to Ace to promote their best, most painfully textured record yet, The Moon is in the Wrong Place, for a night of pure but never monochromatic beauty and catharsis. And they brought Tropo Magica who – back when they were still called Thee Commons as a four piece – Anne and I rolled the dice on at Ace almost a decade ago not knowing anything and walked away with a new favorite band, destroyed. An opening set I couldn’t imagine anyone else following, but, of course, Shannon Shaw, Hunx, and the rest of her band did with grace; making transmuting personal tragedy and quieter moments into anthems that feed the audience’s souls seem easy.
  • Contrary Motion, Urban Arts Space – More of this, please. A stellar chamber music program in honor of Pride Month spanning the spectrum from legends like Pauline Oliveros and Julius Eastman to the first great local contemporary composer I ever heard, Rocco DiPietro (who also worked with and wrote a great book on Eastman), to a striking new piece from co-director (with Sam Johnson) Noah Demland.
Chicano Batman, The Bluestone, May 2024
  • Megan Palmer and the Mezzanines, Rambling House – One of Columbus’s finest exports, Megan Palmer, has been setting the world on fire in Nashville for a while but we always benefit when she comes back through town. This collaboration with Dave Vaubel (The Randys) and Max Button’s delightful Western Swing/countrypolitan covers band The Mezzanines, augmented by the firepower of guitarist Brett Burleson gave fascinating rhythmic textures I wasn’t used to on Palmer songs I’ve been singing along to for years – a samba here, a rolling rockabilly riff there – and she’s always had good bands. Her adding rich violin textures to half of the Mezzanines repertoire was icing on the cake.
  • The Mavericks with Nicole Atkins, Rock the Ruins, Indianapolis – This double bill – finally getting to see the Nicole Atkins lineup with great Memphis guitarist/songwriter John Paul Keith on leads – in Indianapolis, a city Anne and I already love, was a no brainier. A beautiful summer night, The Mavericks changing up the set list in interesting ways – including frontman Raul Malo smiling more than I’d ever seen and finding the perfect balance between the dance party and the after party – and Nicole Atkins and band making those sometimes very intimate songs into anthems as big as the sky.
Nicole Atkins and Raul Malo, Indianapolis, August 2024
  • Meshell Ndegeocello, Wexner Center for the Arts – Meshell Ndegeocello has been on an artistic hot streak lately – following a masterpiece in a career strewn with masterpieces, Omnichord Real Book with an expansive, as-overflowing-with-ideas-as-its-subject tribute to James Baldwin No More Water – bringing the latter live to the Mershon stage under Wex auspices was breathtaking. Going to church in the best ways. The two shows from the Wex on here were – finally, after a while – just scratching the surface; the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Nathalie Joachim, and Tyshawn Sorey were all best-of-year contenders. It was just a stacked year.
  • Steve Dawson and Diane Christiansen, Hogan House – This was a reminder how good Fall is – Anne and I had to leave one of our favorite events, Art of the Cocktail, at the CMA early to make this; we’d also given up tickets for one of my favorite current jazz singers, Cecile McLorin Salvant, at the Wex because we’d bought those when Dawson and Christiansen were announced; all the same night. It’s also a tribute to Hogan House – a venue run by PJ and Abbie Hogan that brings these celebrations of the power of song to our town on a regular basis and constantly blows me away with its welcoming vibe, its remarkably good sound, and the friendliness and charm of its owners I’m lucky enough to call friends. Even with all that going on, within the first few notes of a set that reached back to Dolly Varden classics and leaned heavily on Dawson’s last two stellar records, Time to Let Some Light In and Ghosts, Anne and I both knew there was nowhere we’d rather be, and posted up at a bar halfway home to talk mostly about this set for an hour.
Meshelle Ndegeocello, Wexner Center, September 2024
  • Kris Davis Trio, Columbus Museum of Arts – A piano player who’s given me many of my favorite records and shows over the years making the trio record that stood above for me in a year of astonishing trio records, with one of the finest rhythm sections working, Robert Hurst and Johnathan Blake, hitting the highest heights in that CMA auditorium.
  • Davila 666 with The Ferals, Ladrones, and Las Nubes, Rumba Cafe – The same night as the Kris Davis Trio (what’d I tell you about fall?) brought back one of my all-time live rock backs, Puerto Rico’s Davila 666 for the first time in five years and they tore the roof off Rumba, partying like 2 am while the sun was still out and leading a stacked bill that introduced me to one of my favorite newish bands, Ladrones.
Ladrones, Rumba Cafe, October 2024
  • Dave Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Natalie’s Grandview- I’ve been seeing Dave Alvin shows presented by Alec Wightman’s essential Zeppelin Productions since 2000; Wightman also promoted the first time I ever got to see another of my songwriter heroes, Jimmie Dale Gilmore. This appearance by those two fronting Alvin’s crack Guilty Ones band (Chris Miller, Lisa Pankratz, Brad Fordham) was a clinic in the power of songs – songs they grew up with in a lifetime of music fandom, songs that helped make their names like Alvin’s “Marie Marie” and Gilmore’s “Dallas,” songs by their friends (a jaw-dropping reggae take on a Butch Hancock song), and an example of how to balance an unflinching eye with belief things can get better and people can be better.
  • Jason Moran and the Bandwagon, Village Vanguard, NYC – One of my dream gigs for a long time has been to see Jason Moran and the Bandwagon in their standing Village Vanguard residency – a group that turned my head around when they first came to the Wexner Center under the auspices of Chuck Helm and who are still blowing me away in a variety of contexts – and luckily the last New York trip of the year allowed for just that. The final set of the week was dedicated to Duke Ellington with a side trip to songs he’d written for multi-media collaborations with Joan Jonas (the great artist was in attendance) and the bone-deep love of that music, the keen, active listening and responding between Moran, Tarus Mateen, and Nasheet Waits, and the ability to make it all alive was on full display.
  • Jesse Malin and Friends, Beacon Theatre, NYC – The reason we made that final New York trip and the icon of a saying Anne brings out regularly, “You can’t give yourself away.” Malin has thrown benefits, donated, opened the doors of the many bars he co-owns, for every benefit, every friend of his who was in need – and he’s friends with everyone in the music scene – and so it was only appropriate they all returned the favor. Even those of us who have but a couple specific memories flooded the Beacon Theatre with the kind of love I’ve talked about in this list – hell, in almost all of these lists – written large and in neon. I saw a few things after this – some great – but Malin and his band roaring through “Meet Me at the End of the World” and “Turn Up the Mains,” The Hold Steady exploding “Deathstar,” and Lucinda Williams doing their co-write “New York Comeback” are still echoing in my head.
Jesse Malin and Friends, Beacon Theatre, December 2024

Favorite Festival Sets:

Mendoza Hoff Revels in the bar mirror at Union Pool, NYC, January 2024
  • Winter Jazz Fest, NYC
    • Kaila Vandever, Zürcher Gallery
    • Marc Ribot and Mary Halvorson, Bowery Ballroom
    • Burnt Sugar with Vernon Reid, Brooklyn Bowl
    • Mendoza Hoff Revels, Union Pool
    • A Night at the East, Crown Hill Theatre
Shabaka, Bijou Theatre, Knoxville, March 2024
  • Big Ears Festival, Knoxville
    • Mary Halvorson’s Amaryllis, Tennesee Theatre
    • Jlin, The Point
    • Jason Moran and the Harlem Hellfighters, Knoxville Civic Auditorium
    • Chocolate Genius Inc, Bijou Theatre
    • Christian McBride and Brad Mehldau, Tennessee Theatre
    • Sexmob, The Standard
    • Charlie Dark MBE, Jackson Terminal
    • Shabaka, Bijou Theatre
    • Davone Tines and the Truth, Tennessee Theatre
    • Henry Threadgill/Vijay Iyer/Dafnis Prieto, Tennesee Theatre
Talisha Holmes, Columbus Arts Fest, June 2024
  • Columbus Arts Fest
    • Talisha Holmes
    • Soulutions Band
    • Trek Manifest and the Aye-1 Band
Faheem Najieb Quintet, Jazz and Ribs, July 2024
  • Columbus Jazz and Ribs Festival
    • Faheem Najieb Quintet
    • Milton Ruffin Quintet
    • Clave Sonic
Etran de L’air, Railgarten, Memphis, September 2024
  • GonerFest, Railgarten, Memphis
    • Pull Chains
    • RMFC
    • So What with Derv Gordon
    • Etran de L’air
    • Water Damage
Vernon Reid Conducting Burnt Sugar, Brooklyn Bowl, NYC, January 2024
Categories
Best Of visual art

Best of 2024: Visual Art

What an astonishing year for visual art this was – 64 exhibits in 6 cities, and very little of it let me down. I got my head turned around repeatedly and – for what’s in my town – I often came back again and again to drink from that fountain.

I want to take a few seconds for an elegy with the hope of rebirth for Skylab. I had dear friends who ran it over the years – I just saw one last weekend – and from the first time I went at 19 (ish), I knew my city was better for it. For that kind of a DIY space to hold on in a rapidly changing downtown for 27-ish (I feel like Berry Van Boekel and a couple of other people started hosting art shows in 1997 but I could be off by a few years) years is a marvelous achievement in itself.

Just as worth celebrating is the way it shifted with the interests of the residence but kept the quality so fucking high. The one exhibit on here I knew would be on this list within seconds of walking through the door, and it was of a lineage with the art I drank lukewarm cans of cheap beer and took in during my early 20s but for today. The music shows weren’t rage soaking out of my pores to Sword Heaven and Skeletons anymore, but the dance floor for Melanie Pagani one night I slipped into dance away the memory of a terrible play I saw was packed and the music was spectacular. If you have a few dollars, give to their relocation GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-skylab-gallery-find-a-new-home

As with the other lists, everything here is in chronological order (the three Ming Smith exhibits are grouped based on the first one of those I saw), in Columbus unless otherwise stated, and any photographs are by me unless otherwise stated.

From An-My Lê’s Two Rivers at Moma, January 2024
  • An-My Lê, Two Rivers; MoMA, NYC – My first exhibit of the year, while in town on an impromptu trip around APAP, also coincided with a Members guided tour with a curator of this fascinating mix of installations, sculptures, and photographs drawing lines between war games and her family’s exodus from Vietnam, smashing decades and locations together in ways that included art history and a point-of-view. Staggering.
  • Various Artists, 24/7; Seventh Son Brewing x 934 Gallery – This ticked every one of the senses of community I’m often hungry for – Seventh Son’s welcoming spirit, 934’s interest in mixing up artists of various backgrounds and styles, and a use of the space that still sticks with me.
  • Various Artists, Y’all Don’t Hear Me: The Black Appalachia; University of Tennessee Downtown Gallery, Knoxville – It’s odd writing this blurb right after hearing the great poet Nikki Giovanni died since Big Ears Festival was the last place I saw her read (her hometown, to a packed 1,000+ room at the Mill and Mine), and this group show in tribute to Giovanni they put together the next year was already echoing in my mind. A beautiful cross-section of the black community in Appalachia that doesn’t get spoken of as often as it should and dazzling work.
From Y’all Don’t Hear Me, UT Downtown Gallery, Knoxville, March 2024
  • Kara Walker, Back of Hand; Poetry Foundation, Chicago – Any time I get to see new Kara Walker, I’m overjoyed and the Poetry Foundation was the ideal space for these gargantuan, moving works on paper.
  • Nicole Eisenman, What Happened; MCA, Chicago – I knew a little of Nicole Eisenman’s work but this retrospective did an astonishing job of putting the scope of her interest, her tweaking of art and social history and the way that history and community are vitally important. A show that reminded me to love the world over and over again, without shirking any of its ugliness.
  • Laura Sanders, Her Habitat; Contemporary Art Matters – Finally made it to Rebecca Ibel’s new downtown gallery this year, which was as strong as her previous space. The enormous canvases in Sanders’ show hit me with the way every scene feels suffused with light from the inside out. These paintings feel hyper-realistic at first but – like the plays of Annie Baker or Branden Jacobs-Jenkins – the realism almost bends into surrealism as it gets to a deeper psychological truth.
Nicole Eisenman, MCA, Chicago, April 2024
  • Pallavi Sen, Dream Time; No Place Gallery – No Place Gallery has been the most consistently striking – for my tastes – gallery in Columbus for years and Pallavi Sen’s watercolors surging with overlapping patterns and an intriguing sense of repetition, was a highlight of everything I saw this year; I went back three times and never got it but loved sinking into these shapes.
  • Joan Jonas, Good Night, Good Morning; MoMA, NYC – This was the finest example I’ve ever seen of translating performance art – especially the way documentation changed over the decades – into a formal museum space. Gargantuan, overwhelming rooms that conjured the power and intensity of Jonas’s work but also made room for intimate, punch-you-in-the-face direct interaction with these pieces.
  • Various Artists, The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlatic Modernism; Metropolitan Museum, NYC – I’ve been enamored by The Harlem Renaissance since a middle school English teacher turned me into Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, but this exhibit took the visual arts component of that movement – artists I knew pretty well like Archibald Motley and James Van Der Zee, and so many who were outside of my radar – and connected it to the larger world in a way I spent hours in and could have spent twice as long.
  • Melissa Zexter, Momento; Secret Studio – Secret Studio has turned me onto more of my favorite artists over the last few years than any other Columbus gallery. Melissa Zexter’s embroidered photography struck a nerve with me immediately while opening up an entire universe to me.
From Clouds are So Beautiful That I Can Bite My Toes, Skylab, August 2024
  • Various Artists, Clouds Are So Beautiful That I Can Bite My Toes; Skylab – This group show curated by Amari-Grey was an exposure to younger artists I didn’t know before walking through that door with work that knocked me sideways individually but built power and beauty through the conversation among them. Ducking out of the – also great – street fair atmosphere below, celebrating the massive hanging art Current and with my favorite DJs The Coming Home spinning into something knottier, more ambiguous, but still a celebration of life, was a reminder of how crucial Skylab has been as a place, a reminder, as Sun Ra said, “There are other worlds they have not told you of; I wish to talk to you.”
  • Ming Smith, August Moon and Transcendence at the Columbus Museum of Art; Wind Chime at the Wexner Center for the Arts; and Jazz Requiem – Notations in Blue at the Gund Gallery at Kenyon University – Having all three of these venues present Ming Smith (not born in Columbus but grew up here, not far from where I spent my childhood in the Hilltop) and showing different sides of her art was my single favorite visual art experience this year. The early trip to Africa juxtaposed against the stellar new installation at the Wex, the personally chest-cracking-open look at the Hilltop and the Ohio State Fair in 1989 in Transcendence, and the deep dive into Pittsburgh through the lens of August Wilson in August Moon at CMA, and the perfect conjuring of traveling and jazz icons, many of whom she knew personally, in these Bresson-y moments at the height of their power juxtaposed with the pause right before or right after being on stage at the Gund. This was probably one of the top ten experiences of my life, going through galleries and thinking about art. The kind of work that holds up just as much nerding out with people deep into their critical bag and taking my Mom and watching her be dazzled.
Ming Smith, Jazz Requiem – Notations in Blue at the Gund Gallery, November 2024
  • Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Tranquility of Communion; Wexner Center for the Arts – Another photographer whose work I knew slightly but this broad yet hyper-focused look at his work, curated by Mark Sealy, the director of Autograph, the London space/collective Fani-Kayode co-founded, was an explosion of myth (in a larger sense and also self-mythologizing), desire, fury and beauty.
  • Hannah Fitzgerald, There Are No Lies That Change the Version of You I Had; Urban Arts Space – Among my favorite parts of what Urban Arts Space has been bringing to town are artists I may have seen one piece of in a group show, and giving them a wider space to spread out. My favorite example of that this year – and there were several contenders – was Hannah Fitzgerald’s bodily, disorienting sculptures that recalled Louise Bourgeois, Paul Thek and Alina Szapocznikow, but with a completely unique feel and powerful point of view as they unpacked her relationship with her Mother.
  • Andrea Morales, Roll Down Like Water; Brooks Museum, Memphis – The Brooks in Memphis always has something that makes me overjoyed I made a couple of hours for it whenever I’m in that city I love, and they outdid themselves with this magnificent show of photographer Morales, one of the best explanations of Movement Journalism I’ve ever walked through and one of the most beautiful examples of clear-eyed empathy. Every turn I made here hammered me in the sternum.
Andrea Morales, Roll Down Like Water at the Brooks Museum, Memphis, September 2024
  • Lester Julian Merriweather, Ana*Log; Crosstown Arts, Memphis – Another favorite spot in Memphis over the last several years is the Crosstown complex, the rare renovation of an older building (once an enormous Sears distribution center) that feels like it’s doing things right, including its art gallery, classrooms, public radio studio, and clinic. This first exposure to Merriweather’s canvases winked at Jack Whitten, one of my favorites who I’m surprised I don’t see more influence from throughout the art world, but in a contemporary and personal way. These collaged and gridded abstractions struck a deep chord in me.
  • Cameron Granger, 9999; Queens Museum, NYC – I’ve been a fan of Cameron Granger for a few years – his show at No Place Gallery made my Best Of in 2022 and I still think about it and a film screening he set up at 934 Gallery last year, so I had to make it to the Queens Museum for his first solo museum show. This so far exceeded my expectations it left me floating through the park back to the train and – in a weekend I saw so much work that rocked me – may have been the finest thing I saw in those three New York days. The film at the center of the exhibit reminded me of the potential I saw in science fiction as as kid, to make metaphors real and force us to confront them, to explode our histories and our anxieties, and that only rarely delivers on.
  • Elizabeth Catlett, A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies; Brooklyn Museum, NYC – An artist I’ve loved for a long time, this expanded my understanding of Catlett into other genres and media and (as was a theme for so much of the work that stuck with me over the course of this year) and a beautiful example of empathy that’s not mushy or soft-focused.
Edges of Ailey, Whitney Musem, December 2024
  • Alvin Ailey and Various, Edges of Ailey; Whitney Museum, NYC – Alvin Ailey cast a long shadow over pop culture, not just dance, in a way only a few choreographers have, and this Whitney exhibit did an astonishing job putting him in context and dialogue with influences, peers, the social world of New York, and the AIDS crisis, in a joyous and painful explosion that highlighted the craft and struggle of the work and the power and ecstasy of being in this big gallery with one another.
  • Various Artists, Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy; The Shed, NYC – Props to Anne for finding this, I only knew this recreation of Andre Heller’s Modern Art Carnival was displayed in New York. The best use of enormous art space The Shed I’ve ever seen, and a remarkable act of love in restoring these delightful pieces.
Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy at The Shed, December 2024
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