Susan Sontag in On Photography, her iconic look at the camera’s impact on society, stated that “to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.” In other words, once you click on a chosen subject, it belongs to you forever.  Nancy “Nan” Goldin, whose images taken between 1979 and 1986 of the hard-core subculture of her Bowery neighborhood, as well as forays in Berlin and Boston, has created her own 35mm record of permanency.  These lovers, friends, and strangers, most of whom became casualties of their time through drug overdoses or AIDS, are sadly, long gone.  But their snapshots remain to comfort and perhaps haunt their owner.

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a title taken from a song in Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, is Goldin’s most famous work.  Comprising almost 700 photographs, painstakingly assembled with a little help from her “tribe” into a 42 minute film—peppered with lyrics of her choice throughout—is the mainstay of The Museum of Modern Art’s current exhibition.  As Goldin confesses, “It’s the diary I let people read.  The diary is my form of control over my life….to obsessively record every detail.  It enables me to remember.”

Such nakedness of purpose is rare in an artist.  It’s a work that begs us to pay attention and if only for that reason alone, MOMA is to be commended for bringing it once again to the forefront of our consciousness.  An early mockup of the book, published by Aperture in 1986 with a book design by Keith Davis, is on display along with various posters and silver dye bleach prints adjacent to the screening room.  Ballad was originally presented as part of the Whitney Biennial in 1985 and subsequently at the Berlin Film Festival in 1986.

Surrendering in the dark to this cast of characters—in and out of bed at pre-coital and post-coital moments—feels at times clandestine, like having wandered unwittingly into a peep show.  Faces and bodies appear on the toilet, in the tub, lolling in doorways, supine on sofas, hanging off the trunks of convertibles.  They smoke, drink, shoot up, pose, celebrate over birthday cakes, bare their breasts and buttocks.  Transvestites, body builders, even a young woman in her trimester of pregnancy, confront the viewer with the blank-eyed stares of the downtrodden.  There’s not a lot of daylight in Goldin’s world.  We sense entropy, that whatever pleasures were given or stolen are over too soon. What is left are empty rooms, rumpled sheets, a bloody wall without explanation, and the isolation that follows. 

One can’t blame the viewer for being grateful for the occasional image of domesticity, of familiarity between subjects that may in some instances pass for love.  An elderly couple dancing awkwardly with one another, an affectionate hug whatever its impulse, is a welcome interruption sandwiched between so many other images of degradation and desperation. Such obsessions in  a photographer are not easy to quiet, and the trove of pictures from that period led to two other series: I'll Be Your Mirror (from a song on The Velvet Underground's The Velvet Underground & Nico album) and All By Myself.

It’s impossible to confront such an exhibit and not wonder about the how’s and why’s that led to little Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole.  Clearly, the early trauma of losing a big sister to suicide when Goldin was only 11 had to leave a spiritual vacuum.  It was at the Satya Community School outside of Boston that a teacher, sensing a nascent curiosity in her pupil, introduced her to her first camera.  In an image-driven culture, early influences were easy to adopt—Andy Warhol, Federico Fellini, Helmut Newton were hers for the taking.  By 18, having graduated from the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, she found herself in the hub of New York City’s post-Stonewall drug culture. A colorful bevy of drag queens were all too ready to serve as mentors for her camera’s eye.  “I really admire people who can recreate themselves and market their fantasies publicly.” 

It’s easy to see how the camera became the natural answer for exposure of others as well as self.  For Goldin, the line between art and life soon became so blurred as to be almost nonexistent.  Among the most riveting photographs greeting the viewer in the first room is 'Nan One Month After Being Battered, 1984'.  Hard to look at, it’s a brave, iconic image which undoubtedly served her own needs at the time. For others, it can be read as an unsparing cry for help.

In the same display, there are other arresting images to catch the eye.   The Hug, NYC, 1980,  features a woman adorned with a long wig with back to the camera. A muscled arm clutches her around the waist, the only body part we see of the male.  In Mark tattooing Mark, we see a close up of a man tattooing a tiger and palm trees on his stomach. Another image that stands out, mainly because it’s the only landscape in the show that seems to define itself as such, is Sun Hits the Road, Shandaken, NY 1983.  There’s a melancholy in the picture, perhaps because the road acts as its only subject. 

 It’s easy to see Goldin as the heir apparent to Diane Arbus.  Both precocious, both raised by Jewish parents preoccupied with their own successes or obsessions, as young women they were, more often than not, left to their own devices.  Free to seek outlets to a world beyond the narrow scope of their upbringing, they chose a descent into a netherworld.  Whether through an insatiable curiosity in Arbus’ case or an obsessive dependency in Goldin’s, it was a dangerous journey.  Arbus’ genius was not enough to save her, and she committed suicide in 1971 at 48.  Goldin continues her own search today and at 63, it may be doubtful she will ever fill the void that the early suicide of her own sister left behind. But the work since 1995 is more varied in subject matter, more mature. Since 1995 she has embraced a wide array of subject matter, everything from collaborative book projects with Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, to urban skylines, and not surprisingly—family life. 

In an age of “selfies,” an impatience to seek out Facebook fame—not within the parameters of Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes but better yet, 15 seconds—Nan Goldin’s pictures give us pause. An image can have the power to shake our souls, to realize what is saved and what is lost.

The installation is organized by Klaus Biesenbach, Chief Curator at Large, MoMA, and Director, MoMA PS1; Rajendra Roy, The Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film, MoMA; and Lucy Gallun, Assistant Curator, Department of Photography, MoMA.  The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is on view through April 16, 2017.

Author Bio:

Sandra Bertrand is Highbrow Magazine’s chief arts critic.

For Highbrow Magazine

NEW YORK—HELAC FINE ART announces With(out) Judgment, a multimedia exhibition exploring the ways in which artists construct their own universes.

With(out) Judgment will be on view from June 1 - July 1, 2017 at Helac Fine Art gallery.

Danny Glass’s paintings originate from his personal encounters, from people whom he encounters in his life to the places he has been. Danny communicates a range of

emotions through compositions that are both aesthetically considered and atmospherically calculated to highlight his subject’s expressions and body language. He works from both drawings made from live observation as well as copious amounts of photographs he takes on site. For Danny, time is a key element to his work. Slowing himself down through the act of painting, the extensive image production time allows him to imbue his work with his own expression and emotions with every brushstroke across the canvas.

Influenced by a diverse academic background, Haoran Fan’s primarily black and white digital photography brings a distinct voice, integrating graphic design and traditional art making. Grounded in marketing, graphic design, and advertising, pursuits that by nature must speak to a mass audience, Haoran’s experiences have cultivated a deep understanding of the interaction between objects, humans, and emotions. Peaceful two-toned landscapes stretch across his images with touches of color that intrigue the viewer, completing the bond between the personal with one’s surroundings.

Through her ceramic installations Ella Wesly works with the concept of cultural exchange across the world. Her thrown vessels are created with cotton fabric, incorporating textiles, ceramic, and sculptural aspects to parallel the comfort one experiences around family and loved ones. Her work was born of her experience as a multicultural child in America, a voice that is especially timely in our current climate of heightened xenophobia. Through her installation she invites guests to approach her metaphorical primed canvas, engaging the audience to impart their own unique stories to a table—the natural setting where stories are shared over a meal.

The physicality of her material drives Joanne Y. Kim’s paintings; she uses a variety of media to explore each level of tactility, vibrancy, and manipulability. Joanne creates vibrant canvases with undulations of abstracted planes of paint applied with a meticulous variance. Her pieces seem to speak of an abstraction of thoughts experienced across human connection. With bright playful colors and fluid brushstrokes, Joanne’s work coalesces into a manifestation of control as she plays with the duality of nature versus nurture as a physical reality.

To Kayleigh Starr, photography, painting, and framing are all equally vital in shaping the discussion about one’s personal relationship with the world around them. Her work surrounds the context of a window into a different reality through an object as opposed to an image. She layers her pieces with a tangible surface that is abstracted in a way that plays with perception, moving between the space of the real and the imagined. Kayleigh aims to foster a more personal connection with the audience, seen in her use of family photos from her father’s time as a soldier in the Middle East. With unique media application she acknowledges the inability to take a “perfect” photo in an extreme situation, but rather she brings the situation into focus with the raw tactility that reflects the photographer’s conditions.

The work of Kiseok Kim plays with plasticity in contemporary culture—the transparent, the temporary. In observing everyday objects and graphics, Kiseok incorporates the patterns and colors that are utilized repeatedly in global media. He registers the individual’s place in media by thinking through an idealized being that is surrounded by just a suggestion of a background. The silent, expressionless figures in his work are created with an air of tension inside their rectangular finite world, arranged to express a level of unsettling contrast—much like the artist’s personal experience of negotiating the limits of universality within our broadened world.

Kate, Youhyn Jang raises questions about art and how we receive art individually, allowing the audience to reflect on the works themselves, revealing the known and experiencing the unexpected. In her own words her work embodies the poetry she creates: “Whispering things that have never been a secret; Echoing things that are not hidden; Dissolving what has not arrived yet.” – Kate, Youhyun Jang

Opening Reception: THURSDAY, JUNE 1, 6-8 PM

548 W 28TH Street, Suite 323

New York, NY 10001

Highbrow Magazine

The first thing I noticed upon entering this exhibit was the intentional spacing of the show title that greeted me:  The words “Making” and “Space” were placed at the beginning and end, while “Women and Postwar Abstraction” had been squeezed in between.  All but one of the 94 works by 53 international women artists on display, drawn from MOMA’s own collection, have finally taken center stage.

That’s a subtle but important way of the curators saying that it is high time these talented and transformative artists find their rightful place in the brash, male-dominated universe of abstract expressionism.  For too long the likes of Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, Louise Bourgeois and others worthy of visibility have been brushed to the sidelines of modern art.  As Peter Schjeldahl said in his April 24^th  New Yorker review, the post-war world left women “less with glass ceilings than with absent floors.”

It's an old story, one that should have been relegated to the dustbins of history long ago, but the environment in which artists like Berthe Morisot, Georgia O’Keeffe, Frida Kahlo and Lee Krasner to name but a few grew up was rigidly defined.  Women were hardly solitary stars but marked by the liaisons, constellations if you will—familial, marital and otherwise—that allowed for their creative endeavors to flourish. 

In Morisot’s case, it was her brother-in-law Edouard Manet; in O’Keeffe’s it was her husband and mentor Alfred Stieglitz.   In Frida’s world, it was her own unique surrealistic genius and magnetic personality that held sway over the gigantic personage of her muralist husband, Diego Rivera. And in Krasner’s case, Jackson Pollock hovered nearby—a revolutionary presence that we can assume didn’t suck all of the oxygen out of their studio space. 

Thanks to curators Starr Figura and Sarah Hermanson Meister, with help from Hillary Reder, there’s an airy, capacious feel to the entire exhibit, giving these creations—from Ann Ryan’s miniature but magnificent collages to the monumental woven sisal sculpture by Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz, room to breathe.  In the latter’s case, this massive sienna-colored piece is positively monolithic, imperiously looking down at the viewer as something alternately timeless and terrifying in its beauty.

For many of these artists, a nod to more intimate, personalized approaches was subsumed into a more universal abstraction.  Grace Hartigan’s Shinnecock Canal, situated on the south fork of Long Island, has an almost magnetic appeal through its great blocks of color and zigzag motion.  Such a bold treatment of theme was attributed to a certain “George” Hartigan (a nom de plume briefly used by the artist). 

The Romanian-born Hedda Stern fled from Bucharest during the Nazi occupation, finding inspiration in New York’s interwoven highways.  Her Road series of paintings shuns color for charcoal streaks and shadows, the blur of erratic white spots giving the impression on second viewing of converging headlights.  Another example of the undeniable power of dark tones is reflected in Helen Frankenthaler’s Trojan Gates (1955) where her huge columns suggesting ominous barriers hold sway.  In contrast Joan Mitchell’s turquoise and magenta shapes, arbitrarily dripping down the canvas surface, put her squarely in a natural universe of color (though don’t expect to locate the Ladybug of the painting’s title!).  Elaine de Kooning’s Bullfight (1960) saturates the picture panel with color, introducing a dead-center frenzy of black. 

A lighter approach is evident in Alma Woodsey Thomas’ patterned squares.  A school teacher who didn’t begin painting until her retirement, she became in 1972 the first African-American woman to receive a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Close by, Lee Krasner’s gigantic canvas of pink and white amorphous egg-like shapes is encountered.  Her Gaea, after the Earth Goddess, manages to bring an element of femininity into this whimsical mix without compromising its essential force. 

Photography is obviously a medium well suited to experimentation and generously represented by several works of note.  The most riveting to be found are the works of Gertrude Altschul, a German-born Brazilian.  Nurtured by her association with Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante, a groundbreaking group of photographers in Sao Paulo, her works make clear her mastery of technique.  Reflected shadows from a ubiquitous ladder exemplify the power of geometric abstraction.  My favorite image features a roll of paper, seemingly lit from within, with a rogue cigar smoldering nearby.  An uneasy tension is thereby created by this simple juxtaposition.  

The inherent playfulness to be found in many of Picasso’s sculptures is here evidenced in Dorothy Dehner’s six bronze totems.  They seem in their arrangement to confront one another’s alien personages.  Louise Nevelson’s Big Black from 1963 presents the viewer with a series of conjoined wooden black boxes filled with an arbitrary assortment of dowels, spindles, and stray furniture parts.  Austere and unapologetic, Nevelson gives us in her words “a black that encompasses all colors.”

The elegant use of fabric is nowhere better represented than in Annie Albers’ free-hanging room divider.  She and husband Josef Albers were instrumental in their early work with the Bauhaus School of Design, where she was director of weaving until the Nazis closed the school in 1933.  The pair subsequently emigrated to the United States, teaching at the famed Black Mountain School in North Carolina. 

The appropriation of natural materials beyond the practical to convey emotive power was adopted by several artists found here.  Abakanowicz’s earlier mentioned fiber work takes prominence but that artist keeps stellar company with Louise Bourgeois’ The Quartered One (1964), a Bronze lair or trap but also reminiscent of a carcass, hung as it is from a giant meat hook.  For some it’s an ugly business to behold, but it clearly falls in that realm where art can be—take it or leave it—what the viewer makes of it. 

This work, like the intentions of a percentage of artists on display, takes no prisoners.  Lee Bontecou’s untitled wall sculpture—a concoction of steel, canvas, and discarded conveyor belts from the artist’s own neighborhood laundry—could be a set piece for a production of Sophocles’ Medea, pulling the viewer into its cavernous vortex. 

This is an exhibition not to be taken lightly—celebrating the ambitious scope of these artists’ intentions as much as the works themselves.  MOMA at last has chosen to make space for these formidable women, but there’s little doubt that these creators have chosen—come hell or high water—to take it for themselves. 

(Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction will run through August 13, 2017.)

Author Bio:

Sandra Bertrand is Highbrow Magazine’s chief arts critic.

For Highbrow Magazine

Excerpt from Iexaminer and republished by our content partner New America Media:

Polka dot majesty, that’s one way to describe Yayoi Kusama. She is an indefatigable bewitched queen of the global art world. Still active at 88 years old, since her youth, she has created myth and miracle out of herself to build a singular artistic career. She began to paint in Matsumoto, Japan in the 1950s, and came to Seattle in 1957 where she had her first U.S. show at Zoe Dusanne Gallery. Local artists in the gallery such as Paul Horiuchi and George Tsutakawa urged her to go to New York if she wanted to make it internationally. In New York, she gradually became a prominent avant-garde performance artist.

She was a young woman and a minority in the city at a time (from the end of 1950s to 1970s) when male artists dominated almost all emerging new art movements. Her originality has evolved from her ability to cope with her at times severe mental condition. With her keen awareness of the emerging new art movements and connectivity with fellow artists, she could turn her handicaps into a fierce creative energy that transformed obstacles into artistic solutions. In a literal sense, there is no other way to express it, she is truly one of a kind. Prominent individuals noticed her uniqueness and talents, and opened doors for her. She received numerous awards, and her recognition was validated by a highly prestigious award, The Order of Culture by the Government of Japan in 2016.

In a recent video interview displayed in Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors (at Seattle Art Museum from July 2 to September 10), Kasuma, radiantly dressed in a red wig and dress, confronts the viewer with a penetrating gaze and talks about her hope for young people to harness all their energy to fight like her for love and peace in the world.

At the entrance, many happy, bright-colored, large paintings hang on the wall to welcome all visitors. “Love Myself (2010)” radiates a joyous pink and blue resembling Matisse but harbors a kick of contemporary uneasiness. One sees an endless number of eyes swarming like a school of small fish on these canvases. The recognition of her work came with her shows in New York and Washington, D.C. galleries consisting of a series of “Net” paintings filled with small dots on huge canvases, some as large as 10 meters in width.

For this, she painted nonstop for 50 to 60 hours. She wrote in her autobiography that this was her way to forget about hunger in a chillingly cold New York studio. Others explain it as a condition propelled by the compulsive nature of her mental condition. A smaller oil painting, “Plate 29 (1961)” in the show demonstrates her dexterity as the diverse shape of each dot beautifully captures the inner landscape of a troubled mind. She was about 10 years old when she first began to see the hallucination of these dots.

From the early 1960s on, buoyed by her will to conquer the New York art scene, she began soft sculpture. She sewed an endless number of stuffed forms out of fabric by hand, and attached them on furniture. She filled these creatures of growth on a boat in the gallery in 1963-64, covered whole walls with photo reproductions of them, and called it “Aggregation: Thousand Boats Show.” Here in this exhibition, there is a solitary silver-painted boat with a rich wealth of abundant growth on its surface featuring grapes and leaves that almost seem to symbolize the harvest of life.

The artist herself and most publications discuss those protruding forms as a multiplication of the phallic form, which in Japanese folk life translates as “the god of fertility.” Although she steered clear of politics, the image of a provoking sexuality came from her “happening” events, which she orchestrated in public performances with nude, young participants at prominent places like the Brooklyn Bridge from late 1960s to early 1970s. One of the soft sculptures on the wall, “Plate 44, Ennui (1976)” looks as if it were filled with diverse shapes of a silver larvae.

Read the rest here.

The show was organized by Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC (Feb.23-May 14, 2017) and after Seattle Art Museum, the show will travel to the Broad, Los Angeles (Oct. 21-Jan. 10, 2018), Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (March 3-May 27, 2018), and High Museum of Art, Atlanta (Nov. 2018-Feb. 2019). There will be related activities lead by local artists, including Junko Yamamoto on Sundays, and related films will be shown on July 12th. Please check for details at seattleartmuseum.org.

Excerpt from Iexaminer and republished by our content partner New America Media

When El Museo del Barrio decided to launch uptown:nastywomen/bad hombres, an exhibit of artists living or working in Upper Manhattan’s El Barrio, Harlem, Washington Heights, and Inwood, they didn’t take the challenge lightly.  These artists are individuals whose works engage with the cultural legacy of sexism, racism, homophobia, the power of the media, healthcare or the lack thereof, our natural environment, and violence.  But does that make them or the work “nasty” or “bad” as the exhibit’s title suggests?

After a careful viewing of the show, I’d vote a resounding “no.”  What I did discover in multidisciplinary works whether collage, documentary shorts, photography, painting, textile work or video was a mixture of determination and daring, tenacity and tenderness—even an occasional dose of whimsy.  Only a hint of rage seethed under the surface of the occasional piece.  And, to be expected, youthful passion was present in broad strokes. 

Nostalgia for a foreign homeland is effectively represented in Elan Cadiz’s depictions in Home, 2016.  Colorful paper scraps fill the exteriors of these storybook-like houses, each the same structure repeated in a grid of panels and each one more charming than the next.  Many of the artists represented were uprooted from the Dominican Republic and Leslie Jimenez expresses the social disparity in her Humble Heroes from the Stroller Stories of New York series.  Images of domestic workers and their charges are created by intricately weaving polyester thread on vellum.  These are small, painstaking works of great beauty.  Regina Viquerra’s large violet bouquet constructed entirely of plastic bags is noteworthy, mainly as an example of the esthetic possibility in found objects. 

Such resourcefulness is never better illustrated than in Nari Ward’s Swing. This Jamaican-born artist has taken for inspiration the ubiquitous rubber tire, hung in one of the room’s corners, pierced throughout with aberrant shoe parts – the leather tongues, heels, and toes standing in for the people who once owned them.  It’s both a powerful and poignant work that stays in the mind.

Kenny Rivero has also chosen to reengineer the disparate parts of his life into new wholes.  According to an artist’s quote on the museum’s website, he feels in this way he can “creatively explore, and come to terms with, the broken narrative of Dominican American identity.”  It could be easy in such an array of multi-dimensional pieces to accidentally overlook the singular and haunting, partially- skeletal face of a child drawn against a cold pavement background.  It’s a riveting reminder of one life reduced to its basest reality and one of the show’s strongest images.

Personal narratives are proffered with mixed results, finding a place in a show where the personal psyche is inextricably linked to the world outside.  Ivan Monforte has chosen the video documentary as the way to give his players—in  this case, society’s oft-rejected homosexuals and drug-obsessed—a voice.  One gay young man speaking to the viewer as if to the one causing him anguish appears genuine enough in his complaints, but it’s a one note performance.  As he drones on, we are witnesses to his story, strangers as listeners, but for how long?  I couldn’t help but be reminded of some of Andy Warhol’s early videos of his Factory favorites, i.e., the Screen Tests series from the early 1960s.  Many fans may remember the almost unbearable patience required to experience these artificially-induced slices of life. 

The redeeming factor in such viewing can be the unexpected epiphany from the subject.  In this instance for me, it was when the young man confessed that “loving people can be very ephemeral.”  It’s a risky enterprise, exploring the borders where voyeurism becomes art.

Lauren Kelley in Burlap Interior has a different take on the documentary as art.  She has chosen to place a Black Barbie doll couple in the interior of a car with a narrative evocative of the bored consumer. “Maybe you should take up gardening” the male doll remarks to his female companion at one point. 

The Portfolio and Coronado Print Studio under Moses Ros-Suarez’s guidance is well represented.  All of the prints on display showed an ease with composition.  One memorable screenprint, La Zafra by Miguel Luciano, presents a red monster with feathery organic limbs, a symbol of the sugar harvest. 

Rivero Natal-San Miguel, a Puerto Rican photographer, makes effective use of word signage as part of a larger landscape.  A residential block, marked by a street sign: “Esperanza”, gives us the Spanish word for hope.  Another image gives us a corrugated fence with “Outrage” in large purple letters emblazoned across its surface.

Stephanie a. Lindquist, an artist now working out of Los Angeles, exhibits the object as paradox.  Her Shooter’s Bible is spread open like a family bible, with text and graphics revolving around firearms.  In the artist’s words, she claims to be “fascinated by process-oriented art that privileges the formation of art as a rite or ritual. With time, the objects and images near me become props and stages for the plays I create.”

Francisco Donoso proves that abstraction can elicit a strong emotional response in the viewer.  Powerful acrylic grids seem to explode outward, presenting us with a floating universe, amorphous fragmented shapes caught in his net. 

One aspect of this exhibit is to demonstrate just how intertwined these artists are with the social and cultural landscape they left behind and the one they inhabit now.  In such socially turbulent times, the likelihood is great that art will continue to prove itself a strong barometer for interpreting the world as we find it.

El Museo was founded 45 years ago by artist and educator Raphael Montañez Ortiz and a coalition of parents, educators, artists, and activists who noted that mainstream museums largely ignored Latino artists. Since its inception, El Museo has been committed to celebrating and promoting Latino culture.  El Museo’s varied permanent collection of over 6,500 objects, spans more than 800 years of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino art, including pre-Columbian Taíno artifacts, traditional arts, as well as 20th-century drawings, paintings, and sculptures.

This exhibit, on view until November 5, 2017, is part of the first Uptown triennial in collaboration with The Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University.  Such efforts help immeasurably in educating Caribbean and Latin American peoples, as well as the larger community on the importance of their artistic heritage.

Author Bio:

Sandra Bertrand is Highbrow Magazine’s chief arts critic.

For Highbrow Magazine

Headlining Art Basel season in Miami Beach, the new exhibition presented by the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU (on view Oct. 16 - Jan. 7) celebrates the remarkable life, vision, and heroic tenacity of this 20th-century pioneer and trailblazer, and this is the show's southeastern U.S. premiere. Once the world’s youngest PhD, Ruth Gruber passed away recently at the age of 105.

The show features more than 60 photographs including gelatin silver prints plus an archival trove of personal letters, telegrams, printed magazines, and assorted ephemera documenting the artist’s career. The photographs in this exhibition span more than 50 years, from Gruber’s groundbreaking reportage of the Soviet Arctic in the 1930s and iconic images of Jewish refugees from the ship Exodus 1947, to her later photographs of Ethiopian Jews in the midst of civil war in the 1980s.

“These messages of hope and of living with a heroic purpose to make a difference ring true in today’s world, and align powerfully with the mission of the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU,” said the Museum Director, Susan Gladstone. “We are thrilled to bring this epic story of Ruth Gruber’s life and photos to Miami Beach during Art Basel season.”

A selection of Gruber’s vintage prints, never before exhibited, will be presented alongside contemporary prints made from her original negatives. This exhibition is on loan from the International Center for Photography (ICP) in New York, is drawn from Gruber’s private archive, and was organized by ICP Curator Maya Benton. The Miami presentation is organized by Jackie Goldstein, Curator of the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU. The opening reception is free to Members of the museum (non-members pay $18), on Monday, October 16 at 7:00 p.m. and will include a free screening of the film Ahead of Time, about Ruth Gruber’s life. The museum is located at 301 Washington Avenue, in the heart of Miami Beach’s historic Art Deco District.

1.   Unidentified Photographer

      Ruth Gruber, Alaska, 1941-43

2.  Ruth Gruber

     Eklutna woman reading Life Magazine, Hooper Bay, Alaska, 1941-43

     © Ruth Gruber

3.  Ruth Gruber

A proud father putting his baby to sleep in a bassinet he constructed from gathered rags and pieces of wood, Cyprus Internment Camp, 1947

© Ruth Gruber

4. Ruth Gruber

Romanian families reunite in Haifa Port. Many had not seen each other since the     beginning of World War II, Israel, 1951

© Ruth Gruber

5. Ruth Gruber

Ethiopian Jewish mother with a photograph of her children, who have already immigrated to Israel, Ethiopia, 1985

© Ruth Gruber

Imagine you’re standing in front of a mirror, then suddenly the glass in your gaze shatters.  The “you” perceived is suddenly in a thousand pieces and where are you now?  It’s that disorientation that defines the New Museum’s current exhibit on gender and you’d be wise to leave any residual ideas about identity at the door.

Just when you thought the social contract had allowed for a comfortable assimilation of most if not all parties on the planet, the 42 mostly LGBTQ-identified artists and collectives in “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon” blast that assumption apart.  Just how they manage to do that remains a bit of a mystery, but the tools are familiar to most museum-goers.  Installations, text pieces, photography, performance art, expressive paintings, and a fulsome and flashy series of videos are all in the mix. Race and class remain combustible issues here. 

Diamond Stingily, a transgender woman who at 27 is one of the youngest artists represented, has said that it’s a good thing if the art world “gets more people who look like me to come into those spaces and not have them be so exclusive to a predominantly white audience.” 

Johanna Burton, “Trigger’s” head curator estimates that two-thirds of the show’s participants have no gallery representation.  That may be the case, but much of the work on display screams out to be noticed—not unlike Stingily’s 200-foot-long synthetic black hair she created that runs through four gallery floors of the museum. (A Chicago-born artist, her childhood was spent largely in her mother’s hair salon and hair is obviously an unmistakable power symbol to this artist.) If identity is nothing short of fluid, Nayland Blake’s most obvious attempt at trans-species self-portraiture is his Fursona character, a full-length bear costume that he dons to stage bear hugs for visitors.  The big brown beast sans occupant was positioned against one of the walls during my visit, but it demanded attention nevertheless.

Not to be outdone, the performance artist Justin Vivian Bond periodically strikes a pose in the museum’s window attired in a fetching pink gown.  He uses as a backdrop hand-drawn wallpaper revealing the face of former Estee Lauder model Karen Graham, Bond’s alter-ego.  His project, “My Model/Myself: I’ll Stand by You” puts his own queer stamp on the legions of gay designers that served the fashion industry but remained often invisible in the larger culture. 

Highlights of the video installations include “Girl Talk,” performed by black poet Fred Moten, a charismatic presence in this projection by his collaborator Wu Tsang.  The piece illuminates the pleasures of gossip and is a crowd-pleaser.  MIckalene Thomas elicits lesbian desire in a 12-monitor video “Me as Muse,” as she reclines naked on a sofa with the gaze moving on her body parts. A soundtrack of singer Eartha Kitt, recounting past racial abuses sounds in the background. 

A straightforward and refreshing entry is Sharon Hayes’ documentary wherein she gives us interviewees from Mount Holyoke, an all-women’s college in Western Massachusetts.  The young women are unselfconsciously frank in their responses to their awakening sexuality.  Asked about comparisons to their own mothers, one student remarked, “She married at 16, she didn’t have time to experiment.” One girl identifies as a “he” but is adamant that she/he is still the same person. Another noteworthy entry is “Weed Killer” by English-born Patrick Staff, which manages to be a meditation on chemotherapy based on artist Catherine Lord’s memoirs.

It wouldn’t be unfair to ask when such explorations of the psyche—either one’s own or another’s—transcend the subject to become art.  In such a politically-charged exhibit on gender, such questions may seem superfluous.   We are, after all the struggles for gay recognition and equality, living through the Times of Trump.  Calls for bans on transgender service members to laws governing public restroom access are reminders of how tenuous certain freedoms can be for anyone who doesn’t fit the societal norm.

But “Trigger” if anything, is an ambitious show.  And it has set its site lines on some formidable talents, chief among them Tschabalala Self and Christina Quarles.  Both artists combine elements of abstraction with the human figure as subject.  In Self’s case, her large canvas collages present distorted, sometimes masked beings, rhythmically contorted to the artist’s design.  Pieces of stitched fabric make up their diverse anatomies, such as “Wild Blue Cherry,” the Cherry of the title adorned with polka dot shorts, the word WILD in caps emblazoned across her buttocks.  Another dancer stretches out her four arms spiderlike, a Shiva you wouldn’t want to tangle with.  Brilliant blues and oranges intermingle in another seated figure, a pantheistic creature with leopard patches for a vest.  The figures in Quarles’ paintings startle with their elegantly incongruous forms, such as the couple in “Beautiful Mourning.”  The surreal yet domestic landscape is intimate with flowers shooting out of a checkered table, and a jingle-jangle of limbs suggesting a scene of comfort in grief.

There are those pieces that elicit delight, exhibiting an entrepreneurial spirit as much as shock value.  Vaginal Davis, a Los Angeles-born, Berlin-based transgender artist has created a generous series of small abstract wall reliefs in a blood-red mixture of nail polish, Aqua Net hair spray and other Dollar Store beauty supplies.  If you look closely enough, faces and genitalia emerge from the crimson plaques.  A more formalistic abstraction is offered by Ulrike Muller’s geometric enamel on steel pictures, exhibiting a clean mastery of minimalism and grace. 

Clues are to be found to the breakdown of identity as a theme.  All one has to do is look at Harry Dodge’s unsettling cartoons to sense the absence of a self.  A tiny hooded figure tells us, “Without the sheet I would be invisible.” Another caption reads “We exceed our skins, feel through others.” When Nayland Blake is not donning a bear suit, his own cartoon panels evidence nothingness.  A melted snowman appears in one panel, in another the artist sits in front of an easel, drawing a mushroom cloud explosion. 

Life experienced as covert or clandestine is revealed in the cloistered, bordello-like “Cave of Secrets”, an installation designed by Liz Collins.  The furled drapes, the tufted red chairs that titillate with their bulbous patterns, the hypnotic floor panels and the sleek black walls are seductive but ultimately cloying, claustrophobic.  The narrow, darkened museum corridors, with their black curtains connecting the visitor to yet another exhibit or floor heighten the effect of a nether-world. 

Such shifts toward issues like sexuality and gender are hardly new to The New Museum.  The first breakthrough was “Extended Sensibilities” (1982), followed by “Difference” (1984–85), “HOMO VIDEO” (1986–87), and “Bad Girls” (1994). 

This show is perhaps the most comprehensive if at risk of being misunderstood.   The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in Soho has been mounting relevant and challenging exhibits since Charles W. Leslie and Fritz Lohman began promoting such artists in their loft back in 1969.  But the efforts of mainstream museums to embrace the LGBTQ community, with the aim of defying easy categorization is essential.

Curator Johanna Burton summed it up recently for the New York Times when she admitted, “If the show is done right, it makes people interested but doesn’t allow them to think they fully understand something.  If you stop thinking about yourself as a stable identity looking at something made by another stable identity…it changes the whole game.”

In a time when “selfies” are the instant answer to self-portraiture and identity-seeking, maybe looking beyond the shattered mirror isn’t such a bad idea.

(Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon runs through January 21, 2018 at The New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002.  212-219-1222)

Author Bio:

Sandra Bertrand is Highbrow Magazine’s chief arts critic.

For Highbrow Magazine

Upon entering the current exhibition, ”Modigliani UnMasked” at The Jewish Museum in New York City, the visitor first encounters a large black and white blowup from 1913 of Dr. Paul Alexandre, one of Amadeo Modigliani’s closest friends.  Along with other workers, he is removing a tower of belongings from 7 Rue du Delta.  Within this forced evacuation before the building’s demolition, two paintings of Modigliani’s, a co-resident, are visible in the lower foreground of the photograph—Head of a Woman and Melancholy Nude.  It’s a sad image.  Impossible, perhaps, not to be reminded of the mutability of life itself and the fragility of the work that remains of that life. 

The next image seems to defy the specter of mortality.  One sees a dashing, dark-haired man in a seated, relaxed pose.  It’s a consummate photographic portrait that manages to be confrontationally masculine yet seductive. 

Who was this elusive figure? 

On display are approximately 150 works, those from the Paul Alexandre collection along with a selection of the artist’s paintings, sculptures and other drawings, as well as a number of key representative multicultural examples from African, Greek, Egyptian and Khmer cultures that serve as a counterpoint to his art. 

As the wall notes indicate, Alexandre implored his friend “not to destroy a single sketchbook or a single study.”  We should be indebted to this collector, as the largely black crayon sketches on view here are a master lesson in what line can do, how the curves and angles can surprise and delight.   Alexandre managed to amass over 400 drawings from 1906 to 1914 when the artist was developing what would become his idiosyncratic style. 

Several depictions of the Commedia dell’Arte character Columbine, the love interest of both Harlequin and Pierrot, are on view.  Caught in mid-performance, the artist’s quick brushstrokes capture the figure’s balletic movement across the stage. A revelatory self-portrait of the artist as Pierrot, a surprising inclusion, would later appear as a painting.  Even though Modigliani’s contemporaries were often taken with theatrical characters that were part of the bohemian world in which they coexisted, for him they were intimately connected with his own self-identity as the “Other” in Parisian society. 

The Jewess from 1908 is a powerful example of his need to celebrate the subject’s Jewishness as he saw it.  Based on his early lover, Maud Abrantes, the pale skin and the deep saturation of blues and greens grab the onlooker’s attention, but it is the aquiline nose that dominates the portrait.  To illustrate the extent of antisemitism in the culture in which the artist operated, one has only to study the cover of La Libre Parole (The Free Word) on display.  It features a Jewish man as physically grotesque, celebrating no doubt the pseudoscience of phrenology to suggest such facial qualities are biologically determined. 

Born in Livorno, Italy in 1884 to a middle-class Jewish merchant family, Modigliani was well aware with his Italian good looks and fluency with the French language that he could easily pass as a gentile.  But that was hardly his intent.  “Je m’appelle Modigliani, Je suis Juif.” (I am Modigliani, a Jew) became his personal mantra when making introductions.

Conversely, concealment played a role for the artist.  His fascination with cosmetics in his portraiture in such works as Portrait of a Woman with a Beauty Spot or Nude with a Hat, with the almost androgynous distortion of features, shines through.  There’s an unmistakable desire in almost all his works to mask any signs of naturalism of his subject. A close kinship can be made in Nude to the exaggerated poses of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, a German Expressionist of note.

Actress in a Long Dress, with Bare Breasts demonstrates another early move away from naturalism, with the use of a blank eye in the subject’s expression.  As for Modigliani the man in this artificial construct, he would often mask his long history of tubercular onsets behind drink and drugs. It was better to be inebriated in public than to give in to the defeat of a serious malady. 

There are several portraits on display of his closest ally, Alexandre.  The sketches are deft and sensitive, such as Paul Alexandre with Left Hand in His Pocket.  But the most intriguing depiction of his friend is Unfinished Portrait.  The face and background are flattened and more abstract in treatment than the rest, almost as if Modigliani wanted to obliterate any likeness to the man.

One of the most telling exhibit quotes by the artist is as follows: “Always speak out and keep forging ahead.  The man who cannot find a new person within himself is not a man.”  For Modigliani, the decisive move toward metaphorical abstraction was absolute.  One senses in the later paintings and sculpture a no-turning-back sensibility; he was ready to toss his hat in with the gods of the ancients. French colonialism was making West African sculptures and other ritualistic objects available for study back home and Picasso and Matisse took note. In Modigliani’s case, the exposure created a sea-change in the artist.

A mask from the Fang-Nturu peoples of Equatorial Guiana is prominently placed in one of the first rooms.  As a referential object, it appears right at home.  Other artifacts are judiciously encountered while strolling through the maze of work and manage not to deter from Modigliani’s own sizable sculpture offerings.

Alexandre’s family provided some of his first commissions, but the portrait was no longer a way of depicting a strictly identifiable self for Modigliani.  The equestrian Baroness Marguerite de Hasse de Villers is a case in point. Several studies, entitled “The Amazon” were made and in the finished portrait he decided to change the color of her riding jacket from red to yellow.  That was the final straw for the baroness but Alexandre was only too happy to purchase the painting of his brother’s paramour instead. 

Perhaps the most provocative of Modigliani’s love interests, not only because of her own historical place in Russian literature but because of the drawings and sculptures she inspired is the poet Anna Akhmatova.  For the artist, she was the perfect embodiment of the statuesque, patrician Egyptian queens he found in his visits to the Louvre. 

In 1911, though married at the time, the poet returned to Paris for several weeks to be with him.  The results speak for themselves.  These life studies, seated, reclining, nude, or lying on her stomach indicated through a sureness and economy of line that he had found his quintessential model. Head, from 1911-12 is placed in the center of the room, and is one of the finest limestone sculptures on display.  The triangular shape of the head and the bangs are attributed to her, and the inscription attests to the contours of the Egyptian ankh (an anagram for Akhmatova). Passion and inspiration obviously went hand in hand in this relationship.  She also figured prominently as a kneeling caryatid.  Caryatids, statuesque figures from antiquity upholding architectural weights, held a special fascination for him in his drawings. 

Many portraits, such as the one of Spanish painter Manuel Humbert Esteve, show that the artist did not completely eschew all the particularities of the subject’s identity. To his contemporaries, the pursed mouth and parted hair make clear who the sitter was.  Once Modigliani’s style was firmly entrenched, such individual marks could shine through.

Another key figure to enter the artist’s life in the winter of 1916-17 was Jeanne Hebuterne, a young 19-year-old art student who soon became his lover and then wife.  The portrait on view shows her in a yellow sweater, the elongated masklike face and body showing no traces of eroticism.  It was Jeanne who gave Modigliani a baby girl the following year, also named Jeanne.  Soon pregnant again, she would suffer the loss of her husband to tubercular meningitis on January 24, 1920.  Grief-stricken, she threw herself and her unborn baby from the fifth-floor window of her parents’ home the following day. 

Modigliani’s surviving daughter Jeanne became a tireless advocate of her father’s legacy and is the author of his biography, Modigliani: Man and Myth.

Modigliani’s portraits continue to fascinate the viewer, as mysterious and strangely modern in execution today as they were upon their creation.  We may never know all the reasons that inspired their singular genius but one thing is certain:  They show that the truth of an individual life perceived lies far beneath a natural likeness.                                                                                                   

Modigliani Unmasked will run through February 4, 2018 at The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92^nd Street, New York, NY 10128.

Author Bio:

Sandra Bertrand is Highbrow Magazine’s chief arts critic.

For Highbrow Magazine

Our charming exhibit of small paintings, paper pieces, and sculptures is worth the trip. These works adhere to the gallery’s focus of abstract expressionist style, but offer an eclectic variety of genre, medium and eras. It exposes rare drawings, prints, photographs and paintings from some of the most significant artists of the 1950s and 1960s. This show follows our tradition of representing important artists from all backgrounds to the public.

The artists included are:

Rodolfo Abularach, Mario Bencomo, Seymour Boardman, Ilya Bolotowsky, Ernest Briggs, Gandy Brodie, James Brooks, Lawrence Calcagno, Perez Célis, Herman Cherry, Beauford Delaney, Lynne Drexler, Amaranth Ehrenhalt, Augustin Fernandez, Grace Hartigan, Carl Hecker, Mitchiko Itatani, Buffie Johnson, Andrey Klasson, Michael Loew, William Manning, Jeanne Miles, Leonard Nelson, Richards Ruben, William Saroyan, Ethel Schwabacher, Aaron Siskind, Charmion Von Wiegand, and Wilfred Zogbaum.

Featured artwork: Seymour Boardman, Untitled; Ilya Bolotowsky, Rising Horizontal; Perez Célis, Integra Matura; Ernest Briggs, Mask; James Brooks, A.

Anita Shapolsky Gallery: 152 East 65^th Street, New York City; from Feb. 13 – April 7, 2018.

“The wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorant folly.”  Those words from Thomas Cole (1801-1848) were not the finger-wagging of another angry preacher from his pulpit.  They were the heartfelt sentiments of the country’s foremost landscape artist and arguably one of the earliest advocates for the protection of the natural world. 

There’s no question that masterworks like The Course of Empire series (1834–36) and The Oxbow (1836), centerpieces in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s current exhibition of Cole’s greatness, are proudly claimed by American enthusiasts as their own.  This showing marks the 200^th anniversary of Cole’s arrival in America.  What the Met has done, however, is to focus on the artist’s development through his trips to England and Italy, combined with a well-researched chronological picture of his nascent visual responses to the New World, ending with his late influences on the likes of Frederic Edwin Church, Asher Durant and others who would become the seminal artists of the Hudson River School, which Cole founded. 

Born in 1801 in Bolton-Le-Moors near Manchester, England, the artist was inevitably   moved by the smoky, soot-filled towns of his youth.  Viewers have the rare opportunity to see upon entering the first section of the exhibit, Coalbrookdale by Night, a haunting urban nightscape ablaze with factory fires looming in the background.  (The Coalbrookdale Company furnaces were in operation until 1779.) This painting by Philip James de Louthenberg—created the same year as Cole’s birth—depicts the Madelay Wood, or Bedlam, and came to symbolize the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. 

When the family emigrated to the States in 1818, Cole was quickly apprenticed to a textile producer and wood engraver in Philadelphia.  But it was a move to Manhattan at 22 that exposed him not only to the Hudson River Valley for inspiration but to the schooling he so urgently desired. 

He quickly came to the attention of John Trumbull, the president of the New York Academy of Design who in turn introduced the young man to wealthy patrons. There was excitement in the air.  After all, the Erie Canal had just opened; the possibility of western expansion and trade was inevitable.  An early product of the landscape’s effect on Cole is View of Round-Top in the Catskill Mountains (1827).  Here we see a perfect example of wilderness in a dark majestic mountain with the blasted tree trunks of a lightning storm on the left of the canvas, while the valley below provides a peaceful space for human contemplation.

Still, a happy family life with five children, combined with a deep reverence for the New World was not enough to satisfy his artistic ambitions.  Thomas Cole’s Journey – Atlantic Crossings is a richly-layered examination of his encounters with John Constable, John Shaw and perhaps, most importantly, his exposure to the “mad genius” J.M.W. Turner. 

Turner’s Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812) is one of the most stirring works on display and one can only imagine the effect of those brash and errant brushstrokes on the already amazingly accomplished Cole. The initial shock of encountering the Suffolk painter Constable’s Seascape Study with Rain Cloud (1824) with its turbulent view of a storm shower at sea must have similarly moved Cole.  Likewise, the force of John Martin’s Belshazzar’s Feast (1820)—filled with a biblical wrath against the Babylonian king—carries the same power depicting human corruption. Here was a journey of genius encountering genius.   

Cole was no itinerant Romantic who took his travels lightly.  Following his extensive travels throughout England and Italy, he wrote “Essay on American Scenery”: “The most distinctive and perhaps the most impressive, characteristic of American scenery is its wildness….in civilized Europe the primitive features have long since been destroyed or modified.” What he could make us see of the American wilderness was foremost in his mind: “Such scenes affect the mind with a more deep-toned emotion than that in which the hand of man has touched.”  He would present us with a moral message we could choose or not choose to embrace.

The Oxbow, The Connecticut River near Northampton (1836) is one of the central masterpieces of this exhibit, once again addressing nature untamed with the inevitable advent of civilization. A darkly vulnerable landscape is played out against the order of agriculture, with crops growing in the calm of a sun-stroked sky. It’s a gorgeous composition, the eye traversing the snaking river throughout.

The most riveting and unforgettable part of the exhibit is Cole’s five-part series, The Course of Empire, (1835-36), which depicts the same landscape over generations.  From a state of natural innocence to the consummation of empire, ending in decline and desolation, it is surely the artistic culmination of a great artist’s works.

It is impossible to view this work without feeling the overriding passion of the artist to tell the story—at what cost the human endeavor?  Considering environmental erosion—the reminders of global warning from the scientific community, and the constant flux of floods and wildfires in the daily news—Cole’s message could reverberate with today’s populace with more force than our ancestors acknowledged, their spirits still ablaze with the promise of Manifest Destiny.

Cole left an indelible mark on other members of the Hudson River School, chief among these Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) and Asher B. Durand (1796-1886).  Church was a consummate Romantic, a masterful painter of light in panoramic settings both here and in South America.  Durand was a devoted friend of his mentor, known for his paintings of trees, rocks, and foliage, accompanying Cole on many sketching expeditions in the Adirondacks. 

The Hudson River School painters and their proponents fell into decline for decades, replaced by the demands of later generations, hungry for newer ways of looking at the world and its ever-changing scene.  Perhaps it’s time to look again, at the majesty and beauty of a landscape, in Cole’s vision as well as the one outside the doors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

(Thomas Cole’s Journey – Atlantic Crossings is on view through May 13, 2018.)

Author Bio:

Sandra Bertrand is Highbrow Magazine’s chief arts critic.

For Highbrow Magazine

The National Association of Women Artists (NAWA) in New York City is currently exhibiting through March 28, 2018, "Celebrate Women! in Honor of Women’s History Month." Six member artists, Sandra Bertrand, Nancy Coleman Dann, Susan G. Hammond, Natalia Koren Kropf, Leah Raab and Carol Richard-Kaufmann have chosen to interpret this theme in a variety of arresting ways—from expressionistic portraits of women in the arts, black and white photography combining landscape and the female body, sculptures reflecting the Goddess in myth, to abstract collages, urban and rural paintings and pencil play studies inspired by travels across the Silk Road. 

March 1- 28, 2018

National Association of Women Artists, Inc.

315 West 39th Street, Suite 508

New York, NY 10018

1. Sandra Bertrand: Frida Kahlo and Friend

2. Sandra Bertrand: Louise Nevelson at Rest

3. Leah Raab: Venus de Milo

4. Natalia Koren Kropf: Goddess

Eliot Hess is a lifestyle and travel photographer, currently exhibiting at Williams McCall Gallery in Miami Beach. His work reveals the culture, history and beauty of Cuba, Cartagena, India, Morocco, Peru, Croatia, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere throughout Europe. He lives in Miami Beach and travels frequently to photograph.

Hess is also the co-owner of HWH PR, a leading high-tech public relations agency, and author of bestselling The Munchies Eatbook published by Random House. He is also an investor in two upcoming Broadway projects and is one of the largest mystery book collectors in the United States. He and his wife Lois Whitman-Hess have an extensive contemporary art collection including works by Hung Liu and Jefro Williams. They have one daughter. 

©Copyright Eliot Hess

Highbrow Magazine

Binh Danh

The Photography Show Presented by AIPAD
Pier 94, New York City

April 5 – 8, 2018
April 4: Vernissage

The Lisa Sette Gallery featured a one-person exhibition with Binh Danh at the Photography Show presented by AIPAD.

In the comfortable histories of our youth, genocide seemed an answered question; the retrograde horrors of a generation removed, a closed book. A decade before the present moment of uncertainty in our global existence, photographer Binh Danh refused this pat conclusion. Danh’s early work compiled the Khmer Rouge regime’s eerie death portraits—taken in the moments before victims were executed—and transformed them into a living archive of proliferation: Danh devised a method for creating chlorophyll prints on tree leaves, and inscribed hundreds of portraits of lives lost in the Cambodian genocide upon the tree’s organic surfaces.

During his travels to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, the former prison and execution site where the Khmer Rouge portraits were taken, Danh found himself drawn to views of the bleak rooms, cases filled with victim’s belongings, beds with shackles, and menacing outdoor spaces. Later, when conceiving of his recent works, Danh remarks, “I was not sure why the images of these places stood out to me. But in thinking about them, I began to remember the images we saw from the prison at Abu Ghraib [in Iraq], and it occurred to me that I have actually been thinking about the images of Abu Ghraib since they appeared in the media several years ago. Maybe we have all been thinking about these images.”

In The Ghosts of Khmer: Light and Memory, we are invited to explore the issue of human individuality and responsibility, and the ways those concepts shift over time, in both the ethereal reflective surfaces of Danh’s large-scale daguerreotypes and the images’ paradoxical subject matter. Portraits of genocide victims etched on the daguerreotypes’ silver surfaces recall the bas-relief idols on the walls of Angkor Wat’s temples, which are also the subject of several of Danh’s images.

“With Angkor Wat,” says Danh, “here is this beautiful architectural achievement of art and religion and Buddhist culture. And it was through the beauty of the Angkor Wat temple that the Khmer Rouge emerged, as the regime sought above all to return Cambodia to its glory days. In order to do that, they had to remove anyone who did not go along with their ideology. This is a theme I return to: the darkness and beauty in our history.”

In these photograms Danh invests a personal discourse about the moral implications of photography. He found himself returning to the philosopher Roland Barthes’ description of the role of death in photographic works. Says Danh, “In an image of someone who has passed, they don’t know they’re dead, because they’re alive in the photograph. But we know they’re dead, because we have lived beyond their time.” In this way, continues Danh, “photographs change society and the way we think about time.”

Danh also considered a far earlier transformation in human perception in the process of making these highly reflective works: the introduction of the mirror. Prior to the moment in the 13th century when reflective silverized surfaces were popularized as mirrors, humans defined themselves as members of a group. “At the beginning of human evolution, we didn’t see ourselves in a way that required self-reflection. When mirrors became common, humans became individuals and stopped thinking in terms of the group.”

An homage to both contemporary photographic theory and the black and white binary that defined early photography, the intensely argent surfaces of Danh’s works present a secondary imagery resembling a double exposure, a vibration of shadow and light around the composition’s edges. Whether in the stark chambers of injustice or the luminous expressions of monumental gods, Danh’s images record a secret energy at play in all human endeavors. As we contemplate the mysterious machinations of human destruction, we cannot lose sight of the generative mystery of the Buddha’s form, rising up from the forest floor.

For more information about Binh Danh’s photography, contact the Lisa Sette Gallery: (480) 990-7342.

Highbrow Magazine

When you enter the Whitney’s retrospective, Zoe Leonard: Survey, you step inside a puzzling and prolific universe.  Expect to be a bit startled.  Isn’t this, after all, a revered American art museum and not the New York Historical Society? 

It’s all right to be confused.  Because Leonard’s panoply of artifacts, and that’s largely what they are, force us to look at where we’ve been in this human experiment and maybe even where we’re going.  This photographer and installation artist is really an anthropologist at heart and if you pay close attention, you’re sure to be rewarded for your efforts. 

Consider:  A row of 56 blue suitcases, one for each year of the artist’s life—she was born in 1961 in upstate New York; a long wall plastered with almost 4,000 souvenir postcards of Niagara Falls over many decades; a room of dried hand-sewn fruit scattered across the gallery floor as a graveyard memorial to her artist friend David Wojnarowicz who died of AIDS; a documentation of still photos featuring the film and domestic life in the 1940s of a fictional Fae Richards, a black lesbian actress.  And there’s more, much more. 

The eye moves warily over images that at first feel disjointed, even disorienting. The black and white photos are intentionally left uncropped, their black borders adding to their mystery and power.  Even the dates the shots were taken and produced are a noteworthy item of interest to the artist.  A series of clouds seen from a plane window; aerial images of a New York City landscape, somehow make the grid of buildings below appear removed and anonymous from the life that you know pulsates below. Single images hypnotize—a wax anatomical model photographed with the bodily organs in full view, a preserved head of a bearded woman from the Musee Orfila, a metal chastity belt that may have been mundane in its time but for the contemporary viewer an instrument of torture.  Images like these could parallel the morbid peculiarity of a Diane Arbus monograph but Leonard’s genius is of another sort.  Whatever shock value one feels is quickly offset by a larger subject—time.

Take, for instance, Leonard’s landmark series, The Analogue Portfolio (1998-2009). The sad decline of small mom-and-pop businesses, storefronts and vacant marquees that speak loudly of time’s ravages, confront us with the deep saturation that dye transfer prints allow.  (This process is now obsolete but provided a richness of color and tone for the photographer.)  Objects, not people, hold their sway over us:  An abandoned TV in a wheelbarrow, boxed shoes, suit jackets, teasing the viewer with the poignancy of personal belongings found at the side of a road.   

Cultural signposts are everywhere.  This is an exhibit that urges one to slow down at every juncture.  The Tipping Point, a sculpture comprised of a stack of books, seems hardly memorable until you see it’s 53 copies of the same book: James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time from 1963.  The room that serves as a testament to the tragedy of AIDS victims, Strange Fruit, is particularly haunting for those who remember Billie Holiday’s mournful song of the same name was about the lynching of a Black man and not just an exhibit of dried fruit bits. The decaying fruit also reflects the art-historical tradition of the vanitas still-life, in which ephemeral objects such as flowers, flickering candles, and skulls symbolized human mortality. 

The exhaustive grid of Niagara Falls postcards mentioned earlier nags us with its title: “You see I am here after all.”  Thousands of visitors wanting to attest to their presence at a natural wonder bought a postcard to send home.  Leonard has made the personal need for visibility universal, leaving us with the transitory nature of time. 

Time and again, her images call for us to pause and reflect.  Even personal snapshots are here to discover:  Leonard’s mother and grandmother in the 1940s, leaving Poland for America, then posed under the Statue of Liberty.  Holland Carter, in his recent New York Times review of the exhibit, considers just how meaningful (or meaningless) the recording of the moment can be in the era of smartphones:  “For increasing numbers of digital shutterbugs, reality is not real unless it is photographed…we shoot, send, or store, and move on, rarely revisiting, never mind lingering over, the images we’ve made.”

The need for an existential awareness of time and place comes through in Leonard’s 2016 conversation with Molly Prentiss from Interview Magazine: “Making work for me is being in the world, but it’s also being specific about being in the world. I’m interested in this increasingly rare space of contemplation and taking the time and energy to be thoughtful. We’re all busy. It’s a very fast-paced world. And art—and by that, I mean culture in a wider sense—is one of the few spaces where we’re allowed to look and think without an immediate response or reaction.”

The natural world is given a nod as well.  A “reconstructed tree” was shown in Vienna’s Secession exhibit in 1997 as well as here in photographs of an urban tree mangled in chain link and razor wire fencing.  She is a social activist at the core.  We only need to look at her prose poem, “I want a president”, appearing online a few weeks before the 2016 presidential election. Her message is loud and clear and now stands as a giant installation on New York’s High Line walkway.

The show, curated by Bennett Simpson and Rebecca Matalon from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Elisabeth Sherman from the Whitney, covers the entirety of Leonard’s works, from the late 1980s to the present.  This is the first large-scale overview by a major museum, but the artist has a long history with the Whitney. The museum first purchased her work 25 years ago, and she appeared in three Whitney Biennials in 1993, 1997, and in 2014 when she won the Bucksbaum Award.

Concurrent with Survey is the Whitney’s expansive exhibit, Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables.  It may be surprising for visitors to discover that, not unlike Zoe Leonard, an iconic American artist like Wood managed to address the isolation and desolation inherent in much of modern life.  Leonard is part of that tradition but her passion for finding meaning and permanence is just what we need now.

'Zoe Leonard: Survey' runs June 10, 2018 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY  10014, 212 570-3600.

Author Bio:

Sandra Bertrand is Highbrow Magazine’s chief arts critic.

For Highbrow Magazine

Travis Burke’s creative approach to outdoor adventure photography stems from his own perspective on life. His dedication to conquering anything thrown at him and living life with no regrets shines through in his photographs. Whether it’s walking a slackline over canyons, freediving through caves in the ocean or capturing the Milky Way Galaxy in remote locations, Burke is constantly pushing himself and the boundaries of his craft.

 His initial spark for photography happened about eight years ago when he met up with his parents in Yosemite National Park.  Burke had decided to buy a Nikon D300 to document as much as he could.  The camera forced him to slow down and appreciate the beauty and really search for ways to capture it.  When he got home, he enrolled in a few photo classes at a community college, participated in various workshops and listened to guest speakers to start learning the basics and gain as much knowledge as he could.

From there, he worked for years as an intern and assisted professional photographers in multiple fields to get hands-on experience before slowly taking off on his own.  Burke’s first major photography job that he was passionate about was a staff position with GrindTV, which fell together by attending a journalism class and having a portfolio ready to show.

Over the past four years, Burke has amassed almost 800,000 followers on Instagram and his photos have been published in Backpacker Magazine and on the cover of National Geographic Magazine.  Along his journey, the avid athlete can be found walking slacklines over canyons, freediving through caves in the ocean and pushing himself and the boundaries of his craft.

He’s enjoyed living in the van his grandmother gave him, which he converted into the ultimate “adventure mobile” -- affectionately known as Betty the Grey Wolf.   He’s visited the backroads of Vermont during fall to photograph a covered bridge under the star-filled night sky. He’s captured the dangerous, yet stunningly beautiful ice caves in Washington and spent months in Utah exploring some of the longest and deepest slot canyons in the world, searching for the perfect light. Burke is following his dreams, wherever they take him -- chasing inspiring images and capturing them for us all to see.

Burke’s breathtaking pictures feature the unending beauty of the natural world. A trademark of his images is the human touch: a man on a cliff admiring the beauty before him, a trio trekking through rock formations, a couple kissing under a waterfall. Burke says it helps people experience the emotion and grandeur of the location and imagine themselves being there.

When he is not taking photographs, Burke enjoys surfing, skateboarding, reading, slacklining, Ping-Pong, freediving, backpacking, mountain biking, jogging, rock climbing and snowboarding.

©Copyright Travis Burke

Highbrow Magazine

Los Angeles, California– Kohn Gallery is currently presenting “Sheets,” a solo exhibition of new work by Philadelphia-based artist Jonathan Lyndon Chase. This marks the artist’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery and is his first solo presentation in Los Angeles. Through contorted figures and fractured compositions that float seamlessly between historical and contemporary styles and references, Chase portrays a form of self-expression that puts human touch at the forefront of his art. His powerful figurative paintings highlight the daily lives of black queer men and the difficulties faced by defining one’s identity as such in contemporary society.

Chase’s engagement with the black figure is complicated and multifaceted. He is often fixated on the duality of emotions and experience. It is important that contrasts exist between the mood of his characters and their environment. This focus on depersonalization brings awareness to the experience of struggling to unite different components of gender identity and psychosocial adversity, especially within the black community.

Drawing from his everyday experiences, Chase examines the relationship between space and gender as social constructs; the ways in which gender identity is affected by our immediate environment and the dominant societal norms that exist within that space. For “Sheets,” Chase delves further into this idea of gender performativity, using spatial obscurity as a means of protecting his autobiographical subjects from the trappings of ethno-cultural stereotypes and societal expectations.

As Chase explains, “There are a lot of things that inspire me as an artist— everything from ‘90s color palettes to fashion, poetry, hip hop, jazz, and romance. I'm also inspired by the work of artists like Devin Morris, John Edmonds, Troy Michie, and Romare Bearden that speak to the interrelationship between bodies and Blackness. I love masks, collages, and the similarities and differences between emotions, body, and space. I draw a lot from what I see around me and work with a combination of memory, photography, and collage along with drawing/painting.”

Chase (b. 1989, Philadelphia, PA) lives and works in Philadelphia. Chase currently has work on display in Reclamation! Pan-African Works from the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection at The Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, VA. Previously, his work has been included in exhibitions at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles,CA (2017); Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA (2017); The Bunker, Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody, Palm Beach, FL (2017); and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art, Philadelphia, PA (2016). Chase’s work resides in numerous private and public collections throughout the world, including the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; The Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA; The Wedge Collection, Toronto, CA; and the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection.

For more information, visit: Kohn Gallery:  www.kohngallery.com

1227 North Highland Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90038

Highbrow Magazine

Is art over?  Gloria Gomez Sanchez, a Peruvian artist and activist whose work is in the current exhibition, Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 at the Brooklyn Museum, posed that question back in 1969.  Asking such a thing in her opinion was “as absurd as a rabbit running after a carrot tied to its tail.”

The curators of this extraordinary and, at times, exhaustive exhibition have set their sights on bigger game than such philosophical conundrums. Organized by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, it is the first exhibit to present the contributions of Latin American and Latina women during a period not only of exceptional experimentation but one in which profound political and social turmoil was rampant throughout Latin American countries.  Dictatorships were the order of the day, with subsequent interventions and coup d’etats from the United States quick to follow.  The populace, particularly women, were too often the victims, caught in the middle of a tragic humanitarian upheaval.

One-hundred-and-twenty-three women artists from 15 countries are represented here, giving voice to decades of repression.  Through photography, performance, video and conceptual art, the female body itself often became the primary means in their artworks to express repression and the need to revolt—to figuratively, and literally, break free from the ties that had bound them for too long.  The result of speaking from such oppression is not always pretty to look at.  It can at times be repulsive but at its best, it’s powerful and even at times beautiful.

It should be mentioned that wide recognition for originality and experimentation emerged since the 1990s in the works of Latina artists such as Beatriz Gonzalez, Anna Maria Maiolino, Ana Mendieta, and Lygia Pape, among others.  The period covered here, though including name talent entries such as the iconic wood sculpture, Self-Portrait by Paris-born Venezuelan Marisol—a work that gives us seven carved figures of various attitudes to express the multifaceted nature of identity—there is no attempt to give star status to the few.  This exhibit is too overflowing, too egalitarian in approach to allow for that.   

To give essential order to such a rich helter-skelter of styles, the exhibit is organized thematically in nine sections, exploring key topics like Social Places, Resistance and Fear, Erotic, Mapping the Body and Performing the Body among others, the latter rife with photographic documentation of many highly controversial public performances of the time. 

As part of the Self-Portrait section, one video from 1978 performed by Peruvian Victoria Eugenia Santa Cruz’s Megritaron negra (They shouted back at me) is a confrontational chorus of voices on one of the overhead screens that literally sets the tone for much of the work on display.  Another three-minute video at the other end of the same room presents an Homage to George Segal, featuring Brazilian artist Lenora de Barros brushing her teeth in what appears to be a plaster cast in the style of Segal’s lifelike characters. It’s one of the show’s few pieces that injects a touch of humor in its satirical response to the male-dominated canon. 

Another Brazilian, Wanda Pimentel, is represented by a stunning series, Entanglements.  These are vinyl paintings of great virtuosity, bold colors and geometric compositions showing fragmentary female limbs in claustrophobic disarray.  American-born Judith Baca gives us The Three Marias, three panels with the woman on the left in a masculine pose, the one on the right a cigarette-smoking siren, and in the middle panel a mirror to capture the viewer herself. 

One could argue that broad descriptions have a limited function—the traveler who moves through this emotionally wrought maze may wonder why Argentinian Delia Cancela’s wood construction, Destroyed Heart, with a painted fragment of a red heart and little silk fragments hanging from its base, really belongs in the Erotic section?  Would a damaged heart resonate better in Resistance and Fear?  Little matter. That the artwork speaks in some way to each individual viewer is the point after all.  (During my own visit, I couldn’t help overhearing Catherine J. Morris, the Sackler Senior Curator and organizer for this leg of the exhibit mention to a group of students that you could enter at any point and that every time she went through herself, she learned something new.)

Photography can have an immediacy hard to replicate in other media, especially when it addresses its subject with an honesty and directness of intent.  Born in Switzerland in 1931 but living and working in Brazil, Claudia Andujar produced 12 black and white portraits of the indigenous Yanomassa community.  There’s an indisputably naked beauty in every face.  The dictatorship of 1978 forced her to escape, but when she returned to the Amazon to work in a vaccination campaign, she was able to document the immunized with their ID numbers.  The wall notes tell us that Andujar’s own father died in a Nazi extermination camp. 

Panamanian Sandra Eleta’s photograph of Edita,the one with the feather duster from her La servidumbre (Servitude) series, is obviously posed, but the subject reclining in her chair confronts us nevertheless with an uncompromising gaze.  The same “in your face” attitude is prevalent in Chilean photographer Paz Errazuriz’s series of transgender sex workers in Santiago.  Others, like Lordes Grobet from Mexico, create a fictional tableau vivante in catchy portraits of the artist breaking through metallic paper in three stages—a farfetched nod to The Birth of Venus by Botticelli.  The images were originally printed without fixatives so the work would fade over time.  We can be thankful that the images here have a lasting effect on the eye. 

Argentinian Liliana Maresca’s photograph shows the artist in an elaborate and chilling vise of her own making.  Brazilian Anna Maria Maiolino is represented by a close-up portrait, lifting a pair of scissors to her eye—a clear nod to self-mutilation.  The most heartrending example in this category is an image of Colombian Maria Evelia Marmolejo, wrapped from head to toe in afterbirth placentas with an explanatory title: “I question coming into a world where there are no benefits or peace for newborns in a society where eleven thousand children starve to death in Latin America every year.”   

That brings up another issue—the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of still photography documentation of art performance pieces.  In the case of an exhibition of this nature, the need of the artist to express her subjugation publicly under such harsh political and cultural regimes seems reason enough to document the event.  Chilean artist Sylvia Palacios Whitman’s photographs from her Sonnabend Gallery show of 1977, Passing Through, shows the artist with two giant green hands.  Elements of her performance—the hands and stairs—are placed on the wall but the viewer may be left with an emptiness over the whole business without the performer present. 

In many instances, the video arts are more effective in communicating the complex repository of emotion that is an indisputable part of protest. One three-minute entry from Chile that had a dramatically effective shock value is Chilean Diameta Eltit’s Zones ofPain II.  An attractive woman aggressively follows a homeless man, suddenly planting an openly erotic kiss on him.  This reversal in gender social behavior from 1981 still holds a certain power. Four film screenings from Mexican artists Sarah Minter and Jessica Rodriguez and one from Cuban-born Sara Gomez are also included to satisfy one’s visual appetite and desire for a storyline. 

Graphic art as protest is writ bold in American-born Ester Hernandez’s iconic poster Sun Mad from 1982.  The serigraph on display is a takeoff on the Sun Maid Raisins logo, only in this instance, the Sun Maid in question wears a grinning skeletal face with pesticide warnings noted at the bottom.  A pop art style entry from Colombian Sonia Gutierrez depicts a woman lifted upside down by rope.  The mastery of line and composition challenges the viewer to see it as much for its artistry as for its subject.

A surprising art for art’s sake entry is Argentinian Marcia Schvartz’s Las vecinas, a delightful diptych collage of two cutout female neighbors, hanging over their balconies in a gossipy moment, replete with a small birdcage over one of their heads.  For pure minimalist form, Cuban-born Zilia Sanchez’s Lunar V manages to give us a hauntingly beautiful moon shape on stretched canvas, a center crease implying the juxtaposition of two breasts entwined. 

One of the most ambitious pieces, perfectly suited to the Body Landscape category, is Brazilian Vera Chaves Barcello’s EpidermicScapes.  Thirty printed squares of skin have been enlarged on photographic paper, forming a huge floor display.

One room is covered with a Timeline of Social and Political Events in play that is well worth at least a few minutes before or during the visit.  It is an indispensable tool for understanding in plain English the number of dictatorships, depositions, coup d’etats, disappearances, murders and the eventual rise of feminism and the right to vote for women in Latin America and the United States. 

If one take-away impression from this remarkable exhibition is the universality of repression and the overarching need in the human spirit for freedom, that will be more than enough answer to art and its future in whatever form.

The exhibition will be on view through July 22, 2018.

Author Bio:

Sandra Bertrand is Highbrow Magazine’s chief arts critic.

For Highbrow Magazine

 (MIAMI BEACH)  -- The first-ever museum exhibition about a publicist, honoring the celebrity-studded life and career of a promotional genius who was nationally recognized and greatly admired, is on exhibit June 19 -September 16 at the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU with the premiere of Charlie Cinnamon: Legendary Press Agent.

“The Grand Sage of Publicity, for whom all of life had been a stage*” was unmatched in his field. Because Charlie Cinnamon was revered by the news media at a level uncommon for most publicists, and was highly respected by national cultural institutions, captains of industry, America’s leading philanthropists and arts patrons, his passing in 2016 made national headlines. This timely exhibition comes at a precarious moment for society and the media, offering valuable lessons from history about the ways this community hero honored his life-long partnerships with journalists, artists and entertainers, politicians and business leaders.

The exhibition features more than 100 historic items curated from Cinnamon’s personal archives, from his childhood growing up in the Bronx during the 1920s, all the way through 2016. Photos and ephemera span the more than 60 years Charlie Cinnamon reigned as the country’s most beloved press agent for America’s leading arts organizations and national public affairs campaigns for major institutions an companies. He was singularly respected by several generations of journalists for his honesty and integrity, from the time he started working in the 1940s until his recent passing. While today’s frenetic social media stream and the “fake news” phenomena turn the news industry upside-down, Cinnamon’s straightforward brand of public relations hearkens back to a time when a handshake and a gentleman’s agreement meant so much more.

Cinnamon worked until the age of 94. He presented his last press conference shortly before his death, promoting a national tour for Ali McGraw and Ryan O’Neal. For 60-plus years, he was coveted as a news promoter by the world’s biggest stars, including: Elizabeth Taylor, Johnny Carson, Tallulah Bankhead, Milton Berle, Ethel Merman, Chita Rivera, Lauren Bacall, Liza Minelli, Eartha Kitt, Hugh Hefner, Princess Caroline of Monaco, Julio Iglesias, Rita Moreno and many more.

 “Each year the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU chooses an icon from the community to honor with an exhibition, celebrating their contributions to national culture and the arts,” said Susan Gladstone, the Executive Director of the museum. “Charlie Cinnamon was the ultimate star-maker who transformed our part of the world into a star. We are recognizing the lessons his story offers for today’s generations about the importance of crafting your profession with warm-heartedness, virtue, and character (plus lots of fun, glitz, and razzle-dazzle in the mix too). There is a famous saying on Miami Beach: ‘Everyone has a Charlie story,’ because he helped so many people and cultural institutions for more than six decades. He was beloved as a news-maker during the entertainment industry’s glamorous history.”

The Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU created this new exhibition, curated by Jacqueline Goldstein.

Blayne Beacham Macauley is a painter based in Atlanta, Georgia. She studied Plein Air oil painting in Venice Italy at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica and Studio Art at Boston University. She uses symbols to create abstract paintings, which represent exact moments in her life.  Her work has been featured in Atlanta Homes & Lifestyles, Southern Living and Southern Seasons Magazine.

Macauley’s art explores the idea of the human soul.  According to Macauley, as a soul travels through life, it changes.  It grows, learns, and is damaged by life events.  Certain moments in time can permanently impact a soul.

As Macauley explains, “My work explores those certain moments that shaped and defined my life.  Each impactful moment is distilled down to one image (basket, swing set, kite, man with a crown).  With those symbols, I've created a visual language that I can use in different ways and allow them to interact with each other.  Those interactions represent the malleability of memory, and how my current life perspective affects my perspective on events of my past.​”

To kick off its 10th anniversary celebrations, the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum FIU presents the premiere of Deconstruction: A Reordering of Life, Politics and Art featuring the work of 12 Miami artists: Eddie Arroyo, Zachary Balber, Frida Baranek, Christopher Carter, Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova, Yanira Collado, Gonzalo Fuenmayor, Pepe Mar, Glexis Novoa, Sandra Ramos, Jamilah Sabur and Frances Trombly.

"A Reordering of Life, Politics and Art" comes from the prophetic messages in the 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle. More than 50 years ago, this book foreshadowed our reliance on isolating handheld technology and the 24-hour news cycle that dominates our times. The author Guy Debord warned about "a future world where social interactions become too influenced by images that would prevent us from direct personal contact."

These 12 artists are boldly confronting global issues that are newsworthy, including current events in the frenetic social media stream. These artists open a window that allows us to step back and take a long, hard look at our world today.

These works examine the theme of deconstruction - from current events in the frenetic social media stream to cross-cultural awakenings these artists have experienced in Miami.

The exhibit runs July 14 – September 30.

Atworks by artists (in order of appearance): Eddie Arroyo, Zachary Balber, Frida Baranek, Christopher Carter, Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova, Yanira Collado, Gonzalo Fuenmayor, Pepe Mar, Glexis Novoa, Sandra Ramos, Jamilah Sabur and Frances Trombly. Artist featured on main page: Craig Coleman. 

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