Marcus Civin

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  print February 2023

  Al-An deSouza

  Al-An deSouza has created art across various mediums for more than three decades, examining and embodying transnationality in spite of racism and colonialism. The California-based artist, writer, and educator, a self-described “diasporan,” was born in 1958 in Kenya to parents of Goan descent—five years before the former declared independence from England and three years prior to India annexing the latter, which ended Portugal’s rule over the state. Their exhibition here, “Elegies of Futures Past,” featured a nonchronological installation of works from four photo-based series: “The Lost Pictures,”

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  print September 2022

  Carlos Villa

  Carlos Villa’s sculptural painting from 1995, My Father Walking up Kearny Street for the First Time, includes a Panama hat—a stand-in for the artist’s father. On either side of the cap are two rows of columns covered in black feathers, suggesting a crowded, destabilizing, and unwelcoming San Francisco—the artist’s parents moved to the city from the Philippines during the 1920s. A sign bearing the word ORIENT is placed above the piece, implying an arrogant command and a forced racial categorization.

  A retrospective of Villa’s work was on view at the Newark Museum of Art before traveling to San

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  picks November 23, 2021

  Kandis Williams

  Dancers intermingle through time and space across sixteen large-scale collages, a video, and six sculptural, plant-like assemblages in the Los Angeles–based artist Kandis Williams’s first New York solo outing, “A Line,” curated by Ebony L. Haynes. The polymath’s transhistorical narratives are rich, sharp, and choreographic: Take A Kick and an extension; Graham dramatic solemnity—The Lindy Hop is black dance, funerary in solar plexus, 2021, which is made up of carefully cut-out and glued images of modern dance pioneers Martha Graham and Donald McKayle, laid over a graphite grid on white paper.

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  picks December 17, 2019

  Ramiro Gomez

  One installation in Ramiro Gomez’s exhibition “Here, for a Moment” includes a street-side construction scene and a William Carlos Williams poem, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” (1960), written in marker on a large piece of worn cardboard. In the poem, itself a reading of a painting attributed to Bruegel, a farmer plows his field, oblivious to Icarus’s fall. Gomez’s Icarus has fallen as well: There he is, splayed out on the rocks next to Williams’s poem. Nearby, construction workers are setting up for their day. Before he died, Icarus might have imagined flying off to a good life. Now, the

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  picks August 12, 2019

  Justin Favela

  In a field of golden corn, a crucified figure tips to the left, as if he might fall; resembling Jesus, this is likely the maize god, central to Olmec, Maya, and Aztec belief systems. Butterflies surround another patriarch, perhaps Jesus on a good day: He extends his huge orange-brown arms, offering an embrace. Between these two figures, a green creature surrounded by streaks of orange and yellow hovers over a fire as she delivers a child. Such is the scene in Justin Favela’s temporary piñata-style mural, made of tissue paper glued to cardboard, installed on the walls of an upstairs gallery at

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  interviews April 15, 2019

  Patty Chang

  Well known for her fearless performances and wildly inventive narratives, the Los Angeles–based artist Patty Chang recently began listing her fears. This led to her soliciting other people’s lists of fears as well, which are related to other lists: One explores the range of a mother’s heightened sense of empathy; another imagines useful mechanisms designed to address, among other things, mental illness, existential distress, fear, and individual agency. These lists set the parameters for a new project that departs from Chang’s solo exhibition “The Wandering Lake, 2009–2017,” which was originally

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  picks April 12, 2019

  Agnes Pelton

  You can nearly hear the clean, spirited chime of the lemon-yellow bell at the top right corner of Agnes Pelton’s roughly three-by-two-foot painting Voyaging, 1931. That bell might be calling to a lighter yellow chain to the left, attached like a lure to what loosely resembles the wisp of a plant. All of this hovers above a dark-blue opening in the foaming green waters of some kind of supernatural tide pool. Or is it a mountain range? Return, 1940, shows a giant ghostly primordial bird contemplating its reflection in a shimmering mirage-like pond. The creature is magnetic, pulling in a wayward

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  picks December 05, 2018

  Bahc Yiso

  Bahc Yiso, the late Korean-born installation artist, arts organizer, writer, and teacher who spent his formative years under the name Mo Bahc as an art student at Pratt Institute and as the owner of the alternative space Minor Injury in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, appears deliberate and hopeful in this retrospective. Bahc died in 2004 at forty-six in South Korea, leaving behind mountains of notes, syllabi, press clippings, proposals, drawings, and sculptures that make the impossible seem less daunting if not achievable.

  For Honesty-2, 1996, created a year after he moved back to Korea, Bahc recorded

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  picks November 09, 2018

  “Being Here with You/Estando aquí contigo: 42 Artists from San Diego and Tijuana”

  In 1988, one hundred guests witnessed the wedding-cum-performance of artists Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Emily Hicks. Gomez-Pena, standing on the south side of the US-Mexico border, and Hicks, standing on the north, held hands across the barrier to dramatize the symbolic potential of such a union. Thirty years later, a similar spirit is evoked in this exhibition, which feels consequential and geographically specific in its pairing of a group of forty-two artists from both sides of the border.

  Misael Diaz and Amy Sanchez Arteaga, based in Santa Ana and Tijuana and working together as Cog•nate

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  picks May 31, 2018

  Jack Whitten

  “Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963–2017” is a muscular first effort to assess the sculpture of an artist primarily known for his painting. During summer retreats in Crete, Whitten dedicated himself to sculpture. Two Central African Kongo nkisi figures—one from the nineteenth century, the other from the early twentieth—accompany this survey, along with a dozen other African and Greek referents the artist chose before his death earlier this year. In the Kongo tradition, nails driven into wooden nkisi figures—made to activate mystical forces—record disputes and treaties. Whitten embattled his

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  picks June 09, 2017

  Hein Koh

  By the front window in Hein Koh’s parlor-room exhibition is Three Lonely Hearts, 2017, consisting of lumpy, heart-shaped, spandex cyclopes’ heads cocked to the side, woebegone and piteous. From open-zippered orifices, the heads seem to have emitted glittery, puke-like, bubblegum-pink columns that have since hardened to hold them up. Nearby, The Triangle Twins, 2016, shows two gold creatures, each equipped with two dicks and pointy fingers emerging from shiny wall-bound pillows that read as portals. Two of the four floppy dicks are knotted together on the outside, as if this bond will provide

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  picks May 25, 2017

  Adam Pendleton

  In Baltimore—the southernmost northern city and the northernmost southern city, as some call it—Adam Pendleton evokes Malcolm X, who in his 1964 speech The Ballot or the Bullet rallied black people to resist the comprehensive conspiracy of American racism. “We haven’t benefited from America’s democracy,” he said. “Stop talking about the South. As long as you south of the Canadian border, you South.”

  As seen in one of Pendleton’s various floor-to-ceiling wall works, a reproduction of a historical installation of paintings by Holocaust escapee Marc Chagall appears to be disintegrating or reforming,