diary May 18, 2018

She Brakes for Rainbows

IT’S HARD FOR ME to feel at home at most “gala season” events. For starters, I can’t hold my alcohol. I also start to feel a serious disconnect between my roots—as the Jersey-born offspring of a family of public school teachers—and the way certain sectors of the art world court the one percent. Not to mention the fact that soigné events almost never take place in my neighborhood.

But Wide Rainbow’s first annual gala on May 14 was the exception to the rule. The nonprofit organization, founded three years ago by Ashley Gail Harris, is a DIY female-empowerment engine providing free after-school arts

picks February 09, 2018

Isaac Pool

“Good sister, bad sister / better burn that dress, sister / scar tissue blood blister / suck upon the dregs, sister.” The lyrics to this Hole song, from their unrelentingly rage-filled 1991 album Pretty on the Inside, are chanted like a spell by the actors in Isaac Pool’s object-play 40 Volume, 2016. The work stars four sculptures on pedestals (moved from the gallery into an adjacent black-box space for the performance’s two-night run). The characters, voiced live by actors, include a robust head of fennel—the diva—and three vases composed of tube socks suggestively encrusted with hair gel. The

picks January 12, 2018

Ebecho Muslimova

It’s one thing for a woman to be nasty; it’s quite another thing for her to be unapologetically fat. A little over a year ago, before the #MeToo movement showed the power of collective voices by calling out sexual abusers, Donald Trump deflected criticism, during the presidential debates, about his misogynist attitudes by throwing Rosie O’Donnell’s body up as a rhetorical shield. Add Rosie to a list of full-figured feminists who are brash, excessive, and unafraid of men’s opinions of their bodies. Also enter Fatebe, the flexible, bug-eyed, ultravoluptuous avatar of the Russian-born artist Ebecho

picks December 15, 2017

Françoise Grossen

In the two years since septuagenarian Swiss-born artist Françoise Grossen mounted her first show here, several institutional exhibitions have positioned her as one of the most inventive fiber artists of her generation. Grossen’s strange, corporeal forms speak to her eclectic training—she studied architecture and textiles in Europe, got an MFA in California, and spent a great deal of time in Africa, observing various craft techniques. This show features twenty works from 1970 to the early 1990s, showcasing the breadth of a practice that, as she describes it, “broke with the wall.”

Based in New

picks November 17, 2017

Jessica Vaughn

Earlier this fall, Omer Fast drew the ire of Chinatown antigentrification activists for his installation at James Cohan’s downtown space, which mimicked a stereotypical neighborhood discount storefront. Jessica Vaughn’s current exhibition, “Receipt of a Form,” confronts similar issues of urban movement and displacement, but she wields her materials with a lighter hand. Vaughn’s modus operandi is simple: She relocates the everyday elements of city life, such as worn-out public-transportation seats and their upholstery scraps, into the gallery. Yet her sculptural works mostly function as frames

picks September 22, 2017

Victoria Fu

The California-based artist Victoria Fu appropriates the tactics of illusion used within theater, film, and digital media. Double Curtain 1 (all works 2017), a dramatic piece near the entrance to her exhibition, is coldly spotlit on one side by a digital projector. Printed images on the work’s two diaphanous curtains—hanging back-to-back from a rod suspended from the ceiling—appear to match. But the front-facing curtain, its imagery originally filmed on 16-mm and then digitized, depicts a still from an abstract screen saver full of colorful paint daubs floating against a heavily pixelated

picks September 15, 2017

Sanford Biggers

Two years after the debut of Sanford Biggers’s controversial sculpture Laocöon, 2015—an inflatable ten-foot-long rendition of the 1970s cartoon character Fat Albert, laid out like a corpse (a eulogy to African Americans murdered by police and to the “character assassination” of Bill Cosby, according to the artist)—he has retooled his kill-your-idols theme. For “Selah,” Biggers moves away from depicting literal scenes of black death toward a more symbolically complicated process where icons of black culture are both cannibalized and consecrated. The exhibition features several sculptures from

picks September 01, 2017

“Pearls”

“I don’t enjoy it here / squatting on this island / looking picturesque and mythical,” says the narrator of Margaret Atwood’s 1974 poem “Siren Song,” a second-wave-feminist retort to Homer’s amphibious temptresses in the Odyssey. Today, it appears that sirens have been culturally domesticated, seen less as femmes fatales than as ethereal beauty inspirations for #mermaidhair and #seawitch looks. “Pearls,” curated by Natalie Yang, brings together works by seven female artists in their early twenties who reclaim the siren as a symbol of desire, ecosorcery, and vulnerability.

A recent New York

diary August 22, 2017

W.I.T.C.H. Way

WHEN I TOUCHED DOWN IN WASHINGTON on a recent Thursday for the third edition of the Seattle Art Fair, the city was uncharacteristically hot and hazy, enveloped in smoke from forest fires raging nearby in Canada.

But even the miasma couldn’t dampen my excitement about visiting the metropolis that loomed so large in my 1990s teen imagination. Seeking some classic Seattle vibes, I quickly made my way to Pike Place Market for a strong coffee and zine browsing at the radical Left Bank Books. The atmospheric conditions rivaled LA at its worst, obscuring the Puget Sound and Jeff Bezos’s Amazon biodomes

interviews August 15, 2017

Brendan Fernandes

Brendan Fernandes’s practice straddles the intersection of art and dance, addressing questions of labor, queerness, colonialism, and the formation of identity. For the New York nonprofit Recess, Fernandes has produced Steady Pulse, a project which comprises Minimalist-inspired sculptural elements and a series of events that call to mind the Pulse massacre in Orlando and the vitality of the body in times of political precarity. Every Tuesday and Thursday from 3 to 6 PM, through August 26, 2017, dancers will hold open rehearsals of the collaborative dance piece Hit Back. On August 19, 2017, from

picks August 04, 2017

Naama Tsabar

For all the comparisons between musical instruments and human bodies—especially the guitar as a stand-in for a wasp-waisted woman—relatively few sound artists confront the gendered history of musical performance. Naama Tsabar is an exception. In “Transboundary,” her first solo exhibition here, she shows four monochrome sculptures in felt, strung with piano wire and attached to amps. Like Robert Morris’s felt sculptures from the late 1960s, their scale evokes the body. But unlike Morris’s felts, which were arrayed in folds that often resembled the female form, Tsabar’s sculptures are pinned to

picks July 21, 2017

“Elaine, Let’s Get the Hell Out of Here”

The snappy title of this summer group exhibition—“Elaine, Let’s Get the Hell Out of Here”—comes from an anecdote relayed by Elaine de Kooning in response to Linda Nochlin’s feminist essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (both Nochlin’s essay and de Kooning’s tale were published in the January 1971 issue of Artnews). The painter recalled an incident when a boorish man at a party began to ask her and Joan Mitchell, “What do you women artists think . . . ?” Not waiting around for him to finish his query, Mitchell—as famous for her uncompromising attitude as for her take on Abstract

picks June 23, 2017

Kameelah Janan Rasheed

“This is a stout truth. Are you trying to die on that question?” This is printed on a piece of letter-size white paper, one of hundreds of black-and-white sheets covering a freestanding wall, like ads on a city street. The wall serves as an introduction to A Supple Perimeter, 2017, Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s installation here. But the “stout truth” cuts like a knife—especially following the recent acquittal of the police officer who fatally shot Philando Castile, a young black man, during a traffic stop last year.

Investigating race through text and images, Rasheed’s works take the form of writing

picks May 05, 2017

“Body Language”

The body, in its irrationality and potential for extinction, overwhelms language. This group show, with its melancholic and liberatory overtones, gestures toward that idea. Forcing a strict divide between language and movement, niv Acosta’s digital film Clapback, 2016, brings together sequences from a performance that debuted at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Part of the video presents questions accompanied by house music. The queries alternate between the stuff of social-media surveys (“Kissed any of your Facebook friends?” “Slept in until 5PM?”) to items directed toward

picks April 14, 2017

Trish Tillman

Imagine a ménage à trois between a suburban thrift store, a midcentury modern furniture salon, and a sex shop—the love children born of such a hot-’n’-heavy session might be Trish Tillman’s sculptures. The artist’s current exhibition includes eleven deliciously queered, carefully composed objects. Longhorns, horsehair, metal studs, tassels—Tillman’s decorative references are eclectic but with a Texan flair, and ready for all manner of action with their helpful orifices and prongs.

Her wall-mounted modular pieces seem like headboards from the world’s kinkiest hotel. Afterschool Locker (all works

picks March 31, 2017

“ONE.”

Inaugurating a Bedford-Stuyvesant art space named after the neighborhood’s cash-for-gold shops, the exhibition “ONE.” traffics in sobering monochromes rather than glittery baubles. The three exhibiting artists are united in their desire to explore how political abstractions become tools of oppression. Yet that doesn’t mean their works rely on representational tactics that are easily digestible. Torkwase Dyson reveals how environmental degradation, architecture, and racial injustice are intertwined. The artist gives us two new reliefs, subjective interpretations of black architecture, such as

picks March 24, 2017

“March Madness”

The culture of the mind (art) and the culture of the body (sports) have stereotypically been pitted against each other. But might female-identifying artists, whose own bodies and gender performance are under constant scrutiny, have a more nuanced perspective on the pursuit of athletic prowess? This is the premise behind “March Madness,” a survey of works by thirty-one female artists. The exhibition title references the NCAA basketball tournaments and calls to mind the political ramifications of the recent Women’s Marches.

The main thrust of the show addresses the clash between the aesthetic ideals

picks December 16, 2016

Marianna Simnett

My punishment for being a voluble child, overflowing with words and song that grew louder and angrier as I reached adolescence, is a voice slightly down-pitched by small vocal nodules. They were discovered at fourteen, when I—a natural soprano—had trouble hitting my highest notes. “It’s like a boy’s voice cracking,” a vocal teacher joked, to my great embarrassment. I was diagnosed through an uncomfortable laryngoscopy. Once inserted up the nose and down the throat, the scope makes it impossible to breathe normally, let alone vocalize.

Marianna Simnett’s exhibition “Lies,” exploring the gendered

picks December 09, 2016

Diane Simpson

Diane Simpson’s sculptures are part translation, part fantasy, and pure pleasure. The octogenarian artist begins each work by creating isometric drawings on graph paper. She uses the drawings, with handwritten instructions for assembly, as blueprints for artworks with interlocking components. While they reference articles of clothing, the sculptures are constructed from hard angles, often in materials with an architectural heft. Simpson’s efforts result in a sophisticated, homespun modernism that channels the Midwestern cosmopolitanism of her hometown, Chicago.

Her second show with this gallery

picks November 29, 2016

“The Missing One”

“The nation is, like new Western brands of tinned food, as little touched by the human hand as possible,” wrote the lauded Bengali poet and artist Rabindranath Tagore in response to the advance of British colonization in Bangladesh. Tagore’s reading of how capitalist technology dehumanized politics gains new, brutal significance in our current era. The poet is the shadow figure behind “The Missing One,” an exhibition of twenty-two artists from the Indian subcontinent. Titled after an 1896 science-fiction tale written by writer and scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose, the show considers the role of

Wendy Vogel