Curated by Michelle White
The ghosts of Herman Melville and Walt Whitman haunt Coenties Slip, an inlet near the Brooklyn Bridge in Lower Manhattan, where for a period of time in the 1950s and ’60s a community of artists, filmmakers, and writers lived—sometimes illegally, without heat or water—and worked in ramshackle warehouses (Ellsworth Kelly would drop in on Agnes Martin to eat her homemade muffins and talk art). The Menil’s compact exhibition of twenty-seven works by Chryssa, Robert Indiana, Kelly, Martin, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman will reflect the artists’ range—from Martin’s pared-down abstractions to a large-scale linen-and-silk weaving by Tawney—and rapport. While these renowned figures have enjoyed numerous solo exhibitions, the last show that focused on the group as a whole was at Pace Gallery in New York in 1993. Martin spoke of the slip as existing somehow outside the city, in nature. “Between Land and Sea” celebrates this place apart—a fertile if humble ground for modernism.
