Henriette Huldisch is the incoming Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. She recently curated the exhibitions “Ericka Beckman: Double Reverse” and “Alicja Kwade: In Between Glances” at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is currently Director of Exhibitions and Curator.
1
SIMONE FATTAL (MoMA PS1, NEW YORK; CURATED BY RUBA KATRIB)
Though they span fifty years of the artist’s career, the modestly scaled, carefully composed ceramic works in Fattal’s ingeniously installed show were counterbalanced by a bit of slapdashery that felt arrestingly fresh and of the moment. Glazed in luminous colors or shades of sand and brown, the array of human figures, animals, and off-kilter ruins revealed Fattal’s sustained interest in mythology and archaeology and her efforts to chart deeply human themes such as the ravages of war and recovery.
2
DAVID HARTT, “THE HISTORIES (LE MANCE-NILLIER)” (BETH SHOLOM SYNAGOGUE, ELKINS PARK, PA)
Hartt’s “The Histories (Le Mancenillier),” a project including videos, tapestries, and sculptures, transforms Frank Lloyd Wright’s landmarked building to mesmerizing effect. The artist uses a work by nineteenth-century Jewish and Creole composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk as a catalyst to reflect on migration, specifically the Jewish and African diasporas. Hundreds of orchids (which Hartt considers “diasporic plants”), placed in and around the seats of the expansive main sanctuary, where water leaks from its timeworn roof, form a botanical congregation both droll and elegiac.
On view through December 19, 2019.
3
MARGARET HONDA, COLOR CORRECTION (HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS) AND MARGARET HONDA (CARNEGIE MUSEUM OF ART, PITTSBURGH; CURATED BY ERIC CROSBY AND RICHARD ARMSTRONG)
Experiencing Honda’s films—intellectually and sensorially thrilling for their utterly rigorous restraint—is a rare treat (they truly only exist on celluloid). Color Correction, 2015, made from a film’s so-called timing tapes, consists of a feature-length succession of subtly shifting colors. At the Carnegie, Honda’s lone, human-size frog, lying supine and pitifully exposed on a bed of luxurious rugs, is easily one of the most unnerving sculptures I’ve seen.
On view through January 26, 2020.
4
“JUDSON DANCE THEATER: THE WORK IS NEVER DONE” (MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK; CURATED BY ANA JANEVSKI AND THOMAS J. LAX)
Capturing the raw artistic energy and radical experimentation of one extraordinarily auspicious moment in a downtown New York that had many but is now gone, this excellent survey almost made me a little sad. It was also a curatorial feat, managing to present dance, film, poetry, photography, and ephemera in proximity, in a space they weren’t made for, while retaining much of the spirit in which the works were conceived.
5
KATARINA BURIN, FRAN’S, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
Named after pioneering designer and activist Fran Hosken, this half-hidden, occasionally open, nonpublic lounge is the work of Burin, whose drawings and installations mine the forgotten contributions of female modernists (both real and not-so-real). Timelessly austere and perfectly simulacral, like Burin’s artworks, Fran’s is a distant cousin of the Cabaret Voltaire and also the best bar in town.
6
STEREOLAB
Stereolab’s effervescent 1997 album Dots and Loops, made with veteran Chicago producer John McEntire and featuring Mouse on Mars’s Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma, who supply blippity-bloppity bits, was on continuous play on my CD player in late-1990s Berlin. This and the band’s six other recently remastered and reissued albums sound amazing, and Lætitia Sadier’s political lyrics have lost none of their barb. The music still oscillates between profound alienation and deep connection in a way that feels both revived and reviving.
7
ELLEN HARVEY, NETWORK (SOUTH STATION, BOSTON)
Subway art is a sadly unsung genre, often unnoticed and little loved. Harvey’s mosaic transforms the Headhouse 2 entrance of this major traffic hub with just enough whimsy and sincerity. It features a bird’s-eye view of Boston and a vast blue ocean, nodding at once to the city’s preindustrial past and to impending climate change. If you look very closely, there are mermaids, too.
8
ALICJA KWADE, PARAPIVOT (METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK)
For her gravity-defying installation, Kwade mounted two quasi–solar systems on the top of the Met. The structures comprise intersecting steel rectangles that support nine spheres carved from different natural stones in different colors, hovering as if frozen in space. Not only did the constellations precisely frame the tony buildings surrounding Central Park, they in effect brought the sky down to the roof.
9
MARK FELL WITH ALEC TOKU WHITING (BOSTON CITY HALL)
Presented by the indefatigable experimental-music series “Non-Event,” Fell’s sculptural array of twenty-three speakers in a cavernous lobby demonstrated how sound can work with, reveal, or even compose space. It was a rare occasion in which the music, in an unlikely pairing with Whiting’s koto, perfectly matches the room. And Boston’s hulking, Brutalist city hall is pretty much epic.
10
ARTHUR JAFA, THE WHITE ALBUM
Just off its Golden Lion–winning run at the Venice Biennale, Jafa’s The White Album has stuck with me since I saw it in June. Collaged together from YouTube posts and other online sources as well original footage, the half-hour video presents an exacting cinematic analysis of the culture of whiteness. Together with Jafa’s celebrated Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death, 2016, it holds up an unsparing mirror to the politics of race in the United States on the eve of this century’s third decade.