Author: ethokar

“Hide And Seek” New Work by Jeanne Bieri at Detroit Contemporary July 1–July 30, 2023 by K. A. Letts  Jeanne Bieri’s deeply personal fiber works, collaged from vintage quilt fragments and U.S. army blankets collected from 20th century conflicts, were on view throughout July in her solo show “Hide and Seek” at Detroit Contemporary. The exhibition functions as a mini-retrospective—reflecting the artist’s output over the last ten years. Overlaid with elaborate hand embroidery, they represent a “stitching together” of Midwestern lives and stories into a rich visual narrative of resilience and reclamation.         Bieri, who was awarded a Kresge Fellowship for Fine Art in 2017, has been a frequent prize winner for her fiber work, including the Detroit Scarab Club’s Gold Medal in 2008, 2011 and 2014, as well as a Michigan Council for the Arts grant in 2000 for the study of historic regional quilts.           Discovering fine art in her thirties after moving to Detroit, Bieri brought a trove of memories from her western Michigan childhood to her newfound passion—memories that provide the heart of this emotionally resonant and visually rich body of work. Her father, who fought in World War II, returned with stories of devastation in postwar France, along with his well-worn army blankets. Her female relatives contributed an attitude of frugal make-and-mend, as well as a keen appreciation for the decorative potential of traditional quilt making. And Bieri’s education in fine art at Wayne State University in the 1990s provided a sturdy conceptual scaffolding upon which to build a highly personal record of her life and the life of the community from which she came.         “I grew up on a farm in Hastings, Michigan, went to western Michigan University, taught in a two-room schoolhouse in Hopkins, Michigan, married, and moved to Detroit in 1972,” she states. “In the 80s, I discovered art and art making and it was as if a curtain opened, and I was able to translate the visual world into my terms.”           One of the early artworks in Bieri’s collection of tapestries, Mended, demonstrates the idiosyncratic process with which she combines unconventional materials in esthetically satisfying ways, all done by hand and intuitively. Along the right side of the roughly 48” x 65” tapestry, is a wide, irregular swath salvaged from the ruins of a vintage crazy quilt, banded in jagged crimson, and surrounded by what might be an olive-green landscape—map-like, almost—over which float meandering, stitched linear currents that resolve into concentric circles throughout the composition. Significantly, surgical suture silk salvaged from the Korean War is Bieri’s preferred embroidery thread—here, the act of decoration functions as a ritual of healing.         Bieri describes her creative process as meditative, as she coaxes the quilt and blanket stories to the surface. She states: “My stories become threaded into theirs, together into one. The chain stitching gives a sense of unity, a sturdiness, one I appreciate. The linear quality of the stitch defines the flatness of the surface and at the same time penetrates the fabrics, fusing the layers, fixed for all time.”           Shirt Quilt, created at about the same time as Mended, is a slightly more organized composition. The top quarter of the piece is a row of vertically radiating stripes in two shades of army blanket green. Beneath, a line of salvaged checked quilt piecing gives way to more irregularly assembled fabrics that imply a topographical map. The chain stitching in Shirt Quilt is more densely worked than in Mended and begins to imply a ghostly figure of some kind.         In more recent work, the overall contours of the pieces have begun to reference articles of clothing. The Dance, shown in 2022 at the Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, takes on the character of a figure festively stepping across the wall. The recognizable leaf shapes in silver lamé within the composition reflect a looser, more gestural iteration of her ­process.           Frog Quilt, a tapestry from 2023 that was shown for the first time in “Hide and Seek” at Detroit Contemporary, illustrates the continued evolution of her art practice—away from the conventional quilt format and toward a free-form overall shape dictated by the internal elements of the artwork. Recognizable cutout reverse appliqués of frogs and leaves circulate throughout the composition, interspersed with pieced circles and rows of stripes.         A group of small, monochrome paintings, based on vintage snapshots that Bieri has collected over the years at yard sales and thrift shops, share the wall with her fiber work. She does not know the subjects in the original photos but feels a need to care for these lost images. A number of the paintings, in particular, record a common sales practice of itinerant photographers in the 1950s, who would lead a pony around a suburban neighborhood to attract customers. Doting parents would commission a photo of their child on horseback along with a bonus pony ride.           Though the small paintings do not offer the lush and sensual pleasures of her tapestries, they represent another common through-line in her work. Bieri often acknowledges the value of humane care and her capacity for feeling the innate significance in ordinary lives, as well as for the shared experience that makes up a community. In both her fiber pieces and in these small pictures, Bieri honors the commonalities of our human species in all its quotidian particularity.         Bieri’s work not only conserves, but actively finds, new beauty from the historic resonance of discarded materials and images. Scraps and remnants from the lived histories of G. I.’s and farm wives in America’s heartland are combined in a poignant tapestry of memory. The dull greens and tans of army blankets from various conflicts, juxtaposed with shiny bright satins and meandering currents of embroidery, reveal a previously undiscovered, yet somehow familiar,

“Dear Louise: A Tribute to Louise Fishman” Cheim & Read, New York City, May 18–June 30, 2023 by Paul Moreno Louise Fishman, born in 1939, passed away in the summer of 2021. Cheim & Read, who had a decades long relationship with the artist, mounted a beautiful exhibition of her paintings this past summer which was a bittersweet joy to see. I should share here that I really began my own career in the arts at Cheim & Read in 1998 as the front desk attendant. One of the first shows that I was at the gallery for was Fishman’s 1998 exhibition there. I remember the first day she walked in with her small dog. She wore jeans and a plaid shirt; she was warm and charming and an immediate delight. I must also admit I was not at all familiar with her work but when I saw it, it changed my eye. And in the various times I would encounter her over the years, I would be touched by her wisdom, her desire to find meaning in the world, and her impulse to imbue meaning into her painting.         Though her work contains all the trademarks of Abstract Expressionism, I think it is far too simple to limit her work by calling it late AbEx, as it sometimes has been. In particular, if AbEx is thought of, spiritually, as a great American movement reacting to the horrors of global war while edifying America as the new global cultural center, and physically, as a pushing of paint away from an impulse of representation toward paint’s inherent formal capacities and limitations, the work of Louise Fishman honors these. However, maybe in an accidental spirit of the postmodern, she also teases out the loose threads of these notions. In doing so, she gently creates a space where a queer Jewish woman could express her unique experience of living in the world of our present century.           This gentleness however comes from strength. For example, the 2002 painting My City is a rigorous painting. This roughly six-and-a-half by five-and-a-half foot painting at first reads as a wheat-colored field upon which a rough grid of forest green and terra cotta has been overlaid. The long bold strokes of this grid are thick and consistent, and they trod over the rough underpainting never running out of fuel. But just like a city, we see that the grid is not an overlay, it is the structure in which one must make their way. Within each vaguely rectangular segment of the grid, the pale golden wheat color is painted in and even then, the occasional line of the grid crosses over it. I think this is the story of many a person here in New York; we try to fill in the grid with our selves and even then, when we feel we have made our mark, the city comes and erases it. When you look even closer, you find that the narrative I just described is all atop another underpainting. The bright yellow, the fiery red, the electric blue that one might naturally associate with ‘the city’ is bubbling underneath the comforting colors of the surface, as if Louise is telling us, the city is only ours when we make peace with it.           This sort of imaginative contemplation of a painting is probably quite out of fashion, and as I write this, I fear it is the kind of reading of a painting one dare not do aloud. However, I feel like it is a very useful tool when looking at Louise Fishman’s work. She is usually not the kind of artist who hits you over the head with a directive: look at this, think this, do that. Rather she is opening herself up to the viewer and it is our job to accept her invitation to do some thinking or feeling. For example, in Night of Watching #2, we are given a field composed of layers of nearly black vertical and horizontal marks. Specks of a medium gray appear bright against the dark grays that vary as they turn more reddish purple here, or more cool and earthy there. Some marks appear like brutalist architecture, others like distant hills. The upper left quadrant of the painting contains vertical translucent streaks that begin to pale and surround a gesture where the surface is suddenly gritty. Around the time this painting was made, Louise was adding ashes that she had collected on a visit to Auschwitz to some of her paintings. If you know this, you wonder if those ashes are what this mark is. Whether it is or is not, you are struck with a gravitas of what the moment of that visit must have felt like, of what it was to bring those ashes and memorialize them, of even this moment today 35 years later when antisemitism is again so present.           A very different mood is struck in a large canvas (72 x 88 inches) from 2016, Credo. This joyful painting is an energetic collection of large bold strokes of mostly blues and greens. The composition is almost musical, the bottom quarter is a heavy horizontal bass line above which we have first, on the left, a bold square blast of a complex chord followed on the right by a sudden strident striated flourish. Then there is a counter melody. Just above the bass line, about a third of the way into the picture, a vertical streak starts to just turn pink. Then, in the bottom right corner, almost a composition within itself, a more saturated structure of pink and white along with the aforementioned blues and greens appears to hold up the entire composition. And then, a rest.           Though I was quite enraptured with Credo on one visit to the show, a smaller painting from 1979, Mine and Yours, struck me as

No Words Spoken: The Ordinary in the Works ofKyungwoo Chun by Leandré D’Souza Editor’s Note: Due to the length of this article, it will be published in the print version of the New Art Examiner in two parts. Part One will appear in the October 2023 issue and Part Two in the January 2024 issue. The entire essay is presented below.   PART ONE Along the path to a Buddhist monastery lies a container filled with rocks of varying sizes. Next to it stands a table atop which rests a pile of red fabric. Pilgrims en route stop by. After a brief introduction with South Korean photographer and contemporary artist Kyungwoo Chun and his project team, each picks up a stone (or several of them) and places them inside a red fabric scrap. With a marker, the wrapped stones are ­labelled with their names and dates of birth. Intrigued by the long and patient queue, my three-year-old and I join in. We are told that each person is invited to pick the stone(s) that mirror the weight of the pain they carry. My son pulls the heaviest one out of the barrel, almost too large to lift single-handedly. Folded and tied securely into the square patch, we inscribe his details. The stone, now hidden, joins the others. 3,000 people pour their pain into these tiny parcels. Chun arranges the marked bundles in a grid on to the main temple square. Against a radiant sky, the stones’ burdens vanish beneath the ground that carries them.1           To relieve the heaviness of daily struggle, even for an instant, beckoned introspection and lingered with me. It also led to a decade long association with the artist. This resulted in a series of provocations in multiple contexts in India. Chun was recently in Goa, a state on the southwestern coast of India, where we launched his latest solo project at Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts.2 Songs without Lyrics3 explores alternatives for lyrics with sounds that have no text. The works in the show make visible what is often not seen or as yet unknown, stretching our capacities for listening to sounds that are invented, and generating unimaginable possibilities for communication.   Mapping the Essence of Time         The human subject is a central motif in Chun’s practice. As a photographer, he is preoccupied with the superimposition of time that is inscribed into the image from an extended exposure. For the definition of photography, he draws from the 14th century Korean word Sa-Jin that was reserved for portraiture. The word meant depicting truth or soul, and therefore transcending the reproduction of the real. It is intended in this case, instead, as an “exchange of souls.”4 In Chun’s portraits, he constructs a studio setting in which sitters pose or perform a task for a prescribed duration—a few minutes, an hour, a full day. With the opening of the shutter, photographer and subject embark on a journey. A relational exchange evolves. What we see in the image is a hazy memory of the moments that were spent together. By enabling the experience of real time, consciousness awakens.         This process spreads beyond the photographic record and spills into video, performance, across several geographies, demographics, and social divisions. Fundamental to Chun’s research5 are the study of time as brittle, as caught between the present and what has just passed and is thus absent, and its asphyxiating bond with memory. He is concerned with how we interact in this world, how we relate to ourselves and others. Encouraging social cohesion, he creates situations inside which people (mostly strangers) enter into a framework conditioned by a set of instructions and actions. Like an alchemist, individuals are thrown together which provoke intimacies shown through physical connection. Inside the void, something shifts. The ontological experience moves from the sight to the touch. The body loosens, is freed into a state of sheer abandon and opens itself to new imaginations.6 Sensations of love and compassion flourish. The human soul starts to flutter.           With utmost perfection, Chun intuitively pieces the ingredients together and steps back, allowing time, space (void), and the vibrations that simmer between them to simultaneously morph. In the interim between creation and dissolution, surfaces dissolve. These transient encounters are repeated, over and over, till they arrive at the ritualistic. Chun is testing the nature of being and existence. Within this deeper philosophical inquiry, participants probe the meaning and experience of time. Through the impulse of emotion, a new language arises. The subjects, in their union, are no longer in isolation but are joined together. The residues of these experiments form a landscape, mapping human interactions and the memory of existence.         Activated through the dialectic between the absence of what has passed and presence, a tension is triggered.7 A reserve of memories flows into the empty vessel, stimulated by the interdependence of beings. Each present moment crumbles into the recesses of memory. But rather than widen the distance between the self that is now unfamiliar and what exists in real time, the interconnectedness grows closer. Andrey Tarkovsky states “Time cannot vanish without trace for it is a subjective, spiritual category, and the time we have lived settles in our soul as an experience placed within time.”8 Thus, as the psyche transitions, enabling the exposure of the inner self, experience turns limitless.         As witnesses and participants in these investigations into non-linear processes of memory and time, we begin to understand that the core of Chun’s process is to push us into a state of nothingness. Through embodied experience, through our fundamental connection with others, we chance upon acts of care. It is in our very essence. We are instinctively predisposed to forming meaningful ­relations where we can share love, sorrow towards or with others. It is reciprocal and can only be imagined as a collective act.          

Worth a Thousand Words:Graphic Biographies of Artists’ Lives by Sean Bieri As a lifelong fan of comics, my college years could not have come at a better time. In the late 1980s, the independent comic book scene was exploding. My housemate introduced me to his stash of Raw magazines, the cutting-edge “comix” anthology that first serialized Art Spiegelman’s Maus. From there I went on to discover Love & Rockets, Acme Novelty Library, and dozens more artistically mature comics, some hefty enough to merit the still new label “graphic novels,” that gestured toward a future for comics beyond their super-heroic, kid-stuff reputation.         That future eventually arrived and now even the blandest chain bookstore carries a wide selection of comics for all ages. However, that hard-won term “graphic novel” has become more confusing than ever since many of the best new comics are not fiction at all but biographies or memoirs. In particular, there has been a spate of graphic biographies in recent years that take fine artists as their subjects. (Ironic, perhaps, since us “comix” partisans always insisted that cartoonists were serious artists too!) There are almost too many to list—Jean-Michel Basquiat, Frida Kahlo, and Niki de Saint Phalle each have no fewer than two comics biographies devoted to them—but here is a round-up of some of my favorites.           From 2003, an early entry in the genre is Nicolas Debon’s Four Pictures by Emily Carr—a brief but compassionate overview of the life of the late-blooming Canadian painter whose luminous landscapes have drawn comparisons to Georgia O’Keeffe’s. The book comprises four chapters: Carr’s encounter in her 20s with the Native people of Vancouver; her frustrated attempt to study art in Paris; her rediscovery at age 56 with her first major exhibition and her introduction to the artists of the famed Group of Seven; and her later years working out of a trailer in the woods, where she made some of her greatest paintings. Debon is a French-born illustrator, and his simply drawn characters—Carr’s face is rendered with dots for eyes and a dash for a mouth—reflect his childhood love of Tintin and other European comics. His pastels drawings suggest Carr’s own work, and the moments he chooses to illustrate trace the painter’s life elegantly and succinctly.           Fabrizio Dori’s art in Gauguin: The Other World also beautifully evokes his subject’s work, and he quotes a number of Paul Gauguin’s paintings directly. Dori switches between flat, saturated color when depicting the painter’s time in Tahiti and woodcut-style graphics with a limited palette for Gauguin’s voyage into the afterlife. Gauguin dies early in the book and relates his life story in retrospect to his guide into the beyond—one other than the Spirit of the Dead, the otherworldly entity watching over the prone nude girl called Teura in the artist’s best-known work. Gauguin is given the floor for most of the book, allowed to relate his struggles and motivations from his own perspective. Readers looking for an unequivocal critique of the artist’s transgressions—his abandonment of his family in Denmark, his romanticization of the Polynesian “primitives,” and his marriage to the 13-year-old Teura—may be left frustrated. The Spirit of the Dead, like the other island deities, is bemused by Gauguin, who “like all white men… had a hole in his breast… where evil thoughts are born.” He grants the painter, in his final moments, “the possibility of leaving this life without regrets” by choosing to stay in Tahiti rather than return to France and his eventual ruin. But Gauguin, by his own admission selfish and merciless in his pursuit of freedom, has no regrets; what he sought was “on a painting’s surface, not in reality,” and having found it in his art, he dies, by Dori’s telling, in relative peace.           Edmond Baudoin’s art has little in common stylistically with that of Salvador Dalí. As unreal as Dalí’s scenes are, they are rendered with precision and polish, where Baudoin’s ink drawings are loose, brushy, and expressive. He does mimic Dalí’s collaging of multiple images and symbols, either to draw connections between events and ideas, or to reveal the inner thoughts of characters. Baudoin introduces two guides, a young man and woman, who discuss Dalí’s evolution from literal enfant terrible to art world titan and eccentric celebrity, as they stroll through pages that swirl with images from the painter’s life. There’s a searching, probing quality to the narrative: our guides are often interrupted, supplemented, questioned, or corrected by passers-by, a Greek chorus of ants straight out of Un Chien Andalou, the cartoonist, or by Dalí himself. While the book is predominantly black-and-white, vivid splashes of color are employed for Baudoin’s depictions of Gala, Dali’s indispensable wife and muse, to convey her effect on the painter’s psyche. In one six-panel sequence, depicting Dalí’s first meeting with Picasso, Baudoin succinctly illustrates the pioneering modernist’s influence on the younger artist: for three panels, Picasso silently jabs his finger at some of his own paintings, before showing Dalí to the door. “Got it?” he asks Dalí at last. “Got it,” Dalí replies. When the Surrealist’s art shifts late in life to a “return to classicism,” Baudoin’s approach changes too. In a wonderfully meta move, he yanks his female narrator out of the fantastical scenes from earlier in the book and into his more mundane studio, to her chagrin. She critiques the art on his drawing board: “Your interpretations (of Dali’s paintings) are very eccentric. Betrayals.” “That’s because I’m crazy,” Baudoin tells her, “just like him.”         Cartoonist Bryan Talbot’s career stretches back to the 1960s underground scene. His Adventures of Luther Arkwright, a trippy tale of a dimension-hopping psychic warrior, is one of the earliest British graphic novels. The strange story, then, of a psychologically troubled British Surrealist who kicked against the constraints of polite society and occasionally transformed into a wild animal is right up Talbot’s alley (“I’m mostly a horse,” Leonora Carrington announces on page one by

Richard Haines: Paradise Lost Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York City, May 4–June 30, 2023 by Paul Moreno In the second chapter of The Flâneur, Edmund White writes about the Turkish bath at La Mosquée de Paris, which at the start of this millennium still reserved two days each week for male clientele. He notes: “Although many gay men go to the hammam on Sundays (most of them non-Muslims), they understand they are in a house of worship and they look but do not touch—a rule that adds a civilizing distance to their cruising.” This tension of respectful longing, of polite looking, of open fantasy-building that barely dares the transgression of touch, of the observant stranger in a Gallic environ, filled the room at the recent show of paintings by Richard Haines at Daniel Cooney Fine Art.         Richard Haines is best known for his successful career as a fashion illustrator. His work has transcended the boundaries of that industry to draw the attention of a broader audience who love his social media posts of his drawings of handsome fellows in cute clothes often drawn from the perspective of the man-on-the-street in Paris, New York, or on the occasional beach. He is also an educator and man about town. He is in fact a flâneur of sorts. All of this of course informs his occupation as a fine artist. The work does not feel ardently conceptual like it is pushing the boundaries of painting, nor does it feel like it is grasping at the cool to lure art world speculators. Rather this collection of paintings/drawings feel fleeting and poetic, plain and sincere, the kind of paintings that transport the viewer to a time and place when simply being a flâneur is enough.           This particular group of pictures feels like a collection of moments each committed to canvas (or in one case paper) more than a coeval group of pictures developed together with a show in mind. They were mostly painted in 2022-23, and all display Haines’s recognizable hand, but they vary a lot in personality. One corner was occupied by the one work on paper, Quatre Hommes Dans L’eau, and Three Skaters, Manhattan Avenue. Both of these depict a group of young men going about their business, seemingly rendered, at the perfect moment, from observation. In Quatre Hommes…, four lithe, golden-brown, male figures, drawn from angles ranging from full behind to silhouette, form a callipygian display, each loosely outlined in thick black lines, filled with brushy toffee colored paint, the crowns of their heads left bright white reflections of the glaring sun, as the figures move from only ankle deep into the yellow green smears of water below the white streaked turquoise sky. In Three Skaters…, a sort of cadet blue waterfall of a canvas is populated by three boys that we see from an angle of a discreet observer. They’re carrying skateboards. Their bodies are long and thin with ski-like feet and broad hanger-like shoulders from which clothes that look more runway than skatepark hang. There are dark blue squiggles suggesting urban architecture.           These two pictures are distinctly different from a trio of paintings on an adjoining wall. I initially thought these were each a double portrait but upon reading the titles, Green Narcissus, Pink Narcissus, and Blue Narcissus, I realized the doubling of the model is the effect of a mirror within the mise-en-scene of the paintings. Each of these small paintings (24 x 18 inches) is composed of a field of a saturated wash of its titular color, a white Eames side chair, a model, and his reflection. The acid green version has the model in high-waisted trousers, shirtless, and his vaguely rendered face is slightly goofy. The salmony pink version has the model leaning one handed into the mirror, one behind his back, as if frozen in a sexy casual minuet. The cornflower blue version takes the unexpected turn of the model being nude but for an eyeless black (leather?) hood. These do not feel spontaneous despite the marks feeling fast and unfussy. They do not have the impromptu energy of the aforementioned bathers or skaters. They feel like a model as still life, posed in the studio, on-the-spot, self-aware. In all of them, the background color seeps through; the gestures of the model’s feet are not concerned with specificity; and the images as a whole feel like a prelude to something we do not see.           Yet another mood is struck in a painting called ­Mordechai with Screen and Mirror. This picture possessed the most “finishedness” in the show. The model is simply seated facing the viewer. The outline of his body is less rushed and more finessed. Perhaps most notably, the background is far more considered—no brushy washes here—rather the background is broken into a number of roughly vertical planes depicting, based on the title, a screen and mirror; though these distinctions are left to the viewer to interpret. Perhaps more than in any other painting in the group, here we really see Haines’ love of European romance, particularly, French. The screen appears to depict a diver that calls to mind a Matisse acrobat. The colors and composition suggest an odalisque. The black that covers the model’s shins suggest Schiele. And I am certain I am not the only one who sees a Munchian optical illusion in the painting; but I am not sure that was intentional.         The portrait Austin with Blue Socks felt the most modern to me in the sense of painting during the American Century. It is of note that it is the only painting of a person of color. It also steps away from the brevity of mark in the other paintings to give us a more sculpted and detailed countenance. The amaranth-colored background and a rough goldenrod shape that suggests the foreground, as well as some furnishing on which the model sits, form an exciting composition that evokes Clyfford Still. Splashes

“There Are Many Ways to Hold WaterWithout Being Called a Vase” Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago, June 9–July 29, 2023 by Michel Ségard Antonius-Tín Bui is a Vietnamese American, nonbinary, performance and visual artist whose means of expression in this exhibition is the craft of Chinese paper cutting. This technique for making images dates back to a few centuries after paper was invented, and variations of it are practiced all over the world. But Bui’s pieces are extraordinary in their size and intricacy. The main piece in the front room of Monique Meloche Gallery, called The Work of Love Becomes Its Own Reasons, is 52 inches high by 112 inches long. It is an outstanding example of Bui’s technical expertise and virtuosity.           Flanking The Work of Love… on the right is Like the Ocean, Having Been the Ocean Long Before We Arrived, Each Wave Newborn and Buried at Once; Like Us, Standing Breathless at The Edge, Astonished by Our Own Lungs. (Bui uses extremely long titles that are often mini poems.) Like the Ocean… is an image of two women from two generations backed by delicate geometric screenwork and surrounded by encroaching vines. On the left is Not Everything Floats. I Am Trying to Learn Which Parts of Me to Let Sink, possibly a self-portrait, is a seven-and-a-half-foot high piece. An androgynous figure is crouched at the bottom, again enveloped by vines that also encircle the books and framed pictures in the background. In the upper right-hand corner is incised “Cutting off ur dick just cuz u feel like it.” Melancholy pervades this image. A Silence Settles That Isn’t So Silent, another “family” portrait with two figures, hangs on the opposite wall. The background contains a selection of vases in niches, and a repeated traditional Chinese paper cutting pattern embellishes the garment of the seated figure. Vines, again, surround the figures. In these images, the thing that holds water but is not a vase seems to be the combination of family bonds and traditions. Symbolized by the vines that encroach on the subjects of each of these images, the familial ties suggested in Bui’s works may not be as comforting as they seem.         We have become accustomed to seeing vegetative backgrounds since the emergence of Kehinde Wiley as a star on the contemporary art scene. In Bui’s works vines are an integral part of the meaning of the work and are not a decorative motif. They imply the choking presence of familial and cultural bonds. They are like kudzu, threatening to engulf everything.           The second room of the gallery contains works of an entirely different nature. They address the issue of sexual identification. Noticeably, in most of the pieces, the vines are gone and replaced by broken vase fragments. This new motif alludes to a possible inverse of the show’s title: “when a vase is broken, its water is set free”—suggesting freedom from the constraints of tradition, freedom from the censure of society, freedom to express one’s true self. The main wall of this room contains three works colored in a deep Chinese red. In the middle is Mending in a Daybreak That Casts Every Shadows Except Your Own., an almost seven-foot by three-foot work. It depicts young men masturbating while surrounded by fragments of broken vases and vegetative motifs that echo the vines of previous works. But the parts are not connected into a vine. In fact, they seem more like creatures than leaves, producing a subtly creepy feeling. The piece suggests that sexual self-satisfaction may be ultimately unsatisfying. On either side of this large work are smaller, roughly round pieces, There’s Nothing Left Here for You, and In Between Deaths. They depict broken vases that have the vines as their surface motifs. But what is especially noteworthy in all three is that their backgrounds are no longer a lattice of clean geometric forms. Rather, they are irregularly interconnected tendrils that taper off at the edges like a piece of frayed fabric. Paradoxically, the ensemble is strikingly beautiful despite the unsettling subject matter.           To the left of these three pieces hangs There Are Many Ways to Hold Water Without Being Called a Vase. To Drink All the History Until It Is Your Only Song, the titular piece of the show. Painted a deep navy and measuring approximately seven by three-and-a-half feet, There Are Many Ways… shows an individual of ambiguous gender in multiple, overlapping renderings, as if a sketch or study. They are surrounded by broken vase fragments, with the vine motifs appearing only on pieces of the vases and possibly as tattoos on the skin of the subject. It is the only large piece in this room that does not have overtly sexual content. Of the other three large works, one, Body Called Itself Master. Body Named Itself Free. Body Bought Its Own Freedom. Body Sold Itself to the Top. Body Broken Glass All by Itself. Body Spills All the Light. Body All the Light. Body Only Dark When It Wants to Be, depicts an orgy in an overtly explicit way. But interestingly, the figures are intertwined with the vines and fragments of regular grids can be seen in the background. It is not surprising that the figures are entangled, when one realizes that the title refers to the life of sex workers. This work, too, is in that dark navy blue. The remaining two pieces in this space each seem to show couples who are sexually engaged. But with body fragments appearing here and there, it is not certain that there are only two individuals in each composition. Painted a dark reddish brown (a blend of the navy and the red?), these pieces, as suggested by their lengthy titles, seem to contrast the pleasure of anonymous sex versus the rewards of a loving relationship. One is called Silent & Unkissed – That’s How I Wanted You to Suffer, Too, Boy Who Wouldn’t Look at Me. Seeing You Run So Beautifully on the Track

“Then Is Now: Contemporary Black Art in America” The Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut, April 2–October 15, 2023 by D. Dominick Lombardi The Bruce Museum redefines the importance of a regional museum. Situated in Greenwich, Connecticut, the newly renovated and beautifully expanded museum typically offers a blend of work from the 31,000 objects in their permanent collection and works on loan, in theme exhibitions. The excellent rotating curated exhibitions continue the institution’s 100 year-long mission to bridge the ever-decreasing gap between science and fine art.         An example of a theme exhibition that broadens the scope of their traditional programming, “Then Is Now: Contemporary Black Art in America” is an impressive look at important artists of the past 55 years who have addressed racial injustices throughout our nation’s history. When first entering the gallery, visitors come face to face with Hank Willis Thomas’s highly reflective lenticular work with text that changes from “Then Is Now” to “Then And Now” depending upon where you stand. My first thought looking at this work is how much our current day socio-political status feels all too similar to past oppressive and transgressive behavior. This is especially true since some political extremists remain determined to roll back the clock by decreasing voting access, taking away women’s rights, and demonizing gender fluidity.           Two of the earliest works in the exhibition, which both address the mid-20th century state of the black female, are Charles White’s tempera painting Study for Seed of Love (1968-70) and Elizabeth Catlett’s Homage to My Young Black Sisters (1968). These two works could not be more different as White’s rather poetic representational figure depicted in profile appears to be distracted, minimized, or kept down (low in the picture plane), while bearing just enough inner strength to sway the day. Conversely, Catlett’s entrancing dynamic abstract wood sculpture with a gaping hole in the middle and one fist thrust in the air is overtly defiant, proud, and standing her ground. These two works, coupled with Melvin Edwards’ three welded steel wall reliefs that range in year of completion from 1964 to 2014, present a powerful picture of our nation’s history of slavery, Jim Crow, and racial violence.           Still photography documenting Dred Scott’s powerful 2009 performance I Am Not A Man shows the artist in Harlem, wearing a sign that states the work’s title. “I Am Not A Man” is a reference to the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike of 1968, where the placard “I Am A Man” was seen as a basis for better treatment and wages. Scott is making reference not just to the 1968 strike, but to the thread that works its way throughout all the work here—that we have not yet reached true equality of all people—a goal that seems today to be closer to falling back than moving forward. In the artist’s NFT, a seven-minute slow motion video titled White Man for Sale, we see a depiction of a white male standing atop a two-step auction block on a street corner in Brooklyn. For the most part, passersby pay little attention to the ironic symbolism of the statement, which tells us something about the thought process in this black community. From that perspective, this could actually be possible—a result that speaks more clearly than any actual interaction with the subject might suggest.           Mickalene Thomas’s mixed media triptych Untitled (2013) shows a young, beautiful black woman posing ­seductively as she gazes back at the viewer. The mix of vibrant patterns, glistening beads, mostly unmodulated browns and grays, and the selectively placed collage ­elements that make up areas of each face, suggest the balance between individual identity and the male ­objectification of women. In each panel, the hair makes its mark as a symbol of power and control to counter any compromising or unwanted narrative. The Gypsy ­Fortune-Teller (2007), a jacquard tapestry with a Kehinde Wiley painting as its design, continues a career-long desire for the artist to redefine, expand, and obliterate outdated stereotypical beliefs regarding men of color. The descriptive wall panel makes reference to the Rococo painter Francois Boucher who built a career on capturing the decadence of the aristocracy of late-18th-century Europe. I am getting more of a feeling of Michelangelo da Caravaggio’s Italian Baroque painting Bacchus (c. 1596), specifically in the unusual way that one figure in the foreground is holding their wine glass.           Some of the more conceptual works in the exhibition are by Steve Locke, who uses a Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square (1950-75) aesthetic to expand the intention of Alber’s art—offering a new shape that relates directly to the auction blocks used during slavery. In addition to the import of the reference to the “somber memory of millions of lives lost to slave trade,” I find the color combinations in these works to be both alluring and Modernist in a very different way than the works of Albers (1888–1976)—perhaps it is the sense of finality projected by the colors of the shrinking planes. Betye Saar’s The Weight of Color (2007) focuses heavily on aspects of prejudice, most specifically how it relates to oppression, which in many ways still continues to be a major issue in society today. If visitors would take the time to really experience an assemblage like this—which features a complex narrative with a mammy figure, an old rusty scale, and a crow cramped into an undersized cage secured with a heavy lock—a clearer ­picture of the continuous weight of racism that people of color continue to bear can be more fully felt deep down, specifically by white people like myself.           Emma Amos offers a similar message as the previously discussed artists, albeit a bit more directly. In the center of Mississippi Wagon 1937 (1992) sits the photograph mentioned in the work’s title, which has very specific links to the heritage of the artist. Visually surrounding and simultaneously suffocating the vintage black and white photograph is a loosely rendered confederate

“Gordon Parks The Early Years: 1942-1963” Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, June 30–August 4, 2023 by Tom Mullaney Gordon Parks is considered one of the most accomplished photographers of the 20th century. He was a master of several other talents: filmmaker, composer and the author of three memoirs. Such an acclaimed life is hard to imagine for a child born into poverty in 1912 in Fort Scott, Kansas and who struggled with a succession of irregular, mostly low-paying jobs with little sense of direction until 1942.         Working as a waiter on the Union Pacific Railway, he came across a copy of Vogue magazine. In one of his memoirs, “A Hungry Heart”, he says that he studied its fashion photographs with concentration. He then went out and bought his first camera in a pawnshop for $7.50. “I went to every department store in the Twin Cities seeking to photograph their merchandise without success. But I kept trying.”  Vogue, however, would feature prominently in his future.         He met the talented artist, Charles White, at the South Side Community Art Center in Chicago. They became friends and, one day in 1942, he saw White filling out forms to win a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship. When Parks asked what that was, White told him it was a fund “for spooks and crackers with exceptional talent—writers, painters, composers and sculptors”. He urged Parks to apply.           White won his fellowships, and Parks became the first black photographer to win one as well. When asked where he’d like to spend his apprenticeship, Parks replied without hesitation, The Farm Service Administration in Washington, D.C. The FSA was the home of famed photographers Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Carl Mydans, Jack Delano and was headed by Roy Stryker. Gordon Parks’ life was about to change.         The Rhoda Hoffman Gallery recently mounted a show of his early work that ran from June 30 to August 4. The exhibit consisted of 22 images concentrating on children and African-American life in all its misery and racial, social and economic inequality. Many highlighted the lives of the poor and dispossessed.         On one of his first days, he met a custodian named Ella Watson. Parks asked her to tell him about her life. After hearing her tale of woe, Parks had a memory of seeing Grant Woods’ painting, American Gothic, at The Art Institute of Chicago. Parks took Watson’s photograph (not in this exhibition) with her standing beneath an American flag, holding a mop in one hand and a broom in the other. When Stryker asked him to name the image, Parks answered American Gothic.         That image encompasses Watson’s life of hard work and a life marred by discrimination. It has become an iconic image in Parks’ portfolio. Stryker told him, “Keep working with her. It will do you some good.” For the next month, Parks photographed Watson’s home, her church and any happenstance occasion. The image, Ella Watson with Her Grandchildren, Washington D.C 1942, depicts the cramped quarters of her tiny apartment. Parks captures Watson’s humanity while showing the malnourished condition of her three grandchildren.           This is one of six images in which children predominate. Others show children at play, at school and dressed up at church. Parks’ instinctive ability to capture children is evident in the emotional depiction Children with Doll, Washington, D.C., 1942. Here are, perhaps, a young brother and sister, sitting on the floor, holding a doll. Her brother is asleep while the girl has an arm around the doll and manages a half smile. They are both scrawny, unaware of their living condition.         Parks joined the staff of LIFE magazine in 1948 and, very shortly thereafter, was handling important, assignments, like hanging out with a Harlem street gang and being sent to the 1950 Paris fashion show where his fashion sense shined. He was given twelve pages along with that issue’s cover of LIFE.         Parks, although self-taught, was a master of visual techniques such as choosing angles to shoot, what lighting and settings to choose, atmosphere, and images that contained a strong emotional impact. One of the strongest was Street Scene, Harlem, New York, 1952. It depicts a mournful, completely bushed, black pushcart vendor, ­sitting on a broken wooden crate with, ­apparently, no place to go.         The photos in “The Early Years: 1942-1963” provide foresight into how Parks would develop as a photographer and documentarian of the period. Not all of Parks’ images are depressing. One untitled Chicago shot shows young children in a Chicago school, paying rapt attention to the teacher. Another Chicago 1953 shot, Untitled, depicts a probable church scene, in which Parks cuts the father figure in half to focus on two young girls dressed in their Sunday best facing the camera, one smiling and the other not. A final image, Untitled, Chicago, Illinois, 1953, shows a group of young boys, in the air, arms extended, reaching for a hit ball in a game of stickball. Anyone can relate to the anticipation and joy on the boys’ faces.           Parks would go on to capture classic images showing the struggle of blacks in their fight for equality. In one, an angry father is gathered around a “Colored” water fountain in Mobile, Alabama in 1956. Others captured images of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.         Besides his photographs, Parks became the first African American to write and direct a feature film, The Learning Tree, in 1969, based on his best-selling autobiographical novel. His next film, Shaft, was a critical and box-office success.         He continued working the last three decades of his life, ever evolving his style up until his death in 2006. During his life, Parks was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1988 and was presented

“DEGENERATE! Hitler’s War on Modern Art” Jewish Museum Milwaukee, February 24–August 30, 2023 by Diane Thodos Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.                                                                                            – Theodore Adorno1   People were already beginning to forget, what horrible suffering the war had brought them. I did not want to cause fear and panic, but to let people know how dreadful war is and so to stimulate people’s powers of resistance.                                                                                                          – Otto Dix   We have to lay our heart bare to the cries of peoplewho have been lied to.                                                                                               – Max Beckmann2 Every now and then, displays that reconstruct the history of the infamous, Nazi inspired Degenerate Art show of 1937, get museum exhibitions. These range from the large and scholarly 1991 exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to the modestly scaled 2014 show at New York’s Neue Gallery.  The Jewish Museum of Milwaukee can be added to this list with their exhibit Degenerate! Hitler’s War on Modern Art, a small but comprehensively researched exhibit of Modernist and Expressionist works from the early part of the 20th century. The original Degenerate Art show – Entartete Kunst – was the outcome of the Nazi’s project to hunt down and confiscate all forms of Modernist art.  German museums were stripped of 16,000 artworks made by members of the Die Brücke (The Bridge),  Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), Blue Rider, Bauhaus and other modern art movements. From this the first Degenerate Art venue in Munich exhibited 650 works to be held up for public ridicule and shame.             The Jewish Museum exhibit has carefully hung displays with explanatory placards outlining the historical basis of the newly formed Weimar Republic established after WWI.  As Germany’s first experiment in democracy, Weimar was rife with economic and social chaos and political corruption. It was also a period that opened up new public freedoms and creative possibilities in culture and art. This creativity and freedom terrified the Nazis,  particularly works depicting the social and economic disintegration following outcome of WWI and hyperinflation imposed by the Versailles treaty. The latter resulted in a devaluation of the Deutschmark so severe that by November of 1923 one dollar was worth a trillion marks. A barrel of bills could not even buy a loaf of bread, resulting in food riots that broke down law and order. Even after the crisis was stabilized it became one of the motivating factors that helped bring the Nazis to power. The Great Depression of 1929 was the fatal blow to the Weimar era, leaving 30% of the country jobless and leading to a surge in popularity for the Nazi party that brought them to power in 1933.           What the Nazis feared most – Jews, Bolsheviks, political leftists, cosmopolitanism, sexual liberty, the unconscious – became arbitrary negative labels used in aggressive propaganda campaigns to smear their targets of hatred. One of the museum’s wall texts explains the development of this history:         The National Socialists used culture as a weapon for the ‘purification’ of Germany. When Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, he decreed that all mediums of art be aligned with Nazi ideology and swiftly instated edicts to remove foreign and so-called “detrimental’ influences… The Nazis’ strategy to reshape Germany’s cultural landscape was monumental in scope and their propagandist campaign against modern art unprecedented. Bans on creation; the purging of state collections; the seizing, sale, and destruction of thousands of modernist works; and mounting exhibitions of shame, including the infamous 1937 Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibit, played a decisive role in swaying public opinion. Promoting ‘untainted, German art reflective of its Nordic values and “superior” Aryan race paved the way for more extreme means of social division and cleansing.         The Expressionists of the Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity of the 1920’s era made art that protested the ugliness, sickness, and hypocrisy of social reality:  truths which the Nazis denied and repressed, not the least for the threat it posed to unveiling the dark sickness that lived within themselves. They saw Modern art’s vast array of creative expression as subversive to their project of totalitarian conformity; individuality had to be censored and destroyed. Modernist art was an evil plot to undermine the German nation and people. Adolph Hitler himself stated “We are going to wage a merciless war of destruction against the last remaining elements of cultural disintegration. All those cliques and chatterers,  dilettantes and art forgers are going to be picked up and liquidated.” 3                Most of the Jewish Museum exhibition artworks were small in scale, including many lesser-known artists sourced from local collections. Works were not from the original 1937 Degenerate exhibit, but plaques described each artists history focusing on Nazi persecution and the confiscation/destruction of their works. while also detailing those who had works included in the show. The texts also detailed those who had works that were included in the Degenerate Art show.         These histories included controversy in the case of artists like Emil Nolde. He was

“Paintings, Miniatures, WoodMosaics, and Imagery Boxes—Creative Emergence from thePandemic” SoNa Gallery August 11 – October 14, 2023 by Annette LePique This is a difficult review to write as Laura Botwinick, SoNa Gallery’s Executive Director and one of the new gallery’s two curators (the other, Molly O’Donnell) was nothing but kind, generous, and open with her time and space. Botwinick’s presence lent a sense of intimacy to the work of Chicago artists and long-time collaborators Tom Robinson and Lorylyn Kumlin.         But intimacy does not excuse poorly conceptualized art.         Robinson and Kumlin’s show, “Paintings, Miniatures, Wood Mosaics, and Imagery Boxes—Creative Emergence from the Pandemic” up at SoNa till mid-October, was borne of their shared turn to miniatures during the height of the pandemic. As Botwinick recalled, Robinson happened upon a gutted, but beautiful, Victorian dollhouse in an alley. He and Kumlin took on the project of refurbishing the dollhouse together, and they filled it with meticulously crafted miniature facsimiles of furniture, household decorations, and the everyday detritus of life. This shared project is intertwined in the show with the creation of Robinson’s miniature galleries and Kumlin’s “Imagery Boxes.”           While the show contains earlier work by each artist that trace the developments in their practices, their turn to the miniature form reveals an unbridgeable distance at the show’s heart. Robinson’s miniature scenes are duplications of gallery wings, his studio, and corridors of theArt Institute of Chicago. These likenesses are filled with approximations of his own paintings. His paintings, with their lush, dappled colors and tubercular models sit next to a tiny Edward Hopper and Manet reproduction in the Art Institute, and next to copies of Picassos in the halls of the dollhouse. Why does an artist reproduce their own work, hang it, light it, and christen it withthe company of well-known pieces from the western art historical canon? It comes off as an unabashed song of the self, a paean to artistic ego. Robinson’s apparent turn to this self-obsessed, inward gaze is disappointing, as it has borne art that aspires to live in the realm of the rich. Nothing is said, nothing is done, nothing is changed, it’s simply an endorsement of the status quo.          This is a show that unknowingly reveals the deep alienation that girds each artist’s forays into market-oriented narcissism/ But it is Kumlin’s recent work that betrays something deeply upsetting about the neoliberal relationship to history, society, and identity. As the artist dabbles in virtue signaling and we see her memorialization of her participation in the 2017 Women’s March in her 2023 Crash Box, she should also feel compelled to address the following questions in her work: what do the real-life subjects of your imagery boxes mean to you? Who are Rosa Parks, Katherine Johnson, and the four young victims of the terrorist attack on Birmingham, Alabama’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to you?           It’s a pity that both artists have taken such misguided turns, especially when both Kumlin’s and Robinson’s newer pieces are compared to Robinson’s past work. His past forays into woodworking are notable as they hint at a buried craftsman and possess a level of careful attention that is not found anywhere else in the show. Robinson’s “DeLawn” wood mosaic, part of his Twins series features the face of a young Black model, haloed by dreadlocks, and formedthrough alternating hues of wenge and ebony wood. The piece is itself a diptych, with the young model’s face replicated in mirror image. The two mosaics are immense and dominate the gallery’s back wall. The piece’s size, in combination with its painstaking detail gives the show a much-needed sense of grandeur, a perspective other than the somewhat suffocating presence of both artists’ self-fixation.         Perhaps this is the best note to close on: the search for something other than misplaced moral positioning or self-congratulatory fixation is long and arduous, but it can sometimes lead to the discovery of something interesting. Annette LePique is an arts writer. Her interests include the moving image and psychoanalysis. She has written for Newcity, ArtReview, Chicago Reader, Stillpoint Magazine, Spectator Film Journal, and others.