ABOUT GOINGS ON: How to subscribe and submit listings
Contents for January 29, 2018
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1. Susan Bee, Ann Messner, Mira Schor, FF Alumns, at Pratt Institute Libraries, Brooklyn, opening Feb. 6
2. Melissa Rachleff Burtt, Martha Wilson, FF Alumns, at National Arts Club, Manhattan, Feb. 5
3. Tomislav Gotovac, FF Alumn, at nGbK, Berlin, Germany, opening Feb. 2
4. Frank Moore, FF Alumn, now online at Frankadelic.com
5. Stephanie Brody-Lederman, FF Alumn, at Cross Contemporary Art Gallery, Saugerties, NY, opening Feb. 3
6. Roy Colmer, Kazuko Miyamoto, FF Alumns, at 128 Rivington St., Manhattan, opening Feb. 7
7. Ken Butler, John JB Butler, FF Alumns, at Scholes Street Studios, Brooklyn, Feb. 9
8. Diana Heise, FF Alumn, at UMKC Gallery of Art, Kansas City, MO, thru Feb. 24
9. Pablo Helguera, Suzanne Lacy, FF Alumns, at The 8th Floor, Manhattan, Feb. 9
10. Joan Snyder, FF Alumn, launches new website at joansnyder.net
11. Nicole Eisenman, Cindy Sherman, FF Alumns, in the New York Times, Jan.2 3
12. Nicole Eisenman, Cindy Sherman, Robert Rauschenberg, Nancy Spero, FF Alumns, in the New York Times, Jan. 25
13. Naeem Mohaiemen, FF Alumn, in the New York Times, Jan. 26
14. Simone Forti, FF Alumn, at The Box, Los Angeles, CA opening Jan. 27
15. Irina Danilova, FF Alumn, at Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, NJ, thru Feb. 18, and more
16. John Fleck, FF Alumn, at New Ohio Theatre, Manhattan, Feb. 3
17. Ruth Hardinger, Babs Reingold, Christy Rupp, FF Alumns, at David&Schweitzer Contemporary, Brooklyn, opening Feb. 2, and more
18. James Johnson, FF Alumn, announces two new publications
19. Liz Magic Laser, FF Alumn, at LiFE, Saint Nazaire, France, opening Feb. 1
20. Julie Harrison, FF Alumn, at Mahady Galler, Scranton, PA, thru Mar. 21 and more
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1. Susan Bee, Ann Messner, Mira Schor, FF Alumns, at Pratt Institute Libraries, Brooklyn, opening Feb. 6
The Free Library and Other Histories: A Project by Ann Messner
and
The Complete History of M/E/A/N/I/N/G magazine (1986-2016): Susan Bee & Mira Schor
February 1-April 6, 2018
At
Pratt Institute Library, Brooklyn Campus, Main Floor
200 Willoughby Avenue, Brooklyn NY 11205
Opening reception Tuesday, February 6, from 6 to 8 PM
Tuesday, February 27, 6-8pm – Ann Messner artist talk
Tuesday, March 6, 6-8pm Discussion about M/E/A/N/I/N/G with Mira Schor and Susan Bee, moderated by Martha Wilson
Ann Messner’s The Free Library and Other Histories is a project including the production of a 20-page tabloid on issues of censorship and other matters of free expression and first amendment rights. 2,000 copies to be distributed on and off Pratt campus.
Susan Bee and Mira Schor’s collaborative display of M/E/A/N/I/N/G magazine (1986-2016)–this exhibit includes original issues of M/E/A/N/I/N/G , also photos, artwork, books, and ephemera, in honor of 30 years of the magazine. M/E/A/N/I/N/G has been a collaboration between two artists, Susan Bee and Mira Schor, both painters with interests in writing and politics, and the community of over 150 artists, art critics, historians, theorists, and poets whom they sought to engage in discourse and to give a voice to, on issues related to art making, motherhood and art, racism, feminism, resistance, collaboration, privacy, trauma, and and artists-as-activists.
Pratt Library is a democratic public space that encourages freedom of thought and provides access to knowledge for all, Franklin Furnace’s mission is to present, preserve, interpret, proselytize and advocate on behalf of avant-garde art, especially forms that may be vulnerable due to institutional neglect, cultural bias, their ephemeral nature, or politically unpopular content. As Ann Messner outlined in her response to Live at the Library’s call for exhibition proposals, Franklin Furnace and Pratt Library are the places to go for, “free uncensored access to knowledge.”
Live at the Library was initiated in 2016 with “Anna Banana: 45 Years of Fooling Around with A. Banana,” a retrospective exhibition of the work of Franklin Furnace alumn Anna Banana that included visual art, performances art, costumes, artists books, mail art, and hands-on programs for students and the mail art community. In 2017, “Raquel Rabinovich: Excerpts,” the second Live at the Library exhibition, filled library cases with handmade papers the artist created with mud from endangered rivers. It drew members of Pratt faculty, students, art aficionados and into a discussion of how art can influence our ecological practices. Both exhibitions featured video projections that activated underused library spaces, and selections of pertinent library books temporarily shelved next to artworks, providing context and enabling learning through innovative librarianship and installation techniques.
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2. Melissa Rachleff Burtt, Martha Wilson, FF Alumns, at National Arts Club, Manhattan, Feb. 5
National Arts Club
15 Gramercy Park South, New York NY 10003
Monday, February 5
8:00 PM
The Changing Dynamics of Artist-Run Spaces
Melissa Rachelff Burtt, Angelina Gualdoni, Jodi Waynberg, Martha Wilson
Since the 1950s artists have founded galleries with a mission to make visible artwork that does not yet have a commercial audience. Artist-centric spaces are still a vital part of New York City’s cultural ecology, however unprecedented economic pressures pose challenges about the viability of these important incubators. This discussion will look backward and forward with a frank discussion about the influence of artist spaces and their sustainability.
Moderated by Melissa Rachelff, clinical professor in NYU’s Steinhardt School and author of Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952-1965 this discussion includes three individuals who run both commercial and non-profit artist spaces: Jodi Waynberg, Executive Director of Artists Alliance Inc,./Cuchifritos Gallery (in the Essex Street Market), dedicated to supporting the careers of emerging and underrepresented artists and curators; Martha Wilson, pioneering feminist performance artist and founding director of Franklin Furnace Archive, dedicated to championing the exploration, promotion and preservation of artist books, temporary installation, performance art, as well as online works; and Angelina Gualdoni, a founding member of Regina Rex, an artist-run collaborative gallery in New York, and the recipient of many artist awards, including the Pollock-Krasner Fellowship and the Artadia artist in residence program.
A selection of publications on artist-run/alternative space will be available for sale.
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3. Tomislav Gotovac, FF Alumn, at nGbK, Berlin, Germany, opening Feb. 2
Left Performance Histories
February 3-March 25, 2018
Performance: Ongoing, Bálint Szombathy, The red kiss of history
Opening: February 2, 7pm, with words of welcome by Dr. Torsten Wöhlert, Permanent Secretary for Culture and Prof. Dr. Kathrin Busch, Board of nGbK
neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK)
Oranienstraße 25
10999 Berlin
Germany
Hours: Monday-Sunday 12-7pm,
Wednesday-Friday 12-8pm
ngbk.de
Exhibition with: Vlasta Delimar, Orshi Drozdik, Tomislav Gotovac, Ion Grigorescu, Ju¨rgen Hohmuth (chic, charmant & dauerhaft / ccd), Sanja Ivekovic, El Kazovszkij, Judit Kele, Tamás Király, László Lakner, Zbigniew Libera, Marijan Molnar, Sven Marquardt, Ewa Partum, Zygmunt Piotrowski, Christine Schlegel, Hans-Joachim Schulze & Peter Oehlmann (Gruppe 37,2), Irmgard Senf (Exterra XX), Mladen Stilinovic, Sven Stilinovic, Gabriele Stötzer, Tamás Szentjóby, Bálint Szombathy, Raša Todosijevic, Želimir Žilnik
Where do works of performance art begin and end? How do they or the traces they left behind live on in the context of exhibitions? What do performances in socialist Eastern Europe reveal about artistic expression, political critique or nonconformist social behaviour? The exhibition Left Performance Histories features action art in Eastern Europe from the 1970s on in a way that also reflects on its continued relevance in the present. The show includes works of over 25 artists, some well-known to those familiar with the alternative culture of the former Eastern Bloc, others possibly a new discovery even to the insider.
Rather than a comprehensive retrospective, the exhibition zooms in on a handful of selected topics that have been often left out of critical debates. Where the unofficial art of socialist Eastern Europe is conventionally framed as a reservoir of subversive gestures against an oppressive social, cultural and political environment, the present selection prefers instead to approach performance art as a site of jouissance where conventional self-presentation or socially approved forms of gendered identity, sexuality and standards of beauty may be bypassed. The exhibition also revisits the question of politicized artistic attitudes to suggest that the socialist state apparatus was not only challenged by anti-communist positions but also by critical voices insisting on democratic socialist principles or remonstrating the bitter ideological competition of the Cold War.
Through a diversity of curatorial approaches (including documentary display, discursive events and reperformance), the exhibition also interrogates how performance art can be presented in the context of later exhibitions. It considers the relics, documentation and memory of events as part of these works expanded materiality to propose a possible understanding of performance pieces as unfixed and continuously generated archives that need to be configured anew every time these works appear in public. With this approach, the exhibition explores how the histories of performance art are generated, controlled and understood over time. Left Performance Histories poses questions of what constitutes the artwork and who are the archivists.
The exhibition will be accompanied by an extensive program on February 16/17.
Please find further information here.
A publication on the exhibition will be published in June. (ISBN: 978-3-938515-73-0)
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4. Frank Moore, FF Alumn, now online at Frankadelic.com
Frank Moore, FF Alumn, featured in a new episode of the web video series about his life and art, LET ME BE FRANK
Let Me Be Frank
Episode 10 – Theater of Human Melting
Episode 10, “Theater of Human Melting”, of the LET ME BE FRANK web documentary series, is now available for viewing. Readings by Canadian performance artist, new media artist, writer and curator Paul Couillard, and artist Edna Floretta. Episode 10 follows Frank and his communal family from New York City to Berkeley, California, and describes the beginning of what would become an intimate community of 30 people, evolving out of Frank’s workshops, and personal sessions with a Berkeley psychic teacher. Frank describes his approach to these sessions and workshops with a freedom and willingness to risk, using anything to break through to “controlled folly” and intimacy. Also included is Frank meeting Linda Mac, who would become his life-long partner in shamanistic crime.
Episode 10 includes Moore’s poem, “Fuse”, read by Edna Floretta, and featuring the artwork of Michael LaBash.
This episode also features “Gross to Grace”, the 4th installment of “How To Handle An Anthropologist”, a recurring feature in the Let Me Be Frank series, from the soon-to-be-published book by the same name.
Music by Frank Moore, Sander Roscoe Wolff, Michael LaBash, Vinnie Spit Santino’s Ensemble Abstract Band, Vinnie Spit Santino, The Visitations, and Tha Archivez.
Let Me Be Frank is a video series based on the life and art of shaman, performance artist, writer, poet, painter, rock singer, director, TV show host, teacher and bon vivant, Frank Moore.
The series is partly a biography, but also a presentation of Frank’s philosophy on life and on art. Twenty-plus episodes have been planned based on Frank’s book, Art Of A Shaman, which was originally delivered as a lecture at New York University in 1990 as part of the conference “New Pathways in Performance”. Each episode will feature readings by people who played an important part in Frank’s life, either as friends, lovers, students, artistic collaborators or supporters of his art.
Let Me Be Frank presents Frank’s exploration of performance and art as being a magical way to effect change in the world … performance as an art of melting action, of ritualistic shamanistic doings/playings. Using Frank’s career and life as a “baseline”, it explores this dynamic playing within the context of reality shaping.
The series is available on Frank’s website at http://frankadelic.com and on Vimeo at https://vimeo.com/channels/letmebefrank .
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5. Stephanie Brody-Lederman, FF Alumn, at Cross Contemporary Art Gallery, Saugerties, NY, opening Feb. 3
I am happy to announce that I am part of a drawing exhibition curated by Ford Crull at Cross Contemporary Art Gallery in Saugerties, NY. The show is entitled “Mark Me” and runs from February 3-25, 2018. Artists in the exhibition are: Marianne van Lent, Joseph Nechvatal, Anthony Haden-Guest, Philip Tsiaris, Mark Sheinkman, Gregory Crane, Stephanie Brody-Lederman, Johan Wahlstrom. The reception is Saturday, Feb 3rd from 5-8pm.
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6. Roy Colmer, Kazuko Miyamoto, FF Alumns, at 128 Rivington St., Manhattan, opening Feb. 7
onetwentyeight
PRINT PRINT PRINT
Open to the Public:
Wednesday, February 7th, 2018 – Sunday, March 4th, 2018
Opening Reception:
Friday, February 9th, 2018 6pm-8pm
Gallery Hours: Wednesday-Friday 1pm-6pm Saturday and Sunday 1pm-5pm
Print changed the world. It made, for the first time, the things in the mind of one to be transferred to another outside of his or her presence. Print took the spoken word or the image and made it more transferable.
I now send you these ideas from a digitized typewriter. But, we most likely have never met. And, unless you’re Kazuko, we have never discussed this idea.
Now it is yours to ponder:
Print. Dissemination.
Is everything worth sharing in replication?
Are some things unique, unequalled in replication? Are some things, some ideas, some images more important to promulgate than others? Do you know which ones??
Is there any list that can be comprehensive at this point?
Probably. Maybe. Most hopefully, I think so.
Written by David Fenn
Printed works by: Ryo Watanabe. Roy Colmer. Judy Linn. Nancy Linn. Paul Gutekanst. Kazuko Miyamoto. Sol LeWitt. Tommy Flynn. Ariane Lopez-Huici. David Fenn. Japanese Printmakers… and more!
In memory of Ryo Watanabe
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7. Ken Butler, John JB Butler, FF Alumns, at Scholes Street Studios, Brooklyn, Feb. 9
Ken Butler’s Voices of Anxious Objects
live video recording/concert
For the first time in 20 years!
Come be part of this one-of-a-kind event.
KB – Hybrid Instruments
John JB Butler – guitar
Fima Ephron – bass
Ben Perowsky — drums
Friday Feb. 9th 8pm
Scholes Street Studios
375 Lorimer St. Brooklyn
http://scholesstreetstudio.com/index.html
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8. Diana Heise, FF Alumn, at UMKC Gallery of Art, Kansas City, MO, thru Feb. 24
Exhibition Opens Thursday January 25, 2018 at UMKC Gallery of Art.
Happy winter!
I have three films in an exhibition, Images Flash, opening January 25, 2018 at the UMKC Gallery of Art in Kansas City, MO. The show includes three works, Eyeshot, Duration and September-December 1966. Eyeshot is a 20-minute visual essay that investigates the nature of fighting in combat. Through the process of looking at my uncle’s films, photographs, and objects and recording their conversations, this work resulted in a non-polemical exploration into the effects of war and violence upon an individual, their community and their country. Using the Vietnam-American conflict as a starting point, Eyeshot addresses our need to understand how armed conflict continues to impact us today. The exhibition also includes two companion pieces, Duration and September-December 1966. Each draw their influence from structural filmmaking to find methods to engage my uncle’s archive of images and use strategies other than linear narrative to elucidate the power and effect of war.
It was an honor to make these films with my uncle and I am excited for this opportunity to continue to share this work. The reception will be from 5-7pm on January 25 and I hope that you can come. Here is the gallery info/address for you: UMKC Gallery of Art, Fine Arts-Building 203, located at 5015 Holmes St. KCMO 64110 or online at info.umkc.edu/gallery.
Sincerely, Diana
www.dianaheise.com
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9. Pablo Helguera, Suzanne Lacy, FF Alumns, at The 8th Floor, Manhattan, Feb. 9
Please Join Us at The 8th Floor
Exhibition Opening –
The Schoolhouse and the Bus:
Mobility, Pedagogy and Engagement
Friday, February 9
from 6 to 8pm
and
Conversation with Pablo Helguera,
Suzanne Lacy, and Pilar Riaño-Alcalá
Saturday, February 10
from 12 to 2pm
RSVP https://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/eventReg?oeidk=a07ef2fks8k0c847c60&oseq=&c=&ch=
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10. Joan Snyder, FF Alumn, launches new website at joansnyder.net
We are pleased to announce the launch of Joan Snyder’s new website at
joansnyder.net
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11. Nicole Eisenman, Cindy Sherman, FF Alumns, in the New York Times, Jan.2 3
Please visit this link for the complete illustrated article (text only follows below):
The New York Times
ART & DESIGN
The Art on Her Walls Echoes Her Mission: Backing Bold Works by Women
Show Us Your Wall
By FARAH NAYERI JAN. 23, 2018
LONDON – In many of the world’s major museums, art by women can be hard to find. At the London home of Valeria Napoleone, that’s all there is.
The Italian collector and philanthropist has made buying and backing female artists her central mission. A graduate of New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (where she studied art gallery administration), she moved to London from New York with her husband, Gregorio Napoleone, a financier, in 1998. The Kensington townhouse that they share with their three teenage children is filled with bold artwork by women. Overall, her collection now includes some 350 pieces.
Ms. Napoleone also hosts dinnersfor artists, where she serves her famous homemade tiramisù (she published “Valeria Napoleone’s Catalogue of Exquisite Recipes” in 2012), and funds artwork commissions by the Contemporary Art Society in London and the SculptureCenter in New York.
The 2015 SculptureCenter commission – an installation featuring a giant, bare butt by Anthea Hamilton – was the centerpiece of an exhibition that led to Ms. Hamilton’s nomination for Britain’s coveted Turner Prize. The 2018 commission, a video by Carissa Rodriguez, will be at a SculptureCenter exhibition of Ms. Rodriguez’s work, opening on Jan. 28.
Ms. Napoleone recently gave an art tour of her home, wearing a baseball cap (“bad hair day”) and Yves Saint Laurent platform sandals (with dark pink socks). Above the living room fireplace is Nicole Eisenman’s “Saggy Titties” (2007), the protuberant portrait of a topless woman whose breasts drop slightly below the edge of the canvas. Beside it is Margherita Manzelli’s “Neobros” (1998), in which a woman with pigtails sits on a stool with her tights rolled down to her knees.
The bed in the middle of Ms. Napoleone’s upstairs bedroom is also a commission: from Nanda Vigo, an Italian artist and designer who, in her early 80s, is finally getting more widespread recognition. It has a lit, mirrored frame and a fake-fur cover.
“My collection is about liberating women,” she explained. The following are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Why collect only female artists?
I’m a feminist, believing in equal opportunities. I was aware of the fact that women artists were not considered for gallery or museum representation and were dismissed, underrepresented. I couldn’t figure out why we were missing so much talent just because of gender. From the very first piece, I told myself: “I’m going to create a collection only of female voices. I want to create a choir of voices of females who have been unheard, who have been silenced.”
Can you talk about the Nicole Eisenman work above your fireplace?
It’s a matriarch, a female nude. It has the pretense of being important, in its size but also its presence, as would any portrait of a famous or important man. But it has a sense of humor – the smile, the eyes – and it’s also so incredibly painted.
What about the work hanging next to it – the woman with her rolled-down tights, the suggestion of nudity?
I don’t necessarily look at nudity. I look at imagery, and how women paint themselves and paint other women. That’s interesting. This work pushes your boundaries. I want work that takes me to a place where I have not been before. I want to be provoked. I want to be pushed. I don’t want to buy work where I feel, “Hmm, I’ve already seen it.”
What do you think of the art world today?
The contemporary art world is flooded with money that goes to the top of the pyramid. It doesn’t go to the bottom or to the middle, where it’s much needed and actually impactful. That’s when artists are formed and when they need experimentation – when they need more support to be the Cindy Sherman of the future. There is so much speculation and so much money going into the wrong hands. I see a lot of bad art selling and good art struggling.
How is the #MeToo movement being viewed from within the art world?
The art world is supposed to be so far ahead of everybody else, questioning things and moving forward much before other people do. Instead, it’s a men’s club. Women have had it so wrong for so long. [This movement] helps everybody. All industries are understanding that this cannot continue, and that we need change. Finally, it’s happening.
A version of this article appears in print on January 26, 2018, on Page C20 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘My Collection Is About Liberating Women’. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
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12. Nicole Eisenman, Cindy Sherman, Robert Rauschenberg, Nancy Spero, FF Alumns, in the New York Times, Jan. 25
Please visit this link for the complete illustrated article (text only follows below):
The New York Times
ART & DESIGN | ART REVIEW
A Museum’s Fresh Take on the Whole Megillah
By JASON FARAGO
JAN. 25, 2018
The exhibition “Scenes From the Collection” at the Jewish Museum highlights an untitled work by William Anastasi, from 1987, composed of four canvases forming a cross, with the term “jew” overlapping one quadrant as if transgressing the space allotted to it. The artist considers this the most charged word in the English language, as well as an affirmation of Jewish culture. Right, “The Joys of Yiddish,” one of Mel Bochner’s “Thesaurus” paintings, from 2012.CreditJason Mandella/The Jewish Museum, New York
The Jewish Museum is housed in one of New York’s most ornate mansions: a French chateau sitting right on Fifth Avenue. Yet if you walk into its new permanent collection displays – airy, spotless, with light gray walls and freshly poured concrete floors – you may find yourself wondering if you’ve been teleported to Chelsea.
Earlier this month the museum reopened its permanent collection galleries on the third floor of its extravagant home, which after 25 years had become dowdy and cramped. Working with the architect Calvin Tsao of the firm Tsao & McKown, the museum has undertaken a surgical renovation, excising a staircase and exposing clerestory windows onto Central Park. Stuffy wall texts have been replaced by short panels in a zippy sans-serif typeface, part of a larger rebranding by Sagmeister & Walsh.
Up here the building feels freer and friskier, and the collection presentation does too. Where the previous permanent collection display aimed to narrate 4,000 years of Jewish history, in roughly chronological order, the new one, “Scenes From the Collection,” takes a fractured, impressionistic tack. Artworks and artifacts are freely intermingled in broad groupings, with no regard for the timeline. It’s an adventurous revision, and follows a vogue for nonchronological hangs that privilege thematic links over historical progression.
The trend dates at least to the opening of Tate Modern in London in 2000, and
institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum and Atlanta’s High Museum followed suit. When it works, such anachronism can reveal unexpected connections across time. Just as often, this approach (especially in the Tate’s case) can favor superficial similarities over historical rigor.
We’ll see how the Jewish Museum plays it going forward. “Scenes From the Collection” will be rethought and refreshed every six months. What we can say now is that the display puts visual art, not just Jewish history, at the museum’s heart.
It also assumes a fair amount of familiarity with Judaism; unlike the previous presentation, it declines to enumerate basic facts about the religion, from the nature of monotheism to the demographics of the diaspora. Walking away from a “master narrative,” in favor of discrete “scenes” (as an introductory text here states), the Jewish Museum now offers a nimbler and lighter perspective on art and faith. In places, this feels exciting; in others, the curators may have scrapped too much and added too little.
In “Constellations,” a grab bag of an opening gallery, artworks and Jewish ceremonial objects play off one another in aesthetically pleasing, if historically nebulous, counterpoint. A papier-mâché costume of a golem (a mythical creature brought to life from clay) designed by Robert Wilson for a stage production stands next to an ornate dress of the sort worn by Sephardic brides in 19th-century Morocco, garlanded with gold ribbons and passementerie. A vitrine of chanukkiyot, or nine-stemmed menorahs, is smaller and more judiciously curated than one from the previous collection display, and includes examples from baroque Germany, 18th-century Venice and big-hair Los Angeles of the 1980s, where the Memphis designer Peter Shire crafted a cantilevered candelabra of pastel steel. Early paintings by Mark Rothko and Eva Hesse reveal two young refugees, one from imperial Russia and one fleeing Nazi Germany, feeling their way to new visual languages.
There are fluffed notes. A Torah ark from Sioux City, Iowa, dating to 1899 and featuring a profusion of carved lions, eagles and flora, stands next to an equally ornate but far more rigid portrait of an Ethiopian Israeli by Kehinde Wiley that, as so often in this painter’s work, drowns complex political and historical circumstances in formulaic ornament. This is an example of what nonchronological hangs get wrong: favoring easy visual rhymes – in this case carved wood and floral embellishments – over deep engagement with time, place and method. Beyond the ruptured timeline, this is actually quite a conservative way of displaying art – closer to a 17th-century princely collection than a modern scientific museum.
Century-spanning juxtapositions have a more illuminating impact in a section of the show called “Personas,” in which you’ll find portraits from three centuries, by Jewish artists and of Jewish sitters. The earliest is a self-portrait from 1814-16 by the German neoclassicist Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, holding a painter’s palette and thrusting his hips in luxurious contrapposto. It hangs alongside Louise Nevelson’s morbid vision of herself, and Lee Krasner’s studious one, both painted more than a century later. In these self-portraits, the challenge of representing oneself also must account for roadblocks that elite art institutions put in front of Jewish artists, and particularly Jewish women. Photographic self-studies by Man Ray, Nan Goldin and Cindy Sherman (raised Episcopalian, and done up here as a bearded magus from a B-list biblical movie), and paintings by Deborah Kass and Ross Bleckner, further explode the notion of a unified Jewish identity.
“Scenes From a Collection” works best when it uses anachronism as an interpretive tool, and not just a visual style. That’s especially clear in the excellent gallery called “Signs and Symbols,” which focuses on the Star of David – which, we learn, was initially a pan-religious mystical symbol, and first took on Jewish significance in 17th-century Prague. A marble fragment of a Palestinian tombstone features the familiar hexagram and would have decorated a Muslim grave. The familiar yet still horrifying yellow fabric stars, with the word “Jew” in German or French, appear along side postwar paintings by Morris Louis and Nancy Spero that treat the star as an emblem of both Jewish mourning and universal suffering.
A section called “Masterpieces and Curiosities” focuses on a single object: currently, an extraordinary charm bracelet made by Greta Perlman in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, whose modest bangles (a bullet, a lice comb, a miniature ladle) testify to the endurance of individual creation in the face of barbarity. “Taxonomies” follows, a Judaica display that is essentially a cabinet of curiosities, with dozens of shofars, groggers, and Torah breastplates and finials. Elsewhere, television clips from “Transparent” and “Orange Is the New Black” map the influence of Jewish culture in a diverse America, and the endurance of Jewish humor in the streaming age.
The museum now credits the reinstallation to “the Jewish Museum curatorial team,” but an earlier news release, from November, named two lead curators. One was Susan L. Braunstein, a senior curator and Judaica specialist who has been with the museum since 1980. The other was Jens Hoffmann, the museum’s former deputy director and a contemporary art specialist, whose relationship with the museum was terminated on Dec. 17 after a review of allegations of sexual harassment. The pair had previously collaborated on a 2015 show, “Repetition and Difference,” that displayed contemporary art alongside archaeological and spiritual materials. “Scenes from the Collection” is a heftier continuation of that project, and expands on its free exchange of art and liturgical objects. Contemporary art, in particular, has a much larger presence than in the old permanent collection showcase.
Candida Höfer, the German photographer known for her precise images of interiors, captures the sweeping, angular architecture of a synagogue in Philadelphia designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Nicole Eisenman, the witty and sometimes scabrous New York painter, is represented by a macabre painting of a Passover Seder, in which a young child stabs her gefilte fish with a serial killer’s élan. Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze, an exciting Nigerian-American artist and the youngest represented here, recently entered the museum’s collection with a tender drawing based on a ketubah, or Jewish marriage contract. The drawing integrates Hebrew and English pledges of love with an interpolation of George Hoyningen-Huene’s famous 1930 photograph “Divers.” The woman here wears her hair in elaborate braids, a traditional Ibo hairstyle. (Many Ibo believe they are descended from one of the “lost tribes” of Israel, and several thousand practice Judaism.)
As this display recalls, the Jewish Museum gave early exhibitions to leaders of the postwar avant-garde, including Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and presented innovative group exhibitions like “Primary Structures,” curated by Kynaston McShine, who died earlier this month. Yet it rarely integrated art from those groundbreaking shows into its permanent collection. It’s heartening to see the museum’s current leadership taking an early interest in artists like Ms. Onyinyechi Amanze. A supporting player now, she may be a lead actor in this museum’s subsequent scenes.
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13. Naeem Mohaiemen, FF Alumn, in the New York Times, Jan. 26
Please visit this link for the complete illustrated article (text only follows below):
Naeem Mohaiemen
Through March 11. MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Queens; 718-784-2084, momaps1.org.
One of the standout artists in last summer’s “documenta 14” exhibition, held in Athens and Kassel, Germany, was Naeem Mohaiemen. In Kassel, Mr. Mohaiemen presented a terrific three-channel video, “Two Meetings and a Funeral” (2017), about Bangladesh’s shift from socialism to Islamism in the mid-1970s. In Athens, he showed “Tripoli Cancelled” (2017), which is currently on view in the exhibition “There Is No Last Man” at MoMA PS1. (Mr. Mohaiemen was also part of a group of artists who signed a petition to protect documenta from becoming an entirely “commercial enterprise.”)
“Tripoli Cancelled” was inspired by an actual story about Mr. Mohaiemen’s father, a Bangladeshi doctor who worked in Libya and in 1977 was stranded in Athens’s Ellinikon Airport (an abandoned structure designed by Eero Saarinen that was recently used to house refugees) for nine days after leaving his passport at a preceding checkpoint. Mr. Mohaiemen’s fictional version of the tale is magically existential – like Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett mixed with Julio Cortázar, threaded through the needle of colonialism and 21st-century security states.
For “Volume Eleven (Flaw in the Algorithm of Cosmopolitanism)” (2016), Mr. Mohaiemen digs into another interesting episode in 20th-century history: his great-uncle, the Bengali writer Syed Mujtaba Ali, who wrote in support of Hitler’s Germany in the late 1930s as a way of challenging the British Empire. Displayed as a series of diptych photographs of his uncle’s writing, in a darkened room at PS1, the work highlights our own culpabilities and the possibility of falling on the “wrong” side of history. This is obviously a concern for Mr. Mohaiemen as an artist-activist. And yet he aptly shows not just how the personal is always entwined with the political, but how history veers from neat linear narratives into circular, concentric and even fantastic and unimaginable patterns and designs.
MARTHA SCHWENDENER
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14. Simone Forti, FF Alumn, at The Box, Los Angeles, CA opening Jan. 27
Simone Forti
Time Smear
Jan. 27-Mar. 24, 2018
Opening Jan. 27, 5-8 pm
The Box
805 Traction Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90013
2130625-1747
www.theboxla.com
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15. Irina Danilova, FF Alumn, at Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, NJ, thru Feb. 18, and more
Irina Danilova’s “Underwear on Red Square” (Kolodzei Foundation Collection) at the Zimmerli Museum of Rutgers University in the show Commemorating the Russian Revolution, 1917/2017 until Sunday, February 18, 2018 at the Dodge Gallery
http://www.zimmerlimuseum.rutgers.edu/dodge-gallery-lower-level/commemorating-russian-revolution-19172017#.Wm3cZ6inHIU
and
Irina Danilova is giving a lecture on February 4 at 3pm in The National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kiev, as part of the Parallel Program of the show “Kharkov Avaunt guard”. The lecture is titled “Fighting of art for life or the triumphant end of the avant-garde, afterword” – about the curatorial project “Fluxus Time”, International group “Fluxus” and Vagrich Bahchanyan.
http://namu.kiev.ua/ua/exhibitions/active/view.html&eid=273
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16. John Fleck, FF Alumn, at New Ohio Theatre, Manhattan, Feb. 3
NEW YORK FESTIVAL PREMIERES CONTROVERSIAL
PERFORMANCE ART DOCUMENTARY
CONTACT: Marc Weitz mweitz@newohiotheatre.org
The 2nd Annual NY Indie Theatre Film Festival – NYITFF – screens
JOHN FLECK IS WHO YOU WANT HIM TO BE (Documentary, Festival Premiere),
directed by Kevin Duffy, on February 3, at 5:00, at the New Ohio Theatre, 154
Christopher Street, in New York City. The film intercuts raw archival video and current
footage – from performances in California and New York – with interviews in a
kaleidoscopic portrayal of this often misrepresented and maligned performance artist
and actor, made famous as one of the NEA 4 in the culture wars of the 1990’s. The
documentary provides a crucial historical perspective for our current era of activist art.
The film by Kevin Duffy, who previously directed BECOMING BLOND, is a piercing
critique of our government’s homophobic censorship of activist artists during the
historical height of the AIDS epidemic. The film begins in 1990 when 100,000
Americans had already died of AIDS and ACT UP protested against Wall Street. This
same year, artists used images of the body–and their bodies themselves–to create art
that confronted government inaction.
Critic Carolina Miranda of the Los Angeles Times writes, “This documentary by Kevin
Duffy looks at the performance artist who was at the center of the culture wars of the
early 1990s as one of the NEA Four….The doc follows Fleck during a pair of
performances, flashing back to the early days of his career.”
JOHN FLECK IS WHO YOU WANT HIM TO BE Festival premiere will take place at
New Ohio Theatre located at 154 Christopher Street between Greenwich and
Washington Streets in New York City. The theatre is accessible from the #1 train to
Christopher St. or A, B, C, D, E, F or M train to West 4th St.
Tickets: https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/pe.c/10236552
Screening Date:
Feb 3rd 2018
Time:
5:00 pm – 7:00 pm
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17. Ruth Hardinger, Babs Reingold, Christy Rupp, FF Alumns, at David&Schweitzer Contemporary, Brooklyn, opening Feb. 2, and more
Planet Ax4+1
Ruth Hardinger • Kelin Perry • Babs Reingold
Christy Rupp • Rebecca Smith
February 2nd, 2018 – February 25th, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday, February 2nd, 6pm-9pm
There will be a panel on Sunday February 25 at 3 PM
DAVID&SCHWEITZER Contemporary is proud to present Planet Ax4+1, a group exhibition featuring works by Ruth Hardinger, Kelin Perry, Babs Reingold, Christy Rupp, and Rebecca Smith.
Last spring Ruth Hardinger proposed an exhibition that she and Babs Reingold conceived of several years ago entitled Planet Ax4+1. Quoting from their initial proposal, “Four disparate artists, distinct in their mediums and yet, banded by an analogous cause, have come together to propose an exhibit on Climate Change and how it impinges four positions of the Earth. Multiple definitions exist for our primary title, Tipping Point. Common denominators are shifting “out of balance” or are past the balance. Consequences of this effect swiftly proliferate, influencing crime, epidemics … and have of course, most significantly, our planet.” The artists in the original proposal were Ruth Hardinger, Babs Reingold, Christy Rupp, and Rebecca Smith. Certainly the concept and call to arms grows more urgent by the day, and could have included many other artists working with eco-awareness and the environment such as Mark Dion and Pam Longobardi to name of few, so we have added a fifth participant to this Gang Of Four, the equally relevant and powerful voice of Kelin Perry.
Each of these artists bring specific issues of the planet in their art forms expressing: Underground, Underwater, Trees, Birds & Animals, and Atmosphere.
Eleanor Heartney,
Moderator for our Panel on Feb 25th at 3PM discussing our art and climate change.
Ruth Hardinger
Ruth Hardinger’s socially conscious artwork, signified by abstraction and influenced by environmental issues, is expressed in her sculptures, installations, paintings, works-on-paper, pigment prints, and photographs. Her work has been shown in many solo and group exhibitions. A selective list of venues in which her works have appeared in solo and duo shows includes: Amalie A. Wallace Gallery, Old Westbury, NY, Trace/Matter, Five Myles, Brooklyn, NY, Long Island University Brooklyn, NY, CREON, Sideshow, Lesley Heller Gallery, Artists’ Space, Catskill Art Society, Brunnier Gallery, Iowa State University, and Museum: Centro Cultural de Santo Domingo (Oaxaca, Mexico), Brian Morris Gallery, and most recently, DAVID&SCHWEITZER Contemporary with a one person booth at VOLTA NY. Hardinger was a co-curator, panelist, and participating artist in EMISSIONS: Images from the Mixing Layer at Cooper Union, supported by grants from Rauschenberg Foundation and The Marfa Dialogues. She received First Prize at Hudson River Museum, and showed video in Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sophia, Madrid. Year long grants: Institute for International Education, sponsored by Fulbright Foundation, US-Mexico Commission, McDowell Traveling Scholarship to Europe from Art Student’s League. 3 Month Grant: Altos de Chavon, Dominican Republic.
Kelin Perry
Perry’s practice extends outside of the studio and utilizes her skills as a sculptor and professional architect. It is to an extent per formative, much in the same way Richard Long, Wolfgang Laib, and Andrew Goldsworthy will go for long walks in nature and create sculpture from the natural materials they gather in these meditative walks. Perry scavenges along railroad tracks and in abandoned buildings for discarded and decayed materials. Using these, she creates sculptures of fish and animals – living fossils that reclaim the dignity of these often exploited and disrespected creatures. Her work will be the subject of an upcoming one-person exhibition in Atlanta, Georgia in 2018 and she has participated in numerous group exhibitions in the South over the last decade.
Babs Reingold
Reingold is best known as a visual and conceptual artist for creating alternate ambiguities with her wall art and installations as they relate to the environment, poverty, and beauty. She draws on her early experiences of hardship to create elaborate installations using domestic objects and natural materials like clotheslines, threads, human hair, animal skins, organza fabric structures, rust and tea staining, and encaustic. The dynamics of the environment, power, technology, and the manipulation and destruction of nature are recurring themes in her art. Her installation The Last Tree portrays the world’s 193 countries with fabricated silk organza tree stumps stuffed with human hair in pails. This elaborate installation, curated by Midori Yoshimoto at the ISE Cultural Foundation in New York, illuminates Jared Diamond’s question What was the Easter Islander thinking when he chopped down the last tree? resulting in a culture that demolished the entire wealth of its natural resources. A second show of the traveling exhibit was at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, New York in 2016-2017. Recent museum showings were at the Museum of Fine Arts (St. Petersburg, Florida) in 2015-2016. Reingold’s works of art can be found in numerous public and private collections around the world, and are included in the permanent collections of the Newark Museum of Art in Newark, New Jersey; the Museum of Fine Arts (St. Petersburg, Florida) in St. Petersburg, Florida; and the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia, among others.
Christy Rupp
Rupp Is an American artist and activist. She lives and works in New York City and the Hudson Valley in New York. Her work is inspired by the study of animal behavior. She is one of a group of early eco-artists concerned with urban ecology and our perceptions of nature. Her work has been shown extensively at galleries and museums.
As a resident of lower Manhattan in the late 1970s she exhibited in early artist run spaces including Exit Art, 3 Mercer Street Store, (a precursor to Fashion Moda, Franklin Furnace, the Kitchen, Artists Space, The Clocktower and PS1 International Studio Program, and ABC No Rio. Artists illegally occupied an abandoned city owned building for the groundbreaking Real Estate Show. She participated in the explosion of late 1970’s artist generated activity which included Collaborative Projects, Group Material, Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America (a nationwide mobilization of writers, artists, activists, artists organizations, and solidarity groups that began in New York in 1983), P.A.D.D. (Political Artists Documentation and Distribution), Artmakers, Ventana (a collective of artists in Support of the Artists threatened by US aggression in the Contra wars of the 80’s in Central America). Her work appeared in early publications of The Soho News, East Village Eye, Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, World War 3 Illustrated, and Bomb Magazine. The first publicly visible work was “The Rat Patrol,” which was an outdoor poster project of a life-size rat pasted where garbage accumulated, pointing out the fact the city is a living ecosystem with a delicate balance. “Surely a photograph of a rat borrowed from the NYC Health Department files and mechanically reproduced is not a creation of artistic imagination…it would be unthinkable to see the picture on exhibition in a museum.” – Douglas Crimp. She is the recipient of Creating a Living Legacy, Joan Mitchell Foundation (2015), Anonymous Was A Woman Foundation (2010), National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1984, 1986), New York Foundation for the Arts (1986), Art Matters Inc (1986, 1988).
Rebecca Smith
Rebecca Smith attended Sarah Lawrence College and The New York Studio School. First exhibiting in 1977, she has been making art since the late 1970s, in various media including painting, performance, sculpture and tape drawing installations. Her work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Microsoft, The Tarra-Warra Museum of Art, Australia, The Albright-Knox, and The Hyde Collection, among others. Smith recently had the distinction of being a co-curator, panelist and participating artist in EMISSIONS: Images from the Mixing Layer, as part of The Marfa Dialogues on Climate Change at Cooper Union. She exhibited a large sculpture, Noctilucent Clouds (2015), in Here and Above: A Dialogue Between Sculptures at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, which has been acquired by the museum and remains on view, 25 feet high on the atrium wall. Her most recent one-person exhibition was at Hionas Gallery in NYC in 2016 and is currently exhibiting at the Maier Museum of Art in Lynchburg Virginia in Atmospheric Conditions: Gathered and Unsettled.
DAVID&SCHWEITZER CONTEMPORARY
56 Bogart St, Brooklyn, NY 11206
info@davidandschweitzer.com
davidandschweitzer.com
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18. James Johnson, FF Alumn, announces two new publications
Discopie is pleased to announce the publication of two new books at Lulu.com.
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/discopie
Inspired by ‘The Art of Typewriting’ by Marvin and Ruth Sackner, a wonderful compendium of early concrete and “typed artpoe”, I’ve published some of my own Typewriter and Rubber Stamp poems from 1976-1987 in NO MEAN FEET.
NO TITLE NO CREDIT is a book of found phrases, concrete poetry and other miscellany dating from 1983.
On the occasion of the publication of these two books, all of my books at Lulu are discounted by 20% for a limited time.
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19. Liz Magic Laser, FF Alumn, at LiFE, Saint Nazaire, France, opening Feb. 1
Children Matter
January 27-April 1, 2018
Opening: February 1, 6:30pm
LiFE – submarine base in Saint-Nazaire
Boulevard de la Légion d’Honneur
Alveole 14
44600 Saint-Nazaire
France
Hours: Tuesday-Sunday 2-7pm,
Wednesday 11am-7pm
T +33 2 40 00 41 68
life@mairie-saintnazaire.fr
lelifesaintnazaire.wordpress.com
Artists: Priscila Fernandes, Ane Hjort Guttu, Adelita Husni-Bey, Liz Magic Laser, Marie Preston
The Children Matter exhibition brings together artists who interrogate the place that contemporary society accords to the child, and, through this, the fundamental values of the adult world and its models of education and transmission. The exhibition lays out a non-exhaustive panorama of the visions of artists, philosophers, theorists and architects whose productions raise questions around emancipation.
Several works presented at the LiFE seek out ways of giving the floor to children. In Ane Hjort Guttu’s video Freedom Requires Free People, young Jens, reluctant to the school system, has a liberated speech which seems to point out a paradox: how can you learn to be free when educational models (in the family and at school) imply a relationship of subordination?
The success of alternative educational models like those of Freinet or Montessori, and a renewed interest in Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster, has highlighted the notions of reciprocity and equality in the acquisition of knowledge. Artists and art institutions have picked this up in recent years in the “educational turn”: a collaborative way of working in which art becomes a knowledge-producing space and education a possible space for creation. Developed using this approach, Adelita Husni-Bey’s Postcards from the Desert Island shows the limits of this freedom offered to children. Similarly, Marie Preston’s installation Un compodium proposes to think about new forms of collaboration between the different actors that accompany the child’s life.
In his book Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, Bernard Stiegler points to a generational inversion: adults taking less and less responsibility in the face of their children’s consumption of the “programme industries” (television, cinema, internet and video games). These tools to produce and sell “lifestyle” consider the child as a target for marketing. In their own way, Priscila Fernandes and Liz Magic Laser draw the invisible thread between liberal economy and individual freedom, which crosses current generations. Priscila Fernandes’s video For a Better World reveals the excesses of business and commerce in conditioning children for the 21st century economy. The young boy shown in The Thought Leader by Liz Magic Laser uses personal development methods derived from business management to address an adult audience, returning to them the absurdity of the situation and the search for meaning of our society of the performance.
Finally, a new forum and knowledge sharing structure has been conceived for the centre of the exhibition, that articulates documents, texts and archive material gathered by three researchers around the theme of childhood and the urban environment. Evoking several important historical experiments (the architect Ricardo Dalisi, the district of La Villeneuve in Grenoble …) this central space testifies to the way in which the questions of the society on the educational models reflect and incarnate in the social space of the city, through the built forms of playgrounds or school architecture, across Europe and in Saint-Nazaire.
With a programme of events to discover the rich and compelling history of the debate around education, the exhibition Children Matter proposes to consider recent artistic approaches, without concession on our current world which strongly recall the topicality of these questions and the urgency to seize them.
The Forum is made with the contributions of:
Marie Preston, Artist and Research-Teacher at Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis (AIAC/Teamed).
Aurélien Vernant, Art and Architecture Historian, Author and independent Curator ; Associated Curator of La Biennale d’architecture d’Orléans (2017).
Marie-Laure Viale, Art Historian, Curator in contemporary art public, Co-director of the association Entre-deux (Nantes).
The Forum presents the researches of: Bernard Alleaume, BASE agency, Joséphine Chevry & Olivier Ramon, Riccardo Dalisi, Jean Foucambert, Robert Gloton, Group Ludic, Rolande & Raymond Millot, Marta Pan, Alison and Peter Smithson, Pierre Székely, Aldo van Eyck.
Curatorial team Le Grand Café, contemporary art centre – LiFE, City of Saint-Nazaire:
Sophie Legrandjacques (general curator), Amélie Evrard, Laureline Deloingce
This exhibition is an off-site programme by Le Grand Café, contemporary art centre, Saint-Nazaire (F). It is produced by the LiFE – City of Saint-Nazaire.
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20. Julie Harrison, FF Alumn, at Mahady Galler, Scranton, PA, thru Mar. 21 and more
Dear Friends,
Check out these screenings of my work in Scranton, PA and NYC! I’m currently in residence in Oaxaca until mid-April, so I’ll miss them!
Happy winter,
Julie
1) “Make, Believe: The Maslow Collection and the Moving Image.” Mahady Gallery / Maslow Study Gallery for Contemporary Art, Scranton, PA. Jan 26, 2018 – Mar 21, 2018
2) “Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978-1983.” Club 57 Gallery Screening: Joe Lewis and Friends, MoMA, NYC. Jan 23 – Jan 30
An excerpt from Boundary, a video that Neil Zusman and I made in 1980 at the Experimental Television Center, will be exhibited in “Make Believe.” View “No” on vimeo.
“Make, Believe: The Maslow Collection and the Moving Image”
Jan 26, 2018 – Mar 21, 2018
Opening Reception: January 26th, 5-7 pm
Mahady Gallery / Maslow Study Gallery for Contemporary Art
Marywood University, Scranton, PA
Curator Gallery Talk: February 7th, 4-5 pm
“Make, Believe” generates a dialogue between the work of artists in The Maslow Collection and artists working with the moving image. The films and videos of Basma Alsharif, Nazlı Dinçel, Julie Harrison & Neil Zusman, David Haxton and M.M. Serra all, in their respective ways, interrogate the notion of the acceptance of reality. What might otherwise be considered documentary scenarios become realities that slip, shift and falter, and we begin to inhabit spaces of the unreal or uncanny. These artworks demonstrate a fluid mobility between stable, recognizable ground and the far reaches of the mind and imagination. This freedom of movement also presents itself through a number of diverse practices within The Maslow Collection. Using photography, drawing, painting, printmaking and conceptual practices throughout the 1970s, 80s and 90s, artists like Alice Aycock, Mark Cohen, Barbara Kasten, Dorothea Rockburne and Sandy Skoglund examine similar themes surrounding unexpected spatial realities. They each ask, in their own way, “Will you believe what you see?”
Featuring moving image works by: Basma Alsharif, Nazlı Dinçel, Julie Harrison & Neil Zusman, David Haxton and M.M. Serra; with works from The Maslow Collection by: Alice Aycock, Jennifer Bartlett, Mark Cohen, Hamish Fulton, David Haxton, Barbara Kasten, Martin Mull, Ellen Phelan, Robert Rauschenberg, David Reed, Dorothea Rockburne, Sandy Skoglund and Andy Warhol.
Make, Believe is curated by Herb Shellenberger (independent curator) and Ryan Ward (Curator, The Maslow Collection).
“Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978-1983.”
Club 57 Gallery Screening: “Joe Lewis and Friends” January 23-30, 2018
“Lady Wrestling” was shot at Fashion Moda in the late 70s/early 80s. Joe informed me about the screening and I look forward to seeing the work again.
Club 57 Gallery Screening: “Joe Lewis and Friends”
Museum of Modern Art, NYC. Jan 23 – Jan 30
On the occasion of Joe Lewis’ live appearance in the Club 57 galleries on January 25, we revisit performance videos from this musician, artist and co-founder of Fashion Moda. Documentation of an uptown reprise of Club 57’s Lady Wrestling is memorable for its ringside interviews and record of audiences engaging with the storefront from the street. Lewis performed regularly with his father, Joseph Lewis Sr, and occasionally with iconoclastic countertenor Julius Eastman. This program samples a gig by Lewis, Eastman, and Lewis at Arleen Schloss’s performance salon A’s and Lewis and Lewis performance videos from media artist Davidson Gigliotti’s series of music tapes.
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Goings On is compiled weekly by Harley Spiller
