The New York Times-20080125-Art- -Schedule-
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Art; [Schedule]
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Museums and galleries are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of recent art shows: nytimes.com/art.
Museums
HISPANIC SOCIETY OF AMERICA: 'FRANCIS AL[YUML]S FABIOLA,' through April 6. The first of three collaborations between the Dia Foundation for the Arts and the Hispanic Society of America is an astutely site-specific display of 300 Fabiola paintings collected by the artist Francis Als, who is based in Mexico. Made by devout amateurs worldwide, all are based on a lost original from 1885 and show Fabiola, the fourth-century saint, in profile, wearing a vibrant red veil. Mr. Als's 300 examples pepper dark-wood-paneled galleries with smoldering color and are consistent with the collaborative, subversive and open-ended nature of his art. North Building Galleries on Audubon Terrace, Broadway between 155th and 156th Streets, Washington Heights, (212) 926-2234, diaart.org.
(Roberta Smith)
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: 'BRIDGING EAST AND WEST: THE CHINESE DIASPORA AND LIN YUTANG,' through Feb. 10. Focused on a single modern family art collection, this show weaves like a DNA strand through the Met's Chinese painting galleries. The 40 examples of painting and calligraphy belonged to the writer and scholar Lin Yutang (1895-1976) and his descendants, who have divided their time between China and the West. Accumulated over years, the collection has the casual logic of a household photo album, with evidence of shared habits, tastes and temperaments, and of personal interchange between generations. (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.
(Holland Cotter)
MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM: 'CLOSE ENCOUNTERS: IRVING PENN PORTRAITS OF ARTISTS AND WRITERS,' through April 13. Last spring, in its first foray into modern photography, the Morgan Library & Museum acquired 67 of Irving Penn's portraits of artists, writers and musicians. (Thirty-five were donated by Mr. Penn.) The entire group is temporarily on view in an exhibition that complements the library's collection of 20th-century drawings, manuscripts, books and musical scores. Organized by a guest curator, Peter Barberie, Close Encounters encompasses work from the 1940s, when Mr. Penn first started to work for Vogue, through portraits published in The New Yorker in 2006. Mr. Penn's subjects, including Marcel Duchamp, Arthur Miller and Truman Capote, emerged from their portrait sessions with their carefully shaped personas profoundly shaken. 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, (212) 685-0008, themorgan.org.
(Karen Rosenberg)
MUSEUM OF ARTS & DESIGN: 'PRICKED: EXTREME EMBROIDERY,' through April 27. The second in a series of exhibitions (following last year's Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting), Pricked makes another case for needlecraft without the craft. The show places widely known contemporary artists like Laura Owens and Ghada Amer alongside Elaine Reichek and others who have been working with thread and textiles since the '70s. In the best works historical and technical concerns overlap, just as they do in traditional embroidered samplers. 40 West 53rd Street, Manhattan, (212) 956-3535, madmuseum.org. (Rosenberg)
MUSEUM OF MODERN ART: 'NEW PERSPECTIVES IN LATIN AMERICAN ART, 1930-2006: SELECTIONS FROM A DECADE OF ACQUISITIONS,' through Feb. 25. Collecting Latin American art is a long-standing tradition at MoMA, but it languished a bit in the 1960s and '70s. These recent acquisitions attest to its resurgence in the '90s, with a shift toward various forms of Constructivist-based abstraction that emerged from that region, starting in the postwar period. Unusually oriented toward the body in its emphasis on optical perception and the possibility of function, these selections set the stage for subsequent generations of artists, many of whom are also represented here. The postwar works are especially exceptional, and historically important, but the choices throughout are for the most part excellent. (212) 708-9400, moma.org. (Smith)
NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY: 'LIFE'S PLEASURES: THE ASHCAN ARTISTS' BRUSH WITH LEISURE, 1895-1925,' through Feb. 10. Artists of the Ashcan School, including Robert Henri, John Sloan, William Glackens and others, were known for painting the poor and working-class sides of life in early-20th-century New York. They also enjoyed sporting events, the theater, the circus, dining in fancy restaurants and trips to Coney Island, and the paintings they made of these and other recreational subjects make for a lively, engaging exhibition. 170 Central Park West, at 77th Street, (212) 873-3400, nyhistory.org. (Ken Johnson)
WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART: 'KARA WALKER: MY COMPLEMENT, MY ENEMY, MY OPPRESSOR, MY LOVE,' through Feb. 3. Kara Walker's exquisite, implacable, loose-cannon retrospective at the Whitney Museum is about race, whether in silhouette panoramas cut from black paper, in incendiary drawings or in narrative videos made with shadow puppets. They add up to one of the most important and stirring bodies of art produced by any American in the past 15 years. 945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street, (212) 570-3600, whitney.org. (Cotter)
Galleries: SoHo
ALAN SARET: 'GANG DRAWINGS' The gangs referred to in Alan Saret's latest exhibition, the first major show of his work since a 1990 retrospective at P.S. 1, aren't Angels or Outlaws, Bloods or Crips. Instead they are clutched fistfuls of colored pencils scraped, twirled or swept across the page. The earliest examples are from the late 1960s and executed on graph paper. Later Mr. Saret broke free of the grid, stretching out onto larger sheets of paper. Drawings like Liquiacoriadance Entering or The Verg Integranxin Ensoulment reveal Mr. Saret's spiritualist bent, but works like Triple Cluster or Three Circles Ruled & Free Sweep leave you free to contemplate his draftsmanship without pondering its possible metaphysical functions. The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, (212) 219-2166, drawingcenter.org, through Feb. 7.
(Martha Schwendener)
Galleries: Chelsea
'ACCIDENTAL MODERNISM' As its title suggests, this exhibition meditates on the role of chance in art -- such meditation being a basic strategy, at least since the first collage. The distinctions between accident, randomness and decay are explored in works by Rudolf Stingel, Keith Tyson, Adam McEwen, Josh Smith, Dieter Roth, Ann Craven and Bill Morrison. Exercising the utmost control, Robert Watts and Richard Pettibone pay homage to Marcel Duchamp, the prime mover of chance. Leslie Tonkonow Artworks & Projects, 535 West 22nd Street, (212) 255-8450, tonkonow.com, through Feb. 16. (Smith)
EL ANATSUI: 'ZEBRA CROSSING' Linking together zillions of liquor bottle caps and foil bottleneck wrappers using twists of copper wire, El Anatsui creates enormous, ravishing tapestries. They rightly have made this University of Nigeria sculpture professor an international art star. The danger is that the works could start to seem gimmicky, but for now, they are visually stunning, and the adroitly managed marriage of Pop Art and Social Realism -- i.e., commentary on alcoholism -- is impressive. Jack Shainman Gallery, 513 West 20th Street, (212) 645-1701, jackshainman.com, through Feb. 2. (Johnson)
KAREN KILIMNIK From a distance Karen Kilimnik's blue and green paintings in chandelier-lighted galleries read as romantic minimalism, in contrast to the baroque flourishes evident in her retrospective now at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado. Look closely at the walls, however, and you will see rebellious smears of white glitter paint. Dating from 2001 to 2007, the works are geographically diffuse but visually coherent. In a series of paintings of mountain peaks, twilight skies and ocean depths, titles specify far-flung locations -- Fiji, the Sahara and Siberia among them -- but the paintings merge into a fantasia of blue, green and purple. Ms. Kilimnik's keen color sense makes these works as haunting as they are precious. 303 Gallery, 525 West 22nd Street, (212) 255-1121, 303gallery.com, through Feb. 23. (Rosenberg)
BERTIEN VAN MANEN: 'A HUNDRED SUMMERS, A HUNDRED WINTERS' Traveling through the former Soviet Union between 1990 and 1994, the Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen used an automatic camera to snap pictures of people in and around their homes. The photographs were collected in a book with the same title as this show (it is now out of print), but they were never exhibited in New York. Viewed today, her portrait of a society in transition is a welcome counterpoint to the oligarch-dominated public image of the New Russia. Ms. van Manen may have undertaken her journey in the spirit of Robert Frank, but the seductive proximity of her photographs is more reminiscent of Nan Goldin. Yancey Richardson, 535 West 22nd Street, (646) 230-9610, yanceyrichardson.com, through Feb. 16. (Rosenberg)
Out of Town
ALJIRA, A CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART: '5 DAYS IN JULY: A VIDEO INSTALLATION,' 'BENDING THE GRID: REST IN PEACE' AND 'REBUILDING NEWARK,' through Feb. 23. The historical centerpiece here is 5 Days in July, a video installation distilling the events of the catastrophic racial disturbances in Newark in 1967. It is complemented by Bending the Grid, Helen Stummer's tough, beautiful photographs of street memorials created in honor of young people who died violent deaths in the city in the past few years. As to the future, Rebuilding Newark offers a modest but heartening survey of community development organizations that have materialized over the past 40 years. There are a lot of them, and Aljira should be counted as one. 591 Broad Street, Newark, (973) 622-1600, aljira.org. (Cotter)
Last Chance
ART & PROJECT BULLETINS: 1968-1989 Everyone who was anyone in Conceptual Art was given the run of at least one, and usually several, issues of Art & Project during the 21-year life of its publisher, the Amsterdam gallery of the same name. Each issue was only a single sheet of newsprint folded into four pages, but the format was perfect for photo-documentation, drawings and proposals, as well as for artworks that existed nowhere else. This exhibition of 132 of the 156 issues forms a fascinating line. Specific Object/David Platzker, 601 West 26th Street, Chelsea, (212) 242-6253, specificobject.com; closes on Friday. (Smith)
BRONX MUSEUM OF THE ARTS: 'THE WORLD OUTSIDE: A SURVEY EXHIBITION 1991-2007' A product of the Cuban avant-garde of the late '80s and now a resident of Santo Domingo, Quisqueya Henriquez has exhibited extensively in solo and group shows in North and South America. In her clever, ideologically pointed sculptures, installations, collages and videos, she aims to deconstruct prejudicial stereotypes about the arts and cultures of Latin America. 1040 Grand Concourse, at 165th Street, Morrisania, (718) 681-6000, bronxmuseum.org; closes on Sunday. (Johnson)
BROOKLYN MUSEUM: 'INFINITE ISLAND: CONTEMPORARY CARIBBEAN ART' This large show, with 45 artists and a collective of designers, photographers and architects from the Dominican Republic adding to the count, fills two floors of temporary exhibition space, and care has been given to the selection. Several of the most substantial pieces were commissioned for the occasion. Organized by Tumelo Mosaka, associate curator of exhibitions at Brooklyn, it's an in-house job, a labor of love, though an uneven one. Too much work treads ground already covered by other art over the years. But what's good is really good, and the very existence of a show about identity politics, out of mainstream fashion in 2007, is cause for serious reflection. 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park, (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org; closes on Sunday. (Cotter)
'THE COMPLEXITY OF THE SIMPLE' This beautiful show mixes works of reductive abstraction and of anti-orthodox insouciance by 19 artists. A pristine black-and-white diptych by Ellsworth Kelly faces off with a wooden chair by Tom Friedman that has been drilled with so many holes that it seems to be dissolving in space. Elsewhere there are a hassock-size cylinder of cast black glass by Roni Horn and a large, gnarly tree limb covered by gold glass beads by Liza Lou. L&M Arts, 45 East 78th Street, (212) 861-0020, lmgallery.com; closes on Thursday. (Johnson) FRICK COLLECTION: GABRIEL DE SAINT-AUBIN 1724-1780 One of 18th-century France's greatest draftsmen, Gabriel de Saint-Aubin drew all the time and everywhere he went. He usually worked small, and in many cases you need one of the magnifying glasses provided at the museum to fully appreciate the subtlety and detail. Nevertheless, he had tremendous range. Whether conjuring epic visions of Ancient Roman history or recording intimate views of domestic quietude, he produced works of nonstop graphic liveliness, extraordinary sensuousness and hypersensitive alertness to perceptual reality. 1 East 70th Street, (212) 288-0700, frick.org; closes on Sunday. (Johnson) * KAMOINGE: 'REVEALING THE FACE OF KATRINA' The 10 artists in this group show are members of Kamoinge, a collective of African-American photographers founded in 1963. All traveled to different parts of the Gulf region in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and recorded, in distinctively different ways, what they found: ruined neighborhoods in a panoramic view of the Lower Ninth Ward by Gerald Cyrus; displaced citizens in portraits by Collette V. Fournier, John Pinderhughes, Herb Robinson and Radcliffe Roye; signs and memorials in pictures by Salimah Ali. The individual images are gripping; the cumulative record far more than that. H P Gallery at Calumet Photo, 22 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, (212) 989-8500, calumetphoto.com; closes Friday. (Cotter)
MASK The ubiquity of the mask, regardless of time, place or purpose, is the impetus behind this richly textured exhibition, which includes a global sampling dating back to pre-Columbian South America with examples of mask related-contemporary art. Old and older tend to dominate, but while masks may not be what they once were in terms of physical ingenuity or conjuring, the motif remains both powerful and useful to living artists. Masks, after all, are us, as this show proves, one way or another 75 times. James Cohan Gallery, 533 West 26th Street, Chelsea, (212) 714-9500, jamescohan.com; closes Saturday. (Smith)
'MULTIPLE INTERPRETATIONS: CONTEMPORARY PRINTS IN PORTFOLIO' Digitally produced fake mug shots of Bush administration officials by Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese have stirred up some controversy, but otherwise this is a mild, inoffensive show. Presenting works in various styles by 23 artists added to the New York Public Library's print collection over the past 10 years, the show has a number of highlights, including Thomas Nozkowski's eccentric, abstract etchings; wide-angle views of men trying on suits in a luxurious store, engraved by Andrew Raftery; and funny, absurdly rudimentary cartoons etched by David Shrigley. New York Public Library, (212) 592-7730, nypl.org; closes on Sunday. (Johnson)
'ONE: TEN ARTISTS/TEN MATERIALS, IN MEMORIAM TO SOL LEWITT' A homage to Sol LeWitt organized by the sculptor Dove Bradshaw, this finely tuned show features Minimalist and Conceptualist works by Robert Barry, Marcia Hafif, Jene Highstein and seven others. A piece by Mr. LeWitt is included: a single, roughly horizontal line penciled across one wall according to instructions that read, A not straight line from the left side to the right, drawn at a convenient height. Bjorn Ressle, 16 East 79th Street, (212) 744-2266, ressleart.com; closes on Saturday. (Johnson)
JASON RHOADES Dense, sprawling, endlessly suggestive, the last environment from a purveyor of industrial-strength scatter art (who died suddenlyin 2006 at 41) overwhelms, but remains diffuse and unresolved. It is festooned with slang terms for vagina that are spelled out in neon, like the word beer in a bar, and crammed with ersatz souvenirs from around the world, and accompanied by tapes of entertainments orchestrated by the artist when the work filled his Los Angeles studio. The art, sex and tourist trades are evoked; an atmosphere at once demonic, exultant and desperate builds. A small, barren, shedlike office in the back corner suggests a vacant loneliness behind all the fulmination. David Zwirner, 525 West 19th Street , Chelsea, (212) 727-2070, davidzwirner.com; closes on Saturday. (Smith)
JIM SHAW: 'DR. GOLDFOOT AND HIS BIKINI BOMBS' His career may span more than 30 years, but this California artist continues to specialize in pranksterish, at times sophomoric art. His latest show is overstuffed with such efforts, but there are a few redeeming moments, especially a large, spooky Photo-Realist-Surrealist canvas that gives the show its title. Metro Pictures, 519 West 24th Street, Chelsea, (212) 206-7100, metropicturesgallery.com; closes on Friday. (Smith)
