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☆ Grace Wales Bonner Summons the Spirit Movers in Her MoMA Show
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-30 | by ( Holland Cotter | More About Holland Cotter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

Every few years the Museum of Modern Art asks an artist to sift through its vast holdings and assemble a chamber-music-scale exhibition. Past guest curators have included Ellsworth Kelly, Elizabeth Murray and Amy Sillman. This year the invitation went to the London-based designer Grace Wales Bonner and what a fantastic work of poetic research she’s orchestrated in the show she calls “Spirit Movers.”The idea of sound embodied in material is her foundational theme. In 36 objects she covers a wide modern-contemporary cultural field, which includes figures well-known and overlooked, several with links to the Afro-Atlantic world. The resulting harmonic convergence of these various objects unfurls with a welcoming anthem in the form of Terry Adkins’s monumental wind instrument ensemble, “Last Trumpet,” and with a glowing fanfare in Agnes Martin’s 1963 gold-leaf painting “Friendship.”

Persons: Ellsworth Kelly, Elizabeth Murray, Amy Sillman, Grace Wales Bonner, Terry, Agnes Martin’s, ” Organizations: of Modern Art Locations: London

☆ Largely Ignored by the Western World, Africa’s Medieval Treasures Shine at the Met
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-16 | by ( Holland Cotter | More About Holland Cotter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

We like to keep history as we’ve learned it in a headlock, to make sure it doesn’t shift or change. They turn the world into a fixed field of safe-spots and blanks, an us-them weave of gates and fences. One of the many — many — benefits of much-maligned “wokeness” has been its message to relax the hold, toss the charts or, better, revise them: explore blanks, rethink fences. It’s thanks to this more free-breathing approach to history, including art history, that we’re getting a challenger of an exhibition like “Africa & Byzantium,” which opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this Sunday. At the same time, as its title suggests, the show confuses — in a good way — certain expectations about who made what, and what came from where.

Persons: we’ve, ”, we’re Organizations: Metropolitan Museum of Art Locations: Africa, New York, Asia, Europe

☆ Manet and Degas: A Masterful Pas de Deux at the Met
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-21 | by ( Holland Cotter | More About Holland Cotter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

And if gestures of tribute speak louder than words, Degas made a powerful one. In his increasingly reclusive later years he set about assembling a personal collection of Manet’s work, a sampling of which, in a section called “Degas after Manet,” concludes the show. The painting was so polemically pointed that Manet had to keep it hidden in storage. Degas and Manet, at the start of their careers, first met in the galleries of a grand public museum. In the end, they kept company in a small private one, the shadowy rooms of Degas’s Paris apartment.

Persons: Degas, “ Degas, Manet, ”, Berthe Morisot, Bizet’s, Carmen ”, Maximilian, Austrian archduke, Napoleon III Locations: Austrian, Mexico, London, Paris

☆ Cross-Cultural Exchanges from Vietnam, Ethiopia, the Caribbean
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-02 | by ( Holland Cotter | More About Holland Cotter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Never has “silence” been more resounding. (Chacon went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in music last year.) My 2023-24 go-to list includes other potentially horizon-expanding group shows, all historical. During the “global” moment a few decades back New York museums, large and small, regularly gave us valuable introductory samplings of unfamiliar (here, anyway) contemporary work from Asia. “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s-1970s” at the Guggenheim Museum (Sept. 1-Jan. 7) is in the line of such shows and welcome in the present international spotlighting of Korean culture.

Persons: Harry Smith ”, Raven Chacon, ”, Chacon Organizations: Whitney Museum of American, Miller Institute for Contemporary Art, Carnegie Mellon University, Dakota, Pipeline, “, Guggenheim Museum Locations: Pittsburgh, New York, Asia, Korea

☆ On the Hudson, Visions for a New Native American Art
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-10 | by ( Holland Cotter | More About Holland Cotter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

“Deer Woman’s New Certificate-of-Indian-Blood-Skin” by Natalie Ball, which suggests a kind of quilted explosion, certainly has presence. Larger than either are fiber weavings, modeled on Indigenous jewelry forms, by Eric-Paul Riege, the exhibition’s youngest participant. Riege uses them as props in performances — pushes them aside, moves them around — and visitors are permitted (encouraged, even) to touch them. Sound was a vital component of the 1969 vision for a new American Indian Theater, which I take to mean a new Indian Art. In the early 1960s, when a craze for folk and ethnic music was high, a company called Indian Records, Inc. released many LPs of Native music.

Persons: Natalie Ball, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill’s, Eric, Paul Riege, —, Gibson, Rebecca Belmore, Maria Hupfield —, Ida Halpern, Sonny Assu’s Organizations: American Indian Theater, Indian Records, Inc Locations: British Columbia, Vienna

In order to face either one head on, you must stand on a small, uneven platform of homemade adobe bricks. This is a message from the artist: He’s not interested in a seamless viewing experience. It recalls his contribution to the 2017 Whitney Biennial, where he created a room of adobe bricks. Here, a winding path of bricks connects life-size portraits of members of esparza’s largely queer community. The paintings are also on adobe, referencing his Mexican heritage and accentuating his subjects’ brown skin.

Persons: rafa esparza’s, He’s, JILLIAN STEINHAUER Organizations: Art Basel Miami Beach, Biennial Locations: Los Angeles, New York

☆ Buddhist Art From India: Where the Natural Meets the Supernatural
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-21 | by ( Holland Cotter | More About Holland Cotter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Several free-standing Indian figures turn the show’s final gallery, teasingly titled “The Buddha Revealed,” into a kind of chapel. And it is visually clear that a page has turned, both in the exhibition’s narrative, and in the history of Buddhism itself. By the time the latest of these single-figure icons was made in the late fifth to sixth century C.E., the map of Buddhism was changing. If you didn’t know of this fate it would be hard to guess it from the glowingly vital, all but palpitating early Indian Buddhist art in the Met show. Tree & Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 B.C.E.

Organizations: Metropolitan Museum of Art Locations: Southeast Asia, China, Japan, India, ., Islam, New, Art

☆ The Artist’s Wounded Heart
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-13 | by ( Holland Cotter | More About Holland Cotter | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

During this time, he also associated with a cluster of experimental artists, several of them Puerto Rican immigrants, and he began making art of his own. Some of these props, saturated in Caribbean popular culture, took on a sculptural life of their own. His growing reputation, though, was largely confined to Latino institutions, segregated from the mainstream art world. This changed when the Whitney Museum of American Art commissioned him to create a big installation for its 1993 Biennial. Judging by the object-packed décor, the occupants are Puerto Rican.

Persons: Merián Soto, ” it’s Organizations: Galleries, Whitney Museum of American Art Locations: Puerto Rican, Fort

In important ways the New York contemporary art world was a much bigger place three decades ago than it is today, not in size but in its thinking. The first institutional solo show of the artist Edgar Calel, titled “B’alab’äj (Jaguar Stone),” is a reminder of this. Obliquely, poetically, Calel refers to Mayan views of the earth as a dynamic, responsive, sacred being. (Sections of molded soil spell out the syllable “tik,” the sound he remembers his grandmother making to call wild birds for feeding.) The resulting SculptureCenter piece, beautiful to see, isn’t a “religious” work in any narrow sense.

Persons: Edgar Calel, Calel, HOLLAND COTTER Locations: York, Guatemala

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