Kiki Smith and Whiting Tennis at the Tang

Two artists of both shared and contrasting sensibilities are presented in solo shows at Skidmore College's Tang Teaching Museum through the end of the year. Kiki Smith is by far the more famous and influential of the two; her show did not originate at the Tang, having been brought in from the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington in Seattle. Whiting Tennis, who hails from Seattle himself, is the subject of a Tang "Opener," whereby the museum's curators make a point of introducing an artist not previously broadly exposed in this area. So we have the known and the unknown side by side; the Seattle connection may be intended or not.

I Myself Have Seen It: Photography and Kiki Smith includes a very great number of photographs, but it also features sculptures, drawings, prints and mixed media, all of which are what the artist is widely known for producing. She is considered a feminist, in that her work runs counter to male-dominated viewpoints regarding the female body in art, and she is clearly very much of her time - a child of the '60s and '70s, wild and undisciplined in many ways.

The installation of I Myself Have Seen It is highly structured, however (see view at the top of this post), prominently featuring a narrow ledge at the bottom edge of the gallery's walls that supports an array of countless 4x6-inch color prints in minimal plastic box-frames, running like a subtitled narrative below the entire text of the exhibition. On the walls are many larger, properly framed photographs, as well as the other works, in great big groups and sequences.

Smith's imagery is process-oriented, often derived from ongoing sculptural installations, and it is gritty, grim, even gruesome by turns. Bodies are depicted nude, distorted and dismembered; faces are expressionless. This is not easy work to confront and, despite a lyrical patina to some of the colorful photographs that belies Smith's overall deathliness, difficult to enjoy.

In contrast, Tennis, who has his own flirtation with deathly imagery in the form of gallows- or coffin-like forms, is like a breath of fresh air. Where Smith is grim, Tennis is playful. Where Smith seems to carry the scars of a brutal childhood, Tennis seems to be carrying on the joy of childish exploration. Like Smith, Tennis is comfortable working in a variety of media; unlike her, he seems to have mastered his techniques, whereas Smith appears to be locked in a never-ending struggle with them.

Tennis shows a curious mix of influences: Pablo Picasso, Philip Guston, and Ed Ruscha all come easily to mind when viewing this collection. One room, which contains just five pieces, all dated 2011, represents all these influences and more. A painting titled Droopy (shown at right) is loosely brushed in narrowly limited shades of grey (Guston); another painting with collage (shown below), similarly structured but far more colorful, picks up the Cubist vein (Picasso); and an all-white wall relief that accurately depicts a streetscape has uninflected observation at its core (Ruscha). Then there is a perfectly formed geometric octagonal prism atop a crusty, wooden found table - going in another direction entirely, yet still in harmony with the rest.

Two crowded groups make up the highlight of this show in the sense of revealing Tennis's process. On one wall, a constellation of 36 drawings, prints, paintings, and constructions mirrors the type of installation used in Smith's exhibition downstairs. These works are variously cast, painted, printed, texturized, stamped, or shaped. Tennis is one of those artists who doesn't worry about how he makes it, he just has to make it however it needs to be made.

In another space, a large display of objects on shelves (shown at the bottom of this post) provides potential hours of perusal - there are 108 little sculptures in it, all around 6 inches tall, all handmade. It's an impressive display of ingenuity and skill, but also of freedom.

A lot of the work in Tennis's show is from the past year, showing an artist who seems to have really hit his stride; it's a pleasure to discover this work, which is exactly the experience intended by the Opener series.

Ratings: Smith - difficult to recommend; Tennis - Highly Recommended

Mark McCarty: Skin at Opalka Gallery

It is appropriate that the exhibition Mark McCarty: Skin at Sage College of Albany's Opalka Gallery begins with a self-portrait, because this show is as much about McCarty as it is about the many people depicted in it. Long awaited (McCarty's last solo show - aside from a wonderful mini-exhibition of iPhone pictures that just ended at McGreevy ProLab - was in 2004), comprehensive (the show presents 35 pieces, 36 if you count the one that is, inexplicably, included twice) and focused (all the works are black-and-white portraits) Skin happened because Opalka Director Jim Richard Wilson recognized that it needed to happen.

McCarty has been making both personal and commercial photographs for over 30 years, and both have brought him considerable recognition. But the effort to mount a major art exhibition is easy to leave aside when you are dealing with clients, raising a family, meeting deadlines. So McCarty continued to make the personal work - that's essential - but has tended to only show it in dribs and drabs, usually at one or another regional group exhibition.

Now, we have the opportunity to look at a broad and deep slice of those pictures - still limited to a particular long-term project or two, but a good choice was made to present a very personal segment of the total output, rather than a more diverse survey. It tells a deeply compelling story of lives written on the skin of those living in it, and of McCarty's place amid those lives as participant, observer, and compassionate collaborator.

Like a lot of commercial shooters, McCarty is well versed in a great array of technical skills and styles. This show includes a couple of grainy 35mm shots; 11 images from a square-format rollfilm camera; and 23 prints from 8-by-10-inch sheet film (these in two sizes). All the prints have been produced by digitally scanning the negatives and printing in ink on heavy paper - but you would hardly know it, as they have the look of gelatin-silver prints in texture and tonality.

More than half the pictures are of McCarty's immediate family - wife and children - including his first wife, Vicky, who died of cancer when their daughter, Kate, was still a baby. One of the most affecting images in the show (and no less so for being about 4 by 5 feet) shows Vicky and Kate from behind, their oval heads in rhythm, the regrown hair on Vicky's not nearly as thick as the first-grown hair on Kate's.

In this, as in nearly every image in the show, the subjects are unclothed; those who are not part of the nuclear family include a number of elderly Alzheimer's patients, and others of all ages. Almost never is the picture a "nude," though some get near that when the subject's face is obscured or cropped out. Not surprisingly, those tend to be the less compelling images.

The textures that give the show life are mainly those of the face, with all its lines and freckles, the hands (ditto) and, in certain strong instances, the hair and nails. One very expressive portrait of the photographers' nude second wife crops out her head, but allows her hands to receive the treatment of a sensitive portrait. Another image, of a woman identified as Emilee, shows mainly her torso from the side, folds of fat, stretch marks, scars and all. And another, of the only non-white person in the show (named Miss Ada), is full-face with eyes squeezed shut - but behind one set of lids, there's a hollow socket.

Though the pictures in Skin go back to 1985, it is worth noting that these last three were all made in 2011, clearly demonstrating that McCarty remains at the peak of his creative and expressive abilities. Still, the exhibition works very much as a whole, as a timeline of one life's intimacies and contiguous looks outward in the form of portraits. McCarty's world is here, as is his world view. It is a vital viewing experience.

Rating: Must See

Note: A very handsome catalog, with an opening statement by the artist and essays by Phyllis Galembo and Lyle Rexer, has been printed to accompany the exhibition Skin. Larger and more sumptuously designed than past Opalka catalogs, it is priced at $20, a nice deal. Be sure to check it out when you go.

Ten Years: Remembering 9/11 by Marie Triller

In the inevitable push-pull between form and content thatlies behind all photographic imagery, the work of Marie Triller falls squarelyin the middle of the argument. But it’s a pretty big middle and, as seen in thejust-published collection titled Ten Years: Remembering 9/11 ($29.95, JohnIsaacs Books), her work covers much of that range.

Triller, who earned an MFA at SUNY New Paltz and works as ahigh school art teacher, has had a quiet but persistent presence on the CapitalRegion art scene for decades, and for much of that time she has exhibited expertlymade, digitally captured color photographs that represent human culture, often fromtravels to distant places such as Belize, Ireland, and the American Southwest.One might argue that these pictures were clearly documentary in purpose – and thatwould be true – but it is equally true that they were intended as personalartistic expression. The pictures presented in Triller’s new book are noexception to this duality.

Beginning with a full-bleed cover shot of a motorcycle gastank embellished with an exquisite painting of a New York City skylinedominated by hovering ghosts of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, thebook teases the eye as much as it plucks at the heart strings. Immediately, theparameters are shown: This photographer use color, shape, composition, andpoint of view in ways that your everyday documentary photographers do not.

Perusing the sequences of images inside, which are organizedinto nine chapters of equal length, one gathers a cumulative sense of thedeeper meaning behind the work. The result of 10 years’ worth of anniversary visits to thesite of the WTC attacks, these 97 pictures were culled fromthousands, then thoughtfully sequenced to offer Triller’s interpretation of thechapters’ themes: Memory, Security, Expression, Reflection, Community, Courage,Place, Justice, and Spirit.

Triller explains in a short opening essay to the book thatshe avoided the press photographers’ territory in “the pit” at Ground Zero,choosing instead to focus on “the periphery, the crowds who gather eachSeptember 11 morning, and who tell a truer story of that bright, dark day.” Ithink Triller would say that, through these pictures and this book, she isattempting to share that story – their story – with the rest of us.

But a photographer – an observer – cannot set himselfcompletely aside from the story he photographs. And, so, Triller’s book is therecord of her experience of that story, filtered through her eyes and her lens.What I see when I look at these pictures is a wonderfully sensitive, open setof eyes, guided by an equally open heart, which is thrilling and impressive; Ialso see a highly trained and critically honed eye, which is delightful – and impressive.

Which moves me more? In this work, each depends on theother. The picture of a dark-skinned woman clutching a bouquet of multicoloredroses is pure visual candy – made bitter by the knowledge that she has broughtthem not to celebrate a love, but to remember the loss of one. On the pageopposite, low-angled sunlight hides a man’s face in shadow under ared-white-and-blue hardhat; the picture is as balanced as a still life, as theman bows his head reverently, the hat emblazoned with signatures of othersurviving rescue workers.

There are American flags visible throughout this collection,hanging gigantically on buildings, stitched onto clothing, and everywhere inbetween. This is inevitable given the book’s source material, but it is also,perhaps, a sly nod to two seminal photography books of the past century: WalkerEvans’ American Photographs and Robert Frank’s The Americans, both of whichused the presence of the stars and stripes as a visual cue woven into thefabric of the books’ layout schemes.

Triller uses the same technique, placing a photo with aprominent flag at the start of the book and often beginning each section of thebook with one, too. But her tale is not a patriotic or political tract – it isall about the people who come each year to remember the tragedy of 9/11 at itsepicenter and who are presented here with their raw emotions on full display.Included among them are many in uniform, in family groups, in work clothes, businessdress or biker attire. Many also have their own creative or political messageto share, duly recorded by Triller’s camera.

The photos are presented without titles or captions – we aremeant to take them in visually and draw our own conclusions about what they maymean. This is one of the book’s great strengths. It’s difficult to approach asubject so charged without succumbing to the temptation to preach, but it maybe even more difficult to craft a narrative with images alone, as Triller hasdone very successfully here.

Text is provided in the form of a foreword by Sen. KirstenGillibrand, Triller’s introduction, and a thoughtful afterword by EleanorHeartney – all are brief, leaving the pictures to do the real communicating. Theydo it eloquently, and beautifully.

Note: There will be an exhibit of 11 of Marie Triller’s 9/11photographs at The College of Saint Rose’s Massry Center for the Arts atriumgallery, 1002 Madison Ave., Albany. The show opens on Sunday, Oct. 16, and willrun through Sunday, Dec. 11. Triller is an alumna of the college.

Three exhibitions at MASS MoCA

I finally got myself back to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams this week after a too-long absence, and it was well worth the trip. As my museum-going companion succinctly pointed out, MASS MoCA made its bones by taking risks, and they always seem to pay off - even when something there doesn't work, you have to admire the effort.

At the very least, you have to be impressed by the scale of things at this gargantuan former factory complex, and you can count on the vastly abundant industrial forms that make up the physical plant to be esthetically pleasing and fascinating in themselves, sometimes even more than the art. One reason I made the trip now was to catch the tail end of an important installation by the German painter/sculptor Katharina Grosse, which opened many months ago and will close on Oct. 31.

Ungrammatically and, to me, annoyingly titled one floor up more highly, the piece combines elegantly sandblasted, pure-white forms in styrofoam with garishly spray-painted mounds of rocks and dirt that also contain a few recognizable objects, such as a massive wooden bench and articles of clothing. Also in this group is a floor-mounted, curved planar polygon that is either a painting or a sculpture, depending on your definition of those media, and through a door at the end of the gargantuan space containing these works are two levels of spray-painted rooms, one of which features a framed abstract painting hung on the wall.

Grosse's installation is exuberantly colorful, muscularly formal, richly textural - I could go on, but you get the picture - and I wanted to like it so much more than I did. Somehow, though, it left me cold. Can't really explain why that is, as I normally enjoy all those elements in a wide variety of art. The closest I can come to explaining this failure to ignite is that the piece just doesn't work as a whole, that despite its quantity it doesn't properly fill the space - that this artist has bitten off more than she could chew.

Others surely will disagree, and I encourage you to go and see for yourself whether you do or not - but I am willing to take the risk of saying in print that this piece is, at best, a beautiful and expensive mess.

Meanwhile, up on a catwalk, exposed to the elements and a real challenge to reach on rickety old legs is Michael Oatman's All Utopias Fell, a neo-retro-futuristic fantasy that extends Oatman's longstanding obsessions into his best work yet - an experiential time-and-space capsule that should bring out the kid, or at least the mad scientist, in all of us (pictured above).

Oatman is essentially a collage artist who regularly works in three dimensions as well, creating participatory environments chock-full of stuff: pictures, gadgets, artifacts and so on. AUF consists of an Airstream trailer with solar panel-festooned wings and deployed parachutes that appears to have crash-landed on the museum's superstructure. Its occupant is missing, but his incomprehensible, complex inner world is on full display in the ship he rode in on.

Visitors can enter and do as they please in this delightfully bizarre interior, which is accessible only in good weather (i.e. not during the winter months) and which will remain there indefinitely. It contains all manner of material related to energy - books, a bicycle-driven generator (I rode it, and it works), and more or less functional-looking living quarters (featuring a goodly supply of toilet paper and put-up tomatoes), along with an elaborately (but crudely) furnished electrical workbench and many, many mysterious electronic contraptions.

A full description would be next to impossible - imagine the contents of an artistically and scientifically inclined packrat's garage or basement all fitted into a tiny living space and you get the idea. As with past installations by Oatman, I was left shaking my head in wonder at his ingenuity, resourcefulness, sense of humor - even his sincerity. He's a space-age kid stuck in a postmodern man's world, but thankfully he's got what it takes to drag us back in time to where he comes from - and it ends up looking like a wonderfully twisted version of where we're going.

A third major exhibition that opened at MASS MoCA in May and will remain until March is titled The Workers (or The Workers: Precarity, Invisibility, Mobility); it originated in a smaller form in Mexico, and has been expanded for its incarnation here, to include 25 international artists and filmmakers who depict workers in various ways.

Equal parts art and propaganda, The Workers has a terrific concept and ends up being a fine example of something where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Much of the art in the show is overwrought, as politically oriented art so often is, yet for me the show was still stimulating and enjoyable. As with most of the group shows I've seen here over the years, it uses the space of the galleries extremely well, allowing a comfortable flow from piece to piece and room to room.

A number of the pieces in the show appear to have been made specifically for it, in some cases by local artists, with an eye toward the detailed industrial past of the museum. This conjunction of purposes is the key to the success of the show, and I was somewhat surprised to find that I consistently preferred the pieces in the show that were related to this history.

Whereas some of the international work struck me as bombastic (for example a full-size gallows with an office water cooler set next to the trap door), some of the more local work was resonantly lyrical. My favorite pieces in the show included a wall montage of the torn-out bottoms of paper bags with the names of the factory workers who made them stamped on them (take a look at a paper bag, and you'll see one) by Mary Lum, who lives in North Adams; Los Angeles photographer Anthony Hernandez' Landscapes for the Homeless; and an installation featuring a chain-link fence and images from a 1970 strike at Sprague Electric by New York City-based Camel Collective (pictured below).

The Workers is accompanied by a detailed brochure, fittingly printed on cheap newsprint in black ink. With written material that keys on "the uncertain fate of today's workers," it strikes a rather relevant chord - and one that I respond to more than some, having been laid off from my own job nearly three years ago. As with the logo (seen above, right), the catalog eloquently expresses this exhibition's roots in socialist theory, especially as it was embodied nearly a century ago by Mexican muralists, or more recently by artists of the Soviet regime. Clearly, this point of view still has life in our global culture and still inspires many artists.

Note: There are several other exhibitions also currently on view at MASS MoCA, including Memery; Nari Ward: Sub Mirage Lignum; and Federico Diaz: Geometric Death Frequency-141. Additionally, there's an opening reception in the Kidspace gallery from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday (Oct. 1), which features several excellent artists, including Schenectady's Ginger Ertz, on a subaquatic theme. Seriously fun.

Rating: Highly Recommended

Regarding Place and Wolfgang Staehle at University Art Museum

Marilyn Bridges - Castillo from Perpendicular, Yucatan, Mexico 1982

The University Art Museum is blessed with a pretty impressive photography collection, and has been showcasing a sizable chunk of it through the summer under the title Regarding Place: Photographs from the Permanent Collection. Paired with three digital projections of web- or video-derived color images by the New York City-based, German-born Wolfgang Staehle - who will give a talk at the museum at 7 p.m. on Wednesday (Sept. 7) - this offers a nice opportunity to take in a nearly century-long swath of fine photography.

Regarding Place includes over 100 black-and-white pictures by 17 artists, some of them iconic, some cult favorites, some little-known. The great majority of the prints in the show were donated to the museum’s collection over the last few decades by the Brown family, whose two children attended UAlbany in the 1980s and 1990s, and the show was organized by UAM curator Corinna Schaming, giving a sort of bi-level structure to the selection process. The result is somewhat uneven, but of a very high quality overall, and the installation takes on a subtly intriguing life of its own, as framed prints are variously grouped in rows, stacks, and grids, sometimes loosely spaced, sometimes tightly packed.

Andreas Feininger
Elevated Trestle, Division Street 1941

The premise of the show is, frankly, half baked. Many of these pictures struck me as being fairly indifferent to setting, or distinctly not about place at all – and the trouble it took to try to come up with a unifying theme for the show seems forced. This is evident in the rather tortured language of the press materials – for example, Schaming writes that these photographs “consider the resonance of a given site” and “foreground the direct and emotive appeal of black and white photography, while also informing current photography’s renewed interest in faithfully reproducing the visual world.” I’m sorry, but this is not my idea of meaningful description.

I’d be more comfortable with a less presumptuous approach – such as “here’s some really nice stuff from the collection, and isn’t it great to have a chance to look at it together on the walls instead of leaving it safe in a file drawer in the dark?” I mean, who needs all that theory? The bottom line: Photos like to be looked at, and it's very good to see these photos out of storage.

Highlights abound, including seven small prints by the ageless Manuel Alvarez Bravo that span the 1930s to the 1970s in a carefree leap; five big, bold prints by Andreas Feininger (two of which are also seen in the current New York, New York! show at The Hyde Collection); an appropriately random-seeming set of 10 images by Andy Warhol (these were donated by the Warhol Foundation in 2008); and five Joel Meyerowitz prints from the 1960s - before he discovered large-format color.

Three photographers are represented by a whole portfolio of 12 or more images: Marilyn Bridges, who makes precisely composed aerial pictures of famous sites; Douglas Huebler, a conceptual artist of the unassuming type; and Sally Gall, whose landscapes are lovely, if perhaps a bit sentimental.


Joel Meyerowitz - JFK Airport (Caddy and Christmas star) 1968


Not at all sentimental are the projections by Staehle, though they are also calm and sweet in their way. His pieces, which consist of 24-hour web views of two scenes (one rural, one urban) captured at short intervals and an hourlong continuous loop showing Niagara Falls (with pleasantly roaring soundtrack), struck me as being simply and singularly about the passage of time. Staehle’s cool gaze, aided by Internet technology, allows the viewer to contemplate at leisure a very quietly unfolding drama. Not particularly innovative or unique, in my opinion, but worthy of attention.

Note: If you want to see the Regarding Place and Wolfgang Staehle shows, you must act quickly - they end on Sept. 10.

Rating: Recommended

Wolfgang Staehle - still image from Eastpoint 2004

Three exhibitions at the Fenimore Art Museum

Maurice Prendergast - Landscape with Figures 1910-12 oil on linen

Hurricanes notwithstanding, it’s a nice time of year for a drive to Cooperstown - and with three special exhibitions all ending soon at the Fenimore Art Museum, there’s plenty of reason to make the trip now.

Fans of the Mexican proto-feminist painter Frida Kahlo will be entranced by a traveling show titled Frida Kahlo: through the lens of Nickolas Muray, which centers on pictures of the enigmatic artist taken throughout her 10-year love affair with the Hungarian-born, New York City-based photographer.

Nickolas Muray
Classic Frida (with Magenta Rebozo)
1939 carbon process print

Augmented by inkjet prints of titillating ephemera such as lipstick-kissed letters, the show is not much more than an illustrated soap opera, strangely cool yet passionate, though Muray’s estimable skills with both classic black-and-white and early color technique are brilliantly on display. It’s easy to see from this collection why people such as Salma Hayek and Madonna find Frida so irresistible, though I was equally repelled by the degree of self-indulgence in evidence. If you’re intrigued, you must hurry: The show ends on Sept. 5.

On view through Sept. 11 is a fine, small exhibition of Edward Hopper’s early work titled a window on Edward Hopper, in which the Fenimore has collaborated with the nearby Glimmerglass Festival to reveal the roots of the painter whose work inspired an opera that was mounted there this season.

Though the opera’s performances have ended, the art exhibition stands alone as a valuable investigation into the development of one of America’s foremost painters, and it features some of his really outstanding graphic work that might easily be overlooked if it were in a different context. But here, with just two full-scale oil paintings, and five watercolors to compete with, Hopper’s etchings are a revelation, and his earlier studies are worth the time to examine.

Edward Hopper - Night Shadows 1921 etching

Anyone familiar with the artist’s work will gain insight from the rare display of drawings, going back to his student years and including some commercially oriented illustration (Hopper the painter was 40 before museums began acquiring his art). It’s always a treat to see how an artist develops, and it’s also great fun to have a chance to look at sketches that ultimately led to more impressive finished work.

And, still, the two paintings (Freight Cars, Gloucester, an almost Cubist industrial composition from 1928 and The Camel’s Hump, a dazzling view of Cape Cod dunes from 1931) are as good as it gets; and the watercolors are simply wonderful. Go to see a window on Edward Hopper with the right expectations, and they will be fulfilled.

William Baziotes
Toy 1949 oil on linen

The Hopper show, which draws heavily from a collection formed by Edward W. Root that is now housed at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute in Utica, is a good setup for the highlight of this trio of exhibitions, Prendergast to Pollock: American Modernism from the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, which is also drawn from Root’s amazing collection.

Spanning about six decades of painting, Prendergast to Pollock is a mouthwatering showcase of exquisite work by both famous names and also-rans, organized into loosely tied groups of landscapes, still lifes, figures, and abstracts. Not unlike the current New York, New York! Show at The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls (reviewed here), this show surveys the transition of styles in American art during much of the 20th century from Impressionism to abstraction, and it demonstrates what an auspiciously astute collector Root was.

The highlights of this exhibition are almost endless. The show opens with a Fauvist-colored masterpiece by Maurice Prendergast, but I skipped by it until I was stopped dead in my tracks by three modestly sized Arthur Dove paintings that still shimmer with energy more than 70 years after they were made. A single piece by William Baziotes, small and playful, is mesmerizing, as is a surprisingly small and energetic Mark Rothko from 1947, before he homed in on his mature style of large blocks of color. Nearby is a similarly patchy and transcendent Arshile Gorky.

Charles Burchfield
House and Tree by Arc Light 1916
watercolor

Charles Burchfield is represented by three paintings as well, all watercolors, two of which date to 1916 but seem much fresher, as his work always does. Stuart Davis and Theodoros Stamos sit side by side in an asymmetrical, yet perfectly balanced pairing, while other great moments are provided by lesser-known painters, such as Morris Kantor, whose 1929 Ode to the Antique is deliciously surreal, and Charles Howard, whose stylized cityscape exploits great skill with form and color.

I do have one quibble with the show: No women are represented in this selection and, though Root collected very few women artists, that is an oversight in 2011. But the installation is a great success, due in part to the careful selection of medium grey, royal blue, and acid green for the background colors on various wall panels. It continues through Sept. 15.

The Fenimore also offers permanent exhibits from its world-class collections of folk art and American Indian art, and has beautiful, accessible grounds on the shore of Otsego Lake – altogether, a destination worth setting aside a good chunk of time to explore.

Rating: Highly Recommended

Edward Hopper - Freight Cars, Gloucester 1928 oil on canvas

Marks of Identity at the PhotoCenter

Four portraits from Marks of Identity:
The Body Art Photography of William DeMichele (photo provided)

A very impressive display of 32 color portraits by Albany photographer William DeMichele is on view just through Sunday (Aug. 21) at the Photography Center of the Capital District, but I'm offering this reminder to those who might still want to catch it. And that's possible, as the PhotoCenter is open from noon to 6 p.m. both Saturday and Sunday.

If you go, you will see a body of work about the body, and how people adorn it, and about those people as people. OK, a little convoluted, but the point is that these are not just sensational(istic) pictures of amazing tattoos on naked skin, they are also sensitive portraits of the people who live in that skin.

Originally made around 20 years ago, and shown quite a bit nationally and internationally, as well as having been published in numerous magazines and a couple of nice books (available for sale at the gallery), these pictures still pack a great punch. Indeed, some will be offended by them (those I've posted above are, hmmm, nothin' compared to certain others in the show); but if you focus on the art aspect and not the body aspect, it's mostly rather tame, lyrical, romantic stuff.

This is no accident - 29 of the subjects are female, with only six males weighing in (three of the portraits are of couples), so there's a fair amount of flowers and fairies ... but there are also extreme examples of whole-body designs in black or multicolored ink, clearly done by tattoo artists at the very top of the game, and there's some interesting cultural range to the design content, though all the subjects are American. And some of the bodies, also not by accident, are really very lovely to see, which isn't a bad thing, either, in my opinion.

Bottom line: Whether female or male, pretty or not, young or old, DeMichele respects his sitters, and by treating them with respect and admiration, he evokes revealing, intimate pictures that are both documents of the inky art and works of art in themselves. See 'em if you can.

Rating: Recommended

New York, New York! at the Hyde Collection

Andreas Feininger - Brooklyn Bridge 1940s  gelatin silver print

The show New York, New York! The 20th Century, on loan to the Hyde Collection from the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Fla., is designed to be a crowd pleaser - and, judging from the reactions I witnessed on a recent weekday visit there, it is - but it is also a worthwhile show for any serious art viewer who may or may not care about the theme but will be thrilled to have a chance to see these 60 or so excellent pieces from the Norton's collection.

When you enter the show, you are struck by a clever (actually, too clever) subway-style design scheme to the exhibition, which starts with an appropriately understated audio track of screeching train sounds and a large wall emblazoned with the tiles and signage typical of mid-century New York City subway stations. The one work of art at the entry is a large and graphic black-and-white photograph taken in 1941 by Andreas Feininger under the elevated train at Division Street; potent in its structure of steel, sun, and shadow, the photograph sets the course for this show: not so much that it will be about New York, but that it will feature a lot of art that describes the atmosphere of the place as much as its physical details.

Though the rest of the exhibition space is painted a conservative dark maroon, the subway theme carries through in the form of text panels with the black background, primary color dots, and Helvetica type you still see all over New York's rail system. While these provide useful information, they look odd and distracting here. The show is organized around several sub-themes: On the Waterfront, Avenues and Streets, Tall Buildings, Parks and Recreation, and On the Town, which help to give it form as it spans a good deal of history - both of the city and of art.

Childe Hassam - Melting Snow 1905  oil on canvas

In addition to a great proportion of photographs (27) and prints (add another 8), the exhibition features a range of paintings from the late 19th century to the late 20th, and five somewhat lonely sculptures, four of them in bronze (or plaster with a bronze patina). Fans of photography will recognize many of the names included here - Paul Strand, Edward Steichen, Weegee, Diane Arbus, and other giants are represented by fine, sometimes famous, examples of their work. Equally, there are first-rate photos by some lesser known practitioners, such as Bill Witt, Jerome Liebling, George Tice, and Feininger, whose five prints in the show are really terrific.

Thinking about Feininger, I wonder just how many of the other artists in this show came as immigrants - after all, New York is the world's destination, a place that perfectly exemplifies the ideal of the melting pot and the fresh start. One fine piece among the excellent graphics on view seems to purposely capture that experience - a sketchy lithograph by the Austrian master Oskar Kokoschka that depicts the Statue of Liberty from the water. Surrounded by an ocean of white space, the black-crayon drawing perfectly embodies possibility. It is worth noting that the artist was already past 80 when he made the piece and, though he was never an American, he changed citizenship more than once in his life, and lived out his last decades in Switzerland, perhaps enjoying his own restful neutrality.

More central to the theme of the show are a number of paintings in it by artists associated with the Ashcan School, including George Luks, Edward Hopper, Everett Shinn, and others in the same vein, such as Reginald Marsh and John Marin. These and others offer elements of social commentary - my companion's pick of the group is an acidic study of upperclass gallerygoers by William Gropper - but most focus on the weather, smoke, snow, fog and the sea of humanity that fills and refills New York every day, rather than depicting specific individuals.

Edward Hopper - August in the City 1945 oil on canvas

The works that best exemplify these different moods of the city are about equally distributed among the photos, paintings, and graphics - almost too numerous to mention, standouts include a marvelous color lithograph in the form of an accordion book by Eugene Feldman; exacting etchings by Armin Landeck from 1934 and John Taylor Arms from 1925 that render light and texture to perfection; Childe Hassam's classic of American Impressionism from 1905 titled Melting Snow; and a sweeping photographic overview of a chunk of the Bronx by Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao.

Other particularly special paintings in the show include a terrific vertical mural piece by Stuart Davis; the Hopper, titled August in the City, where, in the deep summer's absence of any humanity, a statue stands in for his typical figure at the window; several John Marins; and a frenetic bit of expressionism by Mark Tobey. Altogether, for me this experience was not so much about New York as it was a great excuse to see a wonderful show of a century of art.

The main problem with the exhibition is its title - because now I can't get that damn song out of my head! It's a great song (personally, I prefer Liza's rendition to Frank's) but, well, you know what I mean about ear worms.

New York, New York! The 20th Century continues through Sept. 18. It originated at the Norton Museum of Art in 2009, and continues on tour, stopping next at the Katonah Museum of Art. The Hyde has organized a full slate of activities around the exhibition, including a week of 9/11 tenth-anniversary events - please see the museum's website for details.

Rating: Highly Recommended

Eugene Feldman - New York West Side Skyline 1965  fold-out book

Reflections on a Museum at WCMA

Edward Hopper - Morning in a City 1944

I've been saying for years that the Williams College Museum of Art, a personal favorite of mine, gets wrongly overlooked because it is next door to the much larger Clark Art Institute and the even bigger MASS MoCA is just a few miles down the road. Now, this imbalance may be even more extreme - that is, the WCMA, after a recent whole-museum re-installation of the collection, is even more deserving of the attention its neighbors easily gain.

Unknown artist, Gabon 20th century
Mbulu-Ngulu (reliquary figure)

To call Reflections on a Museum a revelation is understatement, because it is by design and intention both revealing and enlightening. Augmented by 50 choice pieces on loan through a collection-sharing initiative from the Yale University Art Gallery, this sweeping and thoughtful series of eight exhibitions allows the viewer to get inside the art-making and collecting processes with gentle help from the WCMA's able curatorial staff (and others), but without intrusive label copy or - worst of all - facile explanations.

Rather, the method is to present a remarkably wide range of objects in challenging (but not needlessly provocative) juxtapositions, and then to offer questions about the objects, their context, their provenance, and their ultimate placement in these two prominent university collections. The result is a virtual tour of human civilization, guided but open-ended, which features curious side trips that focus on how we experience objects and art. The natural questions that we would ask on such a trip are posted for us, and some potential answers are, too, but it never feels that we are being pandered or preached to.

Unknown artist (Roman)
 late 3rd century
Sarcophagus fragment of Hercules,
Triumph of Dionysos

A detailed analysis of this ambitious and impressive undertaking would be exhausting either to write or read, so instead I will just try to point out some of the highlights and, as the curators did, leave you to seek your own experience and draw your own conclusions.

Then again, a friend who accompanied me on this visit, and who is a lifelong art lover now past 70 years old, proclaimed about halfway through our tour that Reflections on a Museum is probably the best museum exhibition he has ever seen. So there's a ringing endorsement if I ever heard one.

Two years in the making, the exhibitions began opening in staggered fashion in April and will remain on view through next June. The scale of the project, and the museum's free admission policy, will surely encourage multiple visits, as will The Gallery of Crossed Destinies, where 25 objects are being installed differently by four different guest curators in sequence through 2011; and the Room for Reflection, where a single work of art is showcased each month (through December).

Robert Wilson

Bridge Chair
with Shadow 1999

The current iteration of Crossed Destinies presents its intriguing cross-section of objects as interpreted by Jenny Gersten, the new artistic director of the Williamstown Theater Festival. Titled Expressions, this installation of ancient through modern items is arranged in a way that suggests theatrical dialogue and embellished with quotes from plays. The piece on view in the Room for Reflection was a dazzling glass and ceramic mosaic by Maurice Prendergast titled Fiesta Grand Canal Venice - I say "was" because I'm assuming there will be something new there as of Aug. 1.

The museum's first-floor galleries introduce the concept of the exhibitions with a show titled The Object of Art. Here, essential questions are posed: How does art start? What is it? What is it doing here? and so on. The two galleries contain a great variety of objects, from the plainly utilitarian to the utterly conceptual, and we are encouraged to consider them in relation to each other and in relation to our own thoughts, freely formed or inculcated, about what their object may be.

In one fine pairing, a work of art that is a door (by Jim Dine) sits next to a door that is a work of art (anonymously carved granary door from 19th- or 20th-century Mali). The wall text reads "Q. When is a door not a door? A. When it's a work of art." The beauty of this presentation is that it leaves it up to the viewer to consider how this Q&A may apply to the particular doors on the wall, and to recognize that intention and context both determine the meaning of an object and are mutable. Not incongruously, a complex collector's item that consists of a miniature museum-in-a-box of Marcel Duchamp reproductions sits nearby.

Wybrand Simonsz de Geest the elder
Portrait of a Man 1630

The next room is dominated by four portraits - a pair of paintings depicting a prosperous 17th-century Dutch couple, and a pair of glossy photographs depicting an estranged, poor, 21st-century South African couple. All four portraits are effective and revealing on their own but, facing off, they raise many important issues, not least of which is the fact that the Dutch were colonizing South Africa in the 17th century, and the legacy of that exploitation remains there today. Meanwhile, these four faces also remain as bookends to that history.

Zwelethu Mthethwa - Untitled 2006

The subsequent upstairs galleries begin with a large exhibition titled The Medium and the Message, where the same sort of extreme range is attenuated but still reiterated in books, prints, photographs, paintings, sculptures and more, all of which form part of an ongoing dialogue about material and process. Here, a painting by Joseph Marioni was part of the focus for a gallery talk by outgoing Deputy Director and Chief Curator John Stromberg on the color red that also brought us to paintings by Chester Harding and Grant Wood in the next gallery, and by Philip Guston in the one beyond that.

Stromberg, working his last day at the WCMA before departing for Mount Holyoke, made a compelling case for his favorite color, and for its use in the works cited. He also makes, in a short and humbly placed "Curator's Voice" text panel in a gallery dedicated to Cosmopolitan Modernism, a compelling case for the entire Reflections on a Museum exhibition and the spirit behind it. He writes, "I feel that objects have a kind of 'bill of rights': They deserve to be cared for, displayed to best advantage, and interpreted in ever-changing combinations that keep them alive conceptually."

Reflections on a Museum lives up to that credo.

Additional sections of the installation are: Don't Fence U.S. In: Crossing Boundaries in American Art; Art Re: Art; A Collection of Histories; and an Artist's Project by artist-in-residence Jesse Aron Green.

Rating: Must See

Grant Wood - Death on Ridge Road 1935

Note: Special thanks go out to Lee at The Daily Grind in Albany for Internet access, without which this review could not have been posted.

75th Mohawk-Hudson Regional at AIHA

Escape - Susan Stuart, oil on canvas

The 75th Annual Exhibition by Artists of the Mohawk-Hudson Region, commonly called the Regional, is at the Albany Institute of History & Art this year, and it is huge. Selected by prominent painter Holly Hughes, who considered 1,020 submissions by 235 artists (a record for the Institute, though still far fewer than the nearly 1,500 works submitted by 340 artists to the Hyde Collection last year), the final cut includes 160 pieces by 85 artists.

That’s about five times as many as the 35 works by 17 artists that were in the same show at the University Art Museum in 2003 (presumably a record low). Think of it – one Regional five times the size of another. It sort of boggles the mind. Just reading a list of the whole roster is hard work, and I’ll prove it by putting that list right here:

Mr Swifty - Linda B. Horn
Fake fur, foam structure, plaster shoes

Samuray Akarvardar, Jim Allen, Fern T. Apfel, Jaimee Atkinson, Sebastian Barre, Tina Baxter, Meredith Best, Pennie Brantley, Allen Bryan, James Burnett, Paul Chapman, Yaminay Nasir Chaudhri, William Coeur de Ville, Terry James Conrad, Peter Crabtree, Katie DeGroot, Chris DeMarco, Ginger Ertz, Ray Felix, Abraham Ferraro, Jessica Fitzgibbon, Richard Garrison, Charles Geiger, Barry Gerson, Gail Giles, George Gruel, Bart Gulley, Stephen Bron Gurtowski, Michael J. Gwozdz, John Hampshire, Patrick Harbron, Theresa Hayes, Sarah Haze, Andrea Hersh, Susan Hoffer, Stephen Honicki, Linda B. Horn, Renee Iacone, Mary Kathryn Jablonski, William Jaeger, Paul John, Richard Kathmann, Pooh Kaye, Scott Keidong, Sandie Keyser, Amanda Klish, John Knecht, Ivan Koota, Phyllis Kulmatiski, Gary Larsen, Naomi Lewis, Harold Lohner, Iain Machell, Mona Mark, Paul Mauren, Gwenn Mayers, Mark McCarty, Bryan McGrath, Michael McKay, Jenny McShan, Renata Memole, Michael Mooney, Robert Morgan, Art Murphy, Nedra Newby, Philip J. Palmieri, Liz Parsons, James Paulsen, Kenneth Ragsdale, Marc Rosenthal, John Ruff, Mark Schmidt, Deborah Schneider, Lynn Schwarzer, Jon Segan, Mary-Alice Smith, Charles Steckler, Susan Stuart, Barbara Todd, Ken Vallario, Nancy Van Deren, David G. Waite, Nicholas Warner, Edye Weissler, and Wendy Ide Williams.

With so many people chosen, I feel compelled to offer a few words of commiseration to those who were excluded: Remember, a juried show is by definition subjective. Don’t give up! There’s always next year … . Then again, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the included were feeling a little put out to be part of such a broad presentation. After all, how special is it really to be one of the 85 "elite" from the region this year?

Empire Views with the Green
Nedra Newby, Watercolor

As it turns out, not so very special at all. The show is, indeed, too damn big. Beginning in the first small room that typically introduces AIHA exhibitions, it gets off to a very promising start with a large, vertical, black-and-white video projection of a doubled rushing waterfall that greets the visitor as if to say "this Regional is bold, get ready for a wild ride." Other works in that room, from traditional oil painting to Sharpie on whiteboard, express weather in many forms, setting an intriguing tone for the show to come - it will have themes in whole rooms or parts of them, an almost necessary strategy for presenting so much diverse work, and a wise one - though it fails to deliver on the promise.

The second room takes us in a completely different direction, immediately understood as being all about color. As a shameless color junkie, I have no argument with that, and found many pleasing pieces gathered there. But, in the next (and largest) room of the museum's second-floor spaces, this crispness of organization begins to break down a bit, and some questionable decisions become apparent. (The layout, by the way, was planned by Hughes.)

WC #6 - Paul Mauren
Aluminum, wood, ceramic tile

What at first seems to be charming quirkiness of placement - a very subtle and small box assemblage by Jon Segan is placed well above eye level; three large color photographs by Mark McCarty are forced into a tall totem - turns into extreme imposition in the form of seven works by five artists being jammed into an awkward and tight group on the gallery's end wall. This type of problem recurs in the next large room, where two color photographs by Chris DeMarco are interspersed with two watercolors by James Burnett, a distracting way to show them.

I've heard this increasingly common phenomenon called "curator as artist," and I've seen it work better in truly curated shows - but, when it comes to presenting so many unwitting individuals in a juried regional, I think the artists deserve the respect of less interpretive placement. Had the two DeMarcos simply been placed side by side with the two Burnetts, we still would have gotten the point that they are closely related, without seeing them diminished.

Meanwhile, as I trolled the show for favorites and new discoveries, I found it harder and harder to respond with any energy to the art - even the works I knew immediately to be among the best seemed to have lost their oomph to the crowding and - more to the point - to the juxtaposition with other works that, frankly, should have been edited out. Inclusiveness is a beautiful philosophy, and I think it works extremely well on a youth soccer team. But, when it comes to presenting carefully made and meticulously installed artwork, less is very often more.

If the juror had gone one more round in her process, and retained only the strongest 80 or 100 pieces, all of them would look stronger still. Instead, they are made to keep company with lesser art - not just one or two odd choices, but dozens of them - and this, again, leaves them diminished. Which is a shame, because there is a bunch of terrific art in this show.

Umatilla - Ken Ragsdale, Inkjet print

Among the highlights for me were new works by familiar names: Richard Garrison's four wittily bloodless Circular Color Schemes; another set of four works by Fern Apfel that blend color-field abstraction with simple realism; Paul Mauren's wall-hung aluminum and wood sculptures; two fine color portraits by photographer Peter Crabtree; and two "non-narrative silent videos" by Bil Jaeger.

Equally compelling were works by people new to me, including: Ken Vallario's highly polished neo-Surrealist paintings; two paper collage abstractions (and a painted one) by Bart Gulley; Terry James Conrad's intriguing small geometric constructions in paper and other materials; and two luminously dark color photographs by George Gruel.

These and many other works in the show will shine through the clutter and hold your attention as you make your way through this challenging but very worthwhile presentation. Note that admission to the Institute is free on Fridays and two-for-one on Saturdays through August. There will be Artists Gallery Talks at 6 p.m. on the next two 1st Fridays: Aug. 5, and Sept. 6.

Rating: Highly Recommended

Transition in Troy (Fence Show, Nadia Trinkala memorial show)

Mixed-media painting by Nadia Trinkala at Fulton Street Gallery

There are two major transitions under way in Troy’s arts institutions, with tearful departures and joyous events tied together. The local news has carried much coverage of the decision of the Arts Center of the Capital Region’s president, Amy Williams, to step down and enter the private sector – and her going-away party at the Arts Center on Thursday drew a huge crowd of friends who were happy to share their appreciation of Williams’ leadership over the decades and to wish her well. 

I was a willing part of that throng, as a close follower of the ACCR’s activities since my association with it in the early 1980s, when it was known as the Rensselaer County Council for the Arts and I was a member of its board of directors. At that time, the RCCA established a budget line for a paid Exhibits Coordinator (before that it was a volunteer position), and Williams was the first person hired to fill that post - part time, at $1,600 a year. She and the Arts Center have come a very long way since then, and I wish them both more great progress in the future.

The other big news in Troy is that the long-struggling Fulton Street Gallery is slated to close – but I have it from a reliable source that, instead, it will remain open under new management, with founding Director Colleen Skiff stepping away but continuing to present art under the Fulton Street name at the Uncle Sam Atrium.

This is exciting for many reasons, not least of which is that it means the current Fulton Street exhibition of work by (or inspired by) Nadia Trinkala will continue through the month of August (hours yet to be determined). It is an extraordinary exhibition of very high quality, made all the more touching by the fact of its protagonist’s suicide this spring (click here to see GV’s In Memoriam for Trinkala).

To anyone who may have doubted Trinkala’s credibility as an artist, this exhibition is a revelation. Comprising work in several media – photography, drawing, painting, jewelry, and more,  all of it sensitive, revealing, well-made, and consistent with a personal vision – the show does her memory justice. Trinkala’s dear friends Ray Felix and Robert Gullie made it happen, and they did an outstanding job of curation, preparation, and installation, producing a finely coherent whole that uses the Fulton Street location perfectly, and underscores the importance of keeping this ideal storefront space open as a gallery.

Meanwhile, back at the ACCR, the Fence Salon will come down on Saturday (July 17), to be replaced by the reconfigured Fence Select, which will open on July 29 (along with a solo show in the President’s Gallery by John Yost, a photographer and video artist who earned his MFA at UAlbany this spring). An annual juried show open to all artist members of the ACCR without an entry fee, the Fence Show’s 44-year history and broad appeal qualifies it in my estimation as “the other Regional,” and this year’s lineup fulfills that expectation with strong work in many media, selected by Hudson gallerist Carrie Haddad.

Viewing the hundreds of entries in the Salon, where those that were selected by Haddad are mixed in but designated by a paper marker, I found myself nodding in agreement over and over again. “Yes,” I found myself thinking, “she’s nailing it!” That is, until I saw a superb trio of color photographs by Chris DeMarco, and searched in vain for the “selected” card. Did Haddad fail to notice them amid the chaos of the salon? A staffer assured me that she had been thorough in her perusal – and that I was just one of a number of people who had asked the same thing on DeMarco’s behalf. So it goes with juried shows.

As it happens, the Fence Show had strangely few photography submissions this year. I have no way of knowing why that would be (it has attracted work from numerous fine photographers in the past), but I wonder if the overlap with the Photography Regional (at Albany Center Gallery through July 16) had an effect – or if the fact that Haddad judged that exhibition in Troy just last year (under Fulton Street’s auspices in the Atrium) made some photographers decide not to bother.

Aside from that, I think we can expect the installed Fence Select to be high quality and well representative of the art that this region has to offer. As for the true Regional, which recently opened at the Albany Institute of History & Art, watch this space for a review to run soon.