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In Quiet Chorus: Mary Frank’s ¿Or Was It Like This? and Charles Burchfield’s Solitude

February 7, 2020 By John Haber 2 Comments

co-exhibiting at DC Moore Gallery, NYC (through February 8)
Reviewed by John Haber

Mary Frank is not just a visionary. Neither was Charles Burchfield, back when Modernism was just bringing art back to earth. Yet showing them together brings alive their most unearthly twentieth-century visions. Frank has always had an eye on planet earth. She studied with Max Beckmann, the artist who refused to look away from Germany in the 1930s, even after Beckmann’s exile in America. And then she studied life drawing in New York with Hans Hoffman, the teacher of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. She has stood out among artists less than half her age in a 2009 group show of Natural Histories. She returns now to painting after a decade of photography with an eye to nature – her surroundings at home in the Catskills. That return, though, marks even her most naturalistic subjects as not altogether of this world. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

How to Hate the City: A Storyboard Of Canvases

October 18, 2019 By John Haber Leave a Comment

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
at The Neue Galerie, NYC (through January 13)

Reviewed by John Haber

No movement in early modern art was as cosmopolitan as German Expressionism — and the group that called itself Die Brücke. Who else took to the streets when Picasso was just finding his way from circus performers to still life? Who else first exhibited in a former butcher’s shop, where it also met? When, decades later, Adolf Hitler denounced the movement as “degenerate art,” his rhetoric feels familiar from religious conservatives even now blaming a perceived moral decline on urban liberals. And who in Die Brücke was as cosmopolitan as its oldest founding member, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Leonardo da Vinci’s Saint Jerome Praying in the Wilderness

July 29, 2019 By John Haber Leave a Comment

at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC (through October 6)
by John Haber

Saint Jerome took to extremes. As theologian and scholar, he traveled to the Holy Land to master Hebrew, translated the Hebrew Bible into Latin, churned out commentary after commentary, and defended church doctrine with warnings of hell. And then there was the sinner, shamed by his conduct among women, converted to Christianity after a vision, and living alone in the desert but for a lion and for a stone to beat his breast. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Mrinalini Mukherjee’s Phenomenal Nature

July 18, 2019 By John Haber Leave a Comment

at The Met Breuer
Reviewed by John Haber

Mrinalini Mukherjee had a dual fascination, with Modernism and the myths of her native India. If they seem impossible to reconcile, they both drew her to local materials to make the myths her own. Mukherjee worked in fiber for more than forty years, so it seems only natural that her retrospective at the Met Breuer opens not with a wall but a curtain. The entry holds barely a clue to what comes next beyond the artist’s name and a title, Phenomenal Nature — not even wall text at the side by the stairs. Penetrate within, and the curtains multiply, almost sheer but thoroughly opaque. One can still marvel at the former Whitney Museum, but its movable partitions have fallen completely away. They leave a space no less divided and mysterious for that. One might have stepped behind a stage curtain, only to find that the performance is just underway. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Garry Winogrand: Color

May 31, 2019 By John Haber Leave a Comment

at Brooklyn Museum, NYC (through December 8)
Reviewed by John Haber

Garry Winogrand: Color contains a monster four hundred and fifty photographs. They play, though as a digital slideshow in sixteen tall channels on facing walls. As the very heart of the exhibition, they become a single immersive installation. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Image, The Line

Bereavement Of The Felled: New Works By Trisha Donnelly

May 22, 2019 By John Haber Leave a Comment

at The Shed, NYC (through May 19)
Reviewed by John Haber

If a tree falls in a forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it still make a sound? At the very least, it can make art. For Trisha Donnelly, it must make a sound as well, for art is always listening, even as so many refuse to hear. Much of the planet may be dying, like her two fallen trees at The Shed, but art can speak to that as well. She has the very first show in the cultural center of Manhattan’s Hudson Yards, and it makes quite an impact. It puts to the test a gallery with, as yet, too few visitors, next to a shopping mall serving too little of New York. It looks beyond that very concentration of wealth to a fragile state of nature. It also risks drowning global warming and goodness knows what else in sounds of its own. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Nari Ward: We The People

May 15, 2019 By John Haber Leave a Comment

at The New Museum, NYC (through May 26)
Reviewed by John Haber

When it comes to Nari Ward, it can take a long time to hear so many voices. They are everywhere in his retrospective at the New Museum, fleshing out the sonic landscape amid (and from) the multiple installations. A tanning bed, for instance, made from oil drums, calls out not the work’s title, Glory, but an insistent “Hey, come on over here.” Sons recite their Miranda rights, in a muffled audio, to their very own father, in full dress as a retired policeman. Mahalia Jackson sings “Amazing Grace” over empty baby carriages in the outline of a slave ship. Just three words from the Constitution supply the show’s title, “We the People,” with every one of those people aching to be heard. In each case, the voices call attention to the silence that they can never quite break. And Ward has one listening to that as well. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

The Line

A review of Thelonious Monk's Palo Alto

Palo Alto Sees the Thelonious Monk Quartet at its “Final Creative High”

Reviewed by Marty Sartini Garner Palo Alto on Impulse! Pitchfork Thelonious Monk once said: “Weird means something you never heard before. It’s weird until people get around to it. Then it ceases to be weird.” By the time Monk and his quartet strode into the auditorium at Palo Alto High School on October 27, 1968, […]

Archie Shepp Quartet, Stadsteatern, Stockholm, September 1966. An interview with Archie Shepp, September 2020

Music for a Revolution: A Word with Jazz Great Archie Shepp

Interview by Accra Shepp NYRB My father, the saxophonist Archie Shepp, has recorded more than 110 albums since 1962, performed all over the world, and received numerous honors, including the 2016 Jazz Master’s Award from the National Endowment for the Arts. In the 1960s, he helped define “free jazz,” a new idiom in which the […]

Bobby Seale Checks Food Bags. March 31, 1972.

Food As Culture, Identity and an Enduring Form of Black Protest

By Amethyst Ganaway Food & Wine We are demanding, not asking, for “Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice And Peace.” —Amethyst Ganaway Black people in America have used food as a means of resistance, rebellion, and revolution since being forcefully brought here in the late 1500s. Food has always been a part of the culture and […]

A Pandemic Q&A with David Lynch

Pandemic Musings: A From-The-Bag Q&A With David Lynch

 From David Lynch Theater Presents: “Do You Have a Question for David? Part 1”

Erin Currier, American Women (dismantling the border) II. Read the interview with Erin excerpted from Lisette Garcia's new book, Ponderosas, at Riot Material.

An Interview with Erin Currier: Artist, Writer & Activist

by Lisette García and Barrett Martin excerpted from Ponderosas: Conversations with Extraordinary, Ordinary Women  by Lisette García, Ph. D available November 20th Sunyata Books “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And then you have to do it all the time.” –Angela Davis Barrett: I first met Erin Currier and her […]

A review of Mark Lynas's new book, "Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency," is at Riot Material Magazine.

The Earth Commences Her Retalitory Roar

Reviewed by Bill McKibben  Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency by Mark Lynas London: 4th Estate, 372 pp., $27.99 The New York Review of Books So now we have some sense of what it’s like: a full-on global-scale crisis, one that disrupts everything. Normal life—shopping for food, holding a wedding, going to work, […]

Oliver Stone in Vietnam. A review of his new book, Chasing the Light, is at Riot Material

Oliver Stone’s Chasing the Light Chronicles the Great Director’s Journey Against a Raging Historical Backdrop

Reviewed by Alci Rengifo Chasing the Light by Oliver Stone Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 352 pp., $25.20 If there is anything the year 2020 has shaken into the very fabric of our imperial society, it’s that nothing ever goes according to plan, rarely is anything absolutely assured. While a biological threat has upended not only our […]

Toyin Ojih Odutola's wonderful exhibition, A Countervailing Theory, at Barbican Centre, London, is reviewed at Riot Material Magazine

Stories of Creation, Stories For Our Time in Toyin Ojih Odutola’s A Countervailing Theory

at The Barbican, London (through 24 Jan 2021) Reviewed by Christopher P Jones Despite what intuition tells us, history is constantly changing. The revision of the past happens all around us and at all times, sometimes perniciously and sometimes for enlightened reasons. For her first exhibition in the UK, Toyin Ojih Odutola has done a brave and […]

Driving Whle Black, two books reviewed at Riot Material

Segregation on the Highways: A Review of Driving While Black and Overground Railroad

by Sarah A. Seo Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights by Gretchen Sorin Liveright, 332 pp., $28.95 Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America by Candacy Taylor Abrams, 360 pp., $35.00 The New York Review of Books In 1963, after Sam Cooke was […]

A review of Sontag: Here Life and Work is at Riot Material

Losing the Writer in the Personality: A Review of Sontag: Her Life and Work

Reviewed by Michael Gorra Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser Ecco, 816 pp., $39.99 New York Review of Books Susan Sontag began to read philosophy and criticism as a teenager at North Hollywood High, when she still signed her editorials in the school newspaper as “Sue.” She read Kant and La Rochefoucauld, Oswald […]

Darkness Half Visible In Katya Apekina’s The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish

Reviewed by John Biscello The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish by Katya Apekina Two Dollar Radio, 353pp., $12.74 Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall Humpty Dumpty had a great fall; All the king’s horses and all the king’s men Couldn’t put Humpty together again In the name of nursery rhyme remixology, first let us […]

Heads of the Colored People, by Nafissa Thompson-Spires, is reviewed at Riot Material

Histories of Trauma in Heads of the Colored People

Reviewed by Patrick Lohier Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires Thorndike Press, 293pp., $32.99 Harvard Review In Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s debut short story collection, Heads of the Colored People, a doctor suggests that an adolescent girl’s sudden and overwhelming bout of hyperhidrosis is caused by anxiety, and then asks, “Is there a history of trauma?” […]

Lord Krishna speaks to Prince Arjuna about the Gita

Eknath Easwaran’s Lucid, Scholarly and Ever-Timely Preface to the Bhagavad Gita

The Bhagavad Gita Translated by Eknath Easwaran Vintage Books, 122pp., $15.00 Many years ago, when I was still a graduate student, I traveled by train from central India to Simla, then the summer seat of the British government in India. We had not been long out of Delhi when suddenly a chattering of voices disturbed my reverie. I asked […]

A review of Kevin Young's Brown is at Riot Material

To Inter Your Name in Earth: a Review of Kevin Young’s Brown

Reviewed by Kevin T. O’Connor Brown: Poems by Kevin Young Knopf, 176pp., $19.29 Harvard Review In The Book of Hours, his 2011 collection, Kevin Young moved from elegiac responses to the sudden death of his father to reanimating poems on the birth of his son. His new collection, Brown, reverses the trajectory, beginning with “Home Recordings,” […]

Dispatch: Poems, by Cameron Awkward-Rich

Bloom how you must, wild: a Review of Dispatch, by Cameron Awkward-Rich

Reviewed by Flora Field Dispatch by Cameron Awkward-Rich Persea, 80pp., $12.69 Columbia Journal In poetry, a body becomes not just a vehicle through which we move about the world, but the lens from which we write that experience. What does it then mean to comment on the world from a body that exists at the […]

The Monument to Joe Louis, aka "The Fist," as sculpted by Robert Graham

Relic as Horrific Remembrance in the Monument to Joe Louis

by Max King Cap “My father was a little headstrong, my mother was a little armstrong. The Headstrongs married the Armstrongs, and that’s why darkies were born.” — Rufus T. Firefly, Duck Soup, 1933 He had done it before. One can readily find the photographs of his handiwork; two human torsos, headless, the legs amputated just below […]

Cornel West and his 2001 Preface to Race Matters: "Democracy Matters in Race Matters." At Riot Material.

Cornel West’s “Democracy Matters in Race Matters”

Preface to the 25th Anniversary Edition to Race Matters Race Matters by Cornel West Beacon Press, 110pp., $11.60 Black people in the United States differ from all other modern people owing to the unprecedented levels of unregulated and unrestrained violence directed at them. No other people have been taught systematically to hate themselves — psychic violence […]

Another Week in the Death of America

Samantha Fields, American Dreaming at LSH CoLab, Los Angeles Reviewed by Eve Wood The first verse of the Mamas and the Papas seminal 1960’s anthem California Dreamin’ begins with “all the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey,” at once establishing an atmosphere devoid of color, hope and youthful abandon, and certainly not a […]

Through the Lens of Race, and Jim Crow South, in Eudora Welty's photographs

Reckoning Race in Eudora Welty’s Photographs

by James McWilliams Two portraits; two men. Both are from 1930s Mississippi. The men are situated together, photos 22 and 23, both from Eudora Welty’s only published book of photographs, simply titled Photographs. If you could put a frame around both images it would be the Jim Crow South.

Kara Walker's Fons Americanus (2019) at Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern

A Gathering Of Ruins, And Simmering Consciousness, In Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus

in Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London by Zadie Smith Kara Walker: Hyundai Commission edited by Clara Kim Tate Publishing, 144pp., $24.95 New York Review of Books Two women are bound at the waist, tied to each other. One is a slim, white woman, in antebellum underskirt and corset. A Scarlett O’Hara type. She is […]

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