New York Fall Exhibition Preview

Courtesy The Bronx Museum of the Arts

Quisqueya Henríquez, “Bumpers” (2006)

NY Fall Exhibition Preview

El Museo’s Bienal: The (S) Files 007

El Museo del Barrio
July 25, 2007–Jan. 6, 2008

Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art

Brooklyn Museum
Aug. 31, 2007–Jan. 27, 2008

Here Is New York: Remembering 9/11/01

New-York Historical Society
Sept. 11, 2007–Jan. 1, 2008

Camille Pissarro: Impressions of City and Country

The Jewish Museum
Sept. 16, 2007–Feb. 3, 2008

The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Sept. 18, 2007–Jan. 6, 2008

Richard Prince: Spiritual America

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Sept. 28, 2007–Jan. 9, 2008

Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love

Whitney Museum of American Art
Oct. 11, 2007–Feb. 3, 2008

Georges Seurat: The Drawings

Museum of Modern Art
Oct. 28, 2007–Jan. 17, 2008

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Found in Translation
El Museo del Barrio, the only museum in New York to focus exclusively on Latino and Latin American art, used to find itself with a felicitous problem: Every year hundreds of unsolicited artworks would appear on its doorstep.

What to do with them? In 1999 the museum decided to devote an annual show to exposing the best works from this unseen trove of local artists. In 2005 “The (S) Files” became a biennial. This year’s installment, on view through January 6, 2008, is the largest to date, with a total of 51 artists.

Working with E. Carmen Ramos of the Newark Museum, Elvis Fuentes of El Museo trolled through the archives and scouted beyond the submissions. “We have an archive here of hundreds of artists,” says Fuentes. The curators settled on 46 New York–based artists hailing from Mexico, Venezuela, Cuba, and Brazil, as well as Latin American transplants from Israel, Paris, and Milan. An additional five from Ecuador, this year’s guest country, round out the group.

Among the works, Fuentes and Ramos saw common themes emerge. Some artists reference the hyperreality of the contemporary culture of violence and war, often in relation to the theme of masculinity. Javier Piñón, from Miami, created collages of cowboys hanging from chandeliers and balancing precariously on stacks of chairs, poking fun at an übermasculine archetype.

Labor, immigration, and identity also come up, as does a thread concerning language and communication. César Cornejo, from Peru, best captures the idea with a series of plain light bulbs. Those connected directly to an outlet shine the brightest, while those strung together grow dim. “I think it’s a beautiful metaphor about what is lost in translation,” Fuentes says. “It’s very beautiful and it’s very simple at the same time.”

Demystifying the Caribbean
This fall, Brooklyn, home to New York’s largest community of Caribbean-Americans, hosts the most important exhibition of contemporary art from the region since “Caribbean Art Now” at London’s Commonwealth Institute in 1986. "Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art,” on view through January 27, 2008, at the Brooklyn Museum, brings together more than 80 works made by 45 emerging and established artists within the past six years.

“Our mission is to represent cultural representations from across the world,” says Tumelo Mosaka, curator of the exhibition. “It’s an urgent message for us.” Not surprisingly, much of this message concerns the Caribbean nations’ shared legacy of colonialism. Jean-Ulrick Désert, a Haitian artist now dividing his time between New York and Berlin, draped four mannequins with the flags of former colonial powers for his installation Burqa Project: On the Border of My Dreams I Encountered My Double’s Ghost (2002). Hew Locke, who was raised in Guyana and now lives in London, fashioned El Dorado (2005), a dynamic sculpture of Queen Elizabeth II, from bits of metal, plastic, and other materials.

“All these artists have a sense of being fixed within a particular geographic location,” Mosaka notes. Yet they’re struggling to reshape identity in the face of stereotypes manufactured by the tourism industry and other sources, he says. “The tourist industry has pretty much portrayed an image of how we understand the Caribbean, so this exhibition, it tries to demystify that.”

A diptych series by Cuban-born Quisqueya Henríquez, who now lives in the Dominican Republic, contrasts the Caribbean ideal envisioned by tourists with the reality of poverty experienced by many residents of the islands. Her work can also be seen at the Bronx Museum’s “Quisqueya Henríquez: The World Outside,” the artist’s first major U.S. survey, through January 27, 2008.

Out of the Ashes
On 9/11, one emotion all New Yorkers may have shared was an urgent need to do something. Some spent the entire day wandering the city, looking for a place to donate blood, only to find the blood banks so crowded that workers were forced to turn people away.

The same energy that compelled a solitary city to embrace community—whether by volunteering or consoling a stranger—fueled a project called “Here Is New York: Remembering 9/11/01.” writer Michael Shulan first envisioned the photography exhibition at his Prince Street storefront as a way to raise money for charity. Together with friends, he announced an open call for submissions just days after the attacks. Early on, the group decided the exhibition would be democratic, with amateur snapshots displayed alongside the work of professional photographers.

Shulan and his friends produced the photos on an inkjet printer and hung them from wire with paper clips. To raise money, they sold copies for $25 each. Soon the somber exhibition became a kind of pilgrimage. Visitors from all over the city and country came to pay their respects before images of people running from a wall of ash, firefighters wiping smoke from their eyes, and “Have you seen this person?” photos taped to lampposts in the desperate search for lost husbands, sons, daughters, and wives.

Now long gone from Prince Street, “Here Is New York” is returning to the city, opening at the New-York Historical Society on September  11 and running through January 1, 2008, in commemoration of the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Installed the same way they were downtown, without wall labels, 1,300 photos are accompanied by video and audio recordings of survivors, family members, and recovery workers, as well as a few carefully chosen objects collected by the museum. A fragment of airplane landing gear salvaged from the towers, a smashed clock with the hands frozen at 9:04—each is a powerful reminder of that day.

The Father of Impressionism
Among the Impressionists, Camille Pissarro always stood out. Born in St. Thomas, in what was then the Danish Virgin Islands, to a Sephardic Jewish family, he moved to Paris as a youngn man, against his parents’ wishes. There he studied under the Barbizon realists and stayed ahead of the curve by painting the countryside on the outskirts of the city en plein air.

In 1874, ready to buck the staid Parisian academy, Pissarro collaborated with Monet, Renoir, Degas, and others to form the first Impressionist exhibition. He was the only artist who would go on to exhibit in all eight of the Impressionist shows. “A core of his philosophy was to work outside of the confines of the Parisian establishment,” notes Karen Levitov, curator of “Camille Pissarro: Impressions of City and Country” at the Jewish Museum. “He was very committed to this group.”

While Pissarro is celebrated for his landscapes, he also created more cityscapes than any other Impressionist. Both sets of work were informed by his radical political beliefs—sympathy for anarchism and passionate concern about the plight of the poor.

Throughout a career that spanned several decades, the artist never fell into a rut or settled into a comfortable, easily reproducible style, as some would accuse his peers of doing. “Pissarro was constantly experimenting with technique,” says Levitov, “unlike Monet, who found a style that was profitable to him and continued to  paint in that style.”

By the time Seurat, Signac, and others were developing Neo-Impressionism, Pissarro was again a leader among the trend-setters. He also served as a mentor to younger artists such as Paul Gauguin and Paul Cézanne. In his later years, he was such a patriarchal figure, in fact, that he became known among his peers as Herr Pissarro, or the Father of Impressionism. See this under-recognized innovator’s works through February 3, 2008.

The Met Goes Dutch
With a collection boasting five of the 35 Vermeer paintings in existence, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has long held bragging rights when it comes to Dutch masters. This fall, it gets a chance to show off. To commemorate the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt’s birth, the museum is rolling out its entire collection of Dutch Renaissance paintings, widely considered the best outside Europe.

Consider the numbers: The Met holds 20 paintings by Rembrandt, 11 by Frans Hals, and a total of 228 works, including such masterpieces as Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Jug (early 1660s) and Jan Steen’s The Dissolute Household (c. 1665). Usually only a fraction of these rich holdings are on display at one time.

“The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” on view through January 6, 2008, offers fans of exquisite 17th-century realism plenty to feast their eyes on. But the exhibition may be of even greater interest to visitors who are interested in the museum’s institutional history, with the artworks arranged according to their approximate order of acquisition.

Many came from millionaires such as William Vanderbilt and J. P. Morgan, financial titans who were eager to give their legacy to the first world-class public collection in New York. “They were consciously building a museum comparable to those in London and Paris,” notes Walter Liedtke, a curator in the Met’s Department of European Paintings and an organizer of the exhibition. “A good number of American collectors bought things with the intention of donating all of them to the Metropolitan.”

Ultimately, the exhibition is a lesson in “how one of the best collections of Dutch paintings was formed,” Liedtke says; it’s a mysterious process that visitors seldom see. In conjunction with the show, the Met also presents “Drawings and Prints from Holland’s Golden Age: Highlights from the Collection,” featuring works by 17th-century artists including Rembrandt, Adriaen van Ostade, and Jacob van Ruisdael, through December 17, 2007.

A Rebel Rephotographer
If the art market is the measure of a contemporary artist’s worth, the more than $1 million price tag on Richard Prince’s Untitled (Cowboy) (1989) at a 2005 Christie’s auction might be a good indication of where Prince stands today. The sum was illuminating not just because it was the highest price ever paid at auction for a photograph at the time, but also because it revealed how Prince’s work had fundamentally altered the landscape of contemporary art.

The artist produced Untitled (Cowboy) by simply taking out a camera and photographing a Marlboro advertisement. Prince had been doing the same thing since 1977, when he first snapped pictures of photographs that appeared in the New York Times and touched off a hailstorm in the art community about what an artist can claim as his or her own.

Further outcry ensued when Prince “rephotographed” a picture of tenyear- old Brooke Shields standing naked in a bathtub in 1983. Called Spiritual America, a title Prince borrowed from Alfred Stieglitz’s 1923 photo of a castrated horse, the image remains his most controversial work.

It’s appropriate, then, that the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum chose to name the most comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s work to date “Richard Prince: Spiritual America.” Prince worked closely with Nancy Spector, the museum’s chief curator, to assemble key examples from his most influential series, including the “Cowboys,” “Girlfriends,” and “Upstates” sets of appropriated photos; “Jokes” text paintings; “Nurses” digitized and painted pulp fiction covers; and “Hood” muscle car sculptures.

The selection reveals the precision with which Prince has zeroed in on the underbelly of American culture. He examines our obsession with fame, fascination with rebellion, and voyeuristic appreciation for the tawdry and illicit.

See “Spiritual America” through January 9.

Believe the Hype
In an art world often dismissed as elitist and insular, few artists manage to become mainstream cultural figures. Kara Walker, named one of the “100 most influential people in the world” by Time magazine this year, is one of the rare exceptions.

Since earning an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994, Walker has dealt brashly and unapologetically with the legacy of slavery. You Do (1993–94) sets the tone for much of her later work. The black paper silhouette depicts two African-American women clad in grass skirts manipulating doll-sized figures, including a man in plantation-era coattails and a top hat. By subverting the genteel 18th-century art of paper silhouette, Walker plays on grotesque stereotypes in stark black-and-white.

“She has created an aesthetic form—a visual language,” says Philippe Vergne, one of the organizers of “Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love,” on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art from October 11 through February 3, 2008. That language is elaborated to an unprecedented extent in the exhibition, the first American museum survey of Walker’s work. Whether using shadow puppetry, light projection, or animation, each of Walker’s pieces narrates her ambiguous tales of romance, sadism, oppression, and liberation.

Her 1997 watercolor Do You Like Crème in Your Coffee and Chocolate in Your Milk? envisions black and white bodies packed in a slave ship in sexually compromising positions. Though, as in many of her pieces, it’s hard to tell who’s exploiting whom. The work is one example, Vergne says, of Walker’s ability to tackle race, sexuality, and violence all in one carefully aimed shot.

As for Walker’s new designation as one of the most influential artists of our time, believe the hype, Vergne says: “When someone sees Kara’s work, nobody leaves the room intact.”

The exhibition, which premiered at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis earlier this year, travels to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, from February 17 through May 11, 2008.

Point of Departure
What does an artist renowned for pushing the limits of paint and color theory produce when he puts simple black lines to paper?

According to Jodi Hauptman, curator of “Georges Seurat: The Drawings,” at the Museum of Modern Art, “some of the most spectacular drawings from the 19th century.”

Most art lovers know Seurat for carefully executed Pointillist paintings, in which the artist was interested in mixing colors in the eye rather than on paper, but few have seen his equally meticulous drawings. Not content merely to sketch, Seurat layered thick black conté crayon on creamy white paper to produce luminous portraits of turn-of-the-century Paris. “They are kind of dark and mysterious,” says Hauptman. “They have a cold, white, evocative quality.”

Seurat took his drawings just as seriously as the work he produced with a brush. In 1888, he exhibited eight drawings alongside his monumental paintings at the Salon des Indépendants.

Now MoMA has organized a comprehensive exhibition of his drawings, the first in nearly 25 years, on view from october 28 through
January 17, 2008. Seurat’s renderings of circus performers, popular concert halls, and the “no-man’sland” of factories surrounding the
French capital are normally stashed away for preservation. But here they get the full treatment next to a small selection of the artist’s oil sketches and paintings.

“We’re just so excited to have them here,” says Hauptman, marveling at the range of more than 135 works, which have come from as far away as France, Switzerland, and Japan. The exhibition spans Seurat’s oeuvre— from his academic sketches to studies for monumental Pointillist canvases such as the renowned A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884–86).

Perhaps most exciting of all, visitors will get to flip through the artist’s four existing sketchbooks—virtually, that is. The museum has scanned hundreds of pages to bring these fragile, little-known masterworks to the public.

The Short List
From quirky wrapping paper with images of trash from the Dominican Republic’s beaches to a basketball gutted and turned into a woman’s purse, Quisqueya Henríquez never fails to produce work with inventiveness, humor, and a pointed message. Despite such talent, this midcareer Cuban-Dominican artist has flown largely under the radar in the United States until now. “Quisqueya Henríquez: The World Outside” at the Bronx Museum is the artist’s first major museum survey in the U.S. See it through January 27.

In a unique alliance, New York University’s Grey Art Gallery has teamed up with the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas to bring together one of the most comprehensive overviews of Latin American geometric abstraction ever seen this side of the Rio Grande. “The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Abstract Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection” focuses on how the form evolved from the 1930s through the 1970s in key cities like Montevideo, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Caracas. On view through December 8.

Gabriel de Saint-Aubin chronicled French life at the height of the Enlightenment, painting and drawing the city’s architecture, theaters, Salons, and domestic life with equal vigor and charming flourish. Beloved by connoisseurs of 18th-century French art, his name is nearly unknown in other circles. That was unacceptable to the Louvre, which, together with The Frick Collection, is presenting a long-overdue survey of his paintings, etchings, and drawings, “Gabriel de Saint-Aubin (1724–1780),” through January 27.

Though isolated in the last, troubled years of his life, Vincent van Gogh sustained his friendship with artist and poet Émile Bernard through correspondence. Now 20 of Van Gogh’s own revealing letters are on display in “Painted with Words: Vincent van Gogh’s Letters to Émile Bernard” at the Morgan Library and Museum. These never-before-exhibited letters—complete with sketches and descriptions of some of the artist’s most important works—are shown alongside 22 paintings, drawings, and watercolors that the two artists exchanged or discussed. Through January 6.