Art Catch Up: New York

Wandering and wondering

I’ve been having a hard time getting back into a regular cadence with posts since I paused in August for vacation. I wrote every week without fail from November through July, then…lost my stride. Admittedly, this is a disruptive time. I’ve moved back into my house after a long renovation and now there are a lot of pieces to pick up. Thanks for your patience—

This week I’ll catch up with some of my recent art visits. I hope you find these interesting, even when you can’t see the shows yourself. In order of appearance¹:

• The Campus in Claverack, New York. In July I went to see a newly opened gallery space upstate that was set in an abandoned elementary school. The building and grounds were really the highlight. The New York City gallerists who bought the campus now use it as both storage and exhibit space, and they left it mostly as it was. The art is hung in school hallways, locker rooms, and science labs. There’s a palpable feeling of recognition as you move through the spaces— even if you didn’t attend a school like that (and there’s a uniformity to American school layout and architecture) it is probably an iconic space you’ve seen in films. I loved the Robert Rauschenberg displayed on a blackboard and the choreographed “Track Assignment” by William Forsythe outside on a sports field, which led the viewer through a complicated series of “laps” around a track with goal posts. It slyly parodied the randomness of school assignments with their specific rules and also let you get away with something: “Within the assignment, the suggested actions may be substituted with any achievable action.” Overall, the Campus made you look at the material world differently: is that an electrical box or an art work? It made you wonder.

• Steven Harvey Gallery on the Lower East Side. I started out there this past Saturday to see Lennart Anderson’s “Jupiter and Antiope” (extended until October 19th). My father and Anderson had both moved to New York City in the 1950s via the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and both had worked at Kulicke Frames. I had seen Anderson’s retrospective at the Studio School several years ago, then a few more at the Vision & Art show at the National Art Club this spring. This was a rare chance to see another painting, and I had been struck and impressed by how his daughter

  Eliza Anderson
  had put herself in dialogue with it in a recent Substack post. While at the gallery, I ended up having a long and interesting conversation with the gallery owner, who told me about his aunt Anne Harvey and her art career in Paris in the 1930s and 1940s. It made me think that I should see more art by myself to spark more such serendipitous conversations. I bought the catalog and intend to read more about her.

  

• “Make Way for Berthe Weill” at New York University’s Grey Art Museum (October 1, 2024- March 1, 2025). Also serendipitously, on my way uptown to the Rauschenberg Foundation I stopped to see the relocated and renamed Grey Art Museum. When I taught at NYU the gallery faced west to Washington Square Park; now it faces east to Cooper Square. It’s a lovely, well-sized space, and this exhibit was an ideal segue from my conversation about Anne Harvey in Paris by introducing me to a Parisian woman gallerist I had never heard of: Berthe Weill. Weill was an early supporter of modernists like Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, and Valadon in the early twentieth century, until her gallery was forced to close at the outbreak of World War II. The exhibit demonstrates her extraordinary life and impact through a wide range of paintings and documents. I love the title of the show, which seems to echo the sass of Weill’s memoir, Pow! Right in the Eye! Thirty Years Beyond the Scenes of Modern French Painting.

• Finally, I ended the day at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, which is showing “Signs and Signals” at their building in NoHo on a few Saturdays this fall: October 5, November 2, and December 7th, by appointment. It was a small show of collages and kinetic works from the 1960s to the 1980s, ending in a strangely solemn chapel in the back of the building. The work seemed designed to be playful though and I most enjoyed the large light boxes of transparent colored screens that could be layered up and down like window shades. They jump out in three dimensions, awash in patterns and vivid color.

Is there a theme here, a red thread running through these paragraphs? Delight, I hope. The delight of discovery.

I will end by coming full circle back to a show I saw earlier this summer and wrote about in a July art round up: Susan Weil’s retrospective at the JDL Gallery, also on the Lower East Side. Weil was briefly married to Rauschenberg and their work shares an interest in transparency and motion. I attended a talk on Monday on her life and career (she is still making art at age 94!), which described her daily practice of art and writing. There’s another theme, perhaps, here: women making space for their own work and words— and families coming to terms with artistic legacies.

I will work on returning to a more reliable rhythm soon. In the meantime, thank you sincerely for reading!

1. I am puzzled, by the way, that I can no longer adjust the size of these photos I’m embedding. They now come with more editing options, but not sizing. I am probably missing something. I don’t mean them to be so huge.