Art Round Up: July, NYC
What I've seen and admired this month
This week’s post is a sibling to the one I wrote last month about my encounters with art in New York City. I’m gradually moving back to Brooklyn and really enjoying this re-immersion. I hope my enthusiasm is contagious! Here are some of the my latest forays:
Susan Weil at the JDJ Gallery in Tribeca until July 26th. I first heard about this exhibit through my Women Writing Women’s Lives seminar in June. We had an end of the year luncheon and celebrated the scholars who received Kathy Chamberlain research grants toward their biographical projects. Vanessa Troiano, a doctoral student in art history at CUNY, won a grant for her dissertation on Weil, whose long artistic career has so far been overshadowed by her brief marriage to Robert Rauschenberg in 1950. Now aged 94, Weil is still clearly going strong. The show covers decades of experimentation alongside a steady interest in the body in motion. Her “Walking Figure” (above) charmed me. For more of her personality, see this oral history, which opens with how much fun she and Bob had collecting garbage at Black Mountain College in the late 1940s.
Nell Blaine, “Autobiography,” ca. 1980. Painting within a Painting at Tibor de Nagy on the Lower East Side until July 26th. Founded in 1950, this gallery was known for its association with the artists and poets of the New York School, which overlapped with the period when my father was active in the NYC art world. The exhibit covers the better known Larry Rivers and Rudy Burckhardt but also highlights lovely works by lesser known female contemporaries, like this gem by Nell Blaine. I love the conceit of painting photographs into the still life genre! Blaine’s “Autobiography” is a wonderful collage-like impression of a life in broad strokes and bright colors.
Peter Hujar at the Ukrainian Museum until September 1. This exhibit was a study in contrasts and predates Hujar’s better known career as a member of the downtown art scene in the 1970s and 1980s. Hujar was born into a Ukrainian immigrant family and the museum is a treat in itself in what’s called the Ukrainian Village within the city’s East Village. The signage is completely bilingual and the gift shop overflows with patterned Easter eggs and colorful textiles. Hujar’s early photographs, on the other hand, are black and white exercises in restraint. The portrait of Gillo Pontecorvo above is one of the more engaging, though what really resonates for me is the flatness of the figure against the out of focus background. In another room, Hujar calmly documents the visible dead bodies in the catacombs of Palermo. They are hard to look at, especially when they look back.
Francisc Tosquelles: Avant Garde Pyschiatry and the Birth of Art Brut at the American Folk Art Museum near Lincoln Center until August 18th. My sister found this show on her last day in New York City and we wandered over there as the city entered another heat advisory, rather on a whim. But it turned out to be an amazing web of interconnected ideas about the boundaries of art, history, and mental health. Tosquelles was a Catalan psychiatrist who fled Franco’s regime in 1939 and developed a practice of “institutional psychotheraphy” at the Saint-Alban’s hospital in southwestern France during the Nazi occupation and after. He believed in dissolving medical hierarchies between patient and doctors and encouraging patients’ self-directed work and art-making. The artistic works of Saint-Alban inmates like Auguste Forestier garnered the attention of established artists like Jean Dubuffet, who bought and exhibited the work as Art Brut, or “outsider” art. To cover all this history and the interrelationships between politics and art and psychiatry the exhibit is heavy on exposition, but it manages to convey the complexity of the power dynamics between all these forces— while showcasing many extraordinary examples of the art made at Saint-Alban.
Later that day I doubled up by heading downtown to see Mireia Sallarès’ film The Potential History of Francesc Tosquelles (2021). Described as “halfway between a documentary, speculative fiction, and experimental cinema,” the film was a remarkable account of Tosquelles’s work of resistance across institutions— from mental health treatments to fascist regimes in Spain and France to art world hierarchies. Sallarès interviewed psychiatrists and sex workers and nuns and activists about the possibilities of radical interventions into history by rethinking the roles of women, mental patients, exiles, and other marginalized groups. She regularly interrupted her subjects by cutting to white cards with her own commentary on them. It was fascinating.
I know that most of my readers are nowhere near enough to New York City to benefit from visiting these shows, but I hope the links and images are inspiring anyway. I know that I love to read about what’s on elsewhere. What have you seen recently that you’ve enjoyed, anywhere? Add your own recommendations in the comments. Remember to like, share, and repost, which helps readers find me, and vice versa. Next week I’ll return with more usual programming about my father’s art works and career.
What a rich survey of what is currently going on in my own city! A guide book to what I'll take a look at. Thank you, Victoria!
I was in California for a week just before the Fourth, and had a chance to see the Irving Penn exhibit at the De Young Museum, which was such a pleasure. You are so lucky to have so many options so nearby!