No offense to September, it was fun. I even added a couple of shows to the running for my end-of-year list. But November seems better, bringing with it a welcome seriousness. And Thursday’s crop of openings—the handful I managed to get to—were, overall, more my thing: a mix of old and new, often side by side, sensitively curated, from institutional shows (at MoMA PS1 and the Leslie-Lohman Museum) to an unexpected pairing of artists by SoHo newcomer Pietro Alexander.
In Chelsea, two painters, the young Tschabalala Self and the late Robert H. Colescott, though at different galleries (Petzel and Gladstone, respectively), seemed to be in a passionate conversation about color and the figure—a connection I made not only because I saw their shows one after the other, dodging the neighborhood’s opening-night crowds. No, I didn’t stand on line for Yoshitomo Nara’s Zwirner debut because, well, I guess I’m a terrible snob. But here’s my take on what I did see.
“Hard Art”
MoMA PS1 | 22-25 Jackson Avenue
Through Mar. 15
My day started in Long Island City, on the first open-to-the-public day of “Hard Art,” the eagerly anticipated survey of Black abstraction at MoMA PS1, organized by director Connie Butler. Spanning nearly six decades—from artists like Sam Gilliam, Howardena Pindell, and Senga Nengudi to those of subsequent generations, including Torkwase Dyson, Charisse Pearlina Weston, and Hannah Black—the exhibition is difficult to discuss in brief, and the Critics’ Table plans to cover it at length very soon (watch this space). But I will say that I was glad to be there the morning after the press preview and reception, when the galleries were relatively empty, and I could get a good view of not only the works, but also the wall labels. With the art arranged unchronologically, crystallizing into moments of perhaps serendipitously chiming works, as well as instances of direct citation or homage, it’s easy to get turned around on the timeline.
Mostly separate from the issues raised by this major show, yet inspired by them, I was thinking about the almost reflexive curatorial impulse to exhibit contemporary art with historical work, whether intermingled (as in “Hard Art”) or segregated (as in the Guggenheim’s “Pop: 1960 to Now”). Is it to make a bid to the viewer (or collector) that the older work “looks contemporary” (a compliment suggesting it has stood the test of time, or, even better, that it was ahead of its time)? Is it to find or force a lineage when the belief in an art-historical conversation, sustained over decades, into the present, is untenable?
Jarrett Earnest squirms a little when I question him to this effect over mocktails at Soho’s La Mercerie: He’s presently selecting contemporary work to include alongside, or nearby, that of one of his obsessions, the undersung Romanian-born New York School artist Hedda Sterne (1910–2011) in a London gallery show. Yeah, why curate this way? Good question: None of the artists he’s considering can, by any stretch, be seen as directly influenced by Sterne. But, still, there are formal and conceptual affinities; maybe that’s reason enough to curate such a hybrid thing.
Charlie Engelman & Peter Alexander
Pietro Alexander | 59 Wooster, 2nd Fl.
Through Jan. 7
We’ve just come from an old/new pairing that, if nothing else, looks fantastic, united by a particularly sexy surface. Charlie Engelman’s precise, flocked objects (made this year) call out to Peter Alexander’s looser, black velvet paintings (from 1980–85), in the adjoining room. Jarrett and I snuck in early to the gallery, just before the opening, where Pietro himself was smoothing, with a hand steamer, père Alexander’s large-scale compositions. These sumptuous “Velvets” (as the show is titled) capture, to a degree, the depth of field perceived while in a glass-bottom boat. Pietro’s father is the artist Peter Alexander, associated with the Southern California Light and Space movement of the 1960s and ’70s, so, there’s a lovely twist here, with these almost unknown works: The artist seems to have defected to the invented solo movement that might be called Darkness and Space, inspired in part by, Pietro says, the paintings in Mexican restaurants.
Often, in these, it’s regular old painted brushstrokes that sit on the surface (optically speaking) while other elements, such as glitter, tulle, and cotton-print fabric, form the creatures or plants we want to dive in to see. The paintings absolutely “look contemporary”—they could have been made today—and I guess they were before their time in the sense that no one was interested, per Pietro, in the ’80s.
Meanwhile, Engelman’s luxe objects in the first room tell a different, non-aquatic story, one about finish (he works in LA), recalling, with the flocked stuff, designs for scratch-free jewelry display, or matte animal statuettes, abstracted. Among the group of varied, chic, smart sculptures are also ultra-smooth old-growth redwood objects made in “replica and homage,” according to the press release. They are based not on anything Alexander-related, though, but rather on Louise Bourgeois’s worktable and Ken Price’s ceramic banding wheels.
“PROPS from Barakei: Eikoh Hosoe and Jason Wee”
Leslie-Lohman Museum | 26 Wooster Street
Through Mar. 14
Jason Wee, who works between New York and Singapore, had a super fraught historical assignment for this show, responding to an ideologically complicated (dare I recuperate the term “problematic” here, for shorthand?) body of work in the museum’s collection. Exquisite prints from Eikoh Hosoe’s cult photographic series “Barakei (Ordeal by Roses),” 1961–62, images of the Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima shot at his Spanish colonial-style home in Tokyo, encircle the gallery’s purple walls. (In 1970, the quixotic fascist Mishima died by seppuku after calling for the revision of Japan’s postwar constitution and restoration of the Emperor’s divine status.)
There is much symbolic and formal content to read in Hosoe’s incredible images—of Mishima as St. Sebastian and Adam in the Garden of Eden, or lying restrained inside a length of coiled garden hose—and the show is worth visiting for this suite of photographs (and the accompanying archival material in vitrines) alone. Wee’s sculptural response—a wall-based cruciform draped with green rope—which, we learned during his introductory remarks at the preview, is just as densely symbolic, may take a repeat visit to appreciate. That said, the conceit of the show, the pairing of a contemporary queer artist with a body of vintage work, makes yet another kind of sense: It “activates” the collection (does it?) and supports a living artist via a commission (it does).
Raúl de Nieves
Company | 145 Elizabeth Street
Through Dec. 19
We walked over to Elizabeth Street next, to Company, somehow avoiding the rain, for Raúl de Nieves’s opening of “The Sword, the Horse, and the Silence.” (This show is the wild wildcard that doesn’t conform to my theme.) There, a satisfying denouement (it seems) of the artist’s two-decade-plus preoccupation with the story of St. George and the dragon awaited in the form of the serpent, not just slain by the martyr, but served up in five pieces with the artist’s signature glittering crust. Artist Every Ocean Hughes was admiring the visible ends of the segments, showing a grisly/ornate cross-section of the monster, which featured a pale center of bone-white beads.
Everyone coveted a piece of the dragon, and I imagined it separated, each part sent to a different home, like the broken heart of a friendship bracelet waiting to be reunited, times five. (In fact, Ribbon, 2026, is a single, five-part sculpture). At the entrance to the show, a pearly carousel horse sculpture, dotted with doily-like florets, blocks the bauble-y carnage, so as not to spoil the drama of the dissected dragon. Along the right-hand wall, a group of 2-D abstractions (as opposed to de Nieves’s figurative, acetate “stained glass” works) signal a new approach to the artist’s long-simmering theme: St. George and his horse are inexhaustible subjects, even if the dragon has, at least for now, expired.
Tschabalala Self
Petzel | 520 West 25th Street
Through Jan. 30
I cabbed alone across town to Petzel for Tschabalala Self’s packed opening, where the top margins of giant canvases were visible above the heads of the crowd. Not a departure from her previous subject matter, “Tools of Worship” (as her solo debut with the gallery is titled) extends the painter’s themes and elaborates on the enclosed, mythic space occupied by her (usually) femme figures. They are posing bodies, maybe nude—it’s hard to tell since their limbs, torsos, butts, etc. are either composed of, or clothed in, found textiles—situated in “empty” fields of color. In a few works here, buttery yellow backgrounds hug her patchwork figures with a gently exposing, even light. Though that wouldn’t explain the contradictory directions of the shadows of In Creation, 2026, which features two beings.
Perhaps attuned by “Hard Art” to the rich history of Black artists using and reusing fabric, I was thinking beyond the realm of quilting with regard to her sewn-and-painted mixed-media works, to artists like David Hammons and Rodney McMillian, or to an artist like Suzanne Jackson who uses everything. And I was impressed, as always, with Self’s ability to walk right up to the line of caricature with her exaggerated body parts (and wayward, pointing, or gesticulating breasts) to recast those brash features as indicators of undefined or undisclosed powers.
Color and texture are consummately, inseparably used, in unphotographable ways (I tried and failed to capture a detail I loved, where that butter-hued paint abuts burgundy velvet), and that ability was my great takeaway from the show—I felt almost drunk from it as I made my way around the block.
Robert H. Colescott
Gladstone | 515 West 24th Street
Through Dec. 19
“Cairo,” a sparse-but-so-what installation of figurative work—like Self’s paintings, decidedly not portraiture—on the next street extended the buzz: It’s another show singing with color (well, in the front gallery). During Colescott’s years in Cairo, or rather “before, during, and after” his time there (per the press release), from 1964 to 1968, he produced works ranging from brown monochromes to ultra-vibrant, jaw-dropping canvases that look, at first glance, like exercises in using only pure primary and secondary colors, but are, on closer study, much more complex. Made in a period just predating the earliest works in “Hard Art,” when his experiments in figuration verged on pure abstraction (the amazing, slashing ODE to the Sun, 1968, gives a sunbeam a face, but that’s all), the works here are some of his last before his turn to a more narrative, satirical approach to Blackness and race in art history. That particular fork in the road was on my mind as I headed home Thursday night.
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