New York (13)

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An Interview

Juliet Helmke: I visited your works a few times at Surviving Sandy, but it always took me a while to get close enough, I had to wait for a moment that was completely my own. I heard a lot of people discussing where they had been painted, and a fair number of visitors, not seeing…

Cast in Metal

The storm had subsided only recently. The gaping holes in those skeletal furnishings, coated with a sheen of silver as if still soaked with moisture from the floodwater, are tell-tale signs of recent damage. It was only yesterday that someone was sitting in that chair, talking to a friend who was snuggled in the nook…

47 Catherine; By the F Train

Language comes rockishly alive in New York’s streets. In Chinatown, where Wendy White lives, language for the hanzi-illiterate is phenomenally present. White doesn’t derive the words that adorn her canvases from the Chinese signage that, to Latinate-accustomed eyes, look so multitudinous and vibrant. But one does become more aware of text when seeing the profusion…

Untitled (Unique Color Polaroids)

There is a tragic element, as despite all the attempts at engendering an image that matches a mental picture, the woman underneath the clothes and behind the skin remains a mystery to us and to herself. The perfect projection of the internal imagined self, if it exists, only does so for the duration of the…

Manhattan-pie, with a side of scab-rats

In a review of Bruce High Quality Foundation’s Empire in 2009, Maxwell Heller wrote that the exhibition had tackled issues such as “cultural poverty, urban sterility, and the dawn of the post-American era” with the usual stamp of burlesque-ness one has come to expect from most BHQF works. Looking at Pizzatopia in the Come Together:…

Walden

People say “once an adult, twice a child” as a pejorative for aging but Jonas Mekas has always possessed a child-like curiosity that has propelled his remarkable approach to filmmaking. Mekas is now 91 but in his nearly seven decades of making films, photos, collages, and performances, the artist never succumbed to the deadening of…

MapQuest: Connecting the Art World

New York artist Loren Munk’s paintings depict the art world as a series of maps and thought-bubbles. In an interview with Phong Bui, co-founder of the Brooklyn Rail and curator of Surviving Sandy, Munk cites a job at Utrecht Art Supplies as the opportunity that began his research into the connection between the New York…

The Anonymous Color of the Universe

Certain lines from Wallace Stevens’s great elegy for George Santayana, To an Old Philosopher in Rome, capture for me a quality in these paintings by Stanley Whitney: “On the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street / become the figures of heaven.” In his poem Stevens envisions Santayana dying in a Roman hospital, in…

Pollo Pecking

I volunteered at Red Hook and was overwhelmed by the kindness and community created post-Sandy by the people in New York. There were donations of food, cleaning supplies, power outlets, and free Internet to connect to loved ones. Volunteers lined up waiting to help people clean, take apart, and re-build homes, art studios, and businesses….

Red, Yellow, Green

While the titles of Chris Martin’s “Red, Yellow, Green” #1 and #2 seem to be an acknowledgement of—or maybe homage to—Mark Rothko’s famous masterpieces, the paintings themselves resemble a combination of outsider art and Abstract Expressionism. Born in 1954 in Washington, D.C., Martin has also lived for long periods in the Catskills and has been…

Untitled (Cobblestone Constellation)

We hold our monuments to impossible standards. They are to be classical yet contemporary: elegant and consumable. They are to be mythologizing and didactic, telling an inclusive, rousing story. And undoubtedly, they must be grandiose yet meditative, inspiring feelings of both sublime patriotism and inner illumination. There is something of this impossibility in Barney Kulok’s…

Shadows upon Shadows; Between the Waves

Part of the charm of New York City is the alien aspect of much of its setting: still relatively recent in historical terms, this artificial landscape remains a strange scene to behold. Even the trees dotting avenues and small parks are curated, nature now just another tool that we use in our efforts to make…

FOX NEWS

“Hold this,” Nicole Wittenberg says, handing me one end of the measuring tape she is snaking across the room. After some calculation she sets the 8-by-4-foot panel of FOX NEWS I (2014) in front of her open studio doorway and marches me straight back to the other end of the hall: “This is fifty feet;…