Mimi Gross’ People

If there was an official position for a New York City arts ambassador, Mimi Gross would  be a shoe-in. Gross’ contributions to the history and contemporary discourse around New York City’s cultural scene is both encyclopedic and invaluable. While she shares direct ancestry with a seminal artist –her father Chaim Gross (1904-1991) is one of the most influential American Modernist sculptors– Mimi has created her own original narrative through paint, performance, productivity, and personality.

Mimi Gross, Grand Street Girls, 1963, oil on canvas, 60 x 70 3/16 inches. Courtesy of Eric Firestone Gallery. © 2019 Mimi Gross / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Gross’ artful chronicle is the foundation of her current solo exhibition, Among Friends: 1958-63, at the Eric Firestone Loft in New York City. The paintings, drawings, and film on view support the show’s simple yet descriptive title, and the fact that Mimi Gross has been a catalyst for artistic innovation and camaraderie for over six decades.

Benny Andrews: Illustrator

Draw What You See: The Life and Art of Benny Andrews, 2015 by Kathleen Benson, Clarion Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston & New York

It should be widely known across the art world that Benny Andrews is the ‘Mix-Master.’ Throughout his illustrious career in the visual arts, Andrews has contributed his visionary output to a wide variety of projects and causes. One of these endeavors was illustrating children’s books.

Andrews’ career as an illustrator is the subject of the current exhibition, Benny Andrews, Illustrator, on view at the Morgan County African American Museum in Madison, Georgia.

Humans As Hosts: Activism Against HIV Stigma

Detail of A conversation between Theodore (ted) Kerr, Kairon (kai) Liu, Tree and maybe someone else #100402018, 2018, Kodak C-print, 20 x 24 inches (framed). Courtesy of the artist

Our DNA, the map of our genetic information (our growth, development, functioning, and reproduction), is 99.9% the same for each and every one of the 7+ billion people living on Earth. That said, while we share common genetic bonds, our social, cultural, and emotional experiences are unique. This duality is significantly addressed by two of the foremost figures in developmental psychology: Jean Piaget (1896-1980) and Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934). The research of Piaget and Vygotsky signified that it is a combination of ‘Nature’ and ‘Nurture,’ that accounts for a person’s development. In other words, while we all have the natural ability to learn and develop, how we perceive the world largely depends on our experience and education.

Being that we are so similar in our genetic makeup, yet different due to our cultural uniqueness, the way we address issues that affect health and well – being can be complex and problematic. For example, one of the greatest stigmatized health related issues of the modern era is HIV/AIDS. The fact that HIV is a stigma among civilization is ironic, because a person who is infected can look and feel perfectly fine and may not even know they have the virus for many years. Furthermore, medical breakthroughs have greatly enhanced the prognosis and care for those infected with the virus. With medicine and regimen, an HIV+ person can live a long and healthy life. In spite of all this, cultural perspectives of HIV/AIDS still discriminate against the individuals living with the virus. Judgemental viewpoints and lack of empathy for individuals living with HIV can be far more traumatic and damaging than the actual virus.

If there is one thing that should be made perfectly clear regarding nearly all physiological concerns, it  is that viruses like HIV don’t discriminate and human bodies are ample hosts to these viruses despite a person’s gender, sexual identity, race, or economic status. It is this denial, coupled with sexual and racial biases, that contributes to the greater failure of HIV/AIDS awareness. Society’s struggle to come to terms with the social and cultural issues surrounding HIV/AIDS is clear based on the lack of empathy and understanding for those living with HIV.

The Making of Monsters: An Abuse of Power

Judy Adler, The Making of Monsters

In 2016, I was asked to write an introductory text about a series of recent work by Judy Adler for her solo exhibition titled The Abuse of Power. In light of the troubling current events surrounding Supreme Court Brett Kavanaugh’s alleged abuses on young women and the seminal #MeToo movement in general, I recently returned to the catalogue featuring my essay. It was one of the more challenging pieces I have written. I am publishing a slightly edited version of the original 2016 essay below.

Benny Andrews, The Mix Master

The “Mix Master” himself. Self Portrait, 1962, Ink on paper, 18 x 26 in.

Benny Andrews’ prowess as a master of materials and social and emotional narratives is on display in a current solo exhibition titled Mix Master at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida. The exhibition was realized through the collection of works owned by Edward J. Littlejohn, a renowned expert of African-American legal history.

It is fitting that an outstanding scholar of social justice law would collect works of art by an artist who was steadfastly committed to equality and equity. Benny Andrews represented and re-presented the African-American narrative, most notably through his signature mixed-media collages depicting domestic, economic, political, and social themes. Outside of the studio, Andrews fought on the frontline for the equal representation of black artists in the cultural scene. He co-founded the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), which protested the disproportionate portrayals of black artists by cultural institutions, and created art education programs for marginalized urban youth and for individuals in juvenile detention centers. His work in prisons inspired a national model for youth art programs behind bars. In 1969, Andrews and six other artistic colleagues (Ken Bowman, Peter Dean, Michael Fauebach, Jay Milder, Peter Passuntino, and Nicholas Sperakis) formed Rhino Horn, an art collective that maintained figurative and politically themed art when abstraction and minimalism were trending in in galleries and museums. All of his activist and artistic accomplishments aptly led to his appointment as the Director of the National Endowment for The Arts (1982-84), where he oversaw a powerful platform that advocated for African-American artists who had been largely overlooked by mainstream art circles.

In Mix Master, we are presented with a diverse view of Andrews’ socio-cultural narratives and personal themes from his life as a modern artist. In addition to his expressionistic mixed media works –a combination of paint and found materials such as fabric and burlap– the exhibition features Andrews’ unique contour line drawings, which he created using pen and ink, and some color etchings that demonstrate his skills as an illustrator.

The Conjuring of Colors and Spirit in Aaron Johnson’s New Paintings

Aaron Johnson, who has been continuously pushing the boundaries of painting, presents recent works at Joshua Liner Gallery that highlight his latest innovative painterly technique: stain painting. Previously, Johnson has employed a “reverse-painted acrylic polymer-peel” technique, which consists of multiple painted layers, separated by a clear acrylic polymer, providing captivating spatial dimensions where sleek vibrant colors appear to pop off the canvas plane. Following his reverse-painted acrylic polymer-peel works, Johnson created hybrid combine paintings using an impasto technique of applying acrylic paint over used socks.

Installation photograph of Aaron Johnson: New Paintings. Courtesy of Joshua Liner Gallery.

In his latest body of work, exemplified in the current Joshua Liner Gallery exhibition simply titled New Paintings, Aaron Johnson stuns us with another technical feat by staining raw canvas with highly fluid acrylic paint and summoning up throngs of fantastical figures from within the colorful bursts of pigment. At this point in his career, Johnson’s signature subject matter is easily recognizable. His bestiaries and burlesque scenes, featuring hordes of grotesque figures performing lewd acts and other scenes that would satisfy our nightmares, are a sight to behold and are not for the faint of heart. However, this new selection of paintings feels more ethereal, dreamlike, and pragmatic than anything he’s painted before.

Suggested Viewing/Reading: Portrait Edition

– Ever since the Obama’s portraits were unveiled, there has been a lot of public discourse around their likeness. I recently wrote about how the portraits are important in helping us to experience and connect to our personal/collective identities more repletely. Contemporary art takes time to comprehensively interpret and viewers need to consider the multiple facets and meanings of an artwork when viewing it. The lack of meaningful reflection from many critics of the Barack Obama’s portrait was the basis for Seph Rodney’s article about how many Americans seemingly struggle to engage with art. “The Obama portraits should not be the subjects of hot takes. They are designed to be viewed through the distance of time” writes Chiquita Paschal, who says that the fervor over the paintings shouldn’t come at the expense of critical dialogue.

– Benny Andrews was a great documenter of his era, which included a strong cast of artists, poets, writers, and musicians. Two of Andrews’ portraits featuring his contemporaries will be on view at Forum Gallery in the exhibition titled “Artists By Artists: The Artist as Subject.” The first portrait by Andrews is a mixed media collage and depicts an unidentified poet, while the second portrait, rendered in pen and ink, features the Soyer brothers (Raphael and Moses). The exhibition will be on view through February 24th at 475 Park Avenue at 57th Street.

– Pollock, a play by Fabrice Melquiot, presents a theatrical portrait of Jackson Pollock and his complex relationship with Lee Krasner. However, Paul David Young argues that the play actually upholds the mythos of the ‘heroic male painter’, and does so at the expense of Lee Krasner.

– There is a great profile piece in the New York Times about the San Francisco based artist Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who is the grandson of the founder of the Pakistan Peoples Party (P.P.P.). In his work, which is comprised of visual and performance based methodology, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto “explores the intersection of Islam, sexuality and masculinity.”

 

Kiefer’s Artful Healing

Winter Landscape, 1970, watercolor, gouache, and graphite on paper

Recounting a horrific part of one’s national identity is an excruciating task, more often avoided than addressed directly or repletely. In modern history, Nazi Germany has been a case study of how a contemporary nation heals, reflects, and moves on from the atrocities committed by its previous government. Today, Germany is a pillar of Western Civilization, revered for its economic and social policies. However, the three hundred pound Nazi elephant in the room is still an issue that some of its citizens and elected officials choose to ignore or “deal” with selectively, through banning symbolic references to the Third Reich such as swastikas and Nazi salutes.

Anselm Kiefer’s artwork forces his country to remember how the Nazi’s atrocities violently changed the German cultural landscape during the mid-20th Century. However, instead of appearing didactic and scornful, Kiefer believes that visual art can mend Germany’s sense of pride (or lack there of) for its past. Through his use of Nazi imagery juxtaposed with natural landscapes or cultural relics prior to Hitler’s reign of terror, Kiefer is asking us to question what makes up a nation’s collective cultural identity, and offers a cathartic means for addressing an unforgivable part of  a Germany’s history. The Nazi’s may have appropriated many vital elements of German culture, however, should everything they touched (art, architecture, music, literature, etc.) be deemed non grata in society today? Has banning the symbols and rhetoric that the Nazi’s used, changed the fact that Germany is still struggling with anti-Semitism and white nationalist groups? These are some of the ‘big questions’ Kiefer investigates through his visual art practice, which includes painting, printmaking, installation, and photography. Kiefer’s art counters the collective amnesia regarding Germany’s unfavorable history and digs up its skeletons for us all to reexamine. By doing so we, the viewers, reflect upon our own collective cultural identity. As Americans, do we not have our own cultural demons to coexist with? We have to remember that political correctness often leads to rash censorship, when it may be more effective to meaningfully address sensitive issues outright. Addressing and presenting uncomfortable and sensitive issues is the crux of Kiefer’s artistic process. Therefore, Provocations is a fitting title for his current solo exhibition at the Met Breuer. If political art leaves us yearning to expose, interrogate, and overcome our sense of guilt through empathy and reasoning, then it has been highly effective.

The Gods Must be Savage: Leon Golub’s Raw Expressionism

Gigantomachy II, 1966, oil on linen

Upon entry to the 4th floor gallery at the Met Breuer, where Leon Golub: Raw Nerve is on view, viewers are greeted with the colossal tour de force of the 9 foot, 11 1/2 inches x 24 foot, 10 1/2 inches, unstretched, oil on linen painting titled Gigantomachy II (1966). The larger than life canvas depicts a ferocious battle of nude muscular Olympian gods and giants (the title refers to a battle from Greek Mythology), who through a deliberately rough treatment of paint, appear savagely brutalized. Immediately upon gazing at this work of art, we are given an unapologetic overview of Leon Golub’s career as a Humanist artist whose paintings are a scalding condemnation of the evil that men do.

The 19th-20th century philosopher, George Santayana, stated “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Golub’s paintings are a visual paraphrasing of this statement. Golub was an astute scholar of both world history and art history, however, he viewed the canonical legacy of both through the lens of a skeptic. Golub references the Western canon of art history in paintings like Dead Bird II (1955) and Colossal Torso (1960), but his treatment of Classical imagery is anything but glorious, nor representative of the Democratic label that often accompanies Greco-Roman culture. The rough surface texture on Colossal Torso, realized through a process of layering paint and peeling it away again, is akin to the act of sculpting. Golub even used tools that are more common in a sculptor’s toolkit than a painter’s. His additive and subtractive methods of transforming the surface of the canvas result in an unfinished look or a feeling of decay. The material appearance of these rough canvases typically lends itself to strong visceral and reflective feelings from the viewer. The emotional response is further exemplified through Golub’s use of unsettling and uncomfortable subject matter, which is steeped in a grotesque critique of Western empires that span from the Greco-Roman era through the 21st century.

Joseph Kurhajec: Inside/Outside

While not a consistent member, Joseph Kurhajec was affiliated with the Rhino Horn group on more than one occasion, and displayed his work in some of their exhibitions. He was a longtime friend of the founding members, especially Peter Dean, with whom he co-founded the short-lived “Torque” group, which also included painters Peter Saul and Leon Golub.

Kurhajec, like many of the artists of his generation, was trained in University art programs, and travelled internationally to study the traditional modes of art making. However, Kurhajec’s career trajectory has been anything but traditional. When he first emerged as an artist, whose medium was primarily sculpture, he eschewed the trend of minimalism that had largely prevailed throughout the contemporary art scene of the 1960s. Instead, Kurhajec looked outside of the modern and contemporary art canon and found inspiration and a spiritual connection with the work of African art.  He was particularly interested in the symbolism of power within Nkishi figures, and began to wrap his own works in fabric and fur, or attach objects like nails, metal spikes, and animal horns, in order to express social and emotional connections to the natural and spiritual world. Some of his figures combine human and animal imagery and blur the lines between benevolence and malevolence.