This week in Newly Reviewed, Travis Diehl covers Glenn Ligon and Julius Eastman’s music, Flint Jamison’s robotics and Marc Kokopeli’s unnerving TVs.
Tribeca
Julius Eastman and Glenn Ligon
Through March 22. 52 Walker, 52 Walker Street, Manhattan; 212-727-1961, 52walker.com.
The invective of Glenn Ligon’s tart neon signs — like the word “AMERICA” in reversed text as if seen from behind, or the deadpan “negro sunshine” written in white light — is a staple of the contemporary canon. Versions of both pieces are on view here, along with two new neon works that refer to the writer Toni Morrison and the experimental composer Julius Eastman. They feel dutiful. The show’s energy comes from Eastman, who gets co-billing with Ligon despite having died in 1990.
The show’s title, which includes a racial slur, is borrowed from the title of Eastman’s underground-famous 1979 composition for four pianos.
It’s a blistering panegyric, and it resonates. Not only is the slur scrawled atop a framed copy of Eastman’s score, but it also appears on the David Zwirner website (52 Walker is a Zwirner space), on the catalog propped on the desk and layered in vinyl text on the storefront window. Eastman’s title, part of a series, remains a disorienting linguistic parry, invoking a shadowy racist stereotype, then transforming that fear into power.
The show’s centerpiece is a MIDI version of Eastman’s composition arranged for player pianos. At the top of the hour, three identical glossy black baby grands pluck out dissonant, interwoven tremolos, then crash together for a jagged riff, swelling and pounding for 22 minutes.
The tones are ominous and majestic. But the installation, while organic enough, doesn’t quite match the intensity of Eastman’s original (particularly the 1980 recording from a performance at Northwestern University), probably because player pianos don’t mash their fortissimo to the point of abuse. Without flesh-and-blood performers, shouting and cuing and heaving, the Ligon version is miasmic and pale in comparison, like the electric tick of blinking neons.
There’s a fourth baby grand, too — this one stained brown wood — with no electronics. It sits there, lid open, keys flat, faintly resonating with the other three. Maybe it’s waiting for Eastman.
Lower East Side
Flint Jamison
Through March 8. Miguel Abreu Gallery, 88 Eldridge Street, Manhattan; 212-995-1774, miguelabreugallery.com.
The artist Flint Jamison is known as a founder of Yale Union, an art center in Portland, Ore., and for editing the boutique art journal Veneer. His solo show at Miguel Abreu’s Eldridge Street gallery (he has a related show at Abreu’s Orchard Street location) features half a dozen motorized sculptures that marry the aesthetics of D.I.Y. robotics to fetishy woodworking.
A pair of vibrating columns made from worm-eaten fir and powered by batteries, both titled “Cascadia,” provide a mumbling ambience. Other wall-mounted sculptures resembling thin easels whine and twitch up and down on long threaded rods, such as “Applicate 4.0 (Veneer Magazine),” a thin, shallow, moving shelf of the exotic hardwood purpleheart.
Mercifully, there’s an instruction booklet that includes descriptions of what these crazy robots are up to. The changing shelf height in “Applicate 4.0,” for instance, somehow “references the heights of the 13 issues” of Veneer. “Applicate 2.1 & 2.2,” consists of a pair of aluminum gantries facing off across a side room — their cycling heights mimic the bottom edges of works in the Kunstmuseum Bern’s permanent collection, including. 1,600 pieces bequeathed by Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of a notorious art dealer for Hitler.
The logic of this tinkerer’s idyll can be opaque. What’s more striking, though, is how Jamison’s focus on height and weight conveys a pained skepticism about art’s less empirical dimensions.
Chinatown
Marc Kokopeli
Through March 8. Reena Spaulings, 165 East Broadway, Manhattan; 212-477-5006, reenaspaulings.com.
First, the TVs seduce like candy — a dozen oddball and sculptural screens across several felt-covered plinths. The most prominent are a pair of red tinted orbs, both titled “Check It Out,” from 2022. A monochrome drama unfolds deep in their sockets — a kind of educational video to boost kids’ interpersonal skills, a little retro and ironic.
Similar footage plays on a “High School Musical”-branded screen styled like a bank of red lockers (“Facing Up,” 2024) and a TV nested in a green apple that opens like a cabinet (“Yes You Can Say No,” 2024). The kitsch quickly sours. The video peeking through the apple’s barely open doors, for instance, describes child molestation.
With disturbing nonchalance, Marc Kokopeli’s exhibition packs uncomfortable material into zany shapes. The mood seesaws on an ambivalent fulcrum. A projection near the door, “Elly (Positive Money Affirmation),” cast above the front desk (and onto the attendant’s face), plays a lengthy Ken Burns documentary about New York, overlaid with an animation of a winged elephant slowly filling up the picture with jittering cash, then clearing it away. I first walked in during a segment about New York police scapegoating Black people and Irish Catholics for arson. Juxtaposed, the amassing money seemed in bad taste, but exactly how was hard to name.
Each of these TVs contains a muted scream. It turns out that these after-school specials and public service announcements were made by the artist’s mother. Did her expertise soften the sting of childhood? Is Kokopeli working through something here? And are the coy codes of conceptual art helping or hurting?
More to See
Upper East Side
Acts of Art in Greenwich Village
Through March 29. Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery, Hunter College, 132 East 68th Street, Manhattan; 212-772-4991, huntercollegeartgalleries.org.
D.E.I. didn’t exist in the mainstream New York art world a half-dozen decades ago. Black artists eager for shows had to find them mostly in Black neighborhoods, and live with the fact that a fiction called race would determine their audience.
A rare exception was a storefront gallery called Acts of Art, which opened in the West Village of Manhattan in 1969. It not only exhibited new art by Black artists but also became, de facto, a place where diversity, equity and inclusion were demonstrated and promoted.
Although the gallery is long gone — it lasted for just six years — its spirit is revivified in a small, tightly researched and impeccably mounted exhibition at Hunter College.
Acts of Art was founded by two artists — Nigel Jackson (1940-2005) and Patricia Grey — at a hot cultural moment. The year it debuted, a big show called “Harlem on My Mind” opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Planned as an integrationist gesture but composed of documentary photos rather than art, “Harlem on My Mind” was an infuriating flop and inspired the formation of a protest group called the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition.
When, two years later in 1971, the Whitney Museum opened a show called “Contemporary Black Artists in America,” organized by a white curator, the coalition staged a rebutting group show, and Acts of Art was where it appeared. In a stroke, the gallery caught the public eye and a spot in the history books.
It hosted other activist happenings too, including the first exhibition of the all-women Black collective Where We At. What the gallery did mostly, though, was what it was designed to do: provide a showcase for a wide variety of contemporary Black artists who would otherwise not have been seen in downtown Manhattan. Fourteen of those artists make up the current show at Hunter, organized by Howard Singerman, a professor of art history at the college, and Katie Hood Morgan, the gallery’s chief curator, working with 15 students in the school’s Advanced Curatorial Certificate Seminar.
A few of these artists — Benny Andrews (1930-2006), Loïs Mailou Jones (1905-98), Hale Woodruff (1900-80) — are now canonical stars. Others are less familiar, but no less treasurable. All of their work is, just by existing when and where it did, politically loaded, though almost none is overtly polemical. Nor is there uniformity of subject matter, style or medium. Figurative art dominates, from Dindga McCannon’s jazzy painted portraits, to a haunting biblical narrative by Ann Tanksley, to Lloyd Toone’s African-inspired sculptures made from scrap wood, shoe leather and nails. But Ademola Olugebefola’s etchings take us close to abstraction, and the torn-paper collages of Frank Wimberley take us all the way there. (A survey of Wimberley’s work goes on view at Berry Campbell Gallery in Chelsea starting on Thursday.)
One of the most intriguing things here is a self-portrait painting by Jackson, the gallery’s co-founder. He depicts himself as a grimacing, empty-eyed, barely there ghost. And, in fact, when the gallery closed, in 1975, he more or less disappeared, first moving to Africa, and, after returning to New York, disassociating himself from the art world to which he had made such a vital contribution. We don’t know why, but thanks to this sterling show, that contribution is acknowledged and preserved. HOLLAND COTTER
Chelsea
The Writing’s on the Wall: Language and Silence in the Visual Arts
Through March 29. Hill Art Foundation, 239 10th Avenue, Manhattan; 212-337-4455, hillartfoundation.org.
The success of a personal-choice group exhibition like “The Writing’s on the Wall: Language and Silence in the Visual Arts” at Hill Art Foundation naturally depends on the tastes and curatorial skills of the chooser. And with the writer Hilton Als in charge we’re in good hands. In a wall text, Als writes of his interest in art that suggests equivalencies with language, spoken or written, in terms of its expressive dynamics (loud, soft; dark, light), and its ability to suggest silence — that most radical of sonic conditions.
Some entries here refer to the literal production of language: A sculpture by Rachel Harrison incorporates a typewriter; one by Vija Celmins takes the form of a king-size rubber eraser. Others — a one-line printed text by Christopher Knowles, a vivaciously annotated drawing by Umar Rashid — make language itself a primary visual medium, with abstract drawings by Agnes Martin and Cy Twombly, as light and fleet as signatures, giving visual art the presence of a voice. Finally, spoken word does find a place, in Ina Archer’s three-channel video “Black Black Moonlight: A Minstrel Show,” which surveys a history of minstrelsy as seen in vintage films.
And the show is punctuated with references to writers whose authorial voices the curator admires, James Baldwin chief among them. Als has organized memorable exhibitions around Baldwin before, considering him both a producer of words and as an often-portrayed visual subject, with the two aspects united here in a 1955 first edition of “Notes of a Native Son,” with a grave-looking Baldwin gazing out from the dust jacket.
Baldwin’s presence is also enlisted in an image-word pairing that presses home the ominous implications of the first half of the exhibition title. Next to a 1962 Andy Warhol painting of a matchbox printed with the words “Close Cover Before Striking Match,” Als posts a quote from a Baldwin essay from the same year calling for antiracist revolution. “If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, recreated from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!” Judging by what we’re reading, and seeing, and hearing in the news, “next time” could be now. HOLLAND COTTER
See the January gallery shows here.