The Carrie Mae Weems Odyssey

By Carl Belz

Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, edited by Kathryn E. Delmez, with contributions by Kathryn E. Delmez, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Franklin Sirmans, Robert Storr, and Deborah Willis. Frist Center for the Arts in association with Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2012. Published in conjunction with the exhibition organized by the Frist Center for the Arts, Nashville, TN, September 21, 2012-January 13, 2013. Travel itinerary: Portland Art Museum, Oregon, February 2-May 19, 2013; Cleveland Museum of Art, June 30-September 29, 2013; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, February-May, 2014.

Curator Kathryn Delmez begins Carrie Mae Weems’s artistic odyssey in San Francisco in 1974, when “ a friend gave her a camera for her twenty-first birthday, and she quickly realized the potential of documentary photography to be a tool for tangibly expressing abstract political and social theories,” yet right from the start she allows Weems herself to articulate the odyssey’s impelling mission as “my responsibility as an artist is to…make art, beautiful and powerful, that adds and reveals; to beautify the mess of a messy world, to heal the sick and feed the helpless, to shout bravely from the rooftops and storm barricaded doors and voice the specifics of our historic moment.” The exhibition, which in the catalog is chronologically structured, invites us to observe the odyssey as it unfolds through nearly 30 series combining images, texts, audios and videos, each introduced by brief curatorial comment. Here, a sampling of representative excerpts:

Family Pictures and Stories, 1978-84: “Together, the photographs and narratives create an in-depth and realistic portrait of a middle-class African American family. The book is meant to stand in contrast to the 1965 Moynihan Report, which blamed ‘the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society’ on a weak family structure.”

Ain’t Jokin’, 1987-88 and American Icons, 1988-89: “In these two series, Weems demonstrates how aspects of mainstream popular culture can perpetuate the entrenchment of negative stereotypes and debilitating prejudices…Weems’s intent in both series is for viewers to acknowledge the persistence of an undercurrent of racism in American society and to consider…their potential role as accomplice, be it as participant, consumer, or silent witness.”

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Man and mirror) from Kitchen Table Series, 1990. Gelatin silver print, 27 1/4 x 27 1/4 inches. Collection of Eric and Liz Lefkofsky, 115-128.2010, promised gift to the Art Institute of Chicago. © Carrie Mae Weems. Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago

Kitchen Table Series, 1990: “The images trace a period in a woman’s life as she experiences the blossoming, then loss, of love, the responsibilities of motherhood, and the desire to be an engaged and contributing member of her community…Although Kitchen Table Series…is loosely related to her own experiences, Weems strives for it to reflect the experiences of Everywoman and to resonate across racial and class boundaries.”

Sea Island Series, 1991-92: “Weems became interested in the unique Gullah culture found on the Sea Islands off the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina while studying folklore in graduate school…Because of the islands’ physical isolation from the mainland and their majority black population, the residents were able to retain many aspects of African culture throughout the period of slavery and into the present day.”

Slave Coast, 1993 and Africa, 1993: “A desire to examine more deeply the history and legacy of slavery spurred Weems to travel beyond the southeastern United States to Africa, stopping first along the so-called slave coast of western Ghana and Senegal. The photographs of now empty but once important centers along the slave trade route, such as the holding facilities on Goree Island, move beyond documentary. Powerful words summon the fear, humiliation, and helplessness inevitably felt by the recently captured Africans as they waited to embark on the treacherous journey across the Atlantic to a life of slavery.”

The Hampton Project, 2000: “Hampton Project” critically examines the connection between race and education as experienced at Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (now Hampton University). Founded in Virginia in 1868, the school provided an education and vocational training for recently freed African Americans as well as young Native Americans. Despite largely good intentions, the students were stripped of cultural specificities in favor of conformity and forced assimilation. Weems reveals and grieves for this loss…”

Carrie Mae Weems. The Edge of Time—Ancient Rome from Roaming, 2006. Digital chromogenic print, 73 x 61 in. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. © Carrie Mae Weems

Roaming, 2006: “Weems reflects on the collective human experience in the series Roaming, created…during her residency at the American Academy in Rome. Here she wanders like history’s ghost through the streets and landscapes of various Italian sites, pondering humanity’s past and present condition…A sense of the passage of time, human accomplishment, and an individuals’ relative insignificance are simultaneously evoked as she stands before once grand monuments and sweeping vistas.”

There you have it, a small taste of the social and political concerns driving the Weems odyssey, along with some of the thinking that informs it and its steadily broadening and deepening scope. In the context of the art of our time, Weems emerges from the curatorial comments and essays, and from the essays of the catalog’s guest contributors as well, as quintessentially and definitively postmodern—in the conceptual grounding of her serial practice, her interdisciplinary approach to media, her wide-ranging appropriations and ironic inflection, her probing cultural and institutional critique, and perhaps above all her reliance on performance and the multiple identities it affords as a vehicle for her message.

Concerning which, I think Robert Storr says it best: “Indeed, like a moving-picture auteur, she is the director, set designer, costumer, and star of her own unmoving pictures. By stepping in and out of multiple roles in a manner that only the most inattentive viewer could miss, she signals not only her complete authorial control over every aspect of her production…but her frank admission that nothing in it is ‘natural,’ least of all the part she plays as omnipotent conjurer.”    

And here’s the bottom line: “The author can be anything she wants to be, anything she can imagine being—in art as distinct from life she can ‘fly’…and the viewer can accept what she has to offer without doubting the authenticity of her impersonations since their explicit artificiality is publically posted.”

And there you have postmodern freedom, the grail central to the Weems odyssey.

Art News

By Charles Kessler

Sorry for the blogging hiatus — Hurricane Sandy has taken up a lot of my energies both physically and mentally. I’m thankful the storm didn’t affect my property, but friends and neighbors here in Jersey City, being so close to the Hudson River, were terribly impacted — some still have no power. Some have no homes.

Volunteers helping to clean up in Downtown Jersey City

I’ve always felt that the Historic Downtown section of Jersey City, where my wife and I have lived for 30 years, is like a small town in a large city next to a giant metropolis. Well, the small town caring and neighborliness exhibited during and after the hurricane has shown this to be the case in spades. And the volunteer efforts have been awe-inspiring. (Go to jcnjrecovery.org if you'd like to volunteer or contribute.)

The Raving Jaynes, Amy Larimer and Jamie Graham, Your Move Modern Dance Festival, Jersey City.

One of the many uplifting events that occured in Jersey City during the worst of all this was Your Move, a modern dance festival that took place at Art House Productions. In spite of the winds, flooding, lack of power, transportation difficulties, and the grand finale, a nor'easter that left 6" of snow, the co-producers Avianna Perez, Morgan Hille Refakis and Meagan Woods (all superb dancers and choreographers themselves) were able to pull off this four-day event. And it was a major event indeed, involving 18 choreographers and about 50 dancers from all over the area, some from as far as Philadelphia. This was the third year of this festival, and not only were the dances as outstanding as  I’ve come to expect, but the festival provided the relief and joy we so desperately needed.


CHELSEA NEWS

Hurricane Sandy cleanup, 27th Street west of Eleventh Avenue, Chelsea.

The Chelsea Gallery District also suffered heavy damage. Thursday evenings is when Chelsea is usually packed with people going to art openings, but walking around Chelsea last week was a sad, disturbing and surreal experience. Mixed in with a small and somber art crowd were workers in white hazmat suits and respirators cleaning out basement and ground-floor spaces. It was dark because many street lights were still out, and street-level galleries that would ordinarily be lit up were closed or undergoing repairs. Dumpsters and dumpster-sized, noisy generators were everywhere, and debris from flood damage was piled high along the sidewalks.

22nd Street, Chelsea.

It’s difficult to see how the smaller, more marginal (and often the most vital) galleries will be able to recover. At minimum, flooring and drywall will need to be replaced, and in many cases expensive hazardous waste cleanup will need to be done; plus there is the the loss of records (Eyebeam lost most of their archives). Worst of all, a lot of art was damaged, and I suspect most of it was uninsured. And after all that, there's a good chance insurance rates will increase to the point where it will be impossible for small galleries to survive. You can read more about it here and here.


BUSHWICK NEWS
Bushwick wasn't much affected by Hurricane Sandy, and once transportation was restored to the area (surprisingly quickly) it was pretty much business as usual. Several galleries in 56 Bogart happen to be showing particularly handsome art: Momenta Art and Studio10 have striking video installations by Ira Eduardovna and Richard Garet respectively; THEODORE:Art is showing ravishing large drawings by the talented Juliette Losq; and Slag has seductive, tactile wood sculptures by Mark Lawrence. It seems handsome has become the new intimate.

Two new galleries opened in Bushwick. The hyperkinetic and innovative artist/gallerist Peter Hopkins left Bogart Salon and started another gallery, ArtHelix (no website yet). It is currently located at 102 Ingraham Street, a large space across from Brooklyn Fireproof. Over the weekend the poet Barry Duncan created palindromes based on the names of people coming into the gallery.

Ted Hovivian, the owner of 56 Bogart, the building housing the Bogart Salon, announced that the Bogart Salon will remain, but the “focus of the Salon will be redirected, and it will be reformatted” — whatever that means.

Another new gallery I have high hopes for is Auxiliary Projects. It is run by two well-known multidisciplinary artists, Jennifer Dalton (who shows with the Winkleman Gallery) and Jennifer McCoy (who has a show now at Postmasters). They will be working with various artists to offer small, hand-made, unique works that can be sold for under $300 (see photo below for an example), with the worthy aim of reaching out to people that love art but can’t afford to spend thousands of dollars.

James Huang, Gospel of Skills - Camper, 2012, wood, mahogany, basswood, aluminum, 7 blade, 4 x 4 x 1 inches. $225 at Auxilliary Projects.

Their tiny space (about 200 SF) is located at 2 St. Nicholas Avenue on the corner of Jefferson Street, and it’s open Saturday and Sunday from 1pm - 6pm, and by appointment. Until they get their intercom working, call (917) 805-7710 to be let in. It’s worth stopping by just to talk to these smart and enthusiastic women.


NEW ONLINE RESOURCES
According to the blog Getty Iris, SCI-Arc, the southern California architecture school, has put their entire archive online. The easily searchable archive is composed of, among other things, audio and video recordings of interviews, symposia, performances and discussions from as far back as the 1970s. There are videos of Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss and Pritzker Prize winners, including Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas.  Also included are artists such as David Hockney, Robert Irwin, Mike Kelley and Diana Thater; filmmakers; critics; theorists; and cultural historians such as Paul Goldberger, Dave Hickey and Greil Marcus.

The Metropolitan Museum placed 600 of its catalogs and bulletins online, including 368 out-of-print ones. They are free and can be searched by title, keyword, publication type, theme or collection. Click here for the site.

This isn’t a new online resource, but Google Art Project is growing and becoming more useful. They now have high resolution images of more than 32,000 works from 151 museums and arts organizations worldwide. In addition,  Google Indoor Maps now provides floor plans for more than 30 museums in the United States including all the Smithsonian museums, The Art Institute of Chicago, The deYoung Museum and dozens more worldwide.


ARTICLES OF NOTE
Jackie Wullschlager has a rare interview with the reclusive artist Frank Auerbach in the Financial Times.
 “This will be the most uncomfortable lunch you’ve ever done” said Auerbach to the interviewer.


"International Art English" by Alix Rule and David Levine in Triple Canopy is an intelligent analysis of international art jargon.

"The State of Political Art After a Year of Protest Movements" by Martha Schwendener in the Village Voice:

"Is contemporary art politically useless? Does it serve only as a bystander, offering smart academic responses—or worse, packaging revolution into edgier-than-average commodities to sell to the very elites that these movements challenged? Does art lay the ground for future insurrections, or merely undergird a whole system of capitalist thought and institutions that have to be changed before anything else can change?"

Kyle Gallup tipped me off to "Pondering ‘Pissarro’s People’" by Dana Gordon in The Jerusalem Post:

"How much was it owing to anti-Semitism that Pissarro was essentially left out of the canonical development of modern art, though he was one of its main progenitors? Was he the Moses of modernism who led his colleagues to the promised land, but was not allowed in?"

The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones, reviewing the Roy Lichtenstein retrospective at the National Gallery in Washington (until January 13th), asks: “Was Roy Lichtenstein a great modern artist or a one-trick wonder?”

Then there is this article: “10 reasons not to write about the art market” by Sarah Thornton. Thornton, who wrote the perceptive book Seven Days in the Art World, now declares the subject is too corrupt to write about. (The article seems to have disappeared from the web, but I managed to download it before it was pulled.) Here are her section titles for each of her reasons:
1. It gives too much exposure to artists who attain high prices.

2. It enables manipulators to publicize the artists whose prices they spike at auctions.

3. It never seems to lead to regulation.

4. The most interesting stories are libelous.

5. Oligarchs and dictators are not cool.

6. Writing about the art market is painfully repetitive.

7. People send you unbelievably stupid press releases.

8. It implies that money is the most important thing about art.

9. It amplifies the influence of the art market.

10. The pay is appalling.

EXHIBITIONS
Wade Guyton at the Whitney (until January 13th).
This show has been getting raves, for example from Roberta Smith at the Times and John Yau in Hyperallegic. And I can understand why — this is clever, imposing and tasteful art. But I have misgivings, and since Guyton’s work plays into one of my pet peeves, I’d like to comment.

Wade Guyton, Untitled, 2010, Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen, 84 × 69 inches. Collection of the artist. © Wade Guyton. Photograph by Lamay Photo.

I HATE it when artists make art that's ostensibly abstract and back it up with some conceptual schpeel or some other shtick. Let the work stand on its own and take responsibility for it. And I find it especially irritating when the work is propped up by ideas as cute, and ultimately as meaningless, as these are. ... There — I feel better!

Here are a couple of exhibitions worth seeing that one could easily over-look. Don't.

Hans Hofmann: Works on Paper from the 1940s, New York Studio School, curated by Karen Wilkin (until  January 5, 2013). The drawings in this exhibition demonstrate Hofmann's inventiveness and range more than any exhibition of his paintings I ever saw; and it strongly makes the case for him as one of the seminal Abstract Expressionists.

To go along with the exhibition, Wilkin organized yet another excellent panel discussion a couple of weeks ago. It was with artists Walter Darby Bannard and Frank Stella, and art historians William Agee and Karen Wilkin. The panel agreed that Hofmann should be more generally acknowledged as one of the great Abstract Expressionists. They speculated that he might be under-appreciated because he was a generation older than the other artists, he didn't hang out and fight with them in bars, and he was basically a cheerful person — not as romantically dramatic and intense as say Pollock and Still.

The New York Studio School has an excellent series of free lectures and panel discussions — check here for details.

Elisa D'Arrigo, Dyad (15), 2012, glazed ceramics, 9 ½ x 12 x 7 inches (Elizabeth Harris Gallery).

Elisa D’Arrigo at Elizabeth Harris (until December 22nd).
I know I’m a sucker for ceramics, but this is an especially good show. The work has the quirky biomorphism, rich resonant color and lush surfaces of Ken Price’s ceramics — no small achievement. But in addition, the sculptures seem simultaneously hard and soft; and there's an uncanny suggestion of raw and inflamed flesh in the cracks and crevasses.

Hurricane Sandy

Sixth Avenue in the Village the Friday BEFORE Sandy.

York Street, Downtown Jersey City, October 31, 2012.

Hudson River Walkway, Jersey City.

Entrance to the Holland Tunnel, November 2, 2012.

Charging Station, BJs, Downtown Jersey City.

Art House Productions's Open Mike, November 2, 2012 — pure joy!

Palindromist Barry Duncan:

ON THE MARY SHELLEY WEATHER EVENT

Bossy: a Sandy. Monster.
Final.
Past it now.
I?
Eyes met system's eye. I won't.
It's a plan.
I frets?
No. MyDNAsays: Sob.

Copyright (c) 2012 by Barry Duncan 

Regarding “Regarding Warhol”

By Charles Kessler

Andy Warhol, Self-Portrait, 1967, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, 72 x 72 inches each, (Detroit Institute of Arts). Is Warhol being contemplative, or is he giving us the finger?

Some thoughts on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition, Regarding Warhol: Sixty Years, Fifty Artists (until December 31st):

• Compared to Warhol's work in this exhibition, almost all the work looked minor to me. Jeff Koons held up better than most, but Richard Prince seemed especially weak. I’d like to see how Warhol would do in a show that included major work by Pollock, Dekooning, David Smith, Johns and some other heavy hitters of the last half of the twentieth century. I think he might hold his own, but it would be nice to be able to see. 
• The 1962 Big Campbell’s Soup Can is still exciting. I never noticed the very faint hand-drawn pencil line in the white space just above the red at the top of the label. Such designer drawing!

Andy Warhol, Big Campbell's Soup Can, 19¢, acrylic and graphite on canvas, 72 x 54 ½ inches (The Menil Collection).

Just because people made portraits during this period doesn’t mean they were influenced by Warhol.

Alex Katz, Lita, 1964, oil on canvas, 60 x 60 1/8 inches (The Museum of Modern Art).

• Some surprises in the show — for me at least:

Vija Celmins, Time Magazine Cover, 1965, oil on canvas, 56 x 40.6 cm © the artist. 

Hans Haacke, Helmsboro Country, 1990, mixed media.

• Warhol never expected anyone to watch his eight-hour movie Empire, 1964, for its full length. His original intent was to project it on a wall like a painting, and he was surprised when there was a request to show it in a movie theater. Although he had no objection to others sitting and watching the full film, Warhol himself was never this foolish.
• Nico's "screen test" is not a good example of a Warhol “screen test” because she was used to being photographed (she was a model) and, as a result, she doesn’t display the self-consciousness that I love so much in his screen tests. (The same is true with Dennis Hopper’s screen test.)  Nico did look gorgeous, though.
• I don’t see how Basquiat fits in this show even if he did collaborate with Warhol on some paintings. In fact it’s possible Warhol wanted to collaborate with Basquiat because they were so different.

Some thoughts on the Metropolitan Museum's panel discussion about the influence of Andy Warhol:

The  Rogers Auditorium at the Metropolitan Museum was relatively empty for the panel discussion last Sunday. Did people know something I didn't? 

The panel seemed promising. It included Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, considered by many to be the best up-and-coming curator in the world right now; Arthur C. Danto, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Columbia University; and Louis Menand, Professor of English at Harvard University and on the staff of the New Yorker. Mark Rosenthal, independent curator and co-curator of the exhibition, was the moderator. But it was disappointing. Arthur Danto didn't show, and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev just rambled on, paid no attention to the topic, and made no sense. She said the most influential artist of the twentieth century (not the last half — the entire twentieth century!) wasn't Picasso, or Duchamp, or Warhol. The most influential artist according to her was — wait for it — Joseph Beuys!!!. Matisse didn't even deserve a mention.

Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe's Lips, 1962, synthetic polymer, silkscreen and graphite on canvas, 165 1/2 x 163 inches (Hirshhorn).

My time wasn't completely wasted though. Mark Rosenthal made a couple of interesting points. He thought Warhol was making ironic reference to Dekooning with his monumental painting, Marilyn Monroe's Lips, 1962; and he said Warhol's exhibitions were always installations.

And I got to walk out of the Met with Marla Prather, the co-curator of the exhibition. We talked about the trouble they had exhibiting Warhol's "Silver Clouds". The "Clouds" had to be filled with just the right amount of helium so they would float around and not all gather in a corner of the ceiling or sink to the floor. That was also the reason for the fans, which I didn't remember seeing at one of the original exhibitions in Los Angeles. (Where, BTW, one of the "Clouds" escaped the gallery and flew into the Los Angeles smog.)

Andy Warhol, Silver Clouds, first shown in 1966 at the Castelli Gallery in New York.

Art on the Right and Left Banks this Weekend

By Charles Kessler

Friday night was a good time to be in Bushwick if you wanted to see a wide variety of  Performance Art. At Agape Gallery I saw Variations, a performance by Elise Rasmussen. She directed two actors (Corey Tazmania and Niall Powderly) in various re-enactments of possible scenarios of the 1985 death of Ana Mendieta, the wife of the well-known minimal sculptor, Carl Andre. Andre was tried and acquitted of her murder, but the circumstances remain suspicious to a lot of people. 

Ana Mendieta and Carl Andre

(Medieta was less then five feet tall but went out a very high window to fall 33 stories to her death; she was phobic about heights and wouldn’t go near those windows; they had a history of drunken fights; and Andre had scratches on his face.) The performance got more interesting when the audience started to make suggestions, and it became pretty intense when a few people talked about the pain of their own phobias and experience with suicide. 

Next I went to Grace Exhibitions Space for the Performing Arts. Since 2006, Grace has been an important venue for performance artists from all over the world, and Friday night was no exception. There were performances by artists from Switzerland, Berlin, Estonia, France and, of all places, Kentucky. There was Beat Poetry by Ron Whitehead, an older poet from Kentucky; a chaotic, frankly silly, extravaganza by the Estonian group, Non Grata; 

Voluntarily Out of Focus performed by Non Grata Group from Estonia.
(This panoramic was taken with my nifty new iPhone 5 camera — click to enlarge.)

and the Swiss artist Saskia Edens did one of the best performances I’ve seen in a long time. She carried a thin sheet of ice around to about a dozen people, and she and they would blow on it, melting enough holes so it eventually fell apart. It was an elegant, beautiful, erotic and moving experience, and one that required extraordinary endurance. Why she didn’t pass out and/or get frostbite I can’t imagine.

Breath by Saskia Edens, Grace Exhibition Space.

The 22nd annual Jersey City Studio Tour took place this weekend (my how time flies!). It’s no longer a tour of artists' studios, at least not primarily — instead it’s a citywide series of art exhibitions and performances. Among the highlights was a group exhibition organized by Pro Arts in the Tenmarc building, an enormous space that was generously loaned to Pro Arts for the tour. 

Jersey City Studio Tour exhibition, Tenmarc Building

It’s nearly impossible for a group show like this to look good, but there was plenty of excellent work, and Nimbus Dance Works and Bollywood Funk presented some delightful dances. 

Nimbus at Tenmarc

(Later that day Nimbus invited the public to watch them rehearse for a rare staging of Charles Weidman’s 1936 classic dance, Lynchtown. The dance will be presented in several venues in New Jersey and New York. Don’t miss it — it's powerful stuff!)

Drawing Rooms — a former convent turned exhibition space in Downtown Jersey City

The Tour showcased a beautiful new exhibition venue, a three-story former convent in Downtown Jersey City (see photo above). Organized by Victory Arts Projects, each artist was given their own modest but nicely proportioned room. It’s an ideal space to experience intimate art, although I imagine it would be equally suitable for large installations. It has the potential to be one of the most important art spaces in New Jersey.

 Mazz Swift and Amelia Hollander Ames playing in an historic row house in Downtown Jersey City.

Sunday was a concert by Con Vivo to benefit the Embankment Preservation Coalition, an organization dedicated to preserving an imposing elevated stone railway structure.  Technically the event wasn't part of the tour, although the artists Jessica Dalrymple and Gregg Kreutz, owners of the historic row house where the benefit took place, were on the tour. The event was a warm, neighborly, civilized way to spend the afternoon — and for a good cause. 

The weekend ended with a crawl of trendy bars (the new Jersey City) and at Uta Brauser’s Fish with Braids gallery (a venue more typical of the funky old Jersey City I knew and loved).

Bushwick Gallery Guide Updated

By Charles Kessler

Note: On the right sidebar under "Gallery and Museum Guides" is a pdf file of this guide that can be downloaded. The numbers on the map represent bars and restaurants; these are listed below, after the gallery listings.

Three galleries closed since my last update in February: 950 Hart, Botanic and Kesting/Ray — but at least nine galleries opened, bringing the total to an amazing thirty-nine. They're spread out over a large area; what is being called “Bushwick” actually includes parts of East Williamsburg and Ridgewood, Queens. If you have the energy, it’s possible to do it all in one day (it's about 4 1/2 miles), but you can easily split the tour into eastern and western sections if you prefer. For the eastern section, you can take the L train to Morgan Avenue and go out the Bogart Street exit (toward the back of the train if you’re coming from the west). 56 Bogart, a building with 10 galleries, is across the street from the exit. For the western section, you can start from the Dekalb Avenue L subway station and return via the Jefferson Street L (at Wyckoff and Troutman).

Some galleries are open Friday - Monday, 1 - 6 pm, and most are open at least Sundays. Others, however, are only open by appointment and for openings. It's a good idea to check gallery websites (their names below are linked to their websites), email them, or call the galleries in advance to confirm. It’s also a good idea to take the gallery phone numbers with you because in some cases you may need be let in.

Alphabetical Listing of Bushwick Art Galleries

319 Scholes, 319 Scholes Street, no phone listed,  email: lindsay@319scholes.org.

Active Space, The, 566 Johnson Ave., buzz 5 to be toured through, no phone listed.

Agape Enterprise, 56 Bogart Street, (718) 417-0037, email: info@agapeenterprise.com.

Airplane, 70 Jefferson Street - basement, (central Avenue is a more pleasant street to take to this gallery than the safe but bleak Evergreen Avenue), (646) 345-9394, email: airplanegallery@gmail.com. 

Bogart Salon, 56 Bogart Street, (203) 249-8843, email: bogartsalon@gmail.com.

Bull and Ram, 17-17 Troutman #226, no phone listed, email: bullandram226@gmail.com.

C.C.C.P., 56 Bogart Street, (917) 974-9664, email: cccp@mindspring.com.

Centotto, 250 Moore Street #108, call (908) 338-3590 to be let in, email: postuccio@gmail.com.

CLEARING, 505 Johnson Avenue #10, (347) 383-2256, email: desk@c-l-e-a-r-i-n-g.com.

English Kills, 114 Forrest Street, (use door to the garden on the right), (917) 375-6266, 

email: info@englishkillsartgallery.com

et al Projects, 56 Bogart Street, (914) 498-8328, email: adam@etalprojects.com.

Ethan Pettit Contemporary, 119 Ingraham Street, no phone listed, email: ep@ethanpettitgallery.com.

Grace Exhibition Space, 840 Broadway, 2nd Floor, (646) 578-3402.

Grimm Schultz, 313 Linden Street, Studio B, no phone listed, email: info@grimmschultz.com.

Interstate Projects, 66 Knickerbocker Avenue, no phone listed, email: tom@interstateprojects.com.

IV Soldiers Gallery, 184 Noll Street, no phone listed, email: ivsoldiers@gmail.com.

Living Gallery, The, 1087 Flushing Avenue, no phone listed, email: thelivinggallery@gmail.com.

Luhring Augustine, 25 Knickerbocker Avenue, (212) 206-9100, email: info@luhringaugustine.com.

Microscope, 4 Charles Place, (347) 925-1433, email: info@microscopegallery.com.

Momenta Art, 56 Bogart, (718) 218-8058, email via their website.

Norte Maar, 83 Wyckoff Avenue, (646) 361-8512, email via their website.

NURTUREart, 56 Bogart Street, (718) 782-7755, email: gallery@nurtureart.org. 

OUTLET, 253 Wilson, no phone listed, email: info@OUTLETBK.com. This gallery will be changing its name, email address and website often. Get on their mailing list if you want to stay in touch.

Panoply Performance Lab, 104 Meserole, no phone listed, email: panoplylab@gmail.com.

Parallel Art Space, 17-17 Troutman Street, no phone listed, email: parallelartspace@gmail.com.

Parlour, The, 791 Bushwick Avenue, (718) 360-3218, email:  info@theparlourbushwick.com.

Regina Rex, 17-17 Troutman Street, ring bell #329, (646) 467-2232, email: info[at]reginarex.org.

Robert Henry Contemporary, 56 Bogart Street, (718) 473-0819, email: info@roberthenrycontemporary.com.

Sardine, 286 Stanhope Street, no phone or email listed.

Secret Project Robot, 389 Melrose Street, no phone listed, email: rachel@secretprojectrobot.org. 

Slag Contemporary, 56 Bogart Street, (212) 967-9818, email: info@SlagGallery.com.

Small Black Door, 19-20 Palmetto Street, no phone listed, email: smallblackdoor@gmail.com.

StorefrontBushwick, 16 Wilson Avenue, (917) 714-3813, email: StorefrontBushwick@gmail.com. 

Studio 10, 56 Bogart Street, (718) 852-4396, email: studio10bogart@gmail.com.

SUGAR , 449 Troutman Street, #3-5, ring bell #21, (718) 417-1180, email: sugar@sugarbushwick.com. 

THEODORE:Art, 56 Bogart Street, (212) 966-4324, email: theodoreart@gmail.com. 

Valentine, 464 Seneca Avenue, (718) 381-2962, email: valentineridgewood@gmail.com. 

Weeknights, 566 Johnson Avenue, Studio #27, (201) 953-4062, email: weeknightsgallery@gmail.com. 

Weldon Arts , 181-R Irving Avenue, (347) 955-4455, email: info@weldonarts.net. 

Bushwick Open Studios (BOS), Bogart Street, June 7, 2012.

If you’re going to spend a day gallery-going, you’ll want to stop occasionally at a bar or restaurant for some rest and recuperation. Bushwick is blessed with many excellent ones, and they’re usually a lot less expensive than you’ll find in Manhattan. They're grouped geographically below, and when available, I linked the name of the bar or restaurant to its website. The map was too crowded to include the names of the restaurants and bars, so they are indicated by number. The map was also too crowded to include coffee spots, but two of my favorites are Swallow, 49 Bogart Street, across the street from 56 Bogart; and The Loom, 1087 Flushing Avenue, in the same building as The Living Gallery.  

Recommended Bushwick Restaurants and Bars

1.  Roberta's Restaurant — 261 Moore Street, (718) 417-1118, open daily from 11am - midnight. This is Bushwick’s most famous restaurant, and one of the most unique restaurants in New York. For all that, it’s relatively inexpensive — maybe expensive for Bushwick, but not for Manhattan. Expect a wait. 

2.   MoMo Sushi Shack — 43 Bogart Street, (718) 418-6666, open Tuesday - Sunday from noon - 3:30pm and 6pm - 10:30pm; and Friday and Saturday until midnight. This is the best Japanese food I've had outside of California (I haven’t been to Per Se). Again, maybe a bit expensive for Bushwick, but not for Manhattan, and not for this quality. 

3.   Shinobi Ramen — 53 Morgan Ave (entrance on Grattan Street between Morgan & Bogart), no phone listed, open Monday - Thursday from 6pm to 11pm; Friday and Saturdays, 6pm to 11:30pm; closed on Sundays. This is a small, friendly place where people share long tables. The prices are more typical of Bushwick. (The nearby MoMo and Roberta’s also have communal seating — it must be a Bushwick thing.) BYOB. 

4.   Brooklyn Fireproof Cafe and Bar — 119 Ingraham Street, (347) 223-4211. The kitchen is open daily from 10am - 11pm; and Saturday and Sunday from 6pm - 11pm. The bar is open late. They have an outside courtyard where there’s often live music; and behind the bar is a room that’s sometimes used for art exhibitions.

5.   983 — 983 Flushing Avenue, (718) 386-1133, open 7 days a week from 10am - 2am. They’re a new restaurant that displaced a local favorite, but they have in turn become a popular neighborhood spot.

6.   Narrows Bar — 1037 Flushing Avenue, (281) 827-1800, open Monday - Friday from 5pm - 4am; Saturday and Sunday from 4pm - 4am. They have a pleasant back yard.

7.   Dear Bushwick — 41 Wilson Avenue,  (949) 234-2344, open every day from 5 - 11 pm (bar is open until 1pm on weekends). This is a new pub that specializes in English country food.

8.   Tandem Bar — 236 Troutman Street, (718) 386-2369, hours not listed, but they’re open late. Some food. 

9.   Mama Joy’s — 1084 Flushing Avenue, across from the Loom, (347) 295-2227, open every day from 11am; the bar is open until 2am. This is a very friendly new place that serves good Southern soul food at great prices. Try their shrimp and grits. 

10.   Cafe Ghia — 24 Irving Avenue, (718) 821-8806. The kitchen is open Sunday - Thursday from 10am - 11pm; and Friday and Saturday, 10am -12am. Popular small storefront cafe/bar.

11.   Arepera Guacuco — 44 Irving Avenue, (347) 305-3300, open Monday - Wednesday from noon - 11 pm; Thursday - Friday, noon - 12am; Saturday, 11am - 12am; Sunday 11am - 11pm. Excellent and inexpensive arepas and other Venezuelan specialties. 

12.   Northeast Kingdom — 18 Wyckoff Avenue, (718) 386-3864, open for lunch Monday - Friday from 11:30 - 2:30pm; for dinner, Sunday - Wednesday, 6 - 11pm,  and Thursday - Saturday, 6 - 11:30pm. The bar is open late. Pretty good burgers. 

13.   Tortilleria Mexicana Los Hermanos — 271 Starr Street, (718) 456-3422, open Monday - Friday from noon to 9pm. Very inexpensive, and not bad. 

14.   The Bodega Bar — 24 Saint Nicholas Avenue, (646) 924-8488, open daily from 11:30am - 2am; and until 3am Friday and Saturday. Craft beer and some good sandwiches and small plates. 

15.   Mazelle — 247 Starr Street, (347) 425-7675, open weekdays from 5 - 11 pm; weekends, 11am - 4am, closed Mondays. A new bar/restaurant that serves Russian and Ukrainian food.

16.   Skytown — 921 Broadway, (347) 921-2911; the kitchen is open daily from 8:30am -10pm. The bar is open late.  Nice looking new bar/cafe near Microscope, Airplane and The Parlour galleries.

17.   Little Skips — 941 Willoughby Avenue, (718) 484-0980, open 7am - 9pm every day except weekends when they open at 8:30am. A popular coffee cafe with some food.  Near Microscope, Airplane and The Parlour galleries.

18.   255 Cafe — 255 Wilson Avenue, (347) 985-2399, open Monday - Thursday from 10am - 8pm. This is a generally Spanish restaurant, sort of Mexican/Cuban. The pastelitos are supposed to be good.

19.   Monteros Mexican Grill — 173 Irving Avenue, (347) 533-7857, open every day from 8am - 10pm. They offer a strange combination of pizza and Mexican grill. 

20.   Bon Asian Spice — 140 St Nicholas Avenue, (347) 787-7876, open Monday - Saturday from 11am – 10pm; closed Sunday. Pan Asian food. 

21.   Caribe Star — 54-55 Myrtle Avenue, (718) 386-0387, open Sunday - Thursday from 8am - midnight; and Friday and Saturday, 8am - 1am. Authentic Dominican-American food. 

A Note on Pop Art: 50 Years and Counting

By Carl Belz

A half-century’s now passed, yet I vividly recall the excitement we felt when Pop Art happened in the New York art world at the start of the 1960s. And exciting it was, especially among the generation of artists, critics, curators and art historians who, like me, were entering the field at that moment. Exciting, in part, because the new art was up for grabs, it hadn’t been claimed, as Abstract Expressionism seemed then to have already been claimed, by patriarchs like Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Thomas Hess. Exciting, too, because its link to everyday experience, to billboards and soup cans and comic books, made it immediately accessible, even fun, in sharp contrast to AE’s seriousness of purpose and sometimes unfathomable depth. In addition, but by no means least among the excitements it stirred, Pop’s accessibility also extended to the art market, its product was inexpensive, it could be acquired and lived with for the equivalent of a new suit when a new car remained out of reach. 

Amid such excitements, Pop at the same time incited voices of discontent. Its bark on behalf of the commonplace was said to recall Dada, but it lacked Dada’s political bite and was therefore found wanting. It was said to be flawed as art because it only duplicated the look of the supermarket display and the tabloid front page, it failed aesthetically to transform them. And it was even dismissed out of hand--by no less than Greenberg himself--as a phenomenon belonging not to a proper art history but merely to the history of taste.

Greenberg was right and wrong. Right, insofar as Pop wasn’t first of all about art, it didn’t engage the formal probing and stretching that had characterized modernism’s urge to meaning since the middle of the 19th Century, it mostly adopted the formal tenets that modernism currently practiced, and thus was it considered tangential to modern art’s history. Which is very much the way kindred predecessors such as the Surrealists were regarded at the time of Pop’s happening, and the same was true even of Pop Godfather Marcel Duchamp, who at the beginning of the century had appropriated Cubism’s shallow space and shifting planes to structure his stories about nudes descending a staircase, chess players in competition, and a virgin transforming into a bride stripped bare, but who then abruptly retired from art-making in favor of playing chess himself, becoming in the process an artist interrupted: a fascinating but marginal figure, a major-minor player rather than a force, within the big art historical picture as it was viewed through Greenberg’s modernist prism.

What Greenberg got wrong was in large part a function of what he got right, which in both cases derived from a vision of art historical change based on the model of a mainstream and its tributaries. It was in the mainstream that formal originality powered art forward and in doing so regularly shaped our understanding of its history, at times even prodding a rewriting of that history--as Abstract Expressionism was in the process of prodding a rewriting of the late paintings of Claude Monet at the very moment when Pop appeared. All of which Greenberg surely knew, yet he wrote Pop off as just another example of our culture’s capricious, ever-changing taste. He dubbed it “far out” to indicate it was vanguard in appearance only, and he accordingly judged it as ephemeral, a blip on the radar screen the way Dada had been. It deserved maybe 15 minutes of our attention, but it didn’t affect the writing of art’s history.

Except that it did. From the outset, Pop was more widespread than any cultural alternative we’d previously seen. There seemed overnight to be Pop artists on every street corner and Pop pictures everywhere we turned, in gallery and museum exhibitions and in the media, nationally and internationally. And when the initial excitement about it waned, when the buzz subsided, and when the media spotlight moved inevitably to the next great thing, we realized that Pop had ushered in a sea change of historic proportions. 

To wit: Independence from elite culture had been declared, modernist hegemony in turn had been ruptured, taste had become democratized, and each of us had been set free to indulge without external sanction--and without the guilt and anxiety it engendered--the artistic excitements and pleasures and entertainments that piqued our interest;  free to enjoy Andy Warhol’s gaudy Marilyn in tandem with Mark Rothko’s somber abyss; even free--pace Clement Greenberg--to couple avant-garde and kitsch, to listen to tunes on a headset, say, while cruising art’s history at MoMA or the Met or the Frick Collection. Free, as well, to read artworks without regard for the artist’s intent and to conjure our personal histories of art based on those same favorite pleasures and excitements--the way Roy Lichtenstein did over a span of four decades as he served up his versions of classic ruins and romantic sunsets and Mondrian look-alikes and Abstract Expressionist brushstrokes and riffs on Surrealism and Cubism and Art Deco and Chinese landscapes, and in doing so produced an art historical panorama as entertaining as any theme park at Disneyland or anywhere else. 

As a crown upon these abundant excitements, finally, the new democracy of taste decade by decade spread steadily into the art market, at each heightened level bringing gasps of breathless wonder as collectors exercised their freedom to pay as much or more for an Andy Warhol as for a Jackson Pollock, as much or more for a Lichtenstein brushstroke inspired by Willem de Kooning as for a de Kooning itself, as much or more for all kinds of cultural commodities that nobody among us--at least nobody among 99% of us--could previously have imagined. True, Pop was inexpensive in the beginning, but its humble origin in the market only enhanced the creation myth that was pitched on its behalf, a myth that gradually accrued the iconic status of an investor’s fairy tale about free enterprise and the American Dream.

So Pop was a blast, and we reveled immediately in its exploits and rushed to absorb its message. We looked at Duchamp anew and watched his enormous influence catapult him into the exclusive company of Matisse and Picasso. We rediscovered Surrealism, not in the dreary nightmares of its founding fathers, but right in front of us, in the marvels of America’s everyday mass media culture and dazzling technology. We everywhere saw photography as it blossomed in a veritable renascence of theory and practice. Modern art’s arena seemed suddenly to have been leveled and expanded, no longer was modernism by itself in the spotlight, no longer did we have a mainstream and its tributaries. The non-hierarchical structure of modern society that Greenberg had insightfully found mirrored in Pollock’s overall pictures had come full circle to the gates of the elite world of modernist art. Our methodologies for dealing with both the modern and the modernist art of our time were in turn affected. In the face of Pop’s celebration of everyday subjects and instant access, formalist analyses were felt to be inadequate, even irrelevant. From the outset, news about Pop told us about the artists’ backgrounds, how Andy Warhol had been a commercial illustrator, how James Rosenquist had painted billboards. Constantly reminded that artists made art while living in the real world, at particular times and in particular places, we wanted increasingly to know how those factors affected the objects they made. Increasingly, then, the formalist autonomy of the object yielded to studies emphasizing the context of its creation. 

Pop arrived like a blast of fresh air, welcome and invigorating, and it remains in many ways synonymous with the upbeat aspect of the 1960s. But like the 60s as a whole, not all of Pop, let alone all of its postmodern progeny, has always worn well or been all that it was advertised as being. Not for me, anyway. I sometimes fret, for instance, about the high/low union: Warhol and Rothko may both flatten me, but in radically different ways that are in no way interchangeable. Having come to art via the study of titans like Velasquez and Rembrandt, Manet and Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso, I also fret over news about the death of the author, for I have not the arrogance to assume the author’s stead. I fret further about the claim that artworks need only be interesting when experience tells me they can be, even urge to be, meaningful. Art as entertainment likewise makes me fret, so I reach for the remote. In the grip of our media culture, even the democratization of taste occasionally makes me fret about our being marketed ever more products in the name of cultural pleasures and excitements and thereby pitted against one another in competition for more artistic toys--and becoming in the process more divided from one another, more alone. And naturally I fret about the democratization of the art market, about large sums of money being equated with artistic quality or entitling museum trustees to dictate what their museums collect and exhibit.

But in closing, let me assure you that I’ve made my peace with the market: I have at home a Campbell’s soup can, chicken noodle, signed with my name by Andy Warhol and given to me by a friend in 1966. When I saw a similar can in an auction catalog 25 years later with a $2500 to $3000 estimate, I felt the ultimate excitement, the excitement of cashing in. Hastening to the kitchen, to the shelf where the soup can had sat all those years, to check my modest treasure, I was stunned to realize how shabby it had become, how faded, Andy’s signature barely visible under a film of grease. I knew for sure it was worthless, and my heart ached. How could I have let that happen? How could I have exposed the can to the risks of everyday experience? How could I have just lived with it? Then the lightbulb went on: Worthless on the market, the can was still filled with memories--and they were still worth plenty.    

Carl Belz is Director Emeritus of the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University.