Eliana Willis

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    Artist Carrie Moyer Pokes (Just a Little) Fun at Our Collective Anxieties

    Times are tough. Whether it’s the economy, politics, social issues, or the environment, news headlines are consistently grim but nevertheless, life must carry on. “How do we live with the level of anxiety we have right now?” asked Carrie Moyer from within the midst of Alexander Gray Associates where her newest show was being installed earlier this month. “Maybe from a space that’s quiet, joyful, or self-mocking, that maybe pokes fun a little bit at our anxieties.”
    Carrie Moyer. Photo: Taylor Miller. Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, New York.
    Though Moyer has worked with gallerist Alexander Gray for more than two decades, her solo show “Timber!” marks her first with the gallery. Comprised of new paintings and works on paper, the exhibition considers lived reality within the context of social and environmental instability and everything in between.
    “I’m one of those painters who wants to please the viewer, so I’m always thinking about pleasure. But I’m thinking about pleasure in terms of politics, in terms of a bodily experience,” Moyer explained. “My wife helps me a lot with titles, so we had many discussions about this, and we were thinking about ‘timber’ like from comics—this is what you’d say when you’re telling everyone to take cover. It has a kind of Pop inflection because it’s not really something you’d say, but you might see it in a comic book.”
    Installation view of “Carrie Moyer: Timber!” (2024). Photo: Dan Bradica. Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, New York.
    While Moyer describes the speech-balloon-inspired “Timber!” as encapsulating how she’s been feeling, in other words, like everything is falling apart (something surely felt by many), the show is far from pessimistic. Instead, vibrant, mixed-media compositions offer a playfully abstract macro exploration of movements and processes from the natural world—whether the churning of magma and shifting of tectonic plates or planetary orbits and atmospheric currents.
    In Tears on My Pillow (2024), the majority of the composition is overtaken by large swathes of color evoking elements of a landscape and draping tendrils, large black teardrop shapes rendered in sharp focus draw the eye. They reappear in larger number within Crying – Waiting – Hoping (2024) as well.
    “They’re big drops that look like tears, they’re cartoonish, crazy, huge. They’re drops of paint, but they’re almost like an emoji,” said Moyer. The layered meanings or interpretations of the motif—as drops of paint both symbolically and literally, or as tears—speaks to Moyer’s preoccupation with modes of legibility. “In my work I often mix these kinds of graphic things that seem extremely readable with things that are very process oriented as a way of confounding both ways of reading, melding them together,” Moyer said.
    Carrie Moyer, Tears on My Pillow (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York.
    It also brings to the fore Moyer’s penchant for experimenting with material and tapping its inherent origins and associations; apropos for a show that contemplates the end of the world, earthquakes, glacial shifts, and other doomsday paradigms. Paint pigments are frequently sourced from the earth like ochre or iron oxide, adding another layer of readability. In this new body of work, Moyer incorporates textural materials to her compositions, such as pumice in Tears on My Pillow, and powdered minerals from semi-precious stones, metal, and graphite in Etna’s Folly (2024). In a series of works on paper, salt has been delicately sprinkled over the piece, affecting the flow of watercolors and adding a distinctive texture to the surfaces.
    Installation view of “Carrie Moyer: Timber!” (2024). Photo: Dan Bradica. Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, New York.
    The addition of unexpected materials is not something new to Moyer’s practice. Since the late 1990s, she has regularly added glitter to her paintings with the aim of complicating the effects of abstraction as well as a means of exploring themes around gay identity. This early material experimentation was also deeply engaged with art history and traditional ideas of what made a painting “good.”
    “I don’t think this affects younger painters in the way that it did when I was younger, but it used to be that if you were painting acrylic paint, it needed to be flat. You couldn’t show a brush stroke. There were all these weird constraints and conventions that went along with the material itself,” the artist noted. Moyer’s present paintings continue to toy with these notions, including sealing textural materials under layers of paint, so the shadows cast from the disrupted flatness become physical, “contaminating” the formal elements.
    Carrie Moyer, Crying – Waiting – Hoping (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York.
    Citing a longstanding interest in the legacy of color field painting, which contrary to immaculate flatness instead sought to physically saturate the canvas, Moyer’s paintings frequently vacillate between sections of impenetrable opacity and sheer veils of poured paint—but, ultimately, this is only an illusion. Though many of the passages are poured, the paint doesn’t sit on raw canvas, there is gesso priming the canvas before it even touches the surface. The addition of three dimensional medium like fiber paste, which has a texture similar to paper, allows the surface to be built up, as can be seen in the oblong shapes dotting Crying – Waiting – Hoping, where the paint at times seamlessly envelopes masses and at others appears to drip off its ends. In a manner of speaking, the combination of elements results in a type of “painting joke.”
    “I grew up as a painter in this transition between the death of Modernism and Post-Modernism, so part of me has some set of conventions about what ‘real’ painting is and what painting does intellectually, physically, optically, but then also I’m like ‘Oh my god, listen to yourself!’ No one in good conscience could be strict about any of this anymore or take it too seriously.”
    Carrie Moyer, Mommy Long Legs (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York.
    Is the world ending? Maybe. Is contemporary lived reality overwhelming and anxiety inducing? Certainly. But continue we must. And it is at this juncture that Moyer finds a bit of humor in the situation. Collapsing the distance between human and cosmic scale, “Timber!” confronts a range of serious topics—from art historical canon to natural disaster—with a playfulness and repose that viewers can take a step back and take stock of the magnitude of their and the world’s situation, but perhaps too even have a small laugh at themselves. More

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    Skateboarding’s DIY Video Era Makes Its Way Into a Museum Show

    Before the GoPro and the cell phone camera, there was the handheld video recorder, and for the DIY world of skateboarding, it was a revelation.
    By the late 1980s, video recorders were smaller and more affordable than ever before, and the VHS-format videos they produced were at once artful projections of a burgeoning subculture (long before its 2020 debut in the Summer Olympics) and how-to guides for aspiring skaters. Freely circulated among participants and sold in skate shops, these wobbly, roughly cut, fisheye-lens videos defined the stylings of a generation.
    For the first time, the cultural, technical, and historical importance of these tapes has been placed at the center of an exhibition, taking place at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York. “Recording the Ride: The Rise of Street-Style Videos” brings together seminal examples from the late ’80s and ’90s alongside objects that tell the story.
    Keenan Milton and Aaron Meza at work in 1999. Photo: courtesy Blabacphoto.
    It might seem counterintuitive to gather artifacts of a cultural movement that was spontaneous and chaotic and whose proponents probably never envisioned being catalogued in a museum. But there’s plenty on offer: skateboards (affixed to the ceiling, no less), Polaroid photos shot by acclaimed photographer and filmmaker Spike Jonze, video recorders, period notes on paper scraps, and, of course, a load of tapes.
    R.B. Umali and Danny Supa, 1997. Photo: Sammy Glucksman.
    Such resourcefulness is, in part, due to the well-connected pair that pitched the show: Jacob Rosenberg, a West Coast filmmaker who shot video for the influential skateboarding company Plan B, and Michaela Ternasky-Holland, the daughter of Plan B founder Mike Ternasky. The hope was to curate a show around the 30th anniversary of Ternasky’s death, but the museum saw an opportunity to go bigger.
    “The impact of skate videos extends beyond the skateboard community to art, fashion, sports, music, film, and more,” said Barbara Miller, the museum’s deputy director for curatorial affairs, in press materials. “With our expansive view of the moving image as a reflection and building block of vernacular culture, MoMI is the ideal cultural institution to look at the origins of this essential genre.”
    Filming The Questionable Video (1992). Photo courtesy Sean Sheffey and Jacob Rosenberg.
    While “Recording the Ride” features footage from a range of skateboarding groups including H-Street, World Industries, Birdhouse, 411, and Zoo York, those of Plan B feature prominently. There’s behind-the-scenes footage from Video Days (1991) and a wealth of artifacts connected to The Questionable Video (1992) and Virtual Reality (1993), which are considered formative for the genre.
    One highlight is The Questionable Video, the first film Ternasky made after leaving skateboard brand H-Street. It shows some of the era’s most celebrated figures, including Rodney Mullen, Mike Carroll, and Danny Way, skating to music by the Beastie Boys, Louis Armstrong, and the Doors. As the opening montage wryly put it: “You have no idea what’s going to happen.”
    “Recording the Ride: The Rise of Street-Style Videos” is on view at the Museum of the Moving Image, Queens, New York, through January 26, 2025. More

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    How One of the Greatest Photographers Turned Against Photography

    I do love The Americans. When I’m feeling pensive, sometimes I open the book, and every time I find in Robert Frank’s photographic catalogue of ‘50s America a feeling of clarity about how to look at the world, something to take me out of myself.
    I can already imagine the curators of MoMA’s lovingly assembled “Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue” frowning at this intro. The exhibition’s selection of 200 works is about just about everything but The Americans, the six decades of work that Frank did after that classic achievement.
    Not having it in the mix is a little bit like a band refusing to play its biggest hit, but I actually appreciate the desire to focus on lesser-appreciated material. The reason I bring it up is that I think to understand what Frank was up to, it helps to know not just what he was trying to do, but also what he was trying to undo. And one of the things he was trying to undo was The Americans.
    “Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue” at the Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Frank, who died in 2019, was born in Zurich in 1924. He apprenticed with photographers in his teens, so when he moved as a young man to New York, in 1947, he already had chops. He got work for Harper’s Bazaar doing light editorial work, but it was two Guggenheim grants that let him go on the 30-state road trip in the mid-‘50s that formed the foundation for The Americans, with its gorgeously forlorn vision of the United States in the Eisenhower/McCarthy era.
    Some early critics thought it was a foreigner’s unflattering take on his adopted home—funny now, because what stands out is how equipoised its mixture of alienation and tenderness is, how much poetry Frank gets from the materialism of midcentury U.S.A. Back in New York, he was part of the artist crowd around the Tenth Street galleries and the Beats, and MoMA’s show contains plenty of his images and collaborations with each. Writer Jack Kerouac, then at the peak of his post-On the Road fame, would do the book’s introduction, and The Americans took on a reputation as a definitive document of its time.
    This is more or less where “Life Dances On” starts. Among its first highlights is a fine series called “On the Bus,” which was first shown at MoMA the same year The Americans was published, in 1958. Superficially, it is similar: a sequence of images in the same gorgeous gelatin silver tones showing ordinary characters on the street, here shot from the window of a bus going down Fifth Avenue.
    Two works from Robert Frank’s “On the Bus” series (1958) in “Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    But it’s very different. For all its everydayness, and its similar-seeming obsession with shooting from moving vehicles, The Americans was artfully sequenced and composed, each image striking a perfect, clear note that builds into a (minor-key) harmony. The “On the Bus” series aspires to being a field recording rather than a symphony, a document of passing through a place at a specific moment. Frank saw “On the Bus” as the end of something and the beginning of something else. It was.
    From then on, Frank began to exit conventional documentary photography. I cannot think of any other artist whose public profile shifted as dramatically, from being seen as popularly resonant in a Voice-of-a-Generation way to being seen as intensely hermetic, a complete artist’s artist. (Although his Beat cachet would bring him work shooting the Rolling Stones for 1972’s Exile on Main Street and Tom Waits for 1985’s Rain Dogs, which get their due in displays.)
    Images of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards by Robert Frank displayed in “Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    Frank’s process of editing The Americans involved making 1,000 work prints from 767 rolls of film before making his final selections. You often see his contact sheets reproduced in discussions of the work—all the alternative angles on some scene and then the one famous image from the 83 in the final book, marked out by a red circle (the National Gallery of Art has some you can look at online). Notably, there are later works in “Life Dances On,” like Beauty Contest, Chinatown (1968), with its multiple stacked serial images of the same busy scene, that evoke exactly this raw visual source material.
    Distilling a long, lonely process of looking down to perfect, gem-like moments, Frank had created one of the great, magnetic accounts of postwar ennui—but thereafter it was as if he wanted to reverse the achievement by trying to welcome back into the picture all the life that he had previously edited out. The animating belief behind all of Frank’s experiments post-The Americans is that such documentary images participate in the alienation they document, rendering life cold.
    Robert Frank, Beauty Contest, Chinatown (1968) in “Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue” at MoMA. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Thus, the world-in-motion of “On the Bus” augured Frank turning to the moving image, mainly to odd and difficult art films. The first of these, Pull My Daisy (1959)—shown via a clip and a cluster of stills—was a collaboration with artist Alfred Leslie. It features narration by Kerouac laid over somewhat shapeless scenes of an apartment meet-up of art people. The cast included poets Allen Ginsburg and Gregory Corso and painters Alice Neel and Larry Rivers. Coming after Frank’s deep and deliberate marination in alienation, Pull My Daisy is most interesting in the way it reads as an almost theorem-like reversal, making a direct virtue of intimate community and messy conviviality.
    As for Frank’s subsequent non-moving-image work—the bulk of this show’s cargo—he made photo collages (like Pablo and Sandy, 1979) and landscapes assembled from multiple stitched-together pictures (Mabou Mines, 1971-72). He photographed his own photographs, hung from clotheslines in nature, thereby literally animating them with the surrounding environment (Bonjour—Maestro, Mabou, 1974). He did a lot of scratching lines or scrawling words directly onto the image surface, emphasizing its psychological character (Hold Still—Keep Going, 1989). He spent a lot of time on correspondence that itself can be seen as diaristic mail art (Sarah Greenough has a lovely essay about this in the catalogue).
    Frank’s change of style coincided with a change of content and scenery. After making his name documenting the United States of America, Frank moved to the tiny rural community of Mabou, far out on Cape Breton Island in the east of Canada, in 1970. (An image of a wispy, almost-alive snowdrift swamping a Nova Scotia landscape from 1981 may be the most visually arresting in the show.) From his sprawling, restless tour of the byways of the U.S., he went to rooting in small-town life. Late in life, he made a film that simply followed along on the local paper delivery route, much to the bemusement of fellow Mabou residents, who weren’t sure why this was interesting.
    Robert Frank, Storm in Mabou, New Year (1981) in “Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue” at MoMA. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Most importantly in terms of Frank’s reversals and negations, The Americans was read as the emanation of a collectivity as much as a product of a personal vision (as the title suggests). It was first published in a French version as Les Américains, with Frank’s pictures accompanied by quotations from the likes of Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman, and Richard Wright—textual ornamentation wisely eliminated from the U.S. version to allow the images to speak on their own and of their moment. By contrast, almost all of the work in “Life Dances On” feels turned away from social life, deeply in Frank’s head—even when it is literally looking out the window. Landscapes, interiors, and still lifes are all presented as containers of intimate, half-divulged symbolism.
    In Laura Israel’s documentary about Frank, Don’t Blink (2015), you see footage of him addressing a college class in the early ’70s. He fields a question about why his work has become so hard to penetrate. “I am looking for something,” he says defiantly, “and if my films are in no way as successful to almost all people as my photographs are, it just makes me look harder, to express it stronger and better. Maybe I’ll never get there. I’m just happy that I am looking for it.”
    And Frank did seem, on some level, to find happiness in his journey inwards. If “Life Dances On” nevertheless leaves behind the impression of melancholy, it’s because life itself remains stubbornly full of sorrow.
    Frank outlived both his children. His son, Pablo, suffered from schizophrenia and died by suicide, in his 40s, in 1994. His daughter, Andrea, lost her life in a freak plane crash, aged 21, in 1974.
    As I left the MoMA, I thought suddenly of one of the better-known images in The Americans, titled Crosses on Scene of Highway Accident, U.S. 91, Idaho: scrubby grass, a placeless stretch of road, and three small cross-shaped markers crudely mounted on pieces of rebar thrust into the earth. It’s powerful because the memorial is so anonymous and so unremarkable. A flare of light descends from the sky, seeming to intimate something spiritual. But because the crosses are angled away, the feeling the photo conveys is of them being sped past, forgotten at the moment of their revelation, memory a victim of the same speed that kills.
    Robert Frank, Mabou (1977), showing his personal monument to his daughter. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Two decades later, Frank would make a series of works to memorialize Andrea. Some, in mournful black and white, show abstract shapes, evidently bits of wood and stones he built up in the landscape as a personal mourning ritual, then photographed to give them permanence (his exact explanation, quoted in the catalogue, remains a bit obscure to me). Another, a collage, features a photo of Andrea smiling, inset in a grid. Some of its squares are blank; some contain hazy picture fragments adding up to the outline of the family’s Mabou house. And in one of the squares, Frank has written these words: “for my daughter Andrea who died in an airplane crash in Tical in Guatemala on Dec 23 last year. She was 21 years and she lived in this house and I think of Andrea every day.”
    Frank’s photos of the improvised memorials feel so personal as to remain mysterious. But the collage with her face is so direct that it is almost like witnessing unprocessed grief or reading a page from a diary.
    As an image, that sad roadside memorial from The Americans is the more reverberant testament to the modern experience of death. But as a form of coping with that experience—of inhabiting a consciousness that actually refuses to speed away from the tragedy—the Mabou works are the more meaningful. Their imperfection is something like the beautiful unguarded ugliness of someone’s face as they let themselves weep. More

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    Rock Climbing as Art? Seoul Show Dares Viewers to Ascend

    A week after experiencing the artist Jihyun Jung’s latest piece, I am still sore.
    At the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, Jung has installed a nearly 50-foot-tall rock-climbing wall and titled it Kaeru (2024), “frog” in Japanese. Red climbing holds zig-zag up the installation in two parallel paths, and a safety rope hangs from an auto belay up above. From noon to 5 p.m., Friday through Sunday, visitors can strap on a helmet, harness, and climbing shoes and attempt to scale it.
    During an opening reception last week, I gave it a try and found it to be… very difficult. Moving slowly, painfully slowly, I made it maybe 30 percent of the way up before slipping. Viewers down below nevertheless applauded, which helped my wounded pride. “At the opening, only one person from the general audience made it to the top,” Jung told me later, making me feel a little better.
    Kaeru is part of a superb and surprising show called “Dream Screen” that artist Rirkrit Tiravanija has curated as part of the Leeum’s biannual “Art Spectrum” series, which is devoted to young artists.
    Preparing to grapple with the artwork. Photo by Sun A Moon.
    Jung was born in 1986 and started climbing a few years ago. “I’ve always been fascinated by artificial climbing walls inspired by nature,” he said. “This particular piece is motivated by speed climbing, the sport that started in nature but evolved into something quite different.” The height of his creation is set to the international standard, and the current record in the event is, astonishingly, just under five seconds.
    The brave climbers who make it to the top of Jung’s creation are able to see, close up, two metal sculptures of frogs like those at the Okitama Shrine in Ise, Japan, where they are regarded as symbols of good fortune. The pair are “wishing for double the speed and double the luck,” Jung said.
    Rock climbing in art is unusual, but it is not without its precedents. Matthew Barney was known to scale gallery walls (nude) with climbing equipment early in his career, and Andra Ursuta offered up some not-safe-for-work climbing walls at the New Museum in 2016, while Baseera Khan made climbing holds out of casts of her body parts for a 2017 display at Participant Inc. in New York.
    Right before I fell. Photo by Sun A Moon
    Jung has taken an almost-straightforward but slightly sly approach to the climbing-art genre, which is very much in keeping with his practice. His sculptures tend to look familiar at first, but they get stranger the longer you look at them. In a recent solo outing at the Art Sonje Center in Seoul, he presented a disassembled billboard and objects that he 3D-printed from iPhone scans of automobile scraps. Here at Leeum, he’s using store-bought climbing equipment, but he’s doubled everything and added those frogs. A certain eerie, uncanny feeling lingers.
    It’s an artwork about tough journeys and split-second decisions, and it’s an artwork that offers challenges: Are you willing to climb in front of an audience? Can you make it to the top? The vast majority of people will not be able to, and so it also poses fun, fruitful questions about how to make sense of—and how to evaluate—an artwork that you cannot fully experience.
    But even for those who decide not to put on a harness and make an attempt at the summit, there is a lot of pleasure to be had. “Climbing is both a sport and an art form, combining sculptural beauty and performative elements,” Jung told me. “It’s fascinating to watch people solve the route in their own way as they climb. I love the atmosphere—the cheers and applause from the audience, the dynamic poses of people falling, and the sense of accomplishment when someone finally reaches the top.” More

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    From KAWS to MSCHF—A New Show Celebrates Artists Who Have Made Sneakers Their Canvas

    Since 1995, the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto has surveyed society through shoes, from the legacy of men in high heels to footwear’s role in forensics. Next month, the institution is highlighting the growing relationship between art and sneakers—with a focus on recent artist collaborations that bridge star-studded drops with deeper cuts.
    MSCHF BWD (2023). Photo by Kailee Mandel.
    Coming up at the Bata Shoe Museum is “Art/Wear: Sneakers x Artists,” offering a deep dive into the growing trend, through the lens of 48 legendary artist-driven sneaker designs hailing from the museum’s own collection and new acquisitions alongside outside loans, some from the artists who made them.
    Bryant Giles x New Balance 2002R (2022) Photo by Kailee Mandel.
    “Art/Wear” will play out across the museum’s third floor, in thematic, chronological sections, mapping “the history of how sneakers came to be a focus for artists,” as the museum’s executive director and curator Elizabeth Semmelhack told me over email.
    Peter Max x Randy’s Shoes (1968) Photo by Kailee Mandel.
    “It starts with a look at the mass production of both canvas sneakers and ballpoint pens and markers to discuss the origins of drawing on sneakers with teen girls in the 1950s and 1960s,” Semmelhack, who’s penned numerous sneaker books, continued. The first known artist sneaker collab, which dates to the 1960s, will appear here: a pair of high top tennis shoes by acclaimed psychedelic artist Peter Max, for Randy’s shoes.
    Cey Adams x adidas Adicolor Hi BI2 (2006). Photo by Kailee Mandel.
    Next, “Art/Wear” will explore how graffiti writers like Stash, Futura, and Cey Adams further pioneered the link between art and kicks. Five pairs of KAWS sneakers will anchor this section, in addition to two complete KAWS x Sacai outfits, as Semmelhack noted, “to explore the complete embodiment of art.”
    KAWS x DC shoes (2001). Photo by Brad Bridgers.
    The show final section will devote itself to sneakers by fine artists like Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, and Daniel Arsham. Packaging features most heavily here, demonstrating how “how sneakers and also their boxes and tissue paper give consumers access to artists’ work,” Semmelhack said. She likens the very limited editions of these shoes to fine art prints. A skate deck triptych by Murakami will enliven this space, too.
    Takashi Murakami x BLACKPINK Ohana Full-Bloom Slides (2024). Photo by Kailee Mandel.
    Sometimes, sneakers can feel like a very male dominated space. “Art/Wear” expands beyond this stereotype, including sneakers from about half a dozen female artists, including Shantell Martin, Vicky Vuong, and Kate Knudsen, the widow of Doobie Brothers drummer Keith Knudsen.
    Ruohan Wang x Nike Air Force 1 Flyleather (2020). Photo by Kailee Mandel.
    This show doesn’t shirk drama, either. After careful deliberation, Semmelhack included a pair of Tom Sachs’s Nikes in “Art/Wear,” even though the Olympian outfitter dropped Sachs amidst controversy last spring. Semmelhack said she opted to keep Sachs’s work “because it has been central to the history of artists and brand collaborations.”
    Javier Calleja x Vault by Vans “You Have No Choice” slip ons (2022) Photo by Kailee Mandel.
    Global commerce has enabled the artist patronage system to open up, as artists translate their work onto an ever widening array of products, and reach new audiences around the world. Compared with scarves, jewelry, or clothes, what makes sneakers so alluring?
    Damien Hirst x Vans and Palms Casino Resort polka dot slip on (2019). Photo by Adrienne Naval.
    First of all, sneakers offer a stronger structure, which allows an artist’s designs to shine without the fatigue of holding the body any one way. Furthermore, the packaging and related ephemera surrounding sneaker drops generate a particular kind of excitement.
    Daniel Arsham x adidas Originals FUTURECRAFT 4D (2018). Photo by Adrienne Naval.
    “I think it is important to note that sneakers are not blank canvases,” Semmelhack added. “The storied histories embedded in classic silhouettes, the cultural significance of specific brands, and the longstanding importance of sneakers in the creation of cultural and personal identity are all at play in artist collabs.”
    As the exhibition will show, these sneakers prove that art has power beyond the gallery.
    Mache ‘Blank Canvas’ Runner Customs (date unknown) Photo by Kailee Mandel.
    “Art/Wear: Sneakers x Art” will be on view at Bata Show Museum, 327 Bloor St W, Toronto, October 3, 2024–March 26, 2025. More

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    Manifesta Goes Off-the-Grid to Take on an Over-Touristed Barcelona

    As the Catalan capital, Barcelona’s tourism has sparked a crisis for those who live there. Local residents are battling crowds, pollution, and carelessness when it comes to the region’s culture. Despite the municipal government taking measures including banning the construction of new hotels and raising tourist tax, over the summer, tensions culminated in thousands of protestors not only denouncing the city’s over-tourism, but even shooting tourists with water guns out of sheer frustration.
    The urgency of this atmosphere underpins the 15th edition of Manifesta, which opened to the public on September 9 (running until November 24, 2024). With an artistic team spread across 12 cities on the periphery of the Spanish city, this edition is intentionally decentralized, focusing on local communities as a methodology for sidestepping the ever-increasing tourism and gentrification of Barcelona itself.
    Overseen by Portuguese curator Filipa Oliveira, who is the collective’s creative mediator, this edition takes place around the metropolitan region with a clear ambition: to encourage long-lasting change in the area. Large-scale art events are notorious for paying lip service to such endeavors while often avoiding any meaningful responsibility for enduring transformation. Manifesta 15 seeks to redress this imbalance.
    Garden of ‘La Ricarda’, 1965 © Moisès Villèlia. Photo © Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana. Photo: Ivan Erofeev
    Shakespeare’s famous adage, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” could easily apply to Manifesta, which also goes by the European Nomadic Biennale, and has been ever on the move since 1994. (The last edition was in Prishtina, Kosovo, and the next will head to the German region of Ruhr.) Launched to respond to the new social, cultural, and political reality after the Cold War, thirty years on, the project now doubles down, aiming to make socio-ecological improvement its fundamental principle.
    A tall order, no doubt. Yet this edition’s will to turn our gaze to the peripheries is, thankfully, non-exhaustive; this show is not about asking everyone to go everywhere. Rather, by embedding itself within atomized local social and ecological infrastructures, the project activates art as a mediating factor to enable both critical engagement and, hopefully, sustained change.
    Cue the “clusters:” With three exceptional, if dense, archival presentations mounted at Manifesta 15’s headquarters in Barcelona’s Eixample district—which respectively explore radical pedagogy in 20th Century Catalonia, Barcelona’s democratic and cultural evolution, and Black life in the metropolitan region—the other exhibitions form clusters in spaces as diverse as churches, disused factories, a former panopticon prison, a grain warehouse, and even a bomb shelter. As a whole, this sees 92 artists within three thematic categories: “Cure and Care,” which looks at the healing power of culture; “Balancing Conflicts,” which seeks to protect local natural resources from existential threat; and “Imagining Futures,” which focuses on the Besòs River region, home to one million residents, which has been defined by its disorderly urban growth.
    Exudates, 2024 © Eva Fàbregas. Photo © Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana. Photo: Ivan Erofeev
    Cure and Care
    The concept of care has become a buzzword in contemporary art circles, with methods of repair often proposed through exhibition making, and usually in ways that are fundamentally different from Western approaches.
    At this cluster’s main venue, a 9th-century Benedictine Abbey, an interior courtyard is the definition of peacefulness with its Corinthian columns, trompe l’oeil frescos, and a fountain with bright orange fish. Encountering Simone Fattal’s bronze sculpture Adam and Eve (2021) is an exultant, tongue-in-cheek dig at the iconography of the Christian church, and presumably, when presented in this context, the history of its own questionable approach to care.
    These Biblical figures are abstracted into a glorious amalgam of textured flesh, breasts, legs, and torsos weighted with human authority. Upstairs, Dana Awartani’s medicinally-dyed and hand-embroidered silk installation (Let me Mend Your Broken Bones, 2024) sees darned windows of red, yellow, and orange silk perfectly patching the negative space of the arches, while Wu Tsang’s video Girl Talk (2015), which explores how identity structures can be dismantled, has the exultant singing voice of theorist and poet Fred Moten ringing out through the halls.
    Adam and Eve, (2021) © Simone Fattal. Photo © Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana. Photo: Cecília Coca
    The standout work here is Diana Policarpo’s three-channel video Liquid Transfers (2022–24), a speculative-fiction film about ergot, a fungi growing on wheat that caused hallucinations in humans and shaped social behavior alongside the rise of capitalism. Used by healers, midwives, and experimental military programs alike to “reveal the invisible crimes of our psyche,” it poetically taps into not only the cult of hallucinogenic healing but also into the violent undercurrents of political abuse in the name of care and progress.
    Liquid Transfers, (2022-2024) © Diana Policarpo. Photo © Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana /Cecília Coca
    At the Museo de Ciencias Naturales (Museum of Natural Sciences), it’s easy to wonder whether aesthetic rigor is sometimes sacrificed for methodology. The glass and textile sculptures of Hugo Canoilas, Sculptured in darkness (2020–24)—bulbous, rock-like forms that merge with the vegetation in the museum’s garden—appear less like the “radical inclusion” of non-human life species in a “post-capitalist world” they’re presented as, and more like incidental leftovers. Similarly, the textile and ceramic works by Tanja Smeets, The Life in Between (2024), which appear as fungi-like growths across a great swathe of two additional venues, a Romanesque church and the textile factory Vapor Buxeda Vell, seem parenthetical and, dare I say, needlessly repetitive and rather decorative.
    Infinitely more pertinent as an urgent methodology of cure and care are Lara Schnitger’s colorful patchwork banners, which are draped from the factory’s chimneys: Women’s work is Never Done (2024). As the former “Manchester of Catalonia,” this region was known as the world’s second largest textile industry, which created Catalonia’s wealth. Collaborating with a local women’s sewing association, Xarxa de Dones Cosidores, the installation symbolizes female resilience, building upon the stories of these women and focusing on unrecognized acts of female labor.
    Sculptured in darkness, (2020-2024) © Hugo Canoilas. Photo © Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana / Cecília Coca
    Balancing Conflicts
    While some of the venues in this section leave you wondering if you could have just glanced at installation shots online, rather than schlepping for hours to see somewhat mediocre one-work installations, it’s all worth it once you reach Casa Gomis, a private Modernist villa designed by Antoni Bonet i Castellana between 1949 and 1963.
    As a former refuge for Catalan’s cultural figures during Franco’s dictatorship, it still functions today as a private home. The villa is bathed in the thick scent of pine, which blends with the heat and rain. It sits in the Llobregat Delta Nature Reserve, bordering Barcelona-El Prat Airport, which is lobbying for an expansion that would destroy both the reserve and the property. This time capsule of Modernist architecture, design, and furniture is one in a million: truly breathtaking, and fighting for survival if indeed the airport is given permission to increase its size.
    Parliament of Trees, (2022-2024) © Elmo Vermijs. Photo © Manifesta 15. Photo: Ivan Erofeev
    Encouraging you to sit beneath a leafy, shaded canopy in the garden, works such as Parliament of Trees (2022­–24) by Elmo Vermijs, a layered installation of locally sourced or borrowed timbre, acknowledges trees as being the silent witnesses of climate change, poignantly questioning the fundamental rights of more-than-human entities in our society, which are often voiceless in their struggle for existence.
    Inside the villa, another standout moment here is by Catalan artist Magda Bolumar Chertó, whose site-specific painting Xarpellera for La Ricarda (1966) lyrically arranges dots, shapes, and lines like a musical score of joyfully bright primary colors. It was the backdrop for many music performances that took place at the villa against a milieu of political mire. It’s easy to imagine the avant-garde gatherings that flourished here as a means of escaping Franco’s tyranny, even if only momentarily.
    Imagining Futures
    The absolute standout exhibition at Manifesta 15 is presented at the Tres Xemeneies (Three Chimneys), an utterly colossal thermal power station of concrete and iron built in the 1970s, which generated electricity for the metropolitan region before it was closed in 2011. While the building provided work for the local community, and was therefore termed the “Sagrada Família of the workers,” it too was a source of pollution, environmental damage, and a health hazard: its final closure resulted from its detrimental impact on the climate, causing acid rain.
    Arrow of Time 2, (2022-2024) © Emilija Škarnulytė. Photo © Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana. Photo: Ivan Erofeev
    At the center of the power station is a powerful archival presentation, Memory of the Smoke, which explores the dual sense of belonging and sustenance brought to the people by Tres Xemeneies, alongside its threatening presence. Photographs, letters, maps, and posters trace the development of the building, from the first demonstrations against the “damned soot” to the residents who fought against Francoism, to the fight for improved labor rights and women’s rights. Manifesta 15 worked together with residents of the Sant Adrià area to create this presentation, which is bursting at the seams with memories, as well as to contemplate the role of this past in paving the way for the region’s future urban transformation.
    Another ode to the local residents finds form in the dreamlike outdoor sculpture Urchins (2024), which was initiated by CHOI+SHINE Architects, and was made in La Mina by 120 people living nearby. They wove white threads into lace-like patterns to form two giant spherical structures that appear like immense shells or sea urchins resting near the shoreline. Proximate is Mike Nelson’s Un Intruso (uninvited, into chaos) (2024), a new commission for which the artist built a shack from salvaged materials, with a window that perfectly frames the vast three chimneys slicing into the sky.
    Un Intruso (uninvited, into chaos), (2024) © Mike Nelson, Vegap, Barcelona 2024. Photo © Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana / Ivan Erofeev
    The inclusion of two films are notably well curated: Emilija Škarnulytė’s Arrow of Time 2 (2022–24), which centers on the threat of the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in Lithuania when it was under Soviet rule, and Dziga Vertov’s The Eleventh Year (1928), a recently restored propaganda film. It marked the eleventh anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution, celebrating the Soviet Union’s dictatorial empire and engineering might with the construction of the Dnipro Hydropower Station in Ukraine. Both speak to the disastrous proposition that utopia is achievable through industry.
    When women strike the world stops, (2020) © Claire Fontaine, Vegap, Barcelona 2024. Photo ©Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana. Photo: Ivan Erofeev
    It is really the sculptural installations that make this presentation sing, from the acid yellow pigment and hanging pale-pink cocoons of Carlos Bunga’s The Irruption of the Unpredictable (2024), which calls out to the power of renewal, to Diana Scherer’s Yield (2024), a gigantic tapestry made of roots, soil, seeds, and grass that is draped all the way from one factory floor to another, and that references the spines and bones which fascinated Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí.
    On the top floor of the Tres Xemeneies, Asad Raza’s Prehension (2024) saw the artist removing three of the factory’s windowpanes to conjure the poetic possibilities of the wind, which blows through the space, activating long drapes of white fabric that rhythmically dance in with air: truly mesmerizing. And perhaps the pièce de résistance is Claire Fontaine’s LED installation When women strike the world stops (2020), which conjures the importance of women to this factory’s history; while only making up 1 percent of the workforce, nonetheless women fought in the shadow of the building for personal rights, environmental safety, and improved living conditions.
    Charging art with having the power to activate enduring change—not only to visualize or represent alternative ways of being in the world, but to actively protect and repair–makes Manifesta 15 political by definition. It is a valiant effort, and one that deserves our support while the potential of its long-term influence plays out.
    Manifesta 15 runs from the September 8 through November 24, 2024. More

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    Shantell Martin’s Maze Will Make Times Square Meditate

    Shantell Martin’s style is so appealing that she’s had to battle wine and fashion companies alike for pilfering it. It has also placed her in international demand and created a hectic schedule: this month alone, the London-born artist is celebrating new murals at Rockefeller Center with the Art Production Fund and a limited edition mini-bike with Brompton.
    But she will aim to slow things down a bit on October 1, when she unveils her first-ever walking path, a 160-foot-long labyrinth that will create space for meditation amid the madness of Times Square.
    “I attended several 10-day silent meditation retreats,” Martin told me via email, recalling when she took up the practice while living in Japan in the 2000s. “I haven’t participated in one of those over the past few years, partly because I’ve found that walking and drawing provide a similar sense of mindfulness and space.”
    The artist previously worked with the presenter of the new project, Times Square Arts, in 2020, as part of the nonprofit’s “Midnight Moment” digital art program. Her forthcoming maze, The Path: A Meditation of Lines, will lead viewers on a winding journey through the notoriously frenetic Manhattan hub. Martin’s design, which she’s conceptualized in her stream-of-consciousness style, bears trademarks of the artist’s look, like looping lines, smiling faces, and neat text. More and more visual elements become clear the longer one looks, including mountains, sailboats, and stick figures.
    Of course, it will be hard to divine the larger composition uniting these intertwining, disparate elements in person. That will be part of the fun for those who traverse The Path. Martin’s maze will center on two crisscrossing primary routes, one white, one black. Dotted lines diverge from both, like little roads to nowhere. Playful characters and accents offer unexpected shortcuts along the way, surrounded by words that reappear throughout Martin’s practice, like “breathe,” “someday,” and “are you you,” all formulating different phrases depending on the approach one takes. The work’s only fixed, complete sentence will appear in its upper right-hand corner, for viewers to make out on their way from 47th Street to 48th Street along Broadway: “You are in the right place at the right time.”
    A preview of the walking path. Courtesy of Shantell Martin.
    The maze will be sanctioned off from the rest of Times Square only during activations, such as daily guided meditations and musical performances. Otherwise, participants will have to navigate the winding paths and the crowds all at once. Fortunately, the work is intentionally painted “on a relatively quiet plaza rather than in the center of all the Times Square action,” Times Square Arts director Jean Cooney said in an email. Furthermore, Martin herself has recorded an audio guide, and seating will allow for sustained pauses.
    “Walking, much like drawing, can empower you and move you forward—both metaphorically and physically,” Martin remarks in the project’s description. “Putting one foot in front of the other is a simple yet powerful act, and I hope that this message and activity can be translated through this project.”
    The local Times Square community—including theater staff and sanitation workers—will benefit from their own dedicated walking sessions. Otherwise, The Path will remain accessible to the public all day, every day, through November 20. More