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    in Exhibitions

    Dive Into Environmental Artist Alexis Rockman’s New Show of Dazzling Watercolors Celebrating the Complexities of Ocean Life

    For its first contemporary art exhibition, “Alexis Rockman: Oceanus,” the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut invited the environmental artist to work with its resident scientists and curators to create a series of 10 new watercolors inspired by the complexities of ocean life. The level of detail in each piece warrants close attention, and a key describes all the real-life species—both endangered and invasive—that are depicted, sometimes symbiotically stacked on top of each other.
    At the center of the show is a monumental 24-foot-long canvas that explores the history of human interaction with the sea, from the first early sailors to travel in hand-hewn canoes to the football-field-sized container ships that throng international waterways today.
    Working with maritime historians like Michael Harrison of the Nantucket Historical Association and the Seaport’s curator of collection Krystal Rose, Rockman created a visual timeline of maritime technologies and activities. Dramatically lit photos of historic ship models from the Mystic museum’s collection, as well as a native mishoon, or dugout canoe, loaned by the nearby Mashantucket Pequot Museum, were used as references for the painting.
    “There are 18 of our boats in that painting,” Christina Connett Brophy, the institution’s senior director of museum galleries and senior vice president of curatorial affairs, told Artnet News. “But the models are not all the same scale—some of them are enormous, and some of them are really tiny. And so you see this magnificent big ship in the painting and realize the models are six inches long.”
    Installation view of “Alexis Rockman: Oceanus” at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut. Photo: courtesy of Mystic Seaport Museum.
    Each ship also carries its own important piece of history, from the famous slave ship Amistad, to the Thomas W. Lawson, a seven-masted cargo schooner that wrecked off the coast of Cornwall in the early 20th century, causing perhaps the first large-scale manmade oil spill.
    But perhaps Rockman’s closest collaborator for the show is James Carlton, a global expert on invasive species. “He had something to do with most of the paintings, advising on different animals to include and how things move around,” Brophy said. One of the watercolors, in particular, titled Transient Passages, shows various marine life hitching a transoceanic ride on a plastic bottle.
    “A few months after Alexis finished it, a big paper came out by Jim and several of his colleagues that look at the same themes,” Brophy added. “It proved that coastal creatures carried in water ballast and dumped in the middle of the Atlantic or the Pacific, where people think won’t survive because it’s not their habitat. They are doing just fine because of the plastic waste there.”
    Installation view of “Alexis Rockman: Oceanus” at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut. Photo: courtesy of Mystic Seaport Museum.
    Finding such a surprising note of optimism, in the face of environmental catastrophe, is an overall theme of the show, which also includes a side display on “blue technology,” or alternative maritime business models that are geared towards sustainability. Some examples include bio-plastics made from algae or designer shoe leather made from lionfish.
    “What I love about this series is that some of the themes are really difficult—I mean, they are extinct and invasive species, and oil spills and all kinds of things that are pretty tough—but the paintings are so beautiful and colorful. They seem almost celebratory of the animals that they’re depicting,” Brophy said. “And there are really smart people out there in the world who are trying to find solutions, and they’re doing amazing work.”
    Rockman and Brophy will attend a book signing for the exhibition catalog on World Oceans Day, June 8, at Rizzoli Bookstore, 1133 Broadway, New York.
    See images of the exhibition, as well as Rockman working on the centerpiece for show, below.
    Installation view of “Alexis Rockman: Oceanus” at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut. Photo: courtesy of Mystic Seaport Museum.
    Alexis Rockman, Oceanus (2022).
    Alexis Rockman, Benthos (2022).
    Installation view of “Alexis Rockman: Oceanus” at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut. Photo: courtesy of Mystic Seaport Museum.
    Alexis Rockman, Tsunami (2022).
    Installation view of “Alexis Rockman: Oceanus” at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut. Photo: courtesy of Mystic Seaport Museum.
    Alexis Rockman (center) with works from his “Oceanus” series in the studio.
    Alexis Rockman working on the eight-by-24-foot panoramic oil painting Oceanus (2022). Photo: Adam Reich.
    Alexis Rockman working on the eight-by-24-foot panoramic oil painting Oceanus (2022). Photo: Dorothy Spears.
    Alexis Rockman working on the eight-by-24-foot panoramic oil painting Oceanus (2022). Photo: Dorothy Spears.
    Alexis Rockman working on the eight-by-24-foot panoramic oil painting Oceanus (2022). Photo: Dorothy Spears.
    Alexis Rockman working on the eight-by-24-foot panoramic oil painting Oceanus (2022). Photo: Dorothy Spears.
    Alexis Rockman working on the eight-by-24-foot panoramic oil painting Oceanus (2022). Photo: Dorothy Spears.
    “Alexis Rockman: Oceanus” is on view at the Mystic Seaport Museum, 75 Greenmanville Ave, Mystic, Connecticut, through next spring.
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    in Exhibitions

    The Noguchi Museum Paid Its Employees to Contribute to Its Summer Staff Art Show. See the Works Here

    Something radical is taking place at the Noguchi Museum in Queens. Gallery attendants, curators, project managers, handlers, educators, and registrars have taken over to stage an onsite exhibition of staff artworks. What’s more, they’re getting paid to do so.
    To say the more than two dozen works on show at “A Living Mechanism,” ranging from paintings to experimental installations to intricate sculptures, are good seems a disservice, as if to ignore the well-known reality that American museums are staffed full of jobbing, hopeful artists (indeed, most everyone on display here holds an arts MFA). But yes, the works are strong and as diverse in scope and subject as the individuals who make the Noguchi tick.
    It’s certainly a show art institution laborers deserve. Amid the George Floyd Protests of 2020 with many museums enduring lockdowns, institutions affixed socially conscious statements to their websites and beamed out Zoom seminars on matters of inclusivity and equity. Change was coming. Gatekeepers, it seemed, might loosen their grip.
    Not that “A Living Mechanism” is some good will gesture from on high. It was negotiated and fought for by the museum’s Anti-Oppression Committee, a process co-curator Orlando Lacro said proved shockingly successful. “I have never heard of a museum paying participants to do a staff show,” Lacro told Artnet News. “It’s not a performative gesture by the museum; it was a gallery attendant project, fought for by gallery attendants. We were handed a budget with no strings attached, full creative and logistical control. It’s an example of how the staff makes the museum what it is.”
    The show’s name not only speaks to the collaborative manner in which it was conceived and executed, but also the spirit in which Isamu Noguchi worked. From Greenwich Village to the hamlet of Mure in Shikoku, Japan, Noguchi was forever in search of collaborators—indeed, the museum held a focused exhibition on the subject in 2010. Shamysia Waterman, the show’s co-curator, said Noguchi’s ability to connect with a wide range of people explains the diversity of the art and its appeal.
    “’A Living Mechanism’ harnesses Noguchi’s ethos of relying on every part of space in order to create a harmonious environment,” Waterman said. “His essence lives on.”
    Here are five artists on display at the Noguchi Museum.

    Harumi Ori, I am Here @ Green St & Spring St, New York, NY (2021)
    Harumi Ori, I Am Here at Green St and Spring St New York NY (2021). Photo courtesy the Noguchi Museum.
    In New York, orange is the color of steam cones, a portion of the city flag, a dubious slice of pizza. But in Japan, the color is sacred and for the past two decades, Ori has been playing with this contrast. In sparse yet detailed works, she repurposes orange industrial mesh to capture single moments on New York streets. “The connections between individuals and groups, and the landscapes they pass through and share are revealed,” Ori said. “It is the beauty of these relationships that I wish to express.”

    Shinsuke Aso, Getting out of a rut (2023)
    Shinsuke Aso, Getting out of a rut (2023). Photo courtesy the Noguchi Museum.
    Aso has an eye for photographing the humorous side of everyday objects. His collage works are equally playful and bring together discarded objects in pieces that ask viewers “open-ended questions.” Getting out of a rut places a watch, an oversized playing card, and a plastic hanger on sections of acrylic paper—objects all found onsite at the museum, where the Japan-born artist works as a shop associate.

    Jared Friedman, Withdrawal (Automated Teller Machine 1) (2023)
    Jared Friedman, Withdrawal Automated Teller Machine I (2023). Photo courtesy The Noguchi Museum.
    Forget the city’s postcard architectures; Friedman focuses on the curious shapes of the small, the overlooked, the boringly familiar. On canvas, rug, and astroturf he paints ubiquitous toilet cubicles, white cardboard takeaway boxes, four leaf tile vents. The hope, he said, is to question our sentimentality. It’s easy to picture the bodega street corner onto which his grotty ATM machine is fixed, its blue screen light luring, its stickers illegible.

    Johnathan Glass, Jim Ridl Trio at Deer Head Inn (2022)
    Jonathan Glass, Jim Ridl Trio at Deer Head Inn (2022). Photo courtesy The Noguchi Museum.
    Glass is a particular sort of jazz aficionado. He knows his way around the club circuit (Village Vanguard is his favorite) and boasts a tasteful collection of records, but what he loves best are the frenetic pen and ink drawings he sketches in real time at shows. For Glass, capturing sound means mimicking the movements of the musicians themselves. It’s all there, the straggles of hair, the concerted expressions, the eye contact, the wobbling strings. Here, he shows two works: Robert Glasper’s Dinner Party and Jim Ridl Trio at Deer Head Inn.

    Yali Romagoza, Pain of Cuba, Body I am (2022)
    Yali Romagoza, Pain of Cuba Body I am (2022). Photo courtesy Noguchi Museum.
    The Cuban-born interdisciplinary artist Yali Romagoza has an alter-ego and at the Noguchi Museum, it’s laying on a bed of sand staring at the ceiling. Above it, the sounds of lapsing water and poetry accompany a video projection of a restless body awash on a darkened shore. It’s Romagoza’s response to the disorientation she has experienced since moving the U.S. in 2011 and the enduring longing she feels for home.
    “A Living Mechanism: The Noguchi Museum Staff Exhibition” is on view at the Noguchi Museum, 9-01 33rd Road, Queens, New York, through June 15.
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    in Exhibitions

    Art Duo Komar and Melamid Were Laughed Out of the Soviet Union. Are They Having the Last Laugh on Us?

    Going into the large Komar & Melamid retrospective currently at the Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers, I already knew the wily, proto-postmodern art style that this artist duo brought with them when they emigrated from the U.S.S.R. at the end of the 1970s. Above all, I knew such calling-card projects as “Nostalgic Socialist Realism” and “The People’s Choice,” characterized by a spirit that is brainy and satirical in a way that at times almost becomes a kind of deadpan wackiness.
    But I’m not sure I understood the overall nature of the game. I’m not sure I got that their humor wasn’t just their way of making a serious point, but might well reflect an unnerving skepticism that there were serious points to make.
    For me, seeing the twists and turns of the Komar & Melamid corpus surveyed overall (the duo broke up in 2003 and they now work separately) is something like a moment of zooming out from a maze, seeing it from above, and realizing suddenly that there is no way out.
    Signing Slogans
    The legacy of the Cold War makes the “dissident artist” narrative an appealing hook for any writing on Komar & Melamid. It was certainly part of what made their careers in the States. The catalogue of this show even suggests that the duo’s signature jokes about government propaganda “produced a strong undermining effect on the prestige of Soviet power and advanced its fall.”
    This is a bit much. They certainly were stifled by the authorities (they were part of the infamous “Bulldozer Exhibition” of ’74, when authorities demolished an exhibition of non-official art in a park). But an essay in the catalogue for a previous Zimmerli exhibition, Moscow Conceptualism in Context, states plainly that the small independent scene of non-official artists—very much including Komar & Melamid—was “largely invisible to the general public until they started to be exhibited in the West in the early 1980s.” As a consequence, it says, they “should not be equated with the Soviet dissidents, who relentlessly publicly opposed the Communist authorities.”
    Komar & Melamid, We Were Born to Make the Fairytale Come True (from the “Sots-Art” series) (1972). Photo by Ben Davis.
    Vitaly Komar and Aleksandr Melamid met studying at the Stroganoff Art Academy, both graduating in 1967. At the time, a relative thaw let news of developments in Western contemporary art seep through. Komar remembers getting a sense of Conceptual art “based on scattered quotations from Joseph Kosuth and Lucy Lippard” and “Soviet publications that criticized decadent Western movements.” (The crushing of the Prague Spring in ’68 produced a fresh crackdown on information.)
    In 1972, Komar & Melamid’s first and still most-generative creation as a duo would be a movement they styled “Sots-Art.” In a nutshell, the idea was to reframe state propaganda in the same way as Pop art reframed ads and comics—a great formula, you have to admit. But whereas Pop art was embraced in the U.S. as a frolicsome affirmation of the vibrancy of the post-war consumer society, Sots-Art remained utterly marginal in its homeland.
    Its materially modest vibe reflects this. It is represented in the Zimmerli by a room of funny little paintings, inserting images of the artists and their wives that goof on the idea of Soviet Man and Woman, plus stark white-on-red banners with slogans like “OUR GOAL IS COMMUNISM!” and “WE WERE BORN TO MAKE THE FAIRYTALE COME TRUE.”
    The key detail of these latter works is that Komar & Melamid stamped their own names beneath these arid exhortations, transforming them, through the magic of artistic irony, into arch works of word art. The joke, of course, is these kinds of slogans, which were everywhere in the streets, were so aesthetically flat and ideologically hollow that no one would ever want to claim them. (“The paradox consists in the fact that the only slogans that have survived from the Soviet period are slogans that are signed ‘Komar and Melamid,’” Komar remembers wryly.)
    Pretty funny! But who, finally, were these subversions aimed at within the tightly controlled civil society of the U.S.S.R.? Melamid puts it bluntly, in an interview printed in the new catalogue: “We were addressing the West. We weren’t talking to the Soviet people.”
    All Wrong
    The meretricious nature of official Soviet culture is part of any Western observer’s latent understanding of culture behind the Iron Curtain. What’s more interesting to me is how the work of Komar & Melamid also expressed alienation from the imaginable alternatives to state-sanctioned Communist art.
    Importantly, in their most generative early-‘70s period, Komar & Melamid were mocking critics not just of official art in Moscow, but also—and maybe especially—of the handfuls of active non-conformist artists (most notably the recently passed Ilya Kabakov) who formed an alternative scene. What makes Komar & Melamid unique is just how deeply they imbibed and embodied the cynicism nurtured in the clunky, bureaucratic world of Breshnev-era Russia during the so-called Era of Stagnation—cynicism that metastasized into a disidentification from any positive ideology for art at all.
    Komar & Melamid despised the apartment-bound intellectualism of its non-conformist art scene, with its posture of ethereal spirituality. They mocked spiritual claims for art in works like Circle, Square, Triangle (1975), which took the ideal abstract geometry of the square, triangle, and circle, and presented these with goofy texts advertising their magical healing abilities.
    Komar & Melamid, Post-Art #2 (from the “Post-Art” series) (1973). Photo by Ben Davis.
    For that matter, remarkably, Komar & Melamid were suspicious of big, optimistic claims about Western art as a progressive force as well. Such a sentiment that finds programmatic expression (almost too programmatic) in their “Post Art” series. Made in the early ‘70s while still working in the hermetically sealed Moscow semi-underground, these depict Pop art works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein as flaking, fallen frescos, as if viewed from a future where their glamor had turned to dust.
    Men of the Zeitgeist
    In the late ‘70s, Komar & Melamid made the jump out of their home country, first to Israel (after a period of being held in bureaucratic limbo) and then to New York, where they continued spinning out new projects at a brisk clip.
    There’s a moment in “A Girl of the Zeitgeist,” the late Janet Malcolm’s long, biting New Yorker essay on Ingrid Sischy’s tenure as editor of Artforum, in which Sischy takes Malcolm to visit Komar & Melamid’s studio to show her the deeper end of the New York art scene, why it all matters. Here is the passage I always remember:
    They start another animated debate, one that soon gets into art theory, the condition of art today, the situation of art in New York. As this argument, too, begins to peter out, Melamid sighs and says, “We sit here, and we talk, and I think, ‘Where is life in all this? Life! Life!’ We go at things obliquely, to the side,” making a gesture of ineffectuality with his hand, “instead of straight, like this,” pounding his fist into his palm. He continues, emotionally, “Last year, I woke up in a hotel room in Amsterdam. There was a woman in my bed. I looked in the mirror and saw that my eyebrows were gray. I saw that I was forty.”
    “You got that from Chekhov, you faker,” I say to myself. I am no longer charmed by this pair. I find their performance tiresome, calculated. I look over at Sischy, who is enjoying herself, who thinks they are “great,” and I ponder anew the question of authenticity that has been reverberating through the art world of the eighties.
    The assessment is biting. But also, to call Komar & Melamid fakers… well, I can’t help but think that Malcolm didn’t quite get the nature of the phenomenon she was dealing with.
    Of course, a New Yorker writer, and the U.S. public in general, wanted from them a performance of Russian intellectualism and dissident authenticity. Perhaps that was a role they were playing for Malcolm and Sischy.
    But in Russia, as they themselves remembered, they were known as clowns: “‘It’s a joke, it’s amusing—they’re funny guys—but it’s not art’—that was the general opinion,” Melamid remembers. The lesson that Komar & Melamid brought with them to New York from Moscow was that all postures of artistic authenticity were a pose, a posture, a game.
    In general, one of the things the Zimmerli show makes vivid is how Komar & Melamid willfully refused to ever repeat themselves, abandoning each new art-game as soon as they created it. It’s a tic probably to the detriment of building a “Komar & Melamid” art brand—but that was the point in a way: It emerged from how they generalized their contempt for the deadness of the art-ideologies all around them in Moscow into a sense that being committed to any one art-ideology was inherently deadening.
    Socialist Un-realism
    At the time of the New Yorker article, Komar & Melamid were at the peak of their relevance, with their “Nostalgic Socialist Realism” series launching that year at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts. These were adroitly painted, pokerfaced spoofs of the Old Master manqué style of Socialist Realism.
    You see, for instance, fatherly tyrant Joseph Stalin being visited by a flowy-haired nude muse tracing the shadow of his profile on the wall. That’s an allusion to the classical myth of the origin of art from Pliny, and the large canvas is called The Origins of Socialist Realism (1982-83).
    Paintings from Komar & Melamid’s “Nostalgic Socialist Realism” series. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Robert Hughes praised the show in Time for nailing the “correct borsht-and-gravy colors of official Soviet art of 30 years ago.” Yet the truth is, Komar & Melamid’s tenebrous paintings looked nothing much like the sunny romanticism of the classic period of Socialist Realism. Nor did “Nostalgic Socialist Realism” satirize then-contemporary official art in the U.S.S.R., which had adopted the so-called “severe style.”
    Basically, this suite of paintings has to be seen as the equivalent of Melamid calculatedly channeling Chekhov’s “The Looking Glass” for Janet Malcolm. “Nostalgic Socialist Realism” is a canny game played with the Cold War U.S. audience’s ideas of Russian art. As with a lot of Komar & Melamid’s work, when you really look into it, its ironies somehow turn back on you for having expected something serious.
    Poll Workers
    Another example of the same nesting-doll irony: In the 1990s, Komar & Melamid would realize their most-widely known work, “The People’s Choice.” These were paintings based on a series of polls, where they gathered data about the most-liked and least-liked kinds of art from publics in various countries, and then created works that gathered together all the best and worst traits. (By this method, almost all countries end up preferring figurative art where a historical figure is near a body of water, and hating some form of geometric abstraction.)
    Study for Komar & Melamid, The People’s Choice: Canada (1995-97). Photo by Ben Davis.
    I think of “The People’s Choice” as the ultimate distillation of the best of Komar & Melamid: needlingly funny, possessed of a kind of canny and theatrical cynicism, and inhabiting artistic styles as a series of strategic games.
    It hails from the End of History, post-Cold War era. It can be, and has been, read as carrying on a joke about the illusion of a “People’s Art” from Soviet times. But it maybe even works better as being about the globalization of corporate-optimized, focus-grouped market culture in the Neoliberal ‘90s. It is thus a nicely plastic vehicle for the duo’s all-sided skepticism.
    But, as with “Nostalgic Socialist Realism,” when you really think about “The People’s Choice” your sense of the exact point that it is making starts to slip away.
    Is it about the silliness of mass taste, mocking the comedy of lowest-common-denominator art? Plenty of people read it that way! Or is it, on the contrary, making fun of experts trying to discern the “people’s” taste? After all, the images it conjures of what different national publics might want are clearly based on weird extrapolation and wishful amalgamation.
    History Lessons?
    You get a feeling that some of the animating specificity of Komar & Melamid’s work vanished as the Cold War context faded into the rear view. A series from 1999 making fun of the tropes of patriotic American art the way they had with “Nostalgic Socialist Realism” doesn’t really land. Meanwhile, once the end of the Soviet Union made “dissident Soviet artists” less of a hot topic, some of the interest in Komar & Melamid vanished as well.
    So, what do we do with this body if work now, some two decades after the curtain came down on the Komar & Melamid Show?
    The Zimmerli retrospective was originally going to be called “You Are Feeling Good!”, a title that captures their humor (it’s from a slogan they ironically appropriated for one of their first Sots-Art banners). Instead, the exhibition arrived as “A Lesson in History,” with this more sober tone reflecting today’s renewed geopolitical conflict with Putin’s Russia, and the need to pre-address any questions about showing Russian artists by framing their work in relationship to the legacy of totalitarianism.
    For myself, I do think that there is a lesson to be drawn from this history, I just don’t think it’s this one.
    Asked about final meaning of their work in the catalogue, Melamid volunteers this: “Everything is meaningless.” If the Komar & Melamid corpus resonates now, it won’t really be because it shows us some tradition of heroic satire in Russia. I’d think the better shot would be because people in the U.S. might actually identify with the feeling of being in a world of stagnation, where the ruling ideologies feel arbitrary and senseless, the opposing ones feel cloistered and self-indulgent, and as a consequence the thought that “it’s all a game” becomes more and more seductive.
    “Komar & Melamid: A Lesson in History” is on view at the Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, N.J., through June 16, 2023. 
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    in Exhibitions

    How Hardcore Can Art Get? Does A.I. Need Therapy? And Other Thoughts in the Air at London Gallery Weekend

    The floors were a little sticky at the Groucho, a private members club in Soho that has attracted a louche cohort of creative and media types since the 1980s, and which has had something of a revival in the art scene since it was acquired last year by the hospitality arm of the Swiss gallerists behind Hauser and Wirth. The launch party for London Gallery Weekend was not quite equivalent to the downtown New York scenes snapped by writer and Warhol collaborator Bob Colacello (on view at Thaddaeus Ropac)—but still, a gaggle of beautiful people enjoyed summer spritzes alongside ascendent painters including Sasha Gordon and Joy Labinjo.
    For committed patrons of the arts, London’s nascent gallery weekend poses something of an impossible task. The city’s sprawling geography and the 150-odd participating galleries make it infinitely less manageable than its counterpart in say, Berlin. Between exhibitions, opening parties, and dinners, there is perhaps too much competing for your attention.
    Joy Labinjo and Precious Adesina attend the Frieze 91 x London Gallery weekend opening party celebrating London’s Creative Scene at The Groucho Club on June 1, 2023 in London, England. (Photo by Dave Benett/Getty Images for London Gallery Weekend x Frieze)
    But London needs this. Galleries here have had a tougher time recovering from the pandemic than in other centers. Those difficulties piled on top of the logistical hurdles and bad vibes accompanying Brexit, and even that was before skyrocketing inflation rates and wider uncertainty began to catch up with the art world. With a market that relies strongly on sales made outside of the country, and competition from Paris stealing a lot of the thunder of late, there is a lot riding on this event. It has to excite buyers at home and from abroad, and to create a mid-year moment in the calendar for the city outside of Frieze Week in October.
    So what does London’s art landscape have to offer? Here are some questions that were in the air going into the marathon weekend.
    Installation view of “To Bend the Ear of the Outer World: Conversations on contemporary abstract painting” at Gagoian in London, open until August 25, 2023. Photo courtesy of Gagosian.
    What even is “contemporary” abstraction?
    Ever since the rise of abstract painting in the early 20th century, public attention has at intervals tacked back and forth between a love of abstraction and figuration. As of now, in early-mid-2023, trendy figurative painting is enjoying a healthy moment in the spotlight. Yet a behemoth exhibition of 40 living abstract painters at Gagosian raised the question as to whether we are in the midst of a pendulum swing back in the other direction. “I think both have existed in parallel,” curator Gary Garrels told me at the opening of “To Bend the Ear of the Outer World.”
    “There has been a lot of public attention in recent years for figurative work and I’ve felt that there’s just as much good, interesting work being made that’s abstract and so wanted to forefront that,” Garrels added.
    The exhibition was stuffed with the stars of contemporary abstraction. Even amid stellar works by Gerhard Richter, Cecily Brown, and Frank Bowling, and fare by younger super-stars including Jadé Fadojutimi, you could discover some standout works by artists who have had less airtime of late. Among these were a canvas by Jacqueline Humphries capturing something of the distracting noise of modern life, and a meditative moment of quiet offered by way of Jennie C. Jones.
    Installation view, Jacqueline Humphries at Modern Art. Photo by Michael Brzezinski.
    There is certainly an appetite for the materiality of abstract painting as we emerge from the pandemic and start returning to events in person. The medium doesn’t offer up easy narrative threads and so its power demands an IRL viewing to take in the scale, color, texture, surface, and gestures being made. But what are the defining characteristics of abstract painting being made today?
    “I think it’s about the strength of individuals, the affirmation of individual identity and imagination,” Garrels said. “There’s no slot, no box that everybody’s trying to fit into. There’s no movement. It’s not Abstract Expressionism, it’s not Pop Art, it’s not Color Field… It’s just about individuals having a strength of their own convictions.”
    Jacqueline Humphries is also given solo real estate by Modern Art across both its spaces. Her knowing canvases build on the history of abstract painting and infuse it with digitally native forms and gestures. A series of “pre-vandalized” paintings carry marks that recall Jackson Pollock but also understand the political agency of this kind of mark-making today, specifically invoking actions taken by climate activists desperate to capture media attention by flinging substances at paintings in museums. In the catalogue text for the Gagosian show, Humphries reminds us that abstraction is the notion that “maybe you can augment the ‘real’ effect without the intermediary of represented ‘things.’” Her cogent statements applied onto dizzying, staticky surfaces are still flash-burned to my retinas days later.
    Installation view, “Hardcore,” Sadie Coles HQ, London, May 25 2023 – August 5 2023. Credit: © The Artist/s. Courtesy of The Artist/s and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Katie Morrison / Sadie Coles HQ, London.
    Post-Brexit, and post-lockdown, how can we renegotiate our relationships with each other? 
    Many of us have continued to feel the knock-on effects of being physically isolated for several years, and events and openings still don’t totally feel “back to normal.” Over the weekend I witnessed many an awkward dance as people tried to read from micro-expressions whether a handshake or—god forbid!—an air kiss were permitted forms of greeting. Add to that the effects of our mass retreat online and the consequent further disintegration of our shared sense of reality, and many people have come out the other side of lockdown having internalized socio-political isolation that began long before the pandemic and have been polarized on either side of the too-woke and anti-woke divide. So I was on the look-out for themes of physical intimacy, conversations about cancel culture, and any desire for nuance.
    And boy did I find them at Sadie Coles. A challenging group exhibition titled “Hardcore,” including 18 artists, explored themes of sexuality in and of itself, wholly indifferent to social rules. As Mistress Rebecca, the dominatrix who wrote the curatorial text for the show, put it: “A hardcore rejects niceties because to be hardcore is to never fall into the safe and simple parameters of right or wrong. Today this seems to be an unnecessarily rare, even brave position to take.”  
    King Cobra/ Doreen Lynette Garner, In the Feast of the Hogs (2022). ©KING COBRA (documented as Doreen Lynette Garner). Courtesy of The Artist and JTT, New York.Photo: Katie Morrison / Sadie Coles HQ, London.
    Different people moving through the show might find their challenging line at different points. For me, Monica Bonvicini’s whip of buckle-down leather belts swinging in gentle circles or Joan Semmel’s 1977 painting For Foot Fetishists felt tame, but things got closer to the bone with Darja Bajagić’s Ex Axes, reclaiming images from “women with weapons” fetish sites, and King Cobra/Doreen Lynette Garner’s butchered carcass complete with a blood-stained blonde weave. Arriving at Miriam Cahn’s 2017 fleischbild/famillienbild (Meat Portrait/ Family Portrait) would elicit a wince from even the most sexually liberated; it depicts a couple having energetic intercourse while a pint-sized, childlike figure in the foreground turns away. Cahn’s work in particular, whose recent exhibition at Palais de Tokyo ignited a firestorm of controversy in France, seems to sit right on a knife’s edge of what can be socially acceptable today.
    Miriam Cahn, fleischbild/famillienbild (2017). ©Miriam Cahn. Courtesy of The Artist and Meyer Riegger, Berlin/Karlsruhe.Photo: Katie Morrison / Sadie Coles HQ, London.
    More leather is to be found in the Lisa-Marie Harris sculptures and wall-mounted reliefs at Cooke Latham Gallery, which respond to body shaming and sexually objectifying comments the artist has gotten over the years, and comment on the policing and hyper-vigilant monitoring of the female body as a response to sexual violence enacted on women. Elsewhere, at Stephen Friedman, Sasha Gordon’s surreal self-portraits—including images of herself as living topiary and as a cat—explore the alienation of unconventional human bodies and questions of her identity as a queer Asian American woman in a show titled “The Flesh Disappears, But Continues to Ache.”
    How are artists responding to the alarming technological disruptions of our age?
    The gargantuan leaps forward in the development of A.I. have pushed the tone of the art-tech conversation to a fever pitch; technologists are sounding the alarm about the threat A.I. poses to human existence itself. But even before this recent turn in the discourse, the destabilizing effects of the internet and its flood of information and distracting noise have been giving artists ample material to work with.
    At Sadie Coles’s space on Davies Street, Lawrence Lek’s ultra-prescient “Black Cloud Highway 黑云高速公路” unseats the myth of technological progress in an age of artificial intelligence. Lek’s entrancing 11-minute film Black Cloud follows a lone surveillance A.I. in an abandoned city—SimBeijing, a replica of the Chinese capital built by a tech company to road-test self driving cars. It reports accidents until all other A.I.s are banished, leaving it alone in the metropolis. It then engages a self-help therapy program to help it cope. The aura of post-humanity fills the viewer with dread that we are on the precipice of an abyss, a feeling aided by a thumping soundtrack by Lek and Kode9.
    Maisie Cousins, Green Head (2023). Photo courtesy of T.J. Boulting.
    Continuing on this theme, Maisie Cousins is showing some work made entirely using A.I. at T.J. Boulting as part of the artist’s quest to relive lost childhood memories. Nestled among real family photos are 19 glossy prints of A.I.-generated images based on memories of lost home videos of trips to an amusement park with her late grandfather. These colorful hallucinations recall Martin Parr’s saturated images of British seaside life, if they were on acid.
    At Gazelli Art House, Jake Elwes’s exploration of A.I. and machine learning, “Zizi – Queering the Dataset,” disrupts standardized facial recognition technology by feeding it thousands of images of drag performers. And Machine Learning Porn (2016) exposes the warped understanding of human biology by an algorithm trained to remove explicit imagery by tasking it with creating pornographic visuals.
    Final thoughts
    What these standout shows have in common—the abstract paintings, the intellectual provocations, the tech experimentation—is that they are all grappling with the specific difficulties of contemporary living; the isolating and scary present, the uncertainty about the future, and the inadequacy of the systems, forms, language, rules, and social mores we have available to answer to this existential nausea.
    Many of these works have found a way to express this feeling, and also to propose a way through it. They express a desire for nuance, for queering and questioning labels and boxes, and for opening up space for other ways of thinking, being, and seeing that are undefined. Something Garrels said about abstraction at his Gagosian show might be extrapolated to all of these works: “At the end of the day, it’s the individuals there on their own terms, struggling to find meaning and coherence within this vast barrage of information.”
    Javier Calleja, Still on Time (2023). Courtesy the artist and Almine Rech.
    The hope is that art will return to us some sense of shared understanding about the nature of existence, the perseverance of the human spirit, and how we might sit through this difficult moment in history.
    And if it all feels a little overwhelming, London Art Week has you covered too. Those in need of something to take the edge off of all this heady questioning might head over to Almine Rech, where Javier Calleja’s adorable characters offer up something of a palette cleanser.
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    A New Show on the Infamous Hollywood Blacklist Displays 100 Objects From a Dark Chapter in Tinseltown History. See Them Here

    In an era when one faction of America’s political establishment claims socialists control the entertainment and media industries, it’s worth noting the plain obvious: America has been here before.
    As Cold War battle lines hardened and America flexed its might across the globe in the 1940s, inwardly it began scouring industries for communist infiltrators. The House on Un-American Activities Committee led the charge and in 1947 put Hollywood on trial before Congress. One outcome was the jailing of recalcitrant industry figures, the infamous Hollywood Ten; another was a secret meeting at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel at which politicians forced studio heads to persecute those with Communist Party ties.
    A telegram invitation to this Waldorf Conference is among the more than 100 objects presented at Los Angeles’s Skirball Cultural Center in an exhibition that tells the story of how America’s film industry abandoned civil liberties under corporate and political pressure. On show through September 3, “Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare” is a collision of film and civic history that leads visitors to contemplate the lives ruined, the movies never made, and the ominous echoes in today’s polarized world.
    “‘Blacklist’ highlights issues of persecution, loss of civil liberties, as well as the dangers of propaganda,” Cate Thurston, the exhibition’s curator told Artnet News, noting the show has particular resonance in the context of the writer’s strike. “Dynamic history exhibitions like ‘Blacklist’ are built to facilitate critical thinking about contemporary issues through nuanced explorations of the past.”
    First produced by the Jewish Museum Milwaukee, the Los Angeles exhibition is twice the size of the original and fittingly teems with Hollywood artifacts sourced from the Writers Guild of America West archives and the Margaret Herrick Library.
    Dalton Trumbo features prominently. Trumbo was one of the best-paid screenwriters in the 1940s before being blacklisted for Communist Party affiliations and forced to write under pseudonyms. He did so with remarkable prolificacy. “Blacklist” displays his screenplay for Spartacus (1960) as well as the Oscar statuettes he received for Roman Holiday (1953) and The Brave One (1956), neither of which he was able to collect without compromising his identity.
    Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo served 11 months in the federal penitentiary in Ashland, Kentucky, in 1950. While incarcerated, Trumbo stored some of his personal belongings in typewriter ribbon tins. The items he kept included a calendar and notes from his children. Photo courtesy of Mitzi Trumbo.
    Given the prominent position Jewish people occupied in Hollywood, many of the exhibits speak to the conflicting way Jews both patrolled and disproportionally suffered in the climate of red panic. The aforementioned telegram was addressed to Louis B. Mayer, co-founder of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, the so-called King of Hollywood, whose studio would go on to rigorously enforce the government line. On the opposing side were First Amendment advocates, many of whom focused on the civil injustices dealt to Hollywood Ten—one lobbyist was Lauren Bacall (neé Betty Joan Perske) whose costume for How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) is on show.
    “Many of the creatives and executives affected by the blacklist were Jewish,” Thurston said, “Antisemitism is an explicit theme throughout the exhibition and many of the artifacts the Skirball added demonstrate how antisemitism shaped the Hollywood Blacklist.” For Thurston, curating the show had a personal resonance given Red Scare politics impacted several members of her family: some fled to Europe, others scraped by writing magazine articles under invented names.
    Lauren Bacall’s costume for her role as Schatze Page in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), designed by William Travilla. Courtesy of Larry McQueen Film Costume Collection.
    As with previous Skirball exhibitions, such as a look at Star Trek’s impact on visual culture and the legacy of master puppeteer Jim Henson, “Blacklist” is shadowed by a summer-long film program. The season begins with the 2007 documentary Trumbo in which the writer tells his own story, and goes on to screen classics penned by blacklisted writers including High Noon (1952) and The Breaking Point (1950), as well as The Way We Were (1973) that is based off Arthur Laurents’s experiences with the House Un-American Activities Committee.
    “Skirball welcomes opportunities to honor memory and facilitate dialogue about how collective historic memories influence contemporary American attitudes,” Thurston said. “My hope is that visitors come to the exhibition and make connections for themselves.”
    See more images from the exhibition below.
    Installation view of “Blacklist” at the Skirball Cultural Center. Photo courtesy Skirball Cultural Center.
    Dalton Trumbo’s Academy Award for Best Original Story for The Brave One, awarded to the fictious Robert Rich (1956), Courtesy of Molly Trumbo Gringas.
    Booklet, Committee on Un-American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, D.C. (revised 12/1/1950). Courtesy of the Jewish Museum Milwaukee collections.
    Installation view of “Blacklist” at the Skirball Cultural Center. Photo courtesy Skirball Cultural Center.
    Union flyer promoting the opening of Salt of the Earth (1954). Courtesy of the Herbert Biberman and Gale Sondergaard Papers, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.
    Installation view of “Blacklist” at the Skirball Cultural Center. Photo courtesy Skirball Cultural Center.
    Alfred L. Levitt’s Writers Guild of America membership cards from 1965 to 1982 list both his real name and his front, Tom August. On loan from the Screen Writers Guild Records, Writers Guild Foundation Library and Archive
    “Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare” is on view at Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd, Los Angeles, through September 3.
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    Is Hannah Gadsby’s Picasso Show at the Brooklyn Museum ‘Disastrous’ or Are Its Critics Just ‘Hysterical’? Here Are All the Hot Takes

    From its punny title on down, the Brooklyn Museum’s new exhibition “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby” was designed to start a conversation. Love it or hate it, it’s hard to deny that the show, which looks at the artist’s complicated legacy through the eyes of Gadsby, an Australian comedian best known for the Netflix special Nanette, has succeeded in that regard. 
    Even before it even opened, the show elicited the kind of fervent takedowns you rarely see from art critics these days. Then, just as quickly, the backlash brought on its own backlash. Only three days out from the opening it already feels like we’re in the third or fourth wave of “takes.” (Which in itself is a little funny, because both sides of the debate have accused the other of indulging in the kind of rapid, vapid opinions that dominate Twitter discourses, not legitimate art-historical ones.)
    “There’s little to see. There’s no catalogue to read. The ambitions here are at GIF level, though perhaps that is the point,” wrote New York Times critic at large Jason Farago of the exhibition in a review last week. The show, he argued, “backs away from close looking for the affirmative comforts of social-justice-themed pop culture.” 

    “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby” at the Brooklyn Museum gives the audience permission to ignore what challenges them, and to ennoble a preference for comfort and kitsch, @jsf, our art critic, writes.https://t.co/22PVtnTBaq
    — The New York Times (@nytimes) June 2, 2023

    Gadsby is after a revisionist history with the show, which is one of 50 international exhibitions presented on the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death. The comedian aims to redress Picasso’s legacy with a consideration of his fattened ego and misogynistic tendencies, his documented abuse of women and colonialist imagery.  
    But the gesture extends beyond show’s titular artist too. For Gadsby, Picasso represents Modernism writ large; he’s the male “genius” in a decades-long movement of male geniuses, many anointed at the expense of equally talented women artists. 
    In response, Gadsby has paired a selection of (mostly minor) Picasso pieces with works by pioneering women artists of the 20th and 21st centuries— Nina Chanel Abney, Dara Birnbaum, Käthe Kollwitz, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, and so on. These creators may be also geniuses in their own right, but their works’ connection to Picasso has been seen as tenuous at best.    

    The Brooklyn Museum has dismissed negative reviews of “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” which opened to the public today after being panned in ARTnews and the New York Times. https://t.co/Od6ef1lR6q
    — ARTnews (@artnews) June 2, 2023

    “The function of a public museum (or at least it should be) is to present to all of us these women’s full aesthetic achievements,” Farago wrote, before offering an alternative location for Gadsby’s presentation: “There is also room for story hour, in the children’s wing. 
    That “Pablo-matic” engages in a skin-deep, pseudo-historical investigation of its chosen topic is an opinion shared by other critics too. Artnews’s Alex Greenberger wrote in a review of the “disastrous” show that its “problem—Pablo-m, if you will—is not its revisionary mindset, which justly sets it apart from all the other celebratory Picasso shows being staged this year to mark the 50th anniversary of his death… It is, instead, the show’s disregard for art history,” he wrote, noting that Gadsby studied art history in college only to abandon it out of frustration “with its patriarchal roots.” 

    But while these and other biting reviews circulated online, some pointed out that they came mostly from male critics. “So many angry, hysterical reviews from male art critics must mean that Pablo-matic @brooklynmuseum is saying something really important,‘” wrote the feminist collective Guerrilla Girls, which has a piece in the show, in an Instagram post. 
    Meanwhile, Lisa Small, a Brooklyn Museum curator who, along with colleague Catherine Morris, helped Gadsby organize the exhibition, posted a picture of herself laughing with the comedian. Its caption read: “that feeling when / It’s Pablo-matic / gets (male) art critics’ knickers in a twist.” (Morris reposted it with the caption “An @nytimes columnist got VERY EMOTIONAL about our show.”)
    Australian author Kaz Cooke summed up the sentiment in a Twitter post of her own: “So far male reviewers of @Hannahgadsby’s co-curated Brooklyn Museum Picasso show have slagged it for being about Picasso, not being enough about Picasso, not being funny enough, not being serious enough, having the wrong paintings by women, & having paintings by the wrong women,” she wrote. 

    Shortly after the show opened, Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak weighed in, too. “To those who question whether Gadsby’s voice belongs in this exhibit, I would simply ask: Whose interests are threatened by including it? Or, who benefits from excluding it?” She wrote in an op-ed for the Art Newspaper. 
    “[‘It’s Pablo-matic’] is not about cancelling Picasso. Quite the opposite,” Pasternak continued. “Cancelling means refusing to engage. Refusing to have the conversation. Refusing complexity. Ours is an exhibition that invites complexity. And I’m confident Picasso can handle a little complexity. In fact, he invited it.” 
    “I’m also confident that our audiences can handle complexity, too.”
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    See Inside Keith Haring’s First L.A. Museum Show, Complete With a Pop Shop and a Pink Leather Suit Once Worn by Madonna

    Keith Haring’s linework has graced subterranean tunnels and art’s loftiest exhibition halls. This month, however, marks his first museum retrospective in Los Angeles. “Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody” animates 10 galleries at the Broad, the culmination of a decade of effort first started by the museum’s namesake founder Eli Broad—the late businessman who got his start as a collector buying the work of Haring and his downtown friends in the 1980s.
    Despite the commercial successes of Haring’s approach to accessible art—like his 1986 Pop Shop—“Art Is For Everybody” honors Haring’s political activism. The show features more than 120 artworks and relics that offer shocks of topical vigor, both on and off the canvas, from paintings to experimental videos, ephemera and more. In addition to drawing from its own holdings, the Broad has secured 67 loans from the Keith Haring Foundation and 42 from private collectors.
    “The exhibition offers the opportunity to see work from the full arc of the artist’s career,” curator and exhibitions manager Sarah Loyer told Artnet News. This includes work Haring made as a student at the School of Visual Arts, through to his passing at age 31 from AIDS-related illness.
    “Art Is for Everybody” opens with a striped room highlighting Haring’s Day-Glo paintings. Music culled from his mixtapes transports viewers to Tony Shafrazi Gallery circa 1982. After exploring Haring’s affinity for the graffiti scene’s many moving parts, like hip-hop and breakdancing, the show illustrates how his work grew more fervent with time.
    “He addressed topics from nuclear disarmament during the Cold War Era to religion at a time when the Christian right promoted abstinence-only education despite the growing AIDS epidemic, as well as police brutality, racism, patriarchy, and capitalism,” Loyer said.
    The show closes with Haring’s AIDS activism, then presents a spread of work by downtown art stars like George Condo and Jean Michel Basquiat, who collaborated with the force that was Keith Haring.
    In organizing the show, Loyer came to appreciate that Haring worked with the “confident line” as his primary medium. “If you look closely, you can see it change over time, from the earliest spray-painted works to intricate compositions filling massive unstretched tarpaulins,” she said. Though “Art Is for Everybody” offers universal delights, like a crown Haring helped create for Grace Jones and the pink leather suit Madonna wore to his 1984 birthday party, the show chiefly demonstrates Haring’s ability to blend criticism with optimism through many resounding lines.
    After its showing at The Broad, “Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody” will travel to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Canada. Take a peek below.
    Keith Haring, Untitled (1982). Private collection. © Keith Haring Foundation
    Installation view of “Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody” at the Broad, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua White/JWPictures.com. Courtesy of the Broad.
    Installation view of “Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody” at the Broad, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua White/JWPictures.com. Courtesy of the Broad.
    Keith Haring, Untitled (1988). © Keith Haring Foundation
    Keith Haring with LA II (Angel Ortiz), 3 Piece Leather Suit (1983), leather and paint. © Keith Haring Foundation
    Installation view of “Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody” at the Broad, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua White/JWPictures.com. Courtesy of the Broad.
    Keith Haring, National Coming Out Day (1988), poster. © Keith Haring Foundation
    Installation view of “Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody” at the Broad, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua White/JWPictures.com. Courtesy of the Broad.
    Keith Haring, Untitled (1985). © Keith Haring Foundation, The Broad Art Foundation
    Keith Haring, Reagan’s Death Cops Hunt Pope (1980). © Keith Haring Foundation.
    Installation view of “Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody” at the Broad, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua White/JWPictures.com. Courtesy of the Broad.
    “Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody” is on view at The Broad, 221 S Grand Ave, Los Angeles, through October 8.
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    Photoville Returns to New York With More Than 80 Exhibitions—Many Displayed in the Event’s Signature Shipping Containers

    Photoville, New York’s annual open-air photography show, returns to the city for its 12th straight edition this weekend. On view through June 18, the free event offers more than 80 exhibitions across all five boroughs. On view will be work from hundreds of photographers—some up-and-comers, others award-winning artists and professionals. 
    More than 50 of the exhibitions will take place inside a series of shipping containers—the kind you see stacked like Legos on cargo ships—which will be laid out in Brooklyn Bridge Park for the first time since the 2019 edition of the event. (COVID precautions kept them from being used in the previous three years.) It feels right to have them back; the steel structures have become a symbol of the scrappy event and its aims.  
    Which is not to say that they’re perfect. Many are cramped and reverberant; some are dim and dilapidated from years of use. In other words, they look nothing like the sterile white cubes in which we’re used to seeing art photography.    
    That’s a good thing. For Photoville’s organizers, accessibility, not institutional polish, has always been the goal. They want to bring as many pictures to the public as possible, and the shipping containers—weather-ready, open 24-7—provide a simple solution.   
    “It’s about the stories,” said Laura Roumanos, one of Photoville’s three co-founders, ahead of this year’s event. “We could spend all this money on white walls and beautiful, multimillion-dollar installations or whatever. But that doesn’t matter.” 
    “It’s about the photography,” she continued. “It’s about the story. That is what’s important.” 

    Roumanos, a veteran event producer, said she had tears in her eyes when the first storage containers were laid back in 2012, for Photoville’s first edition. “It represented so much to us,” she recalled. “We fought so hard to make people realize that it was a really great place to show work.” 
    Back then, the show was modest. Roumanos and her fellow founders—Sam Barzilay and Dave Shelley—had, somewhat miraculously, been lent 80,000 square feet in Brooklyn Bridge Park for their nascent event, but the rest required work. So they launched a Kickstarter campaign and secured corporate sponsorships to raise the roughly $250,000 needed to get the festival off the ground. It opened with 20-some shows in a handful of containers.  
    But in the 12 years since then, Photoville has consistently grown: more artists, more exhibitions, more containers, more visitors. More boroughs, too: in 2020, the Brooklyn-centric show ballooned to the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island. (The year before, Photoville’s organizers held an L.A. edition of the event, but the pandemic halted the expansion almost as soon as it started.) 
    A shot of the storage containers at Photoville 2018. Photo: Jessica Bal. Courtesy of Photoville.
    This month’s show represents just how far Photoville has come. Going on display is a record number of exhibitions featuring the work of a record number of artists. The budget for the event exceeds $500,000, and visitor numbers are expected to top last year’s high mark of 1 million.  
    Crucially, the organizers haven’t cut moral corners in the name of growth. Photoville pays its staffers (there are no volunteers) and gives exhibiting artists honorariums. This year, it will finance “65 to 70 percent” of shows, according to Roumanos. The rest will be covered by sponsors—a group that includes the New York Times, the Bronx Documentary Center, and Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, among many others. 
    Stephanie Mei-Ling, Portrait of Ronisha and her sons in embrace,, from her “Overpolicing Parents” series. Courtesy of the artist.
    Inclusivity remains a major programming priority, even if the subject matter may alienate some. Many of the projects on view this year tackle big topics: gun control, gender identity, sex work, the environmental crisis.
    A series of photographs by artist Stephanie Mei-Ling documents the impact of Child Protective Services investigations on families, while a body of work by Mackenzie Calle explores the historical exclusion of queer astronauts from the American space program. Jen White-Johnson’s “Autistic Joy” aims to give visibility to children of color in neurodiverse communities. “Guns, Love, Children, America” by Mel D. Cole depicts kids at an NRA convention wielding weapons like toys.
    “We’re not just showing beautiful sculptures or paintings,” Roumanos said. “These are conversations.”  
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