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      Frida Kahlo Is the Latest Artist to Get the Immersive Installation Treatment With a New Projected Light Show in Mexico City

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      There’s a new way to experience the work of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Art lovers making a pilgrimage to her hometown of Mexico City, where she lived at La Casa Azul with her husband, fellow artist Diego Rivera, can now add a second stop to their itinerary: “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.”
      That’s right, Kahlo, perhaps the world’s most famous woman artist, has gotten the “Immersive Van Gogh” treatment, with a 35-minute projected light show that animates 26 of the artist’s works in larger-than-life fashion. Because Kahlo specialized in self-portraits, the experience is something of an immersive autobiography, telling the story of her struggles with illness and disability, as well as her unconventional and often fraught romance with Rivera.
      The exhibition is a way “to get to know Frida’s paintings, which have been around the world, but with a little bit of familiarity and intimacy,” the artist’s great-grandniece Mara de Anda told Agence France Presse. “I believe that Frida was very avant-garde and modern so this fits perfectly. She was a woman ahead of her time.”
      But while the show does have the Kahlo family’s stamp of approval, it is also is a corporate affair, presented by the National Bank of Mexico Citibanamex and OCESA, a Mexican concert promotion company. The show was produced by Iñaki Barcos Melga and features visuals by Mexican multimedia experience company Cocolab, which bills itself as working at the intersection of art, technology, and entertainment.
      Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo courtesy of Cocolab.
      “FRIDA is an immersive, multi-sensory experience that takes the work of artist Frida Kahlo and presents it on a monumental scale accompanied by music, scenography, sculpture, interaction, and digital animation,” Cocolab said on its website.
      The experience opened on July 6, to coincide what would have been the artist’s 114th birthday. It’s on view at Fronton Mexico, an entertainment venue housed in an Art Deco building.
      Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo by Claudio Cruz/AFP via Getty Images.
      Two-and-a-half years in the making, the experience features famous Kahlo paintings such as The Two Fridas, Girl with a Death Mask, Me and My Parrots, and The Broken Column, Mexican music, and narration drawn from the artist’s letters and diaries. It uses 90 projectors and 50 speakers to present a 360-degree vision of Kahlo’s life and career.
      There is also an interactive “Free Stroke” installation where visitors can draw digitally, and a “Fantastic Creatures” room where they can chose the figures in Kahlo’s artwork that best represents them.
      “You can also listen to the music she listened to, you can see details of her work, [and] you can also find out family secrets,” Frida Hentschel Romero, another great-grandniece, told Reuters, calling the experience “very different from what we have seen [before].”
      Tickets range from MX$280 ($14) to MX$369 ($18).
      See more images of the installation below.
      Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo by Claudio Cruz/AFP via Getty Images.
      Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo by Claudio Cruz/AFP via Getty Images.
      Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo by Claudio Cruz/AFP via Getty Images.
      Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo by Claudio Cruz/AFP via Getty Images.
      Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo by Claudio Cruz/AFP via Getty Images.
      Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo by Claudio Cruz/AFP via Getty Images.
      Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo courtesy of Cocolab.
      Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo courtesy of Cocolab.
      Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo courtesy of Cocolab.
      Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo by Claudio Cruz/AFP via Getty Images.
      Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo by Claudio Cruz/AFP via Getty Images.
      Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo courtesy of Cocolab.
      Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo courtesy of Cocolab.
      Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo courtesy of Cocolab.
      Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo by Claudio Cruz/AFP via Getty Images.
      Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo courtesy of Cocolab.
      Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo courtesy of Cocolab.
      Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo courtesy of Cocolab.
      Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo by Claudio Cruz/AFP via Getty Images.
      Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo courtesy of Cocolab.
      Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo courtesy of Cocolab.
      Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo courtesy of Cocolab.
      “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva” is on view at Frontón México, De La República 17, Tabacalera, 06030 Mexico City, CDMX, Mexico, July 6–September 30, 2021. 
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      Nearly Two Dozen Colorful Artworks Have Enlivened a Small English Town for the 2021 Folkestone Triennial—See Images Here

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      The Folkestone Triennial opens to the public today, July 22, in the British seaside town of the same name.
      For the fifth edition of the town’s triennial of public art (through November 2), organizers have commissioned 23 works by 25 artists. Curated by Lewis Biggs, who founded the Liverpool Biennial, this year’s edition is titled “The Plot.”
      The triennial was postponed last year for logistical reasons, but Biggs said the pandemic context has made people “more willing to slow down and take notice of their physical surroundings,” adding that the public is “searching for [the] color and life-affirmation” that the exhibition offers.
      “Following a year of lockdowns, stress and anxiety for everyone, it feels like there is a renewed energy here in Folkestone,” said Alastair Upton, the chief executive of Creative Folkestone, which organizes the triennial. “Collectively we are ready to welcome people back to the town: a place that is proud of its independence, resilience and creativity.”
      Mariko Hori, Mellowing the Corners. Commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2021. Photo by Thierry Bal.
      Among the works on view is a flaming “Climate Emergency Services” van by artist Mike Stubbs, which offers a warning that feels apt during the U.K.’s current searing heat wave, and a series of tongue-in-cheek billboards by Gilbert & George, such as a poster designating a “good behavior zone.” 
      Meanwhile, minimalist benches by Richard Deacon have been installed in Kingsport Gardens, Jacqui Poncelet has created surreptitious peepholes in a wall with a kaleidoscopic view onto the former site of the town’s gasworks, and the Bangladeshi artist Rana Begum has given colorful new life to a slew of beach huts on Lower Saxon Way.
      See more images of the 2021 Folkestone Triennial below.
      Richard Deacon, Benchmark 1-5. Commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2021. Photo by Thierry Bal.
      Morag Myerscough, Flock of Seagulls Bag of Stolen Chips. Commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2021. Photo by Thierry Bal.
      Mike Stubbs, Climate Emergency Services. Commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2021. Photo by Thierry Bal.
      Mariko Hori, Mellowing the Corners. Commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2021. Photo by Thierry Bal.
      Jyll Bradley, Green _ Light (For M.R.. Commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2014. Photo by Thierry Bal.
      Jason Wilsher-Mills, I Am Argonaut. Commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2021 and produced by Shape Arts as part of the Adam Reynolds Award. Photo by Thierry Bal.
      Jacqueline Poncelet, Looking Ahead. Commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2021. Photo by Thierry Bal.
      Jacqueline Poncelet, Looking Ahead. Commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2021. Photo by Thierry Bal.
      Jacqueline Donachie, Beautiful Sunday. Commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2021. Photo by Thierry Bal.
      HoyCheong Wong, Simon Davenport and Shahed Saleem, Nūr. Commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2021. Photo by Thierry Bal.
      Gilbert & George, CHAIN BRAIN (2019), exhibited at Creative Folkestone Triennial courtesy of the artists. Photo by Thierry Bal.
      Assemble, Skating Situations. Commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2021. Photo by Thierry Bal.
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      How Joseph E. Yoakum, an Enigmatic Former Circus Hand and Untrained Artist, Found Drawing in His 70s—and the Hairy Who as Admirers

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      In 1962, Joseph E. Yoakum had a dream that told him to make drawings. 
      He was 71 then, a retired veteran and one-time circus hand living in Chicago. He had no experience making art. But for the next decade of his life—his last, it would turn out—drawing was what he did, churning out some 2,000 wondrous pieces in the process. 
      Most came in the form of dreamy landscapes, tethered equally to the natural world and the artist’s own fantastical one: scalloped mountains and pristine pools of water, forests that look like heads of romanesco, and winding roads that disappear into the horizon line. A sense of yearning pervades it all.
      The old adage about the Velvet Underground—that only 10,000 people bought their first album, but that every one of them started a band—also applies to Yoakum. Not many people saw his drawings, but those who did came away as immediate and lifelong fans.  
      That was certainly the case with Roger Brown, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Karl Wirsum, and Ray Yoshida—all members of the influential group of Chicago Imagists, the Hairy Who, who were among Yoakum’s most ardent admirers since meeting the self-taught artist in 1968. (Brown would later compare their discovery of Yoakum to Picasso’s discovery of Henri Rousseau.)
      Now, thanks in large part to significant loans from that group, others will get the chance to fall in love with Yoakum’s work, too. A major survey of the late artist’s output—the largest ever mounted—is on view now at the Art Institute of Chicago, with subsequent stops at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Menil Collection in Houston planned for October of 2021 and April of 2022, respectively.  
      Joseph E. Yoakum, Waianae Mtn Range Entrance to Pearl Harbor and Honolulu Oahu of Hawaiian Islands (1968). Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.
      “Jim [Nutt] once told me, “The only reason I can figure that Yoakum doesn’t have greater visibility is that he doesn’t have a weird backstory,’” recalled Mark Pascale, curator of prints and drawings at the Art institute and an organizer of the show.   
      “Yoakum,” Pascale explained, “was just a regular person.” 
      Well, sort of. The artist may have lived a rather regular life, but that’s not how he told it. Yoakum had a habit of fabricating stories about who he was and where he’d been. He was a full-blooded Native American, he told some (or a “Nava-joe” Indian, as he put it); he had a dozen brothers and sisters, he told others.   
      What we do know is that Yoakum, an African American, was born in Ash Grove, Missouri in 1891. He left home at nine to join the circus, and spent the next 10 years of his life traveling throughout the United States and, eventually, Asia, with various acts. In 1918, he enlisted in the army, through which he was stationed in Canada and then Europe.
      Roughly 40 years later, after multiple failed marriages, he settled in a storefront apartment on Chicago’s South Side. It was there that he first began showing his work, hanging drawings in the window. And it quickly became clear that all the travels of his youth had a demonstrable influence.
      Joseph E. Yoakum, American Zeppolin Flight from New York City to Paris France in Year 1939 (1969). Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.
      Yoakum’s drawings were almost always captioned with specific (and often playfully misspelled) names—so specific that you’d assume they were based on places he’d actually been to.
      “Mt Baykal of Yablonvy Mtn Range near Ulan-Ude near Lake Baykal of Lower Siberia Russia E Asia,” reads one.
      “The Open Gate to the West in Rockey Mtn Range near Pueblo Colorado,” says another.
      Whether the artist had ever been to these places is unknown, and because of his penchant for stretching the truth, we may never know. But when it comes to his work, that may not be relevant. 
      By his own assertion, Yoakum accessed these places through a process that he called “spiritual enfoldment.” The phrase was drawn from the literature of Christian Science (Yoakum was a devout believer) and was used by the artist to describe how he used art to locate memory.  
      “He’d make the drawing, he’d have a spiritual enfoldment, he would recognize where the place was, and then he would label it,” Pascale said.
      Joseph E. Yoakum, Mt Baykal of Yablonvy Mtn Range near Ulan-Ude near Lake Baykal of Lower Siberia Russia E Asia (1969). Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.
      There’s a common misconception, given the Imagist’s interest in Yoakum, that he had a great deal of influence on their work. And it’s not hard to draw a line between their brand of representation and his own. But that’s not quite right, explained Pascale. Nutt, Nilsson, and the other Imagists were almost fully formed as artists by the time they discovered Yoakum in the late 1960s. 
      If there was one thing that the movement’s members found in Yoakum’s work, though, it’s an interior picture. 
      “[The Imagists] were all trying to find their way as artists,” said Pascale. “They were looking for this place inside of themselves that was unique. With Yoakum, there it was—this guy found it.”
      In a sense, it was the only thing Yoakum had. By the time he made his drawings, he was estranged from his children and had outlived all his ex-wives. He was alone.
      Joseph E. Yoakum, Mt Cloubelle Jamaca of West India (1969). Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.
      “My takeaway, from all the years I’ve spent thinking about it, is that the landscape drawings that Yoakum made are a picture story of his life,” said Pascale.
      “They are his self-portrait, his autobiography. It’s like 10 years at the end of his life spent making a visual diary of where he was, where he had been, and where he had hoped to go, where he felt most excited and comfortable, and where he felt he lived the most.” 
      “Joseph E. Yoakum: What I Saw” is on view now through October 18, 2021 at the Art Institute of Chicago.
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      Berlin’s Embattled Humboldt Forum Has Opened Its Doors at Last. Can It Persuade Its Critics to Give It a Chance?

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      The highly anticipated—and highly criticized—Humboldt Forum will finally open its doors to the public in Berlin tomorrow after years of delays.
      The €680 million ($802 million) cultural institution will open with six shows this week, followed by a staggered rollout of further exhibitions in the fall and early next year.
      Since its originally planned opening in December was effectively canceled due to the pandemic, the building has stood empty, apart from the curators working inside. Patio chairs dotting the main courtyard did little to add warmth to the Franco Stella-designed building, which is both a plaster-cast ode to the Prussian palace that once stood on the site before World War II, and a hyper-modern structure of cold concrete.
      The opening of the more closely watched parts of the institution—the ethnological and Asian art collections—will open on September 22. Early next year, a temporary exhibition of the Berlin State Museums’ Benin bronze collection, one of the largest in the world, will open, and Germany has pledged to begin restitution that year to Nigeria. Further sections of those collections’ displays will open at the same time, including those related to South America, Islam, and southeast Asia.
      Exhibition view “terrible beauty” © Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss / Photo: Alexander Schippel
      Society and Nature
      For now, the first and second floors of the building will host large-scale public shows that address the intersection of society and nature. The building’s name comes from Alexander von Humboldt, a Prussian-era scientist and naturalist who is thought to have been one of the first to discuss human-induced climate change. (He was also complicit in colonial-era expeditions where he carried out his research.)
      Highlights of the Humboldt’s inaugural program include “Terrible Beauty: Elephant. Human. Ivory,” an exhibition that looks at the history of the ivory trade, and spans the millennia of human’s fascination with the animal part.
      “Ivory has a unique relationship with nature and culture,” said one of the show’s co-curators, Alberto Saviello. “It is a symbol of purity, wealth, and power, but also ruthless exploitation of nature and humans.” The show drives home the illicit industry’s global scale. Historical objects, like the first-known sculpture of mammoth, carved with mammoth tooth ivory, dates back 40,000 years, a delicately carved jewelry box from 16th-century Sri Lanka, and a crushed car from a failed elephant rescue mission are set within a blood-red space. In the entire exhibition, one can hear the labored breathing of a dying elephant.”
      Exhibition view “terrible beauty” © Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss / Photo: Alexander Schippel.
      After all the criticism around how objects arrived into the Humboldt’s collections, the exhibition remains slightly opaque on provenance. More often than not, details about the source of objects are not included in the show’s many instructional panels; instead, they’re tucked into red drawers that one needs to pull out to read.
      Despite its sturdy exterior, the Humboldt Forum lies on increasingly fragile ethical ground. In the more than 10 years since its plans were drawn up, awareness around Europe’s long history of illicit acquisitions has moved from academic backwaters into mainstream news headlines.
      One of the most engaging shows is the Humboldt Lab’s second-floor exhibition “After Nature,” which takes a novel and deconstructed approach to a scientific show about how climate change and species extinction is interrelated with democracy.
      Kulturprojekte Berlin and Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin. Photo: Alexander Schippel.
      Glass vitrines hang from a gridded metal track on the ceiling in rows. The interactive exhibition is a sort of wunderkammer of diverse items that reconsider the political ideologies inextricably entwined in scientific research. The show’s curator, Johanna Stapelfeldt, described it as an act of “ambivalent remembering.”
      Of course, even with the inaugural offering of ambitious exhibitions, the institution continues to draw discussions about whether it should even exist at all. The German Democratic Republic’s parliament, the Palast der Republik, stood in the same spot until 2006, when it was torn down to make way for what would become the Humboldt Forum. An exhibition in the cellar tries to offer some reconciliatory perspective by showing the many manifestations of the site from the relics that were found in the dig—conveying how the location has an even longer history than the Prussian era. Through its halls, small pieces of the Palast der Republik hang or appear on special displays. (A permanent video panorama by design bureau chezweitz tells the story of the location’s history more effectively.)
      “I don’t think anyone would have torn down the Palast der Republik today,” said Alfred Hagemann, head of the Humboldt’s “history of the site” department.
      It is indeed encouraging to finally see the museum’s intellectual prowess working in concert with the building, but how well it will all play out given the challenges that remain in public opinion is an open question.
      The Humboldt Forum in Berlin opens July 20.
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      Nairy Baghramian’s New Marble Sculpture in the Berkshire Wilds Reflects on the Strength and Fragility of the Human Body—See It Here

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      As we wrote last week, the Clark Institute’s outdoor show “Ground/work” is one of summer’s more exciting events, offering visitors the chance to engage with bold public artworks outdoors, at the institution’s sprawling Berkshires campus. 
      And one of the show’s most fun and resonant works is that of Iranian-German artist Nairy Baghramian, whose installation Knee and Elbow (2020) represents the feeling many of us in the last year can share. In the piece, two abstracted forms of two of the body’s primary joints—carved from marble and steel—face off and work together at the same time, suggesting the dual modes of strength and fragility that people around the world have had to endure throughout the pandemic.
      The blocks of marble are “heavily veined and pitted on their surface, suggesting, in the artist’s words, ‘possible collapse,’” according to the show’s notes. At the same time, their power—the ability of knees and elbows to hold the body up—is also emphasized through the work’s dynamic, humorous nature, suggesting themes of hope, possibility, and change. Furthermore, the artist sought to shift the joints from their usual orientation so they could “rest and recover from the stress and impact of daily use.” 
      The Clark also notes that Baghramian—who has long dealt with issues of vulnerability, power, and authority through her careful deconstructions of the human form—sought to build the artwork near the top of Stone Hill’s open meadow, to which visitors must hike. The sculpture’s vantage point, the show notes, “encourages viewers to find a moment of contemplation and pause as the panorama of the landscape unfolds below.”   
      See images of the work below.
      Nairy Baghramian’s “Knee and Elbow” (2020). Photo courtesy the Clark Institute.
      Nairy Baghramian’s “Knee and Elbow” (2020). Photo courtesy the Clark Institute.

      The artist on a site visit to the sculpture. Photo courtesy the Clark Institute.
      Behind the scenes into the making of the sculpture. Photo courtesy the Clark Institute.
      A portrait of the artist. Photo courtesy the Clark Institute.
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      Get an Exclusive Look at the Totally Wacky NFTs Urs Fischer Is About to Sell Through Pace (And Do Your Best to Make Sense of Them)

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      Next week, half a dozen newly minted NFTs by artist Urs Fischer will go on view in a digital exhibition hosted by Pace, another step in the gallery’s full-fledged commitment to crypto-art.  
      The show, presented in collaboration with the Loïc Gouzer-founded Fair Warning auction app and the digital market platform MakersPlace, will live on Pace’s website. 
      Each of Fisher’s NFTs features two quotidian objects floating in a blank white space like a trippy screensaver, constantly converging with one another to form Frankensteinian compound-sculptures: a broccoli stalk bisecting a green sponge, a showerhead merging with a red Nike shoe. Weird stuff. 
      The works belong to “CHAOS,” a larger series of 501 NFTs produced by the Swiss artist.
      For buyers, each piece comes with a reference rendering, access to the raw data behind the visuals, and instructions for how to exhibit it.
      “The individual objects selected for ‘CHAOS’ are engineered, cultured, or manufactured by humans and sourced from the physical world and transformed into a 3D digital model through 3D scanning,” the project’s website explains. They’ll be offered up for $50,000 a pop, according to the gallery. 
      The artist will offset the carbon emissions involved in the minting of each work through a partnership with the nonprofit Conservation International. 
      Urs Fischer, CHAOS #23 Splendor (2021). Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
      Fischer debuted “CHAOS” in April when he partnered with Pace to sell the first entry in the series, CHAOS #1 Human, which depicts a lighter colliding with an egg.
      The work sold through Fair Warning for $97,700. (The collaboration reportedly caused a rift between the artist and his longtime dealer, Gagosian.) Pace did not disclose the prices for the new NFTs.
      The first 500 “CHAOS” works will be unveiled over the course of several months. After that, a capstone 501st artwork, composed of all the objects in the pieces that came before it, will be minted. 
      Among mega-galleries, Pace has been perhaps the most ardent embracer of the crypto art wave. Earlier this month, the gallery announced that it would accept cryptocurrency as a form of payment for all artworks, physical or digital. And in September, it will launch its own dedicated platform for selling artists’ NFTs.
      See more examples from Fisher’s upcoming show below.
      Urs Fischer, CHAOS #20 Sashay (2021). Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
      Urs Fischer, CHAOS #22 Simulacrum (2021). Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
      Urs Fischer, CHAOS #24 Analysand (2021). Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
      Urs Fischer, CHAOS #25 Gratis (2021). Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
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      The Golden Lion-Winning Climate Opera ‘Sea & Sun’ Is Going on a World Tour, Starting With Berlin and New York

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      Lithuania’s Golden Lion-winning performance at the 2019 Venice Biennale, which drew snaking lines around the pavilion, is going on a world tour.
      Sun & Sea (Marina), a poignant live performance that sees opera singers and volunteers sing songs that address our delicate relationship to the planet, will travel to the U.S. after its showing in Berlin this weekend.
      The performance will premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music from September 15 to 26. (Tickets go on sale July 27.) After its New York run, the production will tour Arcadia Exhibitions in Philadelphia, the Momentary in Bentonville, Arkansas, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, ARTnews reported. (Dates beyond New York have yet to be confirmed.)
      The collaboration between Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytėm, struck a chord with the public as they looked down from a balcony to watch performers stretch out on an artificially sandy beach, bake in fake lights, and sing harmonies about their mundane existences, which the pavilion’s curator Lucia Pietroiusti described as “songs of worry and of boredom, songs of almost nothing.”
      Only slowly does the reality of climate change set in for the viewer, as a wealthy mother brags about seeing the “bleached, pallid whiteness” of the Great Barrier Reef and a young man complains that it did not snow on Christmas, and instead “felt like it could be Easter.”
      Co-Artistic Directors, Helen Turner and Pablo Wendel with their dog Coal in the Bauhaus swimming hall, which will be the location of the Sea & Sun performances in Berlin this weekend. © Lukas Korschan for The FACE.
      The performance is likely to resonate even more after the pandemic, a time when our anxieties about natural calamities reached a fever pitch and immersive performances were impossible to stage.
      The Berlin chapter, set to take place July 17 and July 18 at an abandoned Bauhaus swimming pool outside of Berlin, sold out in two days. (Walk-ins may be accommodated, organizers say, but there are no guarantees.)
      “It’s been two years in the making, and after four postponements, it’s completely surreal that its finally happening,” said Helen Turner, the director of E-Werk Luckenwalde, which is organizing the event. “The piece is powerful, especially in the location we have, an abandoned swimming hall, which speaks to ecological catastrophe and increasing feelings of fragility and vulnerability.”
      While 5,000 people normally would have been able to attend, social-distancing restrictions will limit that number to 1,500. Masks must be worn on site.
      The performance is well-suited to the E-Werk location—an arts center that doubles as an electrical power station, fueling both the surrounding area and its own art projects.
      But even with clean energy, the production is… quite the production. For just two days, it cost €130,000 (around $153,500) to get off the ground, according to Turner, and involved 60 performers and cultural workers (not to mention tons of sand, which was carted in from nearby). Organizers in Venice estimated the original version cost $3 a minute to stage.
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      Alex Harsley Spent a Half Century Championing Other Photographers. Now, at 83, the Art World’s Gaze Has Finally Turned to Him

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      Alex Harsley’s new exhibition, a survey of his more than six-decade photography career at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works, is a big deal. In terms of scope, it’s likely the biggest of his life. And yet, the octogenarian artist isn’t exactly taking a victory lap. 
      “I’ve moved far beyond that stuff,” he says, referring to the retrospective nature of the show, which includes New York street photos, arty portraits, and experiments in video from the 1950s through to today. “I’m into a whole different area [in terms of] exhibiting now.”
      We‘re sitting inside the 4th Street Photo Gallery, a cramped storefront space in the East Village overstuffed with old cameras, darkroom gear, and prints—thousands of prints, all lining the walls and stacked in piles of indeterminate age (they might be load-bearing at this point). Harsley has occupied the space for 48 years. 
      “This,” he says, gesturing to the space around him, “this is like an installation.”
      Indeed, 4th Street is like a living, breathing artwork. What has historically been an exhibition space for up-and-coming photographers is, today, more like Harsley’s personal office or studio. At almost all waking hours of the day you can find him in there working—scanning slides, editing photos, hanging and rehanging his work. At 83, his days of roaming the streets of New York with a camera in hand are mostly over, but he has scores of archives still to work through. 
      “Alex is really unsentimental about his own work,” said Vivian Chui, Pioneer Works’s director of exhibitions who co-curated the show with Harsley’s daughter, Kendra Krueger. “He really just wants to make images. He’s not thinking about his legacy, he’s not thinking about where his work was. He’s always much more focused on where his work is going.”
      Alex Harsley, Nite Meetings. Courtesy of the artist.
      Harsley was born outside of Rock Hill, South Carolina, in 1938, and grew up on a rural cotton farm. Only one or twice a month did he see a car or electricity, he recalled. That is, until age 10, when he moved with his mother to New York. 
      Following a stint in the army in his late teens, Harsley moved back to the city, bought his first camera, and learned his way around the darkroom while working as a staff photographer at the district attorney’s office. Then the young photographer was off: churning out 35mm pictures of New York’s faces and places; capturing activists, athletes, and musicians in action.
      In 1971—half a century ago this year—Harsley founded Minority Photographers Inc., an artist-run non-profit based in his apartment that showed the work of up-and-coming image-makers. Two years later came the group’s headquarters: a derelict street-level space offered by the city on the cheap, thanks to Minority Photographers’ 501c3 status. That was the birth of 4th Street Photo. It’s the same space Harsely’s sitting in today. 
      Alex Harsley, Playing In Chinatown (1970). Courtesy of the artist.
      So out of place in the now hyper-gentrified neighborhood is 4th Street that it’s easy to walk past the spot and not even see it, the way you would a travel agency or a phone booth or other neighborhood vestige. And yet, Harsley still gets his fair share of walk-ins coming to look at his work; many even buy it. During our interview, a mother dressed in athleisure came in to pick up a couple of prints for her college-age daughter, who had just moved to the neighborhood. I asked if they’d seen the show at Pioneer Works. They said they had no idea how to get to Brooklyn.  
      For Harsley, an artist largely ignored by museums and galleries in his career, passersby looking to purchase a piece of New York history are his clients. And he’s okay with that. “It’s not about me and my name,” he said. “It’s about the content. So I like to stay behind the [work].”
      But that’s not to say the photographer doesn’t have fans in the art world. If off-the-street visitors are one-half of Harsley’s collector base, then the other half is fellow artists, many of whom were affiliated at some point with 4th Street Photo or Minority Photographers.
      Alex Harsley, Cousins (1980). Courtesy of the artist.
      For generations of up-and-coming photographers in the 1970s through the turn of the century, 4th Street was a site of community, mentorship, and—perhaps most importantly—wall space. Among those who have shown in the gallery are Dawoud Bey, David Hammons, Eli Reed, and Andres Serrano, while others known to have frequented the space include Robert Frank, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Cynthia MacAdams. 
      Harsley, for his part, has stories about all of them—and he’d surely be happy to share them should you stop by. (Bey was a “serious hustler,” he said with admiration; Frank “sold his soul to the devil.”) But listen in and you may detect a latent tinge of bitterness, too. It’s the chip on the shoulder speaking: success never came to Harsley the way it did those heavyweights, even though he considered himself a mentor to many of them. 
      “When I started Minority Photographers, I had to leave myself behind. I worked very hard at helping other people become successful,” he said. “But in the course of all of that I had to sacrifice my own interests.”
      The mood hung heavy for a second, before Harsley lit it up with a joke: “If I had known I was going to be in the same place [50 years later], I would’ve said, ‘Let’s do something else!’” 
      Alex Harsley, Fashion Shoot (1972). Courtesy of the artist.
      “I don’t know if I believe that,” Chui said when I recalled this comment to her. It’s not that Harsley forfeited a great legacy in the name of 4th Street and Minority Photographers; those projects are his legacy. “The nonprofit and the gallery were so special,” she said, “it’s hard to imagine him having not done that.”
      “Alex Harsley: The First Light From Darkness” is on view now through August 22, 2021 at Pioneer Works.
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