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      How to Look at a Basquiat

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      It’s not everyday that New York has two Basquiat exhibitions. At “Art and Objecthood,” decoding the basics: his materials, iconography and unmistakable line.It’s not everyday that New Yorkers can choose between two concurrent exhibitions of work by Jean-Michel Basquiat. “King Pleasure,” an immersive experience designed by the architect David Adjaye and curated by the artist’s sisters Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, includes a recreation of Jean-Michel’s childhood bedroom and his studio and charges $35 admission. “Art and Objecthood,” curated by the art historian Dieter Buchhart at Nahmad Contemporary, gathers an extraordinary trove of paintings Basquiat made on doors, windows and a refrigerator.Though “King Pleasure” includes a number of never-before-seen pieces, too, its emphasis is distinctly on the artist’s life, so I’ve focused on the Nahmad show, whose sparse staging give you a better chance of engaging with the work itself. But you should keep his biographical basics in mind.Young and ambitious, Basquiat shot straight into the center of the New York art world when he was barely out of his teens, showing with some of the country’s most influential gallerists, haunting nightclubs with Andy Warhol, and producing a staggering quantity of art work before dying of a heroin overdose, at the age of 27, in 1988. In 2017, one of his paintings sold for more than $110 million, the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by an American artist.He was also the Brooklyn-born son of a Haitian father and Boricua mother, and though his family wasn’t poor, he spent a few lean years on his own before he started selling work. When he did hit the artistic big time, he was one of the few Black faces there — and issues of race and class, complicated by his own extreme experience, are all over his work.Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Untitled (Refrigerator),” (1981). In the artist’s hands, it wavers between appliance and found surface on which to draw.Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New YorkMaterialsLike most artists, Basquiat drew as a child, famously copying anatomical drawings from “Gray’s Anatomy” while recuperating from a car accident. His first real foray into the adult art world, though, was via the graffiti tag SAMO, which he and his high school friend Al Diaz posted up around SoHo and the School of Visual Arts. Before continuing on to canvas, Basquiat used “found materials” like discarded cardboard and paper or construction debris. In part this was born of necessity — canvas costs money, while broken windows were there for the taking in downtown Manhattan in the 1970s.But Basquiat’s use of found materials was also, as the painted windows, doors and sections of wooden fencing in “Art and Objecthood” make clear, a daring artistic strategy that reverberated through even his more conventional efforts. Unlike ready-mades, the manufactured goods that Marcel Duchamp exhibited as art in the early years of the 20th century, Basquiat’s found objects aren’t exactly sculpture. They’re surfaces for him to paint on. But because they are, also, recognizable objects in their own right, they have a beguiling sort of ambiguity. You can’t quite see “Untitled (Refrigerator)” (1981) as only an appliance, or only a surface to draw on — the longer you look, the more it seems to waver between both categories. And once you’re primed for that sort of ambiguity, you start to see it everywhere. In another context, “Multiflavors” (1982), a royal-blue canvas on exposed wooden stretchers, might just look like a painting. Here, it’s a very peculiar object, too.Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Minor Success” (1980). Pared-down graffiti techniques and pointed assertions of dignity and individuality.Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New YorkIconographyBasquiat didn’t spend long writing graffiti, but he used its techniques throughout his career. The graffiti writer’s pared-down repertoire of easy-to-recognize signs can be as effective on a gallery wall as they are on the side of a building, and one of his favorites — a simple, icon-like crown — shows up on the first piece in “Art and Objecthood,” a white wooden cabinet door titled “Minor Success” (1980). Beneath it are a face without features and a cartoonish sports car.“If you ask 10 people” about the crown, says Buchhart, the curator, “they’ll tell you 10 different meanings.” He goes on to cite Basquiat’s often-quoted remark that his artistic subjects — musicians, athletes, artists — were “royalty, heroism and the streets,” and the way the crown serves to emphasize images or works particularly special to the artist.Essentially, though, the crown claims a figurative mantle of royalty for the artist himself, for the figure he’s depicting, or both — Basquiat’s faces and bodies often read at least partially as self-portraits. But it’s also more nuanced than that, particularly as wielded by a young Black artist intent on making himself a celebrity. You have to ask what kind of social context required him to make such pointed assertions of dignity. Is it one in which Black faces struggle to be recognized as individuals? Or one in which status comes from the possession of material objects like a fancy car?Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Multiflavors” (1982). A painting on canvas demonstrates the unique quality of Basquiat’s writing.Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New YorkWriting/DrawingAnother aspect of graffiti that Basquiat kept hold of was the use of writing for visual effect. In many earlier collages and works on paper, a deluge of all-caps writing fills every available square inch. But you can’t read from beginning to end and expect to find an argument. What you get instead is a cloud of loose associations more similar to a picture, in the way you read it, than to ordinary prose or even poetry.This quality is amplified by the way Basquiat mixes drawing and writing together. If you look back at “Multiflavors,” you’ll find that it has a three-pointed yellow crown in the middle and a cloud of red and yellow circles to one side, and that the white, yellow and pink writing, arranged over blocks of black and blue, forms a striking composition. When you come to read it, you find a group of what appear to be references to advertisements or restaurant signs, phrases like “cheap food” and “HACKED CHICKEN WITH MULTIFLAVORS.” You can’t definitively say whether it’s satire or poetry, angry or exuberant or funny. But it could almost be all of them.CompositionOne thing in particular that’s easier to see in “Art and Objecthood” than in the overwhelming visual cacophony of “King Pleasure” is how conservatively Basquiat organized the elements of his paintings. The sheer profusion of marks can be misleading, but if you recognize the scratches and scrawls of “Minor Success,” for example, as providing a texture rather than so many pieces of separate information, you’ll see that the arrangement of crown, face and car couldn’t be more straightforward. A squat little refrigerator is adorned with a burst of letters and a face in “Untitled (Refrigerator),” but they stop just short of the handle, letting the mostly blank lower section balance their effect. And even when every mark really does carry the same weight, as in an intricately painted yellow door, Basquiat keeps careful control of shape and color to create an overall effect of harmony and stability that balances the frantic energy of his lines.Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Untitled” (1982). His line “shivers like someone naked in a snowstorm.”Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New YorkLineThe most stunning piece in “Art and Objecthood” may be an untitled painting from 1982 — the year the artist himself claimed to have “made the best paintings ever.” Done in acrylic and enamel on a packing blanket mounted on exposed wooden stretchers, it shows a Black face with white features and a blood-red skull marked with little black dashes like watermelon seeds.It’s a searing portrait of the psychic toll of racism: Even as slurs and insulting tropes leave him bloody and exposed, the figure wears a “white” expression to get along. It’s another stately composition, too, balancing a dense figure on one side with empty space on the other and underlining both for emphasis. And it’s as good a place as any to study what may be the single most distinctive feature of Basquiat’s work — his line.The line that describes this skull shivers like someone naked in a snowstorm. It makes a break in the jaw, uneven eyebrows, a bump on the crown of the skull. It doesn’t leave anything unclear; the drawing is as easy to read as a geometric diagram. But this shakiness does transmit extra information. It lends the figure a particular kind of intensity, making the eyes squint and the teeth gnash, and it gives a similar intensity to the art work as a whole, evoking the tension and energy that must have gone into making it. At the same time, it gives you a sense, more vivid than any mere biography, of the personality of the man who drew it — manic and melancholy, electric, incandescent.Jean-Michel Basquiat: Art and ObjecthoodThrough June 11, Nahmad Contemporary, 980 Madison Avenue, third floor, 646-449-9118; nahmadcontemporary.com.— More

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      DJ Kay Slay, Fiery Radio Star and Rap Mixtape Innovator, Dies at 55

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      DJ Kay Slay, who served as a crucial bridge between hip-hop generations, developing from a teenage B-boy and graffiti writer into an innovative New York radio personality known for his pugnacious mixtapes that stoked rap beefs, broke artists and helped change the music business, died on Sunday in New York. He was 55.Slay had faced “a four-month battle with Covid-19,” his family said in a statement confirming his death.Few figures in hip-hop could trace their continued presence from the genre’s earliest days to the digital present like he could. In late-1970s New York, Slay was a young street artist known as Dez, plastering his spray-painted tag on building walls and subway cars, as chronicled in the cult documentaries “Wild Style” and “Style Wars.”Then he was the Drama King, a.k.a. Slap Your Favorite DJ, hosting the late-night “Drama Hour” on the influential radio station Hot 97 (WQHT 97.1 FM) for more than two decades before his illness took him off the air.“Cats know it’s no holds barred with me,” Slay told The New York Times in 2003, when the paper dubbed him “Hip-Hop’s One-Man Ministry of Insults.” In addition to providing a ring and roaring encouragement for battles between Jay-Z and Nas, 50 Cent and Ja Rule, Slay gave an early platform to local artists and crews like the Diplomats, G-Unit, Terror Squad and the rapper Papoose, both on his show and on the mixtapes that made his name as much as theirs.As mixtapes evolved from homemade D.J. blends on actual cassettes to a semiofficial promotional tool and underground economy of CDs sold on street corners, in flea markets, record stores, bodegas and barber shops, Slay advanced with the times, eventually releasing his own compilation albums on Columbia Records. Once illicit and unsanctioned, mixtapes now represent a vital piece of the music streaming economy, with artists and major labels releasing their own album-like official showcases that top the Billboard charts.“You were really the first to bring the personality to the mixtape,” Funkmaster Flex, a fellow Hot 97 D.J., once said to Slay during a radio interview. “That was very unusual. We were just used to the music and the exclusives.”Slay, who became immersed in drugs and spent time behind bars before making it in music, responded, “I had to find an angle and run with it.”He was born Keith Grayson in New York on Aug. 14, 1966, and raised in East Harlem. As a child, he was drawn to disco, dancing the Hustle; when early hip-hop D.J.s began turning breakbeats from those songs into proto-rap music, he traveled to the Bronx to observe and participate in the rising culture.“I had to see what was going on and bring it back to my borough,” he told Spin magazine in 2003. “So I used to hop on the 6 train and go up to the Bronx River Center [projects] to see Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation rock.”He soon took up the affiliated art forms of breakdancing and graffiti, even casually rapping with his friends. “Every element of the game, I participated in,” Slay told Flex. But street art became his chief passion, first under the tag Spade 429 and later Dez TFA, which he shortened to Dez.“I wanted a nice small name that I could get up everywhere and do it quick without getting grabbed,” he said at the time. “You’re telling the world something — like, I am somebody. I’m an artist.”Amid the city’s crackdown on graffiti, Dez took on the name Kay Slay (“After a while you get tired of writing the same name,” he said of his street-art days) and developed a fascination with turntables. “Boy, you better turntable those books,” he recalled his disappointed parents saying. But in need of money and with little interest in school, he soon turned to drugs and stickups.Kay Slay at MTV Studios in 2007. “The game was boring until I came around,” he said. Brian Ach/WireImageIn 1989, Slay was arrested and served a year in jail for drug possession with intent to sell. On getting out, he told Spin, “I started noticing Brucie B, Kid Capri, Ron G. They were doing mixtapes, doing parties and getting paid lovely.” He sold T-shirts, socks and jeans to buy D.J. equipment and worked at a Bronx facility that assisted people with H.I.V. and AIDS.“I can’t count the number of people I saw die,” he told The Times of that period. “Working there really made me begin to appreciate life.”In the mid-1990s, Slay found the professional music business still unwelcoming, and he began to call out, in colorful language on his releases, those label executives he thought of as useless. “I told myself I would be so big that one day the same people I was begging for records would be begging me to play their records,” he said.It was that irascible spirit that helped endear him to rappers who had their own scores to settle. In 2001, Slay had a breakthrough when he premiered “Ether,” the blistering Nas dis of Jay-Z that revitalized headline hip-hop beef following the murders of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. His radio slots and mixtapes became a proving ground, and he later started a magazine called Straight Stuntin’.“He’s like the Jerry Springer of rap,” one D.J. told The Times. “All the fights happen on his show.”Slay’s gruff manner and mid-song shouts would go on to influence his contemporaries, like DJ Clue, a one-time rival, and those who followed, like DJ Whoo Kid and DJ Drama. Alberto Martinez, the Harlem drug dealer known as Alpo, who was killed last year while in witness protection, even hosted a Slay tape from prison.“The game was boring until I came around,” Slay said.He is survived by his mother, Sheila Grayson, along with his best friend and business manager Jarrod Whitaker.In Slay’s on-air conversation with Funkmaster Flex, the other D.J. marveled at the creativity of Slay’s boasts and threats — “If you stop the bank, then I’m gonna rob the bank!” — and asked his colleague if he ever regretted the shocking things he’d bellowed.“I said some foul things, man, on some mixtapes when I was not in full touch with myself,” Slay replied. “But I’m not angry at myself for doing it, because the boy that I was made the man I am today.” More

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      A Graffiti Master’s Final Mural

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      A Graffiti Master’s Final MuralDavid Gonzalez📍 Reporting from the BronxDavid GonzalezAlfredo Oyague, a well-known graffiti artist, wanted to promote peace through his work. Although diabetes forced him to stop painting murals in 2018, he hoped to bring together two crews to paint a wall in the Bronx.Here’s what happened → More

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      From Graffiti to Gallery, Chris ‘Daze’ Ellis Lays New Tracks

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      His paintings at the contemporary gallery PPOW are a bridge to his train-tagging days and a paean to Bronx street life.The Tribeca gallery PPOW, where Chris Ellis’s work is on view, sits around the corner from the old Mudd Club space, which in the late 1970s and early ’80s functioned as a clubhouse for New York City’s downtown demimonde. Graffiti writers from uptown and the outer boroughs mixed with art world habitués, and Keith Haring had the run of its fourth floor gallery. It was where Ellis, who began tagging trains as Daze in 1976, first showed his studio work indoors, a piece he made with Jean-Michel Basquiat for the 1981 show “Beyond Words,” curated by Leonard McGurr (a.k.a Futura) and Fred Brathwaite (a.k.a. Fab 5 Freddy).“The Mudd Club was the first place that I ever sold a piece of work,” Ellis said at PPOW recently, his graying curls peeking out from under a knit cap. “This impromptu collaboration with Jean-Michel, where we both tagged up this piece of newsprint, and Rene Ricard bought it. I think I got 50 bucks from that, so I was happy.”Chris “Daze” Ellis, “A Memorial” (2020), in acrylic, oil, spray paint, respirator on canvas.Chris “Daze” Ellis and P·P·O·WThat version of New York — of artistic production abetted by cheap rent and creative permissiveness — can feel very far away. A plaque marks the spot where the Mudd Club stood; there’s a boutique hotel nearby, its sleek lobby lit by designer lamps. Ellis’s exhibition at PPOW, “Give It All You Got,” which is on view until Feb. 12, attempts to create a bridge between that fertile time in the city’s history and its current iteration: richer, pandemic buckled and more atomized. It brings together pieces from Ellis’s 40-year studio practice, and new paintings that are both mournful and exultant. They elegize, in a collision of figurative precision and emotive abstraction, the artist’s friends and contemporaries, many of whom have died, but also a feeling of wonder that has, if not entirely dissipated, been tempered by a lifetime in the city.“A Memorial” (2020), for instance, depicts a train tunnel shrouded in icy blue darkness, a construction of the ones Ellis spent countless hours in. On its walls and the sides of a subway car he’s committed the tags of writers he’s known. For writers, the visual representation of one’s name is sacred currency, and Ellis renders each in the precise style of its originator, an affecting devotional act. They largely represent first and second generation graffiti writers — Dondi, DON1, IZ, NIC 707, Phase 2. “Each one of these guys had their own story to tell,” he said.The tunnel scene rises into a washy field of bright greens and vaporous pinks, as if leaving the earthly plane for something celestial. The canvas is crowned by a serious-looking respirator — Ellis’s own — that hangs over it like a halo. Ellis, 59, was one of the few graffiti writers that used a respirator while using aerosol paint, which in the ’80s could still contain lead. He credits it with saving his life. It’s a memento mori, charging the canvas with the specter of death but also salvation, ideas that for the graffitist go hand in hand; the art at once a source of peril and a lifeline.Chris “Daze” Ellis, “Untitled (City),” (1984), spray paint, acrylic, collage at PPOW.Chris “Daze” Ellis and PPOWHis other recent work continues in this mode: realist, sober depictions of subway stations or the interiors of train cars dissolving into drippy splatter and intense bursts of color. They address Ellis’s split consciousness, his studio practice and his train days. In some, massive letters spelling “DAZE” creep up, interrupting the plane (As with other writers, Ellis’s nom de graf doesn’t hold special significance; he simply chose the letters he was best at rendering.)Along with artists like Futura, Zephyr, John “Crash” Matos, Lee Quiñones, and others, Ellis is one of the surviving members of a clutch of figures that achieved recognition in that era for their innovations in aerosol art, a distinctly American expressionism that prized dexterity and bravado and eventually became a movement with global reach. The careening lines and splashy strokes in Ellis’s latest work are reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism’s muscular gestures, and are a reminder that style writing is a form of action painting).“It very quickly took over my whole life,” Ellis said. Born in Brooklyn, he grew up in Crown Heights and began painting trains in 1976 while enrolled at the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan. “I spent a lot of time sketching and drawing and hanging out at train stations for hours waiting to photograph pieces that went by,” he said. “I knew I was creative, I didn’t know that I was calling subway painting art.”Ellis juggles spray paint cans in his Bronx studio in front of “Eastern Parkway” (2016) at left; “Untitled” (2021) in the center, and a cutout from the 1980’s at right.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesBy the early 80s Ellis had transitioned into a studio practice that translated the energy of its moment. “Untitled (City),” from 1984, shows a crowded club scene, a Reginald Marsh-like crush of punks and poets and people simply trying on new personas the way one might a fez, as a figure in a lower corner does.“This would have been the scene in Danceteria or Area, this weird mixture of all these different characters from all levels of society,” he said. “I was a part of that, too.” Nightclubs provided space for experimentation, exhibiting work that established galleries were less keen on. Ellis recalls a night at the Mudd Club when Basquiat pressed a fresh copy of “Beat Bop,” his spacey, panoramic record with Rammellzee and K-Rob, into his hands. Today it’s considered a blueprint of modern hip-hop.“I feel like when you read about the history of what happened then, it looks like these events could have taken place over 20 years, but it was only a few years. Every week something was going on you didn’t want to miss out on.”Chris “Daze” Ellis, “The Explorers” (2021), spray paint, acrylic on canvas.Chris “Daze” Ellis and P·P·O·WMuch of the new work invokes Mr. Ellis’s sons Indigo and Hudson, 9 and 12. They provide the models for two life-size resin sculptures, as well as the figures in “The Explorers” (2021), an expansive painting of a rail yard, a site stitched from Mr. Ellis’s memory, and now marked with homages (off to one side, the front end of Blade’s “Dancin’ Lady” train, an early influence, is visible). The site is both indelibly the Bronx and also not; the yard and trains cast in numinous ultramarine and violet signal that this is a kind of psychic haven. “It’s not that important to me to have a specific representation of a place, it’s more like you recognize it, but not really,” Ellis said. Honeyed light shines from apartment windows.In its desire to present a corrective portrait of a misunderstood place, “The Explorers” has an affinity with an older work, “Reflections in a Golden Eye,” from 1992, also on view, a pastoral toile of daily Bronx street life — the botanica, the mother and child, stoops, the subway — joined by a Rauschenbergian construction of studio flotsam: a mousetrap, a T-shirt silk-screen, a “Danger” sign. “My studio has been in the Bronx for decades now. I always loved being up there. Where there’s a lot of negative connotations about the Bronx, I always saw the positive.”When Ellis began making paintings he wasn’t yet in a studio of his own. He would paint on rooftops or in corners lent by friends. “Reflections in a Golden Eye” is one of the first pieces of art Mr. Ellis made in his own space, and it shows an artist expanding both formally and metaphorically, as well as the ways artists of his generation absorbed diffuse source material into hybridized forms, like cartographers redrawing the shape of the city in real time.Installation view, “Chris Daze Ellis: Give It All You Got,” PPOW, New York.Stan NartenIn recent years there’s been a revived interest in this period of art: the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, exhibition, “Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation,” from 2020; “Beyond the Streets,” in 2019, and “Henry Chalfant: Art vs. Transit, 1977-1987” at the Bronx Museum of the Arts that same year (Ellis’s work figured in both). Work by Futura and Mr. Quiñones has been the subject of recent gallery shows, as has Rammellzee’s oracular oeuvre, which Red Bull Arts surveyed in 2018. Jeffrey Deitch recently announced his representation of Rammellzee’s estate.“At one point I felt that it was being swept under the carpet,” Ellis said. “I like that people are trying to fill in the blanks about what they didn’t know.” He traced this to a combination of nostalgia and clarifying hindsight, but isn’t interested in being lodged in either.“I don’t want to be stuck in a certain era. You can’t recreate a period that no longer exists. The generation that’s coming up now, they will be affected by things like social media, the immediacy of being able to see something right away. It’s not word of mouth anymore, but I believe there is still this community.”Ellis in his Bronx studio with studies for paintings.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesA few months ago, Ellis visited McGurr at his studio in Red Hook after an extended period out of contact. “When I was getting started he was one of the people that let me use his studio to paint,” Ellis said. “We have a shared history. More recently I’ve done some projects with Pink and Crash. We don’t speak to each other everyday, we may see each other once a year,” he said. “But people are still very much evolving.”Chris Daze Ellis: Give It All You GotThrough Feb. 12, PPOW, 392 Broadway, TriBeCa; 212-647-1044; ppowgallery.com. More

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      Prehistoric Rock Art ‘Irreparably Damaged’ by Vandals, Officials Say

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      Geometric rock carvings that are believed to be at least 3,000 years old were scratched with names and dates at Big Bend National Park in Texas.Abstract geometric designs at Big Bend National Park in Texas that had survived for thousands of years were “irreparably damaged” by vandals who scratched names and dates into the prehistoric designs, the National Park Service said.The Park Service said on its website that the ancient rock art was damaged on Dec. 26 in the Indian Head area of the park, which encompasses more than 800,000 acres in southwest Texas and stretches along 118 miles of the United States border with Mexico.Since 2015, archaeologists at the park have documented more than 50 instances of vandalism, the Park Service said.Damaging park resources is against federal law and defacing rock art and ancient cultural sites violates the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, which aims to protect archaeological resources and sites on federal and Native American lands.Tom Alex, an archaeologist who retired from the park in 2014 after working there for 32 years, said that the damaged abstract designs were known as petroglyphs and that they had been pecked into the rock panel.“There’s wavy lines, curvilinear lines, geometric patterns, squiggles and things that just kind of meander across the rock surface,” Mr. Alex said on Saturday.Mr. Alex said it was difficult to determine precisely how old the art was, but, based on the weathering, the petroglyphs were most likely made somewhere between 3,000 and 8,000 years ago. He said these types of designs represented some of the oldest rock art in North America. In the more recent time period, rock art included more representations of people and animals.The abstract pecked art is common across the southwestern United States. It is not yet possible to determine what group of native people were responsible for the designs at Big Bend, Mr. Alex said.It was also not known who damaged the rock art, though the person, or people, responsible left some clues. Four names were scrawled on the art: Adrian, Ariel, Isaac and Norma, according to photos shared by the Park Service. The year 2021 and the date “12-26-21” were also scratched on the rock.Tom VandenBerg, the chief of interpretation and visitor services at Big Bend, told Texas Monthly that the park had received “pretty strong potential leads” about who was responsible for the vandalism. Mr. VandenBerg added that the park avoided providing maps and directions to the carvings to prevent damage to the ancient site.Bob Krumenaker, the superintendent of Big Bend, condemned the vandalism in a post on the park’s website. “Damaging natural features and rock art destroys the very beauty and history that the American people want to protect in our parks,” he said.Park staff members tried to repair the damage, but much of it was permanent, the post said.Mr. Alex said some of the scratches on the panel were superficial and possible to clean up so they would be less obvious, but others had penetrated the prehistoric designs. “Those scratches are going to be there forever,” he said.Stewards of public lands have complained about an increase in vandalism and graffiti in recent years.In December 2020, Zion National Park in Utah said that nearly every day, staff members there found “words and shapes carved, drawn, painted (with mud, dirt, pigment, paint) or scratched on rocks.”In January 2019, several of the signature spiky-leafed Joshua trees at Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California were damaged during a government shutdown. More

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      After Half a Century, White Columns Still Surprises

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      New York’s longest running alternative art space celebrates its own near-mythic history — as well as the twists and turns of the city’s cultural scene.“I’m going to use a word you’re not supposed to say,” the sculptor Jeffrey Lew declared with a touch of bravado. “I’m sort of a sociopath.”In 1969 Lew and Rachel Wood, then his wife, purchased a decrepit six-story rag-salvaging factory in SoHo for $110,000. They moved into its upper floors with an assortment of kindred artists and, with fellow sculptors Gordon Matta-Clark and Alan Saret, turned the unheated ground floor and basement into a 7,400-square-foot exhibition space named 112 Greene Street (and later 112 Workshop), after its location. Subsequent shows featured a wall-mounted piece made of 500 pounds of decaying carrots, massive holes cut into the floor, and a dance troupe swinging overhead from the 17-foot-high ceiling.Installation view of the inaugural group show at White Columns’ first home at 112 Greene Street, Oct. 1970.Cosmo Sarchiapone, via White ColumnsThe Glenn Branca Ensemble performing at White Columns’ “Noise Fest,” June 20, 1981.Terri Slotkin, via White ColumnsThose early ’70s spectacles have since attained near-mythic status; work staged there that Lew felt museums and established galleries either couldn’t, or wouldn’t, show has since been feted in museums and blue-chip galleries. But Lew soon grew tired of the creeping professionalism brought on by a National Endowment for the Arts grant. “When I got the N.E.A. grant they said, ‘Give us your schedule.’ A schedule?” Lew recalled with a laugh. “The minute people start acting like curators, that’s when the good stuff ends.”By late 1978, Lew said he’d had enough of committees and payroll issues. He’d already turned the building’s upper-floor lofts into co-ops, but he was still the art space’s landlord. Citing his hefty tax bill, he tripled its $550 monthly rent, fully aware that its governing board could never afford the new rate. “Like I said, I’m a sociopath,” Lew explained. “I just didn’t have any feelings whether it went under.”Audience at a concert by the Italian folk group Pupi e Fresedde, held in conjunction with a White Columns exhibition of Peter Schumann’s puppets and masks, September 1977. Peter Schumann and White ColumnsYet 112 Greene Street didn’t die. Quite the opposite. It eventually found a new home in the West Village, as well as new leadership. Rechristened White Columns, the nonprofit became not only New York City’s longest running alternative art space, but one of its most enduringly vital. The evidence is on its walls as part of its 50th anniversary exhibition, which Matthew Higgs, the gallery’s director and chief curator since 2004, describes as part celebration and part tribute to the ongoing story of the New York art scene.Poring over the archival installation photos and printed ephemera, what emerges is a dizzying array of artists who began their careers with solo debuts there. From John Currin and Cady Noland in the ’80s to Rachel Feinstein and Glenn Ligon in the ’90s, no one style predominates. The common thread is simply that a given director found an artist interesting enough to present work and offer it for sale with no strings — one of 15 to 20 such shows every year — relying on grants and donations to cover its now approximately $1 million budget.Jeffrey Lew with his installation “Drawerings,” Jan. 25 – Feb. 6, 1975.Jeffrey Lew and White Columns; Cosmo SarchiaponeOne of Lew’s parting gifts may be precisely what allowed White Columns to continue past his brinkmanship. In late 1979, sensing a simpatico spirit, Lew encouraged Josh Baer, then 23 years old, to apply for the space’s vacant director position. Baer had no formal administrative or curatorial experience. But he’d grown up at the heart of the ’70s New York art world — his mother and stepfather were the acclaimed painters Jo Baer and John Wesley. Even more crucially, he was immersed in the new art forms bubbling up downtown. “Everything was blending together,” Baer recalled. “Hip-hop was breaking out, break dancing, graffiti art, noise music. That Gordon Matta-Clark era, that minimalist sculpture thing of SoHo, had now been replaced by a generation that’s more at home at the Mudd Club.”Baer insisted that being chosen to run White Columns in 1979 “wasn’t a glamorous thing to walk into. It was in impossible shape.” Sighing over his own naïveté, from his current perspective as an art adviser, he added, “Only somebody that young would be dumb enough to do it.” Monthly rent may have only been $415 at the space’s next home near the West Side Highway, but that was hardly a well-trafficked art burg. Moreover, the entire year’s budget was a mere $8,000 — with no provision for a director’s salary.From left, the artists Gretchen Bender, Cindy Sherman with Josh Baer, the White Columns director, at a fund-raiser, May 27, 1982.Robin Holland, via White ColumnsThe crowd inside a Danceteria benefit for White Columns, May 27, 1982.Robin Holland, via White ColumnsThe artist and new board member Mike Roddy suggested that Baer rebrand the space as “White Columns,” an architectural nod to the classically styled features of both its old and new addresses. It was also a droll statement about the rigid hierarchy of the art world being 100 percent white, Baer said critically. Hoping the frisson of spotlighting artists of color under the new name wouldn’t be lost on anyone, the updated moniker was made public for a September 1980 show featuring a sprawling subway-style mural by Lee Quiñones and Fred Brathwaite, a.k.a. Fab Five Freddy, one of the first times graffiti had been brought indoors into a prominent gallery setting.“We were both planting our flags in a whole new atmosphere,” Quiñones said recently, speaking of Baer’s invitation to spray-paint White Columns’ interior. Indeed, his show drew a host of downtown luminaries, from the critics Edit DeAk and Rene Ricard to the writer and cable TV host Glenn O’Brien, all of whom in turn helped spark a thorny love affair between the worlds of contemporary art and graffiti which continues to this day. The buzz-laden response also firmly linked White Columns’ new identity with both the nascent East Village art scene and the art market boom as each gathered steam in the ’80s.Lee Quiñones’s and Fred Brathwaite’s Sept. 1980 show at White Columns, one of the first prominent gallery exhibitions of graffiti in New York City.Charlie AhearnThat soaring market — and the ability of a White Columns show to catapult an unknown artist into its midst — could take on almost ridiculous aspects. “The commercial art world is a genius in finding ways to sell things that seem unsellable,” noted Bill Arning, who became director in 1985 and is now a Houston gallerist. At the March 1988 solo debut of Cady Noland’s unsettling installations — including a pair of geriatric walkers slung over a stanchion with a photo of a pistol leaning nearby — Arning said he fruitlessly tried to convince the collectors Don and Mera Rubell to purchase a piece for $400. He said Mera Rubell eventually admitted to him that she’d ended up buying that same piece a year later, once Noland’s career exploded — for $40,000.As the ’80s ended and the market mania collapsed, the resulting tensions rebounded inside White Columns. The painter Marilyn Minter said her 1988 solo debut there resulted in no less than 10 galleries pursuing her. Grateful to the space for plucking her out of semi-obscurity, she joined its board in 1991, happy to put her growing cachet at its service, even as her own sales slowed. “We were lucky to keep the doors open back in the ’90s,” Minter remembered. “Just keeping the air-conditioning on in the summer was a big deal!”Jeff Lewis studying a selection of White Columns publications from the 1990s and early 2000s.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesDespite the ’90s deepening recession, artists continued to see a White Columns show as transformational. “It changed my life completely,” John Currin said of his 1989 debut there, long before his portraits would fetch seven-figure sums at auction. “I made $5,000, that was huge! My entire income for the whole year before was $9,000 slaving away on drywall jobs.” A decade later, his wife, the sculptor Rachel Feinstein, said her own debut quickly moved her from working at the front desk of the Marianne Boesky Gallery to becoming one of its represented artists.Accordingly, Paul Ha, Arning’s successor in 1996 — and current director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center, in Cambridge, Mass. — said he learned to set aside his misgivings at having White Columns act as a de facto “talent scout” for commercial galleries. “When you see so many people struggling, you just want to help them with their career,” Ha explained. Some of Esteban Jefferson’s work at his Nov. 2019 solo debut at White Columns.Esteban Jefferson and White Columns; Marc TattiHiggs continued that tradition, with a notable tweak. “When I arrived at White Columns,” he said, “the question for us as an organization was what could we do that would make a difference?” The inclusion of both Black and female artists was finally on the cultural world’s radar. However, “What was strikingly obvious to me was that the work of artists with developmental disabilities was just completely underrepresented in the field of contemporary art. There were these extraordinary organizations like Creative Growth in Oakland or Visionaries + Voices in Cincinnati, supporting extraordinary communities of artists. But they just didn’t have access to the same kind of networks that artists coming out of Yale or Columbia’s M.F.A. programs might.”Enter White Columns. Higgs has presented 25 solo shows of developmentally disabled artists so far, including William Scott, who he notes finally had a work acquired by the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art — 14 years after his debut at White Columns. “Patience is a key factor here,” he quipped.Matthew Higgs, left, and the artist B. Wurtz during the opening of White Columns’ 50th anniversary exhibition.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesYoung art school graduates haven’t been entirely nixed: The painter Esteban Jefferson was an immediate sensation with his 2019 solo debut, an expanded version of his Columbia M.F.A. thesis vividly contrasting a Paris museum’s African statues with the faces of its staffers and their blandly institutional setting. But Higgs has also made a point of spotlighting barely seen older figures, from David Byrd, who drew chilling drawings of the Westchester psychiatric ward where he worked for 30 years until 1988, to Ben Morea, who created abstractions in 1964 before becoming better known as an art world provocateur and political activist. Even other venues have received attention: In 2010, the artist Margaret Lee was asked to put together a retrospective on the raucous, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink group shows she began staging in 2009 at her semi-legal 179 Canal space in Chinatown.Lee said she was pleasantly shocked by her discussions with Higgs as she explored recreating 179 Canal’s chaotic vibe and messy energy within White Columns. “He never said ‘I don’t like the aesthetics of this.’ It was more ‘I’m around if you want to talk, but you’re free. Just be responsible.’” So, echoing the anti-guidelines first offered by Jeffrey Lew on Greene Street decades ago — Do what you want, just don’t burn the place down? “Actually,” Lee recalled wryly, “we did almost burn White Columns down. We wanted to leave a microwave running for 24 hours. Matthew said, ‘No, you cannot do that. You need a fake microwave.’ That’s where he drew the line!”From the Archives: White Columns & 112 Greene Street/112 Workshop — 1970-2021Through July 31 at White Columns, 91 Horatio Street, Manhattan; 212-924-4212; whitecolumns.org. More

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      in Street Art

      ‘Bueno para el alma’: los muralistas de São Paulo apuestan por convertir a su ciudad en un lienzo

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      Los funcionarios de esa ciudad brasileña antes acosaban a los artistas del graffiti y los muralistas, tratándolos como vándalos. Ahora el gobierno incluso financia esas expresiones artísticas que hacen de la metrópolis una galería al aire libre.1 de junio de 2021SÃO PAULO, Brasil — Cuando Eduardo Kobra comenzó su trabajo artístico pintaba las paredes de São Paulo en las horas cercanas al amanecer con representaciones crudas de la vida urbana, pero siempre trabajaba rápido y estaba muy atento de las patrullas de la policía.Por esa época, en Brasil no se podía ganar dinero como artista del graffiti y los riesgos abundaban. Los transeúntes solían insultarlo, la policía lo detuvo tres veces y acumuló docenas de citaciones por daños a la propiedad pública.“Muchos artistas de ese periodo se cayeron de los edificios y murieron”, recuerda Kobra. “Y hubo peleas muy violentas entre las bandas rivales de grafiteros”.Pero eso es el pasado: muchas cosas han cambiado desde que Kobra llevó su arte a las calles de São Paulo hace dos décadas.Ahora es un muralista aclamado internacionalmente, y São Paulo, la ciudad más grande de América Latina, ha llegado a impulsar, e incluso financia, el trabajo de artistas que las autoridades acosaron y difamaron en el pasado.El artista Eduardo Kobra frente a un mural que pintó en honor a las víctimas de la COVID-19, en São Paulo.El resultado es un auge del arte que utiliza las paredes de los edificios, antes monótonos, como lienzos de gran tamaño. Las decenas de murales recién pintados han suavizado los bordes de una de las megaciudades más caóticas del mundo, salpicando destellos, poesía y comentarios agudos en su horizonte.Esta forma de arte ha prosperado durante la pandemia, ya que los artistas encontraron consuelo e inspiración bajo el cielo abierto durante los meses en que las galerías, los museos y los espacios de actuación estaban cerrados.Muchos de los murales que fueron pintados el año pasado abordan la crisis de salud que ocasionó la muerte de más de 440.000 personas en Brasil, y que profundizó la polarización política.Kobra pintó un gran mural afuera de una iglesia que muestra a niños de diferentes religiones usando mascarillas. El artista Apolo Torres pintó un mural en honor a los repartidores que proveyeron de alimentos a la ciudad de 12 millones de personas cuando estaban en vigor las medidas de cuarentena.Aunque los alcaldes recientes de São Paulo a veces han sido hostiles y ambivalentes con los artistas callejeros, el gobierno actual ha apoyado plenamente la realización de murales.El año pasado, la oficina del alcalde lanzó una plataforma en línea llamada Street Art Museum 360, que cataloga y mapea más de 90 murales que pueden ser apreciados virtualmente por personas de todo el mundo o experimentados al recorrer la ciudad.Es fácil dejarse cautivar por el mural de Mag Magrela, “I Resist”, que muestra a una mujer desnuda arrodillada, con las manos en una pose meditativa y la palabra “presente” garabateada en su pecho.Un mural de Mag MagrelaUna obra de Mauro Neri de una mujer negra mirando hacia el cielo, con los ojos bien abiertos bajo la palabra “Realidad”, es una de las piezas que fueron creadas el año pasado con la intención de resaltar la injusticia racial.“La experiencia de toparse con estas obras de arte hace que la vida de la ciudad sea más humana, más colorida y más democrática”, dijo Alê Youssef, secretario de Cultura de São Paulo. “Es bueno para el alma”.Desde 2017, la ciudad ha gastado alrededor de 1,6 millones de dólares en proyectos de arte callejero.El arte del graffiti despegó en Brasil en la década de 1980 cuando los artistas se inspiraron en la escena del hip-hop y el punk en la ciudad de Nueva York. Fue una búsqueda dominada por hombres e impulsada, en gran medida, por artistas de comunidades marginadas.Los garabatos y bocetos eran una forma de rebelión, dijo Kobra, para las personas que se sentían impotentes e invisibles en la metrópolis, que es el motor económico de Brasil.“Crecí en un mundo lleno de drogas, crimen y discriminación, donde las personas como yo no tenían acceso a la cultura”, dijo Kobra, de 46 años. “Esta fue una manera de protestar, de existir, de difundir mi nombre a través de la ciudad”.La mayoría de los artistas que se hicieron famosos durante la era en la que el arte callejero todavía era una escena clandestina aprendieron observando a sus compañeros en vez de asistir a las universidades, dijo Yara Amaral Gurgel de Barros, de 38 años, quien escribió su tesis de maestría sobre el muralismo en São Paulo.“Aprendieron en las calles, viendo a otros dibujar, estudiando cómo usaban pinceles y rodillos para pintar”, dijo De Barros. “La mayoría son autodidactas y han transmitido sus habilidades de persona a persona”.Kleber Pagu, un muralista, bajando la pintura de un tejado para un nuevo mural en São Paulo.En la década de 1990, la proliferación del arte callejero se sumó a un paisaje desordenado y visualmente abrumador. Durante años, São Paulo tuvo pocas regulaciones para la publicidad exterior, dejando gran parte de la ciudad, incluidos muchos edificios con al menos un lado sin ventanas, envuelto en vallas publicitarias.En 2006, los legisladores de la ciudad concluyeron que la ciudad estaba inundada de contaminación visual y aprobaron una ley que prohíbe los anuncios grandes y llamativos al aire libre.A medida que se retiraron las vallas publicitarias, los muralistas comenzaron a tratar la repentina abundancia de paredes desnudas como invitaciones a pintar, primero sin permiso y luego con la aprobación del gobierno de la ciudad.Esos gigantescos espacios en blanco fueron una suerte de lienzos fascinantes y atractivos para Mundano, un conocido muralista y grafitero de São Paulo que dijo que las obras de arte exhibidas en galerías y colecciones privadas nunca le habían llamado la atención.“Siempre me sentí incómodo con el arte convencional porque era principalmente para las élites”, dijo Mundano, quien solo usa su nombre artístico. “En la década de 2000 salí a las calles con la intención de democratizar el arte”.Las paredes monótonas de los edificios se han convertido en lienzos de gran tamaño. En la foto se muestra “Trabajadores de Brumadinho”, una obra del artista Mundano.En 2014, Mundano comenzó a pintar los carros gastados y monótonos de los recolectores de basura reciclable, convirtiéndolos en exhibiciones coloridas e itinerantes. La iniciativa, a la que denominó “pimp my cart”, llenó de orgullo a los trabajadores. Más tarde, el artista creó una aplicación de teléfono que permite a las personas comunicarse con los recolectores de basura cercanos.“Siempre quise que mi arte fuera útil”, dijo Mundano. “El arte puede abordar los problemas más cruciales de Brasil”.Uno de ellos, según Mundano, es la tendencia de muchos brasileños a olvidar los momentos de trauma, un fenómeno que se encuentra en el corazón de su trabajo como muralista.“Brasil es un país sin memoria, donde la gente tiende a olvidar incluso nuestra historia reciente”, dijo Mundano, frente a uno de sus grandes murales ubicado en una concurrida intersección del centro. “Necesitamos crear monumentos para los momentos que nos marcaron como nación”.El mural “Trabajadores de Brumadinho” es un homenaje a los 270 trabajadores asesinados en enero de 2019 en un sitio minero en el estado de Minas Gerais, cuando estalló una presa llena de fango y lodo.Un primer plano del mural de Mundano, cuya pintura fue hecha con barro del desastre de la presa Brumadinho.Mundano viajó al lugar del accidente en la localidad de Brumadinho, donde recogió más de 250 kilos de lodo y sedimentos, que utilizó para pintar el mural.La obra es una réplica de una pintura icónica de 1933 de Tarsila do Amaral, una de las pintoras más reconocidas de Brasil, y muestra varias filas de trabajadores, cuyos rostros reflejan la diversidad de Brasil, luciendo cansados ​​y abatidos.Mundano dijo que decidió replicar la pintura de Do Amaral como una manera de subrayar lo poco que han cambiado las cosas en casi un siglo.“Siguen oprimidos por las industrias”, dijo.La muralista Hanna Lucatelli Santos también se inspira en temas sociales y dice que se sintió llamada a representar cómo las mujeres muestran su fuerza.Hace años descubrió el poder único de los murales, incluso a pequeña escala, cuando dibujó una imagen de lo que ella define como una mujer “fuerte, pero delicada” en su propia casa. De repente, las relaciones en el hogar se volvieron más armoniosas y la energía más positiva, dijo.Hanna Lucatelli Santos dijo que sus murales de mujeres fuertes pueden “equilibrar la energía de la calle, que tiende a ser tan masculina”.“Eso hizo que nos tratáramos de una forma más amable”, dijo Santos.Santos, de 30 años, ha tratado de replicar ese efecto a mayor escala pintando murales de mujeres que miran la ciudad abarrotada con un aspecto sereno y místico. Sus creaciones también son una refutación a la forma en que las mujeres a menudo son retratadas en la publicidad brasileña y en el arte creado por los hombres.“Ves mujeres pintadas por hombres que tienen cuerpos artificiales, están totalmente sexualizadas”, dijo. “Esas figuras hicieron mucho más para oprimirme que para liberarme”.Uno de sus trabajos recientes, un par de murales ubicados en unas paredes adyacentes, muestran a la misma mujer de frente y de espaldas. La imagen frontal incluye la frase: “¿Te has dado cuenta de que somos infinitos?”, y el otro lado muestra a la misma mujer cargando a un bebé en su espalda y sosteniendo la mano de un niño pequeño.“Quería que la gente se cuestionara cómo la sociedad ve a las madres”, dijo. “Y sé que una mujer de ese tamaño, una mujer mística, tiene el poder de cambiar el entorno debajo de ella, de equilibrar la energía de la calle, que tiende a ser tan masculina”.Un mural de la artista Soberana Ziza en el centro de la ciudad.Lis Moriconi colaboró en este reportaje desde Río de Janeiro.Ernesto Londoño es el jefe de la corresponsalía de Brasil, con sede en Río de Janeiro. Antes formó parte del Comité Editorial y, antes de unirse a The New York Times, era reportero en The Washington Post. @londonoe More