Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion: At the New York Historical Society

This exhibition is dedicated to the long journey of immigration, through which Chinese populations have come in their path towards americanization. The exhibit is composed mainly of nostalgic photographs that portrait the life as it was seen in an eighteenth-century North America, including the specific context of New York as well, not only as a global-country perspective.

The exhibition features objects, as well as photographic images. However, what seems interesting, is how this archive of images proof the cultural changes that Chinese immigrants have gone -and still do- to achieve an 'accepted' level of americanization. From these interesting photographs it is possible to see the early stages of the Chinese newcomers into the United States, and how the culture was starting to assimilate the new environment that was America. The exhibit is directed, mostly, to individuals interested in cultural studies, as well as an archive for Chinese descendants that seek to understand, through images and objects, the journey of their ancestors within North-American history.

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Tommy Hartung: At the On Stellar Rays Gallery

Hartung's 'The Bible' video combines found footage, sounds and animation to convey meanings related to the Bible. A colleague recommended this show to me because of the weird relationships stablished by the artist between imagery and religious meaning.

Personally, the film appears forced, intendedly twisted and unnecessarily complicated to understand. The only references that draw back to the Bible subject is a choir of boys chanting in an obviously religious way, referencing the 23rd psalm.

I am not a devote fan of contemporary art, specially New Yorker contemporary art because of the extravagance of the resources employed to convey simple meanings. Even though there are interesting scenes in this video, the overall outcome was not possible to internalize, at least by me.

Still from 'The Bible'
Taken from On Stellar Rays Gallery Website

Ernest Cole: At the Grey Art Gallery

South African Photographer Ernest Cole is honored with this amazing photograph exhibition at the Grey Art Gallery.

The images come from his own experience in his native country, and his work reflects his arguments in regards to the status of African people, subjected to early Europeans, establishing in South Africa. These black and white photographs narrate the discrimination, scrutiny, exploitation, vicissitudes and cultural assimilation process, evidenced in the impacting scenes depicted by the artist.

Cole's work in this honorable exhibition infiltrate the hidden face of a South African labor class, as a racially discriminated and physically exploited and humiliated community. His work also shows another side of that reality, evidencing few moments of joy and cultural pleasure, leaking from hard-work endeavors to which they where forced.

Image courtesy of:
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For a Love of His People: At the National Museum of the American Indian

This is a long-lasting exhibition of photographs by artist Horace Poolaw, a Native-American artist himself, whose photographs depict the in-between life of native tribes, merging together with the Western American expanding culture.

The photographs are all black and white, platinum gel printed, and exquisitely detailed. This exhibition was outstanding in my opinion, because of the honesty that comes through the subjects photographed by the artist.

In these scenarios, the artist does not discriminate sex, age or status of the tribe members adopted as subjects of his work. The Natives are shown in town celebrations, wearing a mixture between Western outfits and Native ceremonial props, including jewelry, being worn by an equally mixed body of people, featuring Caucasian and Native physical attributes.

The importance of this exhibition lies on the simple fact that it becomes an obvious visual sample that speaks for the mutual, peaceful journey that Native Americans and Western white people build together, in harmony and tolerance, which contradicts the overly famous historical past, tainted with blood and massacres. The pictures do not intend to erase this historic happenings, but rather offer an alternative view that helps explain actual populations of mixed white-native communities, nonetheless absolutely relevant to American past. To see some samples, let us see some photographs from the original source, the National Museum of the American Indian:

Erica Baum: At the Bureau Art Gallery

I went to this show a while ago, as part of my Thesis class at Parsons, The New School. The exhibition by Baum features two-dimensional pieces, based on photographic abstractions in black and white. Her work explores a contemplative narrative that plays with gender, memories and basic forms, which, in my opinion, reference early learning in childs, which reinforces the concepts of nostalgia and memories.

The curatorial work for Baum's exhibit plays with the scale of the works themselves, as some of the prints are medium to small in size, so certain installation arrangements had to be made in order to construct a logical story, told throughout the photograph fragments of Baum's work. Here some images from Bureau:

Sky Studies: Oil Sketches from the Thaw Collection: At the Morgan Library

In this uncommon show, the Morgan Library delivers a great number of oil paintings, executed on paper, as exercises/studies of sky coloration and clouds, by artist from the middle of the eighteenth century in Europe.

The samples seem uncommon because of the medium itself, and the insistence to depict an ever-changing subject that, accordingly to the information seen in the Museum information boards, determined the entire palette to be used within the entire composition of the future painting. Such sky studies were elaborated before the actual painting, as a way for preparing the artist to capture the essence of a given landscape environment.

It is a pleasure and a privilege to encounter the visual studies before the master paintings. So many times, as evidenced in this exhibit, the practice behind the final work reveal how thoroughly the artistic endeavor dives into the object to be depicted, and the process denotes and reveals even more pleasant, interesting aspects that give art history its consistency as a cultural study around the world. These following images from the Morgan Library's website help illustrate the exhibition here:

Jennifer Paige Cohen: At the Nicelle Beauchene Gallery

During this visit to the Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, the work of white American artist Jennifer Cohen fills out the entire space. Cohen's work depicts abstract gestures, materially produced by plaster applications and second-hand clothes, which provide the color factor into the overly white plaster figures. 

Her work, as I found observe in three-dimensions, gravitate between the abstract and the figurative. The physical parts found in her sculptures are obtained by making mould impressions of body parts, which, according to the artist statement, reference sensuality, the human body, seduction, and their relationship to the outer world. Her work can be compared in some aspects to Mike Kelley's own sculptures, as a comparative study that draws from the body, the abstract, and the inaccessible, ethereal meanings behind forms that cannot be identified as neither absolutely abstract, nor figuratively human. Here some images, courtesy of the Bicelle Beauchene Gallery: