NYC Art Shows

So, You Want To Work At An Art Gallery…

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Summer in the City is a time for Fresh Air Kids, scrambling to stay cool, making sure to put on that sunscreen and water, water, water. 

Notice that none of those are particularly Art-related. 

That’s because most of the galleries are on short schedules, closed on Saturdays, or maybe the entire month of August, and the museums are gearing up for their new fall seasons. As a result, it was easy to miss a sleeper show up at David Zwirner’s 19th Street location- After Hours, mounted just east of the construction going on in their western gallery, which they apparently figured summer was a good time to get done. I’m glad I didn’t sleep on it. It’s a show of Art by the staff of David Zwirner’s galleries around the world. Very handsomely installed, it’s easy on the eyes and a number of pieces linger in the mind. “Easy” and “linger”…two words that go nicely with summer. 

T. Dylan Moore, Self-Portrait, 2024, Casein on paper. Jasper Johns, has used this seemingly difficult medium to work with medium extensively, making me sit up and take notice of its possibilities- as T. Dylan Moore’s Self-Portrait does here (shot at an angle to minimize glare). Seen in After Hours, July 17, 2024. Pictures in this piece are thumbnails. Click any for full size.

I can hear some readers saying, “Man, it must be slow in NYC if he’s writing about a show by gallery staff members.” In reply I would remind readers that I first met Caslon Bevington in 2017 while she was working at David Zwirner. I have subsequently written about two of her solo shows.

Chase Barnes, Stateless Revision 1, Machine Vision, 2023, Multi-channel video installation on dual NEC monitors. Seen in  After Hours, July 18, 2024.

The big takeaway from After Hours for me is that there are A LOT of talented folks working for David Zwirner. This is not the first rodeo for any number of them. Chase Barnes, for example, already has a PhotoBook published by Jason Koxvold’s renowned Gnomic Book. It shows me the track to working at a major gallery is F A S T. Being an Artist looks good on a resume for a gallery gig, and having shown or been published travels well by repute. It’s also got to be a real asset for said Art dealer to have such people on their staff in innumerable ways. 

Lauren Ferrara, Absence, 2020, Found wood, recycled fabric, recycled paper, and recycled plastic bags, seen at After Hours, July 17, 2024.

In my experience, most people don’t give a second thought to staff members they encounter at an Art gallery. To work in a New York Gallery is an achievement in itself. A lot of people are drawn by the beauty and glamour of working with Art & Artists. That means there’s a lot of competition for these jobs. It serves to reason that an Artist seeking such employment would have an edge all other things being equal. And maybe that’s why the quality in After Hours was so high.

I was impressed with After Hours to the point that I saw it 4 times.The last two visits were because of  Oji Haynes. 

Kris Graves, the mastermind behind LOST IV taking a group portrait of 7 of the 10 Artist/Authors included in the set. From left, Oji Haynes, Richard Renaldi, Melody Melamed, Peter Baker, Tracy Dong, Melissa Alcena and Yoav Horesh. Seen at the LOST IV Book Release, Printed Matter, July 11, 2024.

I met Mr. Haynes at the Kris Graves Project’s 10-volume  LOST IV book release at Printed Matter. So taken with his PhotoBook, Anthem, was I that I took the bold step (for me) of walking over and telling him. We proceeded to have a remarkable conversation during which we discovered a shared passion for Art book collecting, with any number of overlapping Artists, from Robert Rauschenberg to Gordon Parks and Jeff Wall. He also revealed it was his first PhotoBook, consisting of an overview of his Photography to date,  and he had been reluctant to do it. Luckily, Kris Graves managed to convince him that now was indeed the time and the results are one of the strongest books (in my view) in the set. No mean feat in fast company. 

A spread from Anthem. Mr. Haynes told me he had originally envisioned the right-hand Photo as the cover. *- Kris Graves Projects Photo.

Then, he told me he had moved on in his practice and was now creating Sculptural pieces, and one of them was included in After Hours! Ahhh…he, too, is a David Zwirner staffer. I went back to the show on a mission.

Oji Haynes, Scriptures, 2024, String lights, cement, inkjet photo, diamond dust, and mixed media on fabric couch. Seen in  After Hours, July 17, 2024.

Tucked nicely into a corner at the far end of a large gallery, his piece, Scriptures, 2024, couldn’t be more different, yet similar, to his Photography. His book consists of intimate moments, most, but not all, including people- singly, in paris or small groups. Scriptures is intimate, as well, in a different way. Though I continue to ponder it, I had a few initial reactions. 

Left side showing the text, “LISTEN TO WHAT”

Right side showing the text, “GOD HAS TO SAY.”

First, it struck me as a collection of things people might find buried if they took apart a couch they’d had for a long time. Things that might fall out if you lifted it up from one end. Second, it gave me a feeling somewhat reminiscent to looking at Kerry James Marshall’s Souvenir II, a work that memorializes memories.

Kerry James Marshall, Souvenir II, 1997, Acrylic, collage, and glitter on unstreteched canvas banner. *-Renaissance Society Photo.

Then, I thought I’d love to see it hung between Mr. Marshall’s piece and Robert Rauschenberg’s revolutionary Bed. Rauschenberg mounted a bed on a wall. Mr. Haynes has mounted a couch on the two walls of a corner.

Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955, Oil and pencil on pillow, quilt, and sheet on wood supports. The first work to take a piece of everyday household furniture and reenvision it. Of this work, Sarah Sze said, “That kind of intimacy is very specific to Rauschenberg. A willingness to be tender, to be intimate, to share a kind of a very interior urgency. An urgency to share a kind of interior self publicly1.” Her words resonated with me while seeing Scriptures. Seen at MoMA during Robert Rauschenberg Among Friends, August 5, 2017.

Or, next to them in chronological sequence. While Mr. Marshall’s piece may be seen as primarily a memorial to MLK, JFK and RFK and slain Civil Rights workers, the intimacy is heightened by the fact that it, and Mr. Marshall’s similar Souvenirs Series, take place in living rooms, where (no doubt) carefully chosen items abound, including couches. It’s that feeling and those items I thought of when seeing Mr. Haynes’s Scriptures. All three works are filled with the touchstones of a life, or the lives of an immediate few. In Oji Haynes’s case, the “meaning” is up to the viewer. I see a number of dreams in a self-enclosed space, though your results may differ. 

Oji Haynes holding a copy of his first PhotoBook, Anthem, at the LOST IV Book Release, Printed Matter, July 11.2024.

The definitions of “scriptures’ in the American Heritage Dictionary are- “1. A sacred writing or book. 2- A passage from such a writing or book. 3- The writings collected as the Bible.” Taking those as a point of context, tilts things to the “sacred,” and what’s sacred for whosever items these are. In one sense, it’s a time capsule of hopes, dreams, achievements, memories, simultaneously revealing the passage of time. Auspicious, indeed. Mr. Haynes was not on hand when I went back to After Hours. He told me he had to go install work in a show in San Francisco.

With work like Scriptures hot on the heels of a just-released auspicious first PhotoBook Anthem, Oji Haynes has already reached another new plateau. I’ll be among those watching with interest where he, and his Art, goes next. 

So, Beware: That Art gallery staff member you see or speak to on your next visit may well be an Artist whose work you’ll be going to see one day soon. It’s happened to me. More than once.

*- Soundtrack for this piece is “Summer in the City” by John Sebastian and Lovin’ Spoonful from 1966. This vintage video could have been shot here this week-

NighthawkNYC.com has been entirely self-funded & ad-free for 9 years, during which 330 full-length pieces have been published! If you’ve found it worthwhile, PLEASE donate by PayPal below to allow me to continue. Thank you, Kenn.

You can also support it by buying Art, Art & Photography books, and Music from my collection! Art & Books may be found here. Music here and here.

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Ed Ruscha & The Two-Sided Coin of Influence

This site is Free & Ad-Free! If you find this piece worthwhile, please donate via PayPal to support it & independent Art writing. You can also support it by buying Art & books! Details at the end. Thank you.

Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava (*- Unless otherwise credited.).

This is the third and final part of my look at Ed Ruscha/Now Then. Part 1  is here. Part 2 is here.

1- Heads

One door closed, another opened. Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, 1965-8, Oil on canvas, seen at MoMA. Ed Ruscha/Now Then is now open there. Pictures in this piece are thumbnails. Click any for full size.

Ed Ruscha/Now Then is a memory for those of us who saw it at MoMA from September 10, 2023 to January 15th of this year. It’s a memory in the making for those who are seeing it now at LACMA, seen above in Ed Ruscha’s 1965-8 nebulous “portrait” of it (which I discussed in Part 1), or will be seeing it until it closes there on October 6th. They’ll be pleased to know it’s a show with staying power, a show I continue to relive and think about on a daily basis, six months after it closed here. After following the trail of his devlopment in Part 1, “Ed Ruscha’s Head Scratchers,” seeing some echoes of the work of Artists past, I began to wonder… Every Artist I’ve come across has had influences. Who influenced Ed Ruscha? As the show was up, and now after it ended here, that question lingered.

Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q., 1919, or later. One Artist Ed Ruscha has repeatedly expressed his admiration for is Duchamp, who he met in the early 1960s. There are numerous version of L.H.O.O.Q. since the 1919 original. I chose this one because t contains all the elements of the original, which I cannot find (if you have  let me know)- the mustache, the goatee, and the famous letters all of which Duchamp added to a Mona Lisa postcard. Duchamp once said that L.H.O.O.Q. means “there is fire down below,” though I’ve seen other definitions.  *- Photographer unknown.

“Duchamp had quite a sizable influence on me from a pictorial standpoint and from an emotional standpoint,” Ed Ruscha (Ed Ruscha, Leave Any Information After the Signal, P.324).

Ed Ruscha has not written an autobiography, so his book, Leave Any Information After the Signal, a collection of “Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages” from 1960 to 2000 is the closest thing we have to a primary written source. In addition to just looking, I turned to it, along with the numerous other interviews he’s given over his six-decade plus career, for insights.

As seen in Part 1– Encountering Johns’s  Target with Four Faces in a black & white reproduction in a 1957 magazine was, he said, an ‘atomic bomb’ in his training, ‘a stranger fruit’ that he ‘saw as something that didn’t seem to follow the history of art. My teachers said it was not art. ‘I didn’t need to see the colors or the size…’ ‘I was especially taken with the fact that it was symmetrical, which was just absolutely taboo in art school- you didn’t make anything symmetrical…Art school was modernism, it was asymmetry, it was giant brush strokes…it was all these other things that were gestural rather than cerebral. So I began moving to things that had more of a premeditation1.’” Jasper Johns, Target with Four Faces, 1955, Encaustic on newspaper and cloth over canvas surrounded by four tinted-plaster faces in wood box with hinged front. Seen in Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror at the Whitney in 2021.

Besides naming Duchamp, Jasper Johns and his counterpart Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha hasn’t addressed the subject of influences all that often.

René Magritte, The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe), 1929, Oil on canvas. (Not in the show.) *-LACMA Photo

Pondering the visual evidence, the first name that came to mind was Rene Magritte, 1898-1967, a well-known Belgian Artist who also had a long career and touched on a number of subjects Ed Ruscha has, while sharing his fondness for taking the familiar out of context (which Mr. Ruscha does with words, objects and places). He also incorporated words. Though often labelled a “Surrealist,” his work touches on any number of other realms and styles of Painting, which made him ahead of his time. As a result, his influence is extraordinary and ongoing. Time and again, I’d look at an Ed Ruscha, or a section of one, and think “Magritte,” beginning with Actual Size, 1962, which I showed in Part 1, which echoes Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, 1929 better known by the famous words it includes, “This is Not a Pipe2.” The Magritte seems to echo his contemporary, Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q., from 1919.

Salvador Dalí, Open Field with Ball in Centre and Mountains in  Rear, Study for the Walt Disney film Destino, 1948, Oil on masonite, left. Ed Ruscha, Painkillers, Tranquilizers, Olive, 1969, right. (*- Dali from the Dalí & Film MoMA catalog. Ed Ruscha as I saw it in the show.)3.

Of him, Mr. Ruscha said, “Yes, Magritte did influence me, but it came the other way around—what I call 360-degree influence. That’s influence from a person’s thoughts and force and not from his pictures, which the person being influenced has not seen, until later on. The same with Dalí. I’ve been influenced by Dalí, but it’s been through other sources. Because I’ll go back, and I’ll be working on something and I’ll see a picture of Dalí’s I’ve never seen before, and there is my work. (P.56).” I wrote about seeing Dalí in Rauscha in Part 1– before I found that quote.

Surrealism Soaped and Scrubbed, Ed Ruscha’s cover design for Artforum 5, No. 1, Special Issue: Surrealism, September, 1966. 

What about “Surrealism’s” influence, that of the group of European Artists so labelled?

Ed Ruscha was Art Director for Artforum Magazine from 1966-19724. His cover for the September, 1966 “Surrealism” Special Edition I find fascinating, particularly in regards to Ed Ruscha’s Art, overall. While this image has almost nothing to do with “historical Surrealism,” I find it ripe with the “kind” of surrealism (small “s,” which he also uses here) I see in Ed Ruscha’s work, while also being another of his trademarked play on words. There is nothing in “historical Surrealism” that influenced this (as far as I know), and so it’s another work that makes me wonder what, if anything, inspired it. On page 349 of Leave Any Information After the Signal, Mr. Ruscha denies the influence of the Surrealists handling of light on his work. That’s all he has to say about it.

The Back of Hollywood, 1977, Oil on canvas. Was Ed Ruscha the first to Paint words backwards? Probably not.

What about influences on his Word Painting? In After the Signal, he said,  “Well, there’ve been so many artists who have used words throughout the centuries really, but the ones I enjoy are mostly from the twentieth century. Say, Kurt Schwitters. [. . .] 5” On page 115, Paul Karlstrom directly asks Mr. Ruscha,  “Who were your heroes then, your role models?” He replied, “Well, I guess de Kooning was, and Franz Kline. Franz Kline had a lot to say at that particular time, and so they were more or less the passwords. You just emulated them, almost automatically. Then if you couldn’t emulate them you weren’t really on the right track. I still think that. But the work of Johns and Rauschenberg marked a departure in the sense that their work was premeditated.” It sounds like he was referring to his early days as a student under the Abstract Expressionist influenced Chouinard faculty in the late 1950s, as once again, it’s hard for me to see the influence of de Kooning or Kline in Ed Ruscha’s work.

Joan Miró, Photo: This is the Color of My Dreams 1925, Oil on canvas. *- Met Museum Photo

The Surrealists began as a literary “movement,” that experimented with “automatic writing.” Later, their influence spread to Painting. In Miró’s Photo: This is the Color of My Dreams, it comes full circle. Part of the Artist’s “peinture-poésie” (painting-poetry) series, this strikes me as a forerunner or precursor to the Word Paintings of Ed Ruscha. Yet, I have no idea if he saw it, or other works in Mirós series,  or when.

America’s Future, 1977, Oil on canvas. The title is shown in the next picture.

The feeling I’m left with is that these Artists “effected” him in ways outside of a direct visual influence. They are, what I call, “echoes.” What Ed Ruscha called “360 degree” influences. As for the stated influences, in Part 2, I mentioned that Thomas Cole was the influence on Mr. Ruscha’s Course of Empire series, from who he borrowed the name of the series. It seems to me the rest of his influences, if any, remain up for conjecture. Still, taking him at his work on possible influences would leave Ed Ruscha remarkably original.

Detail. Though Painted 18 years before he began his Course of Empire series I showed in Part 2, seeing this made me wonder if this work should be appended to the end of the series, i.e. the final outcome of it.

2- Tails

Turning the influence coin over, however, 67 years, and counting, into one of the most remarkable careers in American Art history, at this moment in time it’s hard to think of another Modern & Contemporary Artist, let alone an American Artist, who is more influential than Ed Ruscha is. In fact, it’s impossible for me to list here all the realms in which his influence can be seen. Those that come to mind the quickest include-

-His role in furthering the breaking of the strangle hold of Abstract Expressionism in Painting in the early 1960s.

-His unique way of incorporating words and typography into his Art.

-His Paintings of L.A. and the American West6.

No place on the planet has more Artist’s books than NYC’s Printed Matter, home of 15 ,000 books they’ve created. How many are/were inspired in part or wholly by Ed Ruscha? I don’t know the total but I keep finding more every time I go in. May 6, 2024.

-His ground-breaking Artist’s books/PhotoBooks. (Is it a stretch to say he’s played a defining role in the Contemporary Artist’s Book & PhotoBook phenomenon? I don’t think so.)

-His style of nonjudgmental roadside and aerial Photography.

-Entire genres of Painting, Photography and books have sprung up around his work.

Jeff Brouws, Various Small Books Referencing Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha, 2013. 288 pages of books, and just books, by other Artists influenced by Ed Ruscha, and it’s now 11 years old!

To this point, at least two substantial books, including the book above, have been published focused solely on his influence! All of this is even more impressive (or mind-boggling) when you consider Ed Ruscha is still with us and going strong at 86. Usually, the influence of Artists is something referred to in the past tense.

-His unique way of incorporating words and typography into his Art.

Ed Ruscha’s presence is so pronounced at Printed Matter, they even have a well-worn box just for books he’s influenced. ‘Nuff said. No, that’s not a copy of Mr. Ruscha’s very rare Twentysix Gasoline Stations. It’s Michalis Pincher’s 2009 homage to it, which “borrows” Ruscha’s cover verbatim.

All of this, also, makes it harder to fathom that Ed Ruscha/Now Then was the first large Ed Ruscha show here in 41 years7, and his first show at MoMA! That makes the extent of his influence that much more impressive. Suffice it to say it’s a lot easier to see Ed Ruscha’s influence than it might be to see the influence of others on his work.is so pronounced.

The saddest moment of the entire 4 month run of Ed Ruscha/ Now Then: the show’s entrance, moments after it closed for the last time on January 15, 2024. I saw it on its first preview day, and I was there when it closed for good. Shows are fugacious events. The ending of a great show is always sad; like saying “goodbye” to a friend. One you’ll never see again.

-Takeaways

In addition to providing an opportunity to ponder the scope of his influence, Now Then provides the chance to assess his achievement and his place among the important Artists of both the 20th and 21st centuries. Ed Ruscha strikes me as an Artist who is continually moving forward to the point that he is a seemingly endless innovator. Ed Ruscha/Now Then provided a rare chance to see the craft behind the mystery his work evokes; to watch the Artist move on an almost step-by-step basis from his beginnings though each of his phases, with a focus on his recurring themes and his innovations.

Yet, he’s also an Artist who’s extremely aware of his, and our, pasts, and his Art stays in touch with it often in surprising ways. Ed Ruscha has never stood still long enough to have any box his work gets put in fit for very long. The Ed Ruscha box is the only one that fits an Artist as extraordinarily diverse as Mr. Ruscha has been and continues to be. Ed Ruscha/Now Then is a show that will live long in memory, and no doubt, influence.

Part 1 of my look at Ed Ruscha/Now Then is here. Part 2 is here.

*- Soundtrack for this piece is  “Goodnight My Love,” as performed by Paul Anna. In 2017, MOCA commissioned a short documentary on two themes in Ed Ruscha’s work (the text of which is here). In the resulting piece, Ed Ruscha says, “I’m gonna play this tune called ‘Goodnight My Love’ and this represents everrything I felt about California when I first came out here…” Because he doesn’t specify which recording he’s going to play, I chose the Paul Anka version from 1969.

NighthawkNYC.com has been entirely self-funded & ad-free for 9 years, during which 330 full-length pieces have been published! If you’ve found it worthwhile, PLEASE donate by PayPal below to allow me to continue. Thank you, Kenn.

You can also support it by buying Art, Art & Photography books, and Music from my collection! Art & Books may be found here. Music here and here.

Written & photographed by Kenn Sava for nighthawknyc.com unless otherwise credited. To send comments, thoughts, feedback or propositions click here. Click the white box on the upper right for the archives or to search them. Subscribe to be notified of new Posts below. Your information will be used for no other purpose.

For “short takes,” my ongoing “Visual Diary” series, and outtakes from my pieces, be sure to follow @nighthawk_nyc on Instagram!

  1. Alexandra Schwartz, Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles, P.15 ↩
  2. I cannot think of Rene Magritte without thinking of the singular Photographer, Duane Michals. When I met him, I quickly shifted the chat from Photography to Painting. He rightly gloated over the fact that he had met and Photographed his three favorite Painters- Balthus, Giorgio de Chirico, and Rene Magritte, with who he did a terrific PhotoBook, that he graciously signed for me. All three are under-appreciated in my book, and remain among my favorites, too. ↩
  3. In spite of being among the best known, in my view, Dalí may be the most under-appreciated Artist of the 20th century, as anyone who saw the incredible Salvador Dalí Centennial Exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum in 2005 knows. It’s partially his own fault, as the endless fantastic stunts he put on overshadows the appreciation of his Art in my opinion. History will eventually fix that, I believe. ↩
  4. Alexandra Schwartz, P.35 ↩
  5. Ed Ruscha, Leave Any Information After the Signal, P. 324 ↩
  6. Along with those of, and quite different from,Georgia O’Keeffe. ↩
  7. As I mentioned in Part 1, the last big Ed Ruscha show here was the traveling retrospective, The Works of Ed Ruscha, which came to the Whitney Museum in 1982! ↩

NoteWorthy PhotoBook of 2024: LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity

This site is Free & Ad-Free! If you find this piece worthwhile, please donate via PayPal to support it & independent Art writing. You can also support it by buying Art & books! Details at the end. Thank you.

Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava.

The NighthawkNYC.com NoteWorthy PhotoBook of 2024: LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity, Published by the Museum of Modern Art

When I met her at the Museum of Modern Art on May 10th, at the Preview of her stunning early mid-career retrospective, I told Ms. Frazier her book, LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity, was my NoteWorthy PhotoBook of the Year. Yes, the year. Even though we’re barely half way through 2024 as I write this and there are still six full months to go). With all due respect to all the books not yet released as well as those I have not yet seen, Ms. Frazier  gets my 2024 Trophy as most recommended PhotoBook for her powerful & urgently important book, published to accompany and expand on the show of the same name. Frankly, she deserves a medal for the work she has done.

LaToya Ruby Frazier proudly showing me her new book, Monuments of Soilidarity at MoMA, May 10, 2024

Having begun taking Photographs at 16, she seemed to find her voice almost immediately. “I had decided when I was a teenager that I had to make work that was socially and politically conscious1,” she said.

Auspicious beginnings. The Notion of Family, 2016.

Her early work focused on 3 generations of her family and life in her hometown of Braddock, PA in her debut PhotoBook, The Notion of Family, in 2016, which announced her arrival to the world in memorable fashion. She subsequently turned her attention to the coalminers in the Borinage, Belgium, in And From the Coaltips a Tree Will Rise, in 2017. Returning the U.S., she documented the closing of the G.M. plant in Lordstown, Ohio in The Last Cruze, 2019, and the man-made water crisis in Flint, Michigan in Flint Is Family In Three Acts, 2022 in book form. All four books are NoteWorthy in their own right.

MoMA, May 12, 2024

Monuments of Solidarity is an overview of LaToya Ruby Frazier’s work to date in what is a Show of the Year candidate along with Käthe Kollwitz, which happens to be installed right next to Monuments of Solidarity at MoMA. Monuments takes the viewer right up to the work shown in her most recent NYC gallery show, More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland, 2021-22, which I wrote about here. The piece, which consists of 18 Inkjet panels on IV stands, was recently fittingly acquired by the forward-looking Baltimore Museum.

Partial installation view, More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland, 2021-22, as installed at MoMA May 12, 2024. Each piece is in 2 parts. On the right-hand panel is a text written by the subject of her Photo on the left panel. You can see it installed at Gladstone Gallery in my look at it here.

There are a lot of great Artists in this country. You have your list. I have mine. There are also a lot of important Artists working here today. One thing that sets LaToya Ruby Frazier apart, in my view, is that, in addition to her poignant Photography, she brings her subjects right into her work. Though hers is the overall vision, the results feel collaborative. This serves to make the results unlike most of what’s come before.

Installation view. Flint Is Family section. May 12, 2024 including more compelling texts from her subjects accompanying her Photos.

After posing for the picture with her book, she asked me what I thought of her show. I told her I was very moved by the Photos she took with and about her Grandmother, now well-known images from her instant classic The Notion of Family. In them we see the Artist’s vision and talent were stunningly present from an early age, as if she was born with a camera in her hand, while we also get insights into her and her family’s life in her hometown. Braddock, PA, which in turn fueled her passion to inspire change and to right wrongs.

UPMC Braddock Hospital and Holland Avenue Parking Lot, 2011. The community hospital in ruins, where her grandmother passed.

After we see the passing of her Grandmother, the show took an immediate turn and from then on was focused on depicting crises effecting “everyday” citizens, working class people, and issues of race. 

MoMA, May 10, 2024

Monuments of Solidarity is not only a “PhotoBook.” It delves deeply into its subjects in a way I find every bit as powerful as her Photographs are. This is evidence of LaToya’s extraordinary way with people. Watching her at MoMA, she took the time to have an actual moment with everyone she encountered. Even me (we’d never met).

LaToya Ruby Frazier Takes on Levis, 2011, Stills from the Video which premiered on Art21. LaToya took issue with Levi’s after they featured her hometown, Braddock, PA, in an “Everybody’s Work Is Equally Important” ad campaign. As part of the campaign, Levi’s  opened a public Photo Workshop in SoHo. In response, LaToya put on a pair of Levi’s and in a performance in front of the Levi’s Photo Workshop, preceded to destroy them while wearing them. The intense Video is looped in the show. From the book, Monuments of Solidarity.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, the person, makes every bit as good, and memorable, an impression as her work does, though the intensity we see in pieces like her incredible Levi’s Performance Video remained under the surface.

MoMA, May 10, 2024

I think her people skills, which isn’t the right term for someone who is as genuine as Mr. Frazier is…make that her humanity, is a central reason why her Art is so powerful and so direct, project after project. LaToya gets to the heart of the issue and speaks to why it is important- for those directly involved, and for all of us, like very few Artists working today can.

Partial installation view. The Last Cruze, 2019 (recently acquired by MoMA), looks at the last Chevy Cruze to be made in Lordstown, Ohio after G.M. halted production and closed the plant, throwing all the workers out of their jobs.

Ms. Frazier’s work is compared by some to that of the F.S.A. (Farm Services Administration) Photographers of the 1930s, including Dorothea Lange. As I ‘ve showed, one thing of many that sets her work apart is that she foregrounds the experiences of her subjects right alongside her Photographs in texts they authored; something the FSA Artists didn’t do. In fact, I can’t think of any Artist who has done it as consistently as LaTory Ruby Frazier has.

On this spread from The Last Cruze PhotoBook the subjects of Photos accompany them in pieces they wrote.

She gives many, maybe event most, of the actual people she depicts in her projects, their own voice. Quite often their words take up more space in her books and in this exhibition than her Photos do! I can’t say I’ve ever seen that before, either. In the literal sense, her work truly is a collection of  “moments of solidarity” between Artist and subject.

Entrance to at MoMA as seen on May 10, 2024. The show is up through July 20th.

Two asides- Two coincidences struck me while preparing this piece. First, LaToya Ruby Frazier – Monuments of Soilidarity is installed right across the hall from the equally terrific Käthe Kollwitz at MoMA. Walking through one, and then the other, it was impossible for me to ignore how much in common they share. I wish I had asked LaToya what she made of Ms. Kollwitz’s show. Both Artists have made the “Art of social purpose” the center of their work.

“I have no right to withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate. It is my duty to voice the sufferings of men, the never-ending sufferings heaped mountain-high.” Käthe Kollwitz, 1867-1945, 2.

Her first major retrospective at an NYC museum (How is that possible?) makes an open and shut case for Käthe Kollwitz as one of the major Artists of her time, something that has been well-known in Germany and elsewhere, making it past time for the rest of the world to catch up.

Preparing this piece also reminded me of another young woman Artist who I selected as my NoteWorthy Art Book of 2024: Es Devlin. Though they’re from different parts of the world, and work in different mediums, they’re both making extraordinary inroads into the world with their work. As I wrote in my look at Es’s book, An Atlas of Es Devlin, she’s garnered unheard of media acclaim. LaToya was just named one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People of 2024.” That’s pretty amazing, of course, but I bet it doesn’t come with a cool Owl statuette!  ; )

Woman of Steel Button Pin, 2017

“Woman of Steel” reads the button on the cover. Though she’s not a steelworker, she could easily wear one and it would completely suit her in the literal sense.

*-Soundtrack for this piece is “Poverty” by Yemi Alade, from her album, Woman of Steel, fittingly, performed here live-

NighthawkNYC.com has been entirely self-funded & ad-free for over 8 1/2 years, during which 320 full-length pieces have been published! If you’ve found it worthwhile, PLEASE donate by PayPal to allow me to continue below. Thank you, Kenn.

You can also support it by buying Art, Art & Photography books, and Music from my collection! Art & Books may be found here. Music here and here.

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  1. “Latoya Ruby Frazier Takes on Levi’s,” Art21 ↩
  2. As quoted, here. ↩

Ed Ruscha’s Wall Rockets

This site is Free & Ad-Free! If you find this piece worthwhile, please donate via PayPal to support it & independent Art writing. You can also support it by buying Art & books! Details at the end. Thank you.

Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava.

This is Part 2 of my look at Ed Ruscha/Now Then at MoMA. Part 1 is here, Part 3 is here.

From the late 1950s, through the early 1960s Ed Ruscha made regular trips back and forth between Oklahoma City, where he grew up, and L.A., his adopted home since the late 1950s. In 19621, he Photographed the gas stations that caught his eye on these journeys with his trusty Yashika Twin-reflex camera, taking 60 or 70 Photographs2. In an interview in 1973 he said, “What used to belong to the Navaho and Apache Indians now belongs to the white man and he’s got gas stations out there. So, I started seeing it as cultural curiosities.”

“I’d always wanted to make a book of some kind.”

He continues. “When I was in Oklahoma I got a brainstorm in the middle of the night to do this little book called Twentysix Gasoline Stations. I knew the title. I knew it would be photographs of twenty-six gasoline stations3.” “The first book came out of a play with words. The title came before I even thought about the pictures. I like the word ‘gasoline’ and I like the specific quality of ‘twenty-six4.'”  “Months went into the planning of that. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by loosening up. You know, not gotten so concerned with how I wanted the thing to look. I changed the form about fifty times at the printer’s5.” He self-published Twentysix Gasoline Stations in 1963 (although the title page states 1962).

You’re looking at a revolution. Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1963, revolutionized the Artist book, the PhotoBook, and street-side Phtography, with unique design, turning gas station Photography into a genre in the process. This copy was hanging for visitors to peruse, which was somewhat surprising as it’s now a rare book- even this second edition copy is worth hundreds of dollars. Knowing all of it from reproductions, this was the first time I was able to page through an actual copy of it. Pictures in this piece are thumbnails. Click on any for full size.

It’s an Artist’s book/PhotoBook whose influence is now incalculable.

Published in an edition of 400 copies, a case can be made that it ‘s the most influential PhotoBook of the contemporary period after Robert Frank’s The Americans (which the Artist acknowledges as an influence). Twentysix Gasoline Stations, with its “industrial” look and feel stood at odds with the frequently hand-made Artist’s book norm to the time. Virtually every aspect of the Artist’s book was reimagined, from the typography and text layout on the cover to the sparseness of the interior contents, with a lack of text save for image titles.

Believe it or not, this is one of the most influential Photographs in Modern & Contemporary Photography. STANDARD, ARMADILLO, TX, perhaps the key image in Twentysix Gasoline Stations, went on to have multiple lives of its own, inspiring numerous Ed Ruscha Paintings, Drawings & Prints, as well as the work of other Artists.

Speaking of the end result, he said-

“I realized that for the first time this book had an inexplicable thing I was looking for, and that was a kind of a “Huh?” That‘s what I’ve always worked around. All it is is a device to disarm somebody with my particular message5.”

Having immersed myself in PhotoBooks for the past 7 years, and Art books most of my life, it’s impossible for me to overstate the influence Twentysix Gasoline Stations has had, and continues to have, on the Art world. It turned Art & PhotoBook creation and publishing on its head, rewriting what a book could be and who could make one. He’s said he meant the pictures to be “like a collection of readymades7,” a term and genre Marcel Duchamp put on the Art map. Still, it received a mixed reaction when it was released, including famously being rejected by the Library of Congress.

Standard Station, Amarillo, TX, 1963, Oil on canvas, 64 15/16 x 121 13/16 inches. The “locomotive” compositional device, seen in Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights, 1962, in Part 1, returns, splitting the composition in two, just the beginning of what’s fascinating about this.

“I would say I came to painting through photography,” Ed Ruscha8

The STANDARD, ARMADILLO, TX, Photograph begat the Standard Station, Amarillo, TX Painting in 1963. Obviously, the Photo just shown has been reworked, reimagined, or he based this on another Photo. Whatever the case may be, the resulting composition seen here would subsequently take many forms and become iconic. Standard Station, Ten Cent Western Being Torn in Half, below, followed a year later.The Paintings begat Standard Station, Amarillo, TX Prints, with Standard Station, Amarillo, TX Drawings being created along the way. So ubiquitous did they become that gas station Paintings and gas station Photography are now, basically, his genres. Sooner or later, everyone who shoots or Paints a gas station is going to be compared to Ed Ruscha. Many, like Vik Muniz, openly acknowledge the influence.

What strikes me are the abstract elements, like the selective detailing- you can read the prices on the gas pumps, but detail disappears on everything behind them, creating a surreal experience (the “realistic” gas pumps offset against the featureless building behind them), under that big red sign whose white lettering, offset against the engulfing darkness, feels bold.

Standard Station, Ten Cent Western Being Torn in Half, 1964, Oil on canvas, 65 x 121 1/2 inches. Mr. Ruscha has likened  the comic flying off the canvas to the upper right to a “coda” in Music. For me, it looks like debris, garbage, pollution. In this piece, the featureless building has light and shadows added to it. Once again, the numbers and text on the gas pumps are very legible.

At the time, Ed Ruscha shot them, gas stations were bastions of the new found freedom of the open road and the catalyst of the massive post-war westward exodus that the Artist, himself, became a part of. Over time, gas stations would be seen differently as the toll of pollution and environmental decay mounted.

Ed Ruscha’s second most famous Artist book/PhotoBook. A copy of the legendary Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966, published in one long accordion fold. Ed Ruscha put a tripod on the back of a truck and went up and down Sunset Strip taking one Photo after another until he had shot every building on both sides of the street. Here, we get one direction on the top of the page, with what’s across the street synchronized and mirrored along the bottom.

Further books followed- 14 more to 1972, the most famous of which is Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966, another ground-breaking work. Ed Ruscha has stated that part of the reason he went west after high school, instead of east, was because of the glamour of L.A. Here, he shows the “glamour” of the famous Sunset Strip in all its “glory.” Then, in 1973, he shot all 12 miles of Hollywood Blvd. In 2004, he reshot Hollywood Blvd in color, and paired with the 1972 images, they became the book THEN & NOW in 2005. It’s one example of Ed Ruscha combining his love of the effects of time with revisiting his past subjects.

In all the acclaim he receives I almost never hear credit given the Artist for his exceptional Painting technique- the equal of anyone else’s of his time. Right from the start, Painting after Painting reveals sublime subtlety and under-appreciated skill.  Then Now provided a glorious chance to study his, often large, Paintings up close and marvel at his skill and taste. It also provides the extremely rare chance to see works of the same subject side by side, particularly two of his famous Standard Gasoline Station Paintings.

Shows present once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to see great works united from distant parts of the globe for a brief time. That’s why I waited over an hour for the crowds to part to get this shot. More than likely, I’ll never see these two great Standard Stations together again. Both of these also feature the “speeding locomotive” compositional device seen in the Large Trademark Painting, which adds to the somewhat surreal overall effect, wonder and mystery.

Further to the Large Trademark Painting, Ed Ruscha also began Painting the sights of L.A., which again seems to be his domain to the point that I can’t think of anyone who Painted the city before he did. (I’m sure there were. Right?)

“Being in Los Angeles has had little or no effect on my work. I could have done it anywhere.” Ed Ruscha, Leave Any Information at the Signal, Statement in “West Coast Style”

Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, 1965-8, 53 1/2 x 133. 1/2 inches. Fun fact- Guess where Ed Ruscha/Now Then reopened on April 7, 2024 after closing at MoMA? You’re looking at it.

Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, 1965-8, like most of Ed Ruscha’s work, has been the subject of endless conjecture. Over the years, the Artist has made a few statements about it, including this one, “… There’s no great message here. It’s just a picture to look at9.” That might be hard to believe. After graduating college, he took that trip to Europe I mentioned in Part 1, and came away disappointed at the lack of Contemporary Art on view in the museums. Back home, things weren’t much better. Contemporary Art was slow to gain admission to the hallowed halls of institutions here. Is it a stretch to think this was somewhere on his mind when he Painted this? I tend to think it was in there somewhere. The Watts riots had recently taken place. The Now Then Catalogue has this to say about it-

“Ruscha’s characteristic denial of content ignores the fact that not far from his studio in mid-August 1965, just a few months after the inauguration of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the city of Los Angeles was burning10.”

Ed Ruscha said, “The plain truth behind the Watts riots is that the riots themselves were good and beneficial and healthy regardless of loss of life. The Watts riots nationalized sympathy for a gigantic racial injustice11.”

He soon set a number of other sites on fire in his Paintings, including the an Amarillo Standard Station (which wasn’t in the show), and Norm’s, which was.

Norm’s, La Cienega, on Fire, 1964, Oil and pencil on canvas. The work features a complete lack of detail, save for the letters “ORMS” on the sign.  It’s interesting how the flames follow the “locomotive” line. Without those letters (which themselves are meaningless without the title), this Painting would be a completely abstract composition of shapes and lines.

For someone who’s so closely associated with L.A., and has been for over 60 years, it’s strange that some of his most well-known work shows L.A. landmarks being destroyed or in ruins. For example, he has continued to “destroy” the Hollywood sign, in different ways, over and over again throughout his career. Still, his fame continued to rise as did his association with the city. In spite of all this (and possibly because of it), in 1978, a six-story(!) tall mural (also referred to as the “Ed Ruscha Monument”) of the Artist was created by the Artist Kent Twitchell, for who Ed Ruscha was “the unorthodox hero of the art world.” Would anyone else be able to “destroy” a city’s landmarks and then become seen as the figurehead of that city’s Art community with a monument created for them? It didn’t happen for Nero. Unlike the emperor, Ed Ruscha didn’t actually destroy anything, except maybe in his mind and on some large canvases.

Rancho, 1968, Oil on canvas, which looks like it was made with a liquid, surrounded by Fire, Sin, Rustic Pines, each 1967, Gunpowder on paper, from left to right.

This calls to mind another thing Ed Ruscha doesn’t get enough credit for: innovation. In the 3rd, 4th and 5th galleries we see pieces made out of strange and unprecedented materials. Unhappy with the possibilities of paint or pencil, the Artist began exploring the possibilities of Drawing with gunpowder! The results, as seen above, are incredible. He found he had more control with it. In 1969, the Artist began going further, using unconventional materials in his Stains Portfolio of seventy-five substances ranging from L.A. tap water to egg yolk.

Installation view of Chocolate Room, 1971/2023, Chocolate on paper sheets.

His Chocolate Room for the United States Pavilion at the 1970 Venice Biennale, and recreated in a room of its own in Now Then, followed. After that, he began using a number of these “other” materials in his Word and Phrase Paintings.

Cotton Puffs, 1974. Egg yolk on moiré fabric, 36 × 40″

Along with this constant experimentation came the inevitable failure, like the egg yokes in Cotton Puffs, 1974, fading quickly. Ed has been remarkably cool with these. Accepting them for what they are12. (And probably learning in the process.) Each has its place in his oeuvre, with all the examples on view seeming to hold up remarkably well over the years given they are experiments. By the mid-70s, he had gone back to pastel on paper13. Though the materials experiments were short-lived, it led me to peruse the 7 volumes of the Ed Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonne of the Paintings, published by Steidl (which is a bit ironic- or fitting- because Steidl has published the work of any number of Photographers who include gas stations in their work, including the entirety of the 3-volume set, Gas Stop, by David Freund), which revealed that this insatiable exploration of materials was only the tip of his creativity iceberg. Paging through it (which only goes up to 2011 at this point), I was amazed to discover that though he has created a number of works with ostensibly the same subject, no two are identical. The differences are obvious or subtle. Still, this speaks to Ed Ruscha’s seemingly endless powers of invention and refusal to repeat himself verbatim. I was stunned when I discovered this, which was completely unexpected (though I should have been tipped off by what his STANDARD STATION, ALBUQUERQUE Photograph became). Seeing this range and variety gave me a glimpse of insight into just what may be keeping him going and creating since the late 1950s.

Wall Rockets, 2000, Acrylic on canvas

Perhaps THE highlight of Ed Ruscha/Now Then at MoMA for me was the chance to see 6 of the 10 Paintings from the Artist’s Course of Empire series. As I’ve looked at his work over the past 24 years of this century, these have fascinated me as much as any other work by Mr. Ruscha. Created for, and then debuted, at the 2005 Venice Biennalle, they subsequently travelled to NYC where they were on display at the Whitney in a show of the same name, the last important (though small) Ed Ruscha show in NYC until Now Then. Somehow, I missed them there, so seeing 6 might be as close as I get to seeing them all.

3 works from Ed Ruscha’s Blue Collar series, 1993, on the 3 facing walls.

Occupying the large, penultimate gallery of the show, the Course of Empire Paintings strike me as serving as a touchstone for a number of Ed Ruscha themes. They also eerily presage what has been going on in much of NYC (and perhaps elsewhere) this decade, with a number of stores and businesses closing due to Covid, then more closing due to the realities of our post-Covid (if we are post-Covid) economy, many have changed hands in a short time. Others remain for rent. The shape, perspectives and lack of detailing on the one-story  buildings I find reminiscent of Standard Station, Ten Cent Western Being Torn in Half, seen earlier. In each, our point of view is the same, and the same as in that Standard Station Painting- they are seen from below.

At the opposite end of the gallery, the same scenes reappear in his Course of Empire series, 2005, now in color, though right and left are flipped. (The scene on the right wall is that depicted on the left wall in Blue Collar Photo, above this one. The scene on the left wall is the scene shown on the right wall of the Blue Collar series above this one.)

The series evolved over a period of 13 years, with Ed Ruscha Painting the 5 black & white pieces, titled Blue Collar, in 1992-

Blue Collar Trade School, 1992, Acrylic on canvas. The only multi-story structure in the series.

Returning to the subject and the same sites  in 2005, this time in color and showing the effects of time passing.

The Old Trade School Building, 2005, Acrylic on canvas

Perhaps, his most subtly powerful series, their under-stated compositions lead to open-ended interpretations.

Installation view of the complete Course of Empire, by Thomas Cole, 1834-36, as seen at The Met’s Thomas Cole’s Journey in 2018. The rise and fall of civilization as seen from the same place, with the same distinctive mountain peak appearing in each Painting.

Based on, and in homage to, Thomas Cole’s legendary Course of Empire series, 1834-6, (which I wrote about here), they are another instance of Ruscha revisiting earlier work, his Blue Collar series from 1992. These also highlight that alongside the humor in any number of his pieces, running parallel, is a real depth of concern. Concern for the country, the world, the environment.

Psycho Spaghetti Western #7, 2010-11, Acrylic on canvas

“It’s all just rape of the land for profit these days. It’s fairly sick. Southern California is all just one big city now. But what do you say about progress? … So something’s got to give, and the landscape’s the first thing that gives….There is a certain flavor of decadence that inspires me. And when I drive into some sort of industrial wasteland in America, with the themeparks and warehouses, there’s something saying something to me. It’s a mixture of those things that gives me some sense of reality and moves me along as an artist,” Ed Ruscha 14.

Taking full advantage of having such a long career, the Artist has revisited past themes, and places, fairly often to the point that it’s a running theme in his work. Change over time…for the better, or worse, is left to the viewer to decide. Ostensibly set in L.A., the structures in Blue Collar/Course of Empire could be literally anywhere. As such they have a universality to them (as do a number of other 21st century Ruscha’s) that sets them apart from his purely L.A. work, like his Hollywood sign pieces.

Our Flag, 2017, Acrylic on canvas. The last work in the show.

Thomas Cole influencing Ed Ruscha’s Blue Collar & Course of Empire series started me thinking about other possible influences on his work. I touched on some in Part 1. In Part 3, I’ll take a closer look at them, and then flip that coin over.

Part 3 is here. 

*- Soundtrack for this piece is “L.A. Woman” by The Doors, one of the ultimate L.A. bands, from the 1971 album of the same name. (Narrowly beating out “California Girls” by the Beach Boys from Summer Days (And Summer Nights), 1965.) Ed Ruscha was into “car culture” before moving to L.A., and after, among other things he has in common with the #1 L.A. band of its time. Notice the gas station Jim Morrison, “another lost angel,” to quote his lyric, stops in to about half way through-

NighthawkNYC.com has been entirely self-funded & ad-free for over 8 3/4  years, during which 320 full-length pieces have been published! If you’ve found it worthwhile, PLEASE donate by PayPal below to allow me to continue. Thank you, Kenn.

You can also support it by buying Art, Art & Photography books, and Music from my collection! Art & Books may be found here. Music here and here.

Written & photographed by Kenn Sava for nighthawknyc.com unless otherwise credited. To send comments, thoughts, feedback or propositions click here. Click the white box on the upper right for the archives or to search them. Subscribe to be notified of new Posts below. Your information will be used for no other purpose.

  1. Ed Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonne of the Paintings, Vol 7, P.476 ↩
  2. E.R., Tate, P.30 ↩
  3. Willoughby Sharp, ‘“… a kind of a Huh?”, An Interview with Edward Ruscha’, Avalanche, no.7, Winter/ Spring 1973, p.30. ↩
  4. ER, Tate, P. 31 ↩
  5. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/edward-ruscha-1882/ed-ruscha-and-art-everyday ↩
  6. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/edward-ruscha-1882/ed-ruscha-and-art-everyday ↩
  7. Reading Ed Ruscha, P.50 ↩
  8. Ed Ruscha, Photographer, P.7 ↩
  9. Ed Ruscha quoted in Ed Ruscha/Now Then Exhibition Catalog, P.21 ↩
  10. Ed Ruscha/Now Then Exhibition Catalog, P.21 ↩
  11. Ed Ruscha, Leave Any Information at the Signal, P.5 ↩
  12. E.R., Tate, P.65 ↩
  13. Ed Ruscha/Now Then, P.170 ↩
  14. Leave Any Information at the Signal, P.18 ↩

Ed Ruscha’s Head Scratchers

This site is Free & Ad-Free! If you find this piece worthwhile, please donate via PayPal to support it & independent Art writing. You can also support it by buying Art & books! Details at the end. Thank you.

Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava (*- unless otherwise credited)

Show seen: Ed Ruscha/Now Then @MoMA

Who doesn’t like the Art of Ed Ruscha?

Installation view of the entrance, September 14, 2023. Images in this piece are thumbnails. Click any picture for full size.

Walking through the crowds at MoMA’s winter blockbuster, Ed Ruscha/Now Then over my six long visits bookending a terrible, six-week illness, I saw smiles as visitors moved from piece to piece, yet I couldn’t help but wonder how many of them felt they “understood” his Art. While humor undoubtedly plays a part in the craft of an Artist who knows you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, however they appear at first glance, his work usually leaves me scratching my head.

Returning to look at it again and again, that his work says something different to me every time I look at it has kept Ed Ruscha among my favorite Contemporary Artists. Judging from the turnout at MoMA, I’m far from alone in that. Having the chance to explore, and be mystified by, 200 pieces of his Art in Now Then from the, approximately, SIXTY-SEVEN YEARS(!) he’s been making it proved an all-too-rare chance to take a good hard look and try to get to the bottom of the mystery.

I Don’t Want No Retro Spective, 1979, Pastel on paper. The catalog for the last Ed Rusha retrospective in 1982(!) is also known by the Ruscha on the cover of its catalog, I Don’t Want No Retro Spective, though the show’s title was THE WORKS OF ED RUSCHA. 

“All too rare,” as in Now Then is the first Ed Ruscha retrospective here since 1982, (and so mine, too): over FORTY YEARS ago!1 The gap between them is another head scratcher given how popular Ed Ruscha’s Art is. The title Ed Ruscha/Now Then can be taken as a reference to the Artist’s penchant for revisiting his subjects over time, as well as the fact the show includes old and recent work, or a chance to see his older work now. It’s also a rare retrospective of a West Coast Artist who came to prominence in the 1960s mounted on the East Coast. Bruce Conner didn’t live to see his at MoMA like Ed Ruscha has. Ed Kienholz, and Mr. Conner’s friend, Jay DeFeo, among others, are still waiting for their East Coast retrospective.

Installation view from just inside the entrance of the first gallery looking into the second. Boss, 1961, the famous Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights, 1962, and the infamous OOF, 1962-3, left to right, all Oil on canvas.

Walking through it, I became particularly fascinated by how his style(s) developed, and how Edward Joseph Ruscha IV became Ed Ruscha, one of the most influential Artists in the world among Modern & Contemporary Artists, if not THE most influential, at this point in time.

Oklahoma-E, 1962, Pencil, colored pencil and charcoal on paper

Born in Omaha in 1937, his family moved to Oklahoma City when Ed was 5. Early on, he had a passion for comics and a love of typography, particularly as it appeared in commercial publications. All of these are combined in Oklahoma-E from 1962, a seminal year in his early career. His initial desire was to become a Commercial Artist, and it was towards that end that he left OKC after graduating high school to head to L.A. with a friend in a lowered 1950 Ford, to study it. He chose to go west rather than east because of its energy, glamour, and its “hot rods and custom cars2.” Unable to get into his chosen school, he was accepted at Chouinard Art Institute (later Cal Arts, where Henry Taylor would study in the 1990s). His teachers, disciples of Abstract Expressionism, “wanted to collapse the whole art process into one act3.’’ “It (Abstract Expressionism) was, in his opinion, ‘a solid way of thinking…If you think about the paintings that were done in the 1950s, I find them overwhelming, nothing but quality…It was a very powerful time in art.’ However, ‘…within AbEx there was no room for my ideas4.'” While this frustrated him, they did succeed in getting him to change his focus from Commercial Art to Fine Art, which we can all be grateful for. After Now Then, I wonder if they accomplished more.

While in school in 1957 he had an epiphany.

One of the most extraordinary works of the 1950s. Jasper Johns, Target with Four Faces, 1955, Encaustic on newspaper and cloth over canvas surrounded by four tinted-plaster faces in wood box with hinged front. Seen in Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror at the Whitney in 2021.

“The breakthrough he sought came in 1957, when he spotted a small black-and-white repro of Jasper Johns’s 1955 Target with Four Faces in the Feb/Mar 1957 issue of Print Magazine. Encountering Johns’s painting was, he said, an ‘atomic bomb’ in his training, ‘a stranger fruit’ that he ‘saw as something that didn’t seem to follow the history of art. My teachers said it was not art. ‘I didn’t need to see the colors or the size…’ ‘I was especially taken with the fact that it was symmetrical, which was just absolutely taboo in art school- you didn’t make anything symmetrical…Art school was modernism, it was asymmetry, it was giant brush strokes…it was all these other things that were gestural rather than cerebral. So I began moving to things that had more of a premeditation5.’”

Dvision, 1962, Mimeograph on paper, One of five Prints by five Artists in the Portfolio issued in conjunction with the New Painting of Common Objects show.

That has continued to this day. Along the way, he and others (including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist), built on what Johns, Rauschenberg and Marcel Duchamp had started: the “next thing” after Abstract Expressionism, an Art based in the recognizable, the familiar, the every day. Some called it “pop.” Personally, I see nothing but danger in trying to box Ed Ruscha (who has consistently eschewed boxes).

In fact, one word comes to my mind over and over again as I look at his Art over time: abstract. If I were going to use two words to describe it they would be “premeditated abstraction.” Look at Division, above. It contains what would become Ed Ruscha trademarks- text, typography, and images, combined in a way that are next to impossible for most viewers to “read.” If that’s not “abstract?” What is? Maybe his teachers would be proud after all. It was only through delving into his history, I found that 3327 Division Street was the address of his first L.A. studio6. The car might have been his. Does that mean there’s more of a backstory to it? I haven’t found it. In the end, for me this says there may, or may not, be personal meaning to some/many/even all of his Art, but, 60+ years on, they haven’t come to light. So, with Division, as with all his Art, the viewer is left to make of them what they will.

The two earliest piece in the show, SU, 1958, Oil, ink and fabric on canvas, (sixty-six years old!), left, with Dublin,, 1960, Oil and ink on canvas, right. Yes, a comma is part of the title.

Before graduating, he took hitchhiking trips that he immortalized in some of the earliest works in the show. the mysterious SU, 1958, the earliest, strikes me as a forerunner of what would come later. Even in these early works, text and imagery appear, though separately, as different elements that seem to stand apart from each other until the viewer brings them together, or creates a narrative around them, in his or her mind. These elements have continued in his work to this day, though he would soon start layering them. SU is, also, one of the relatively few of his works that refers to an actual person, the title referring to Su Hall, his girlfriend at the time.

Actual Size, 1962, Oil on canvas, 67 1/16 x 72 1/16 inches. His breakthrough work when it was included in the landmark New Paintings of Common Objects show. A Painted, flaming, “actual size” can of Spam in its lower section is accompanied by some brush marks that might be associated with Abstract Expressionism. In fact, a number of his early pieces, like Three Standard Envelopes, 1960, also include them. Given his prodigious technique, on display in this, I don’t see how these marks can be considered accidental. Jennifer Quick7 surmises these connote AbEx’s commercialization. I see them as Ruscha making this technique his own, using it in a way none of the AbEx Artists did. I also see it as an early example of the many forms that abstraction would take in his work.

A number of his early works are quite edgy, daring and ripe with a surprisingly loose use of the brush. Were these done for class to please his teachers, or…? In fact, even some later pieces, like his Stains portfolio, contains marks that seem right out of AbEx. These stands at the other end of the technical spectrum for an Artist who possesses a superb Painting technique, something he doesn’t get nearly enough credit for in my view. They also make me wonder if his AbEx disciple teachers had a bigger effect on their student than it might seem.

The rest of the gallery includes highlights of his early 1960s Word Paintings. We watch as he continued to strip away excess and refine his concept. Eventually, single words appeared alone on solid backgrounds This is interesting because he has said of his recent phrase Paintings that the backgrounds are simply that. Early on, as in Actual Size, they appear to be more.

Vienna, Austria, 1961. This striking Photo was in a vitrine in the show, which prevented my getting a decent picture. This image of it comes from the book Ed Ruscha and Photography, P.48

After  he graduated college, Ed spent 10 months on an extensive tour of Europe. While he reports not being impressed with the museums (among other things, he was disappointed by the lack of Contemporary Art), he took note of quite a bit of what he saw while out and about, particularly the street signs, with their foreign words, different design & typographies. He Drew and Painted a number of these, but he also put the new Yashica twin-lens reflex camera he was required to get in one of his classes to good use, taking a number of interesting Photos, beginning a revolutionary career in the medium in the process. Back home in fall, 1961, he set to work. Less than a year later his work was included in the landmark show, New Paintings of Common Objects at the Pasadena Art Museum, along with that of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Wayne Thiebaud and others, and so-called “pop” Art was born. Ed Ruscha has consistently rejected being boxed, though he rode on the coattails of the “movement,” and the word is still used in describing his work, ignoring the visual evidence.

The first gallery concludes with an infamous work. Does this look familiar?

Ummm…It might not be what you might think it is. It’s a detail of the center of the target in Jasper Johns’s, Target with Four Faces, 1955, shown earlier. Now, look at this-

Yes! One of the two “Os” in Ed Ruscha’s OOF, 1962 (reworked 1963). Just five years after he saw Target with Four Faces, Ed Ruscha Painted the above. Coincidence? Homage? Fallout from that “atomic bomb going off in my training?” My feeling is the visual evidence is pretty strong for making a case for any or all three.

Hello! I’ve never appeared on NighthawkNYC over its 8 1/2 years, except in my self-portrait in the Banner (and a picture in my last piece, here, from the distant past). Until now. I’m introducing myself to NHNYC readers in front of a Painting I have a personal connection to: OOF, 1962-3, Oil on canvas, 71 1/2 x 67 inches on Ed Ruscha/Now Then’s final day, January 15, 2024. As for my “personal connection” to OOF? Very, very few know. My thanks to the lady who graciously agreed to take this.

Personally, it’s hard for me not to think there’s an influence; in the colors, the shape of the circle/”Os.” Even if it’s subconscious. Looking at both of these works now, they’re both revolutionary in their way. The Johns has been discussed at length over the past 60 years. Does anyone else think OOF is a revolutionary work, let alone a masterpiece? I believe it’s both. Revolutionary? It’s possibly the first time (as far as I know) that a Painting features a “word” that Merriam-Webster categorizes as an “interjection,” and not an actual “word” per se. I also believe it’s an “alt masterpiece.” Seriously. The composition, colors, font, placement of the text are all perfect, belying Ed Ruscha’s mastery of typography and graphic design, with the sublime taste that would be a hallmark of his work. OOF stands as the pinnacle of his early word Paintings in my view. Oof is a word, if it is one, that defies concrete understanding, making it a perfect (unofficial) conclusion of sorts to the series. Merriam-Webster says Oof is an interjection “used to express discomfort, surprise, or dismay8.” They point out “the first known use of the word was in 1777,” which I find hilarious. How do they know? Did they consult an Oofologist? They further define an interjection as “an ejaculatory utterance usually lacking grammatical connection9.”

Oof!

OOF everywhere around town. A first step to a better world! I yelled “OOF,” but he didn’t stop.

As such it seems to me that OOF stands as an outlier among the single words Ed Ruscha chose as the subjects of his early 1960s Word Paintings (BOSS, HONK, ACE, SMASH, FLASH and NOISE, shown below, et al) because it is quite abstract, and therefore, a jumping off point for what was to come. I wish I had asked viewers what the Painting said to them. Having owned it for 61 years, MoMA is well aware of its mysterious appeal. No doubt that is why the museum chose to emblazon OOF all around town as the focus of their show marketing.

Noise, Pencil, Broken Pencil, Cheap Western, 1963, Oil and wax on canvas, 71 1/4 x 67 inches. There are two Painted pencils in the piece, and lo and behold someone left another one on the floor, behind the left stanchion. I resisted the urge to move it for effect for this picture. Maybe, I should have…

Along with abstraction, it seems to me there are surreal elements in his work. Perhaps no single word Painting has these abstract/surreal qualities than Noise, Pencil, Broken Pencil, Cheap Western, 1963, which also represents an evolution. Ed Ruscha has long considered it one of his best Paintings[3, Per the wall card.]. In it, the mystery of the word is added to with three very realistic images, close to its own edge. Unusual for a Painting, or Art, it leaves the center, the focus of most Art, empty except for the background color. Most of the previous Word Paintings centered the featured word. As such, it’s both unique and a precursor of other works that combine words and images. It’s also both abstract, thought it depicts realistic objects, and surreal. If I read it from the left, the whole pencil lies quietly seemingly in mid-air. The word “NOISE,” another monosyllabic word, grows until it reaches the right side (again, like a speeding train) where it hovers above the broken pencil. The cheap western seems to be hovering in the air, too, like the left-hand pencil, where it wouldn’t make noise until it lands, which it might be close to doing. The Artist has created “action” from three still objects and a word.

In the catalog for that last major Ruscha retrospective there’s this-

“The broken pencil calls to mind the incident Ruscha has referred to a number of times in interviews when as a child in parochial school he was regularly rapped on the knuckles with a pencil by a nun who caught him misbehaving in class. Is the pencil, then, simultaneously a symbol of expression and repression10?”

If this is the case, though Mr. Ruscha has not said that this incident is what’s depicted here, my reading of it wonders if the “Cheap Western,” i.e. the comic book which appears to be reaching the bottom of the piece, was struck from his hand when he was caught reading it in class, being a big fan of comics at this age, the broken pencil having been cracked over his hand. It’s also, simultaneously, an abstract and a surreal composition. As many have pointed out, it also leaves the center bare. It carries forward his use of the single word, while also taking it on a new tangent.

Bouncing Marbles, Bouncing Apple, Bouncing Olive, 1969, (not in the show) has much in common with Noise, Pencil, Broken Pencil, Cheap Western from six years earlier. One of countless Ed Ruschas that feel surreal to me. Here, he “sugar coats” the surrealism by using harmless objects like marbles and an apple on a welcoming green background. Leaving the olive, the looming black, and the fact that the marbles & apple are bouncing to stir up our imaginations, making the work decidedly not a “still life.” *- Photographer unknown.

Noise, Pencil, Broken Pencil, Cheap Western is another one-Painting revolution, like OOF was. Though both were only followed-up indirectly, as in Bouncing Marbles, Bouncing Apple, Bouncing Olive, 1969. Now, look at this-

Salvador Dali, the legendary Surrealist, Open Field with Ball in Centre and Mountains in Rear, Study for the Disney film Destino, 1946, Oil on masonite. Influence? Seen in MoMA’s catalog for their show Dali & Film.

Works like Noise, Pencil, Broken Pencil, Cheap Western and Bouncing Marbles, Bouncing Apple, Bouncing Olive (and other works that include marbles and olives) are so different from anything that’s come before in his work. Yet, as time went on, they are joined by many works that while they depict recognizable objects are very abstract, even surreal, including his recent Tom Sawyer Paintings. Most of them have no words, and taken as a group they now form a sizable part of his oeuvre. For my part, I trace them all back to Noise, Pencil, Broken Pencil, Cheap Western from 1963.

Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights, 1962, Oil on canvas 66 9/10 x 133 1/10 inches. An early L.A.-inspired work, like most of Ed Ruscha’s work its “meaning” is nebulous. At the time he Painted this, the famous Film studio was in decline and going through layoffs. One reading might be a comment on fleeting fame about to fade out, or like his PhotoBook, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966, possibly a hard realization for the Artist who relocated from Oklahoma City, that glamour is not all it appears to be from afar. It’s also a work that is reminiscent of a speeding, approaching train, a compositional device he would use again. Though it’s described as “Oil on canvas,” those are graphite lines leading to or from the vanishing point.

In 1962, L.A./Hollywood, its sites and culture began appearing in Ed Ruscha’s Art, as in Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights, which is also a precursor to his multi-word and phrase Paintings. Over the succeeding 60+ years, few if any, Artists would become more associated with Los Angeles than Ed Ruscha is and has been. From then to now, he would continue to Paint the city, and words and image would coexist in his Art, while single words largely became multiple words and, beginning in 1973, short phrases that he has continued to create to this day.

By the beginning of the second gallery of Now Then, some of the core themes of his work have been created and have already metamorphosized. This revealed the development of a working process based in an endlessly restless creative drive that would not let Ed Ruscha stay in one place for very long Artistically. What lay ahead over the next six plus decades(!) has been nothing if not the continually unexpected.

Part 2, “Ed Ruscha’s Wall Rockets,” is here. The concluding Part 3, “Ed Ruscha & The Two-Sided Coin of Influence,” is here. 

*-Soundtrack for this piece is “Down the Highway,” by a Musician who has been creating and performing for about as long as Ed Ruscha has: Bob Dylan, born May 24, 1941, 3 1/2 years after Ed Ruscha. Bob released “Down the Highway” the same year Mr. Ruscha created a number of the Paintings in this piece, on 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

NighthawkNYC.com has been entirely self-funded & ad-free for over 8 years, during which 320 full-length pieces have been published! If you’ve found it worthwhile, PLEASE donate by PayPal to allow me to continue below. Thank you, Kenn.

You can also support it by buying Art, Art & Photography books, and Music from my collection! Art & Books may be found here. Music here and here.

Written & photographed by Kenn Sava for nighthawknyc.com unless otherwise credited. To send comments, thoughts, feedback or propositions click here. Click the white box on the upper right for the archives or to search them. Subscribe to be notified of new Posts below. Your information will be used for no other purpose.

  1. The traveling retrospective, THE WORKS OF ED RUSCHA, came to the Whitney Museum in 1982, one of five museum stops it made, when the Artist was about 45. ↩
  2. ER, Tate, P. 9 ↩
  3. Alexandra Schwartz, Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles, P.17 ↩
  4. Alexandra Schwartz, Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles, P.15 ↩
  5. Alexandra Schwartz, Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles, P.15 ↩
  6. E.R. Tate, P.100 ↩
  7. in her book, Ed Ruscha: Art & Design in the 1960s ↩
  8. Here ↩
  9. Here ↩
  10. I Don’t Want No Retrospective- The Works of Ed Ruscha, P.15 ↩

Henry Taylor: The Art of Empathy

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Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava.

Show seen: Henry Taylor: B Side @ the Whitney Museum

See Alice Jump, 2021, Acrylic on canvas, as are all the Paintings in this piece, unless specified. From the wall card- “The track-and-field legend Alice Coachman, depicted here, set a record in the high jump at the 1948 London games, becoming the first Black woman to win an Olympic gold medal. By altering the photo and positioning Coachman as if she is jumping over houses in a neighborhood, Taylor metaphorically alludes to the social and economic barriers she overcame growing up in the segregated South.” The pictures in this piece are thumbnails. Click any picture for full size.

I’ve had my eye on Henry Taylor since I reported that he was “Having a New York Moment,” as I called it in 2017 when he received the High Line Mural Commission simultaneously with being one of the “stars” of the 2016 Whitney Biennial. Okay, both eyes. The Artist returned to NYC in 2019 for a solo show at Blum & Poe, at which I met him.

Henry Taylor modifying/ammending his wall-sized Mural with my Sharpie at Blum & Poe, September 24, 2019.

I lent him my Sharpie which he proceeded to use to modify the large Mural that was the centerpiece of his show as I watched with my mouth open. I then followed him to the terrace where he inscribed his outdoor installation with it. I’d never seen an Artist modify a work (or two) hanging in a show in my 40+ years of show-going before.

Needless to say meeting Mr. Taylor that night was an extraordinary experience made unforgettable by his being quite nice to me, and I don’t think it had to do with the pen. I came away feeling Henry Taylor is one very hard not-to-like man. I wondered if that might have been born in the fact that Henry Taylor is a “30-years in the making overnight sensation.” All this being said, everything I express about his Art here I felt before I met Mr. Taylor. Almost exactly four years to the day later, Mr. Taylor’s Art returned to NYC in Henry Taylor: B Side at the Whitney, his mid-career Retrospective, which only expanded my appreciation of the depth of his accomplishment and filled in the gaps.

Gettin it Done, 2016, at the show’s entrance.

B Side is the most powerful Painting show I’ve seen since Kerry James Marshall: Mastry at the lost and lamented Met Breuer in 2017.

Now, or never! 4:30pm, January 28, 2024. One and one-half hours before Henry Taylor: B Side closed for the last time. Installation view of one of the two, large parallel galleries I mention further below. The other is behind the wall to the left.

This is remarkable because Henry Taylor was so late in getting his Art career started.

Hammons meets a hyena on holiday, 2016. Henry Taylor is a student of Art history and an entire gallery was devoted to works inspired by the work of other Artists. Here, he riffs on Dawoud Bey’s famous Photo of David Hammons selling snow balls one winter day from 1983.

The first thing that might catch a viewer’s eye is his palette. On a number of occasions his colors caught my eye from hundreds of feet away across large rooms. For that reason alone, a full Retrospective of his work over 6 galleries of the Whitney Museum’s 5th floor this winter, was a thing of beauty.

Untitled, 2021, Acrylic on linen. In fitting with the show’s title, here the Artist “covers” a Painting he saw in London’s National Portrait Gallery of King Henry V. This could be a play on his nickname- “Henry the VIII,” being the youngest of 8.

But life is not full of blue skies, roses, or bowls of cherries, and neither is Henry Taylor’s Art. There’s much, much more to be seen in his work. As enchanting as his palette is, it’s the depth of his content and his unique way of presenting it that sets his Art apart.

Untitled, 2022. A Portrait of the Artist’s brother, Randy, a former Black Panther (with a large one looming behind him) and now a dog breeder in Texas, depicted looking like he’s about to give a speech as he did in those earlier days.

That content speaks to a very wide range of subjects. Perhaps, most well-known for his Portraits, which as Antwaun Sargent points out, differ from the work of Kerry James Marshall in his preference for “the outcast,” as he calls them1. This is fitting for a show titled B Side, which is a reference to the other side of a single 45rpm record. The B Side of a hit 45 was almost always something overlooked and rarely played, except by devoted fans. It can also be a collection of lesser known or cover songs (like the album B-Sides, by Oasis). Both seem to fit the show. Yet, along with outcasts, B Side contains numerous Portraits of icons- political, Musical, and athletic. Throughout, it seems to me Henry Taylor Paints his subjects from the inside, out. Something quite remarkable. My impression is that he does it through empathy; from connecting and relating to the person he’s depicting in some way- even if he’s never met them, as in the Portrait of Alice Coachman up top. As good as his Art is, in the end, empathy might be what separates Henry Taylor.

Too Sweet, 2016. This extraordinary Portrait is based on a Photo the Artist took from inside his car as this man approached seeking help from passing motorists. A whopping 132 x 72 inches, its monumentality is furthered by viewing the figure from below. It’s also an example of the Artist selectively blurring facial details, in this case his eyes, which occurs off and on in the show, and which I find endlessly fascinating. I wasn’t a bit surprised to find out that MoMA has acquired it.

B Side complements his Portraits with a wide range of scenes from everyday life, with the specter of racism, and its impact, hovering as the omnipresent horror it is and has been, never far away. Of course, Mr. Taylor is well-acquainted with the reality of racism. Some of his Paintings on the subject of his grandfather hint that his 1933 murder in East Texas may be a continuing influence, as could well be expected. In fact, this was the subject of the large Mural, Ancestors of Genghis Khan with Black Man on Horse, 2015-17, which graced one of the lobbies of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, as I showed here.

Resting, 2011, Acrylic and collage on canvas. Taylor depicts his niece and nephew sitting on a couch at home with a reclining figure behind them. Further back is a Corrections Corporation of America truck, a line of uniformed men, and a wall with “WARNING SHOTS NOT REQUIRED” stenciled on it. Before the couple are Canteen Correctional Services forms for family members to authorize items prisoners can purchase at the commissary.

Most often, but not entirely, his subjects are Black, and with the body of work he has created over the past 30 years, Mr. Taylor has emerged as “one of the most powerful and poignant observers on what it means to be Black in America working today1.”

Wegrett, 2006, Acrylic and cardboard collage on linen. One of the most unique Portraits of an Artist with his mother in Art. The collaged cardboard seems to read “WE REGRET.” The wall card says- “Here, the words may allude to the pain he feels about the hardships his mother faced in her life. As Taylor explained, ‘I painted a picture of myself on my knees in front of my mama, and I don’t know why I painted that, but I just did, and I know I cried on that.'”

To complement his range, the show has been arranged by theme. As a result, B Side is a bit like a story with chapters; beginning with family, moving to his early creative days, and then to the subjects that hold his attention as a mature Artist. His current level of success doesn’t seem to have changed him or his Art one iota. Everything he’s done has that feeling of having been cut from the same cloth.

Untitled, 2016–22. Dr. Martin Luther King plays football with some kids while 3 ominous figures watch from the rear.

The first two galleries are devoted to Portraits, with an emphasis on his immediate and extended family, and some Self-Portraits. It’s hard to think of another Artist who has Painted his extended family so often and so strikingly (as in Untitled, 2022, shown earlier, of his brother, Randy- one example). Throughout B Side, I was fascinated by the Artist’s choices in creating his Portraits. Specifically, his choices of when and which facial details to include (as in Untitled, 2016–22, above, and Too Sweet, 2016, earlier). Are these done to cause the viewer to look elsewhere besides the face, or to make them look closer? This is a bit reminiscent of what Edward Hopper did on occasion, as in his Room in New York, 1932, as I discussed here.

First work. A collection of Henry Taylor’s Portrait Drawings of patients he worked with at Camarillo State Hospital, 1985-95, Graphite on paper. One is Pastel, colored pencil and ink on paper. These date from during his time as a student at Oxnard Community College and then the California Institute of the Arts (aka CalArts).

The third gallery took the viewer back to Henry’s beginnings as an Artist. Born in 1958, he spent the decade from 1984 to 1994 working as a psychiatric technician at Camarillo State Mental Hospital, Camarillo, CA.3. During this time, he created his earliest known work, Drawing and Painting a number of the patients he worked with: adults living with developmental disabilities or mental illness as well as those seeking treatment for substance use disorders, developing close relationships. 

“I learned not to dismiss anybody,” he recalls. “It just made me a little more patient, a little more empathetic. It taught me to embrace a lot of things. A lot of people will avoid a person who doesn’t appear normal, but I’m not like that.” Henry Taylor, in a must-read 2016 interview, here.

Untitled 1992. One of the earliest Paintings in the show. When B Side opened in October, I was buried in my piece on Van Gogh’s Cypresses which I published in November. Cypresses mostly takes place when Vincent was a patient in an insane asylum. Therefore, it was impossible for me not to make a connection between Henry’s experiences and Vincent’s. When I first saw this Painting, I was immediately reminded of Photos of the bath tubs Vincent was assigned to for therapeutic treatment in the San Remy Asylum almost exactly a century earlier.

For the last half of that decade as a psych tech, he was also a student at CalArts where he was at least a decade older than his fellow students, graduating in 1995 (among numerous others, Ed Ruscha was a 1961 graduate). Henry began his Art career at 37. After struggling to find representation and recognition, the world has gradually caught up with him to the point that 30 years on, he’s now one of our more influential and respected Artists, with a blockbuster Retrospective that appeared at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), L.A. before moving to the Whitney.

Screaming Head, 1999, Oil on canvas. Just wow.

Working with his patients turned out to have a decisive impact that would continue in everything he’s done. Early on in his career after graduating, Paintings, like this one, continued to speak to his Camarillo experiences. 

From there the visitor emerged into two large parallel galleries that lie at the center and heart of the show largely focused on being Black in America. The first one ranges from a 4th of July cookout to incarceration to the show-stopping THE TIMES THAY AIN’T A CHANGING FAST ENOUGH, 2017, depicting the murder of Philandro Castile. On the other side of the wall, the other large gallery features Paintings related to the Black Panthers and a large installation recreating a Black Panther speech with appropriately attired mannequins.

THE TIMES THAY AIN’T A CHANGING FAST ENOUGH, 2017. Per the wall card- “Taylor has said that he was motivated to paint this scene immediately upon learning about it- ‘I don’t even think I thought about ever showing that one when I painted it; it was just something I had to get out of my head.'”

THE TIMES THAY AIN’T A CHANGING FAST ENOUGH is the most powerful Painting I’ve seen this century. It’s hard for me to think that history worn’t regard it as akin to a (Goya’s)  The Third of May 1808  of our time.

“Taylor’s paintings occupy a new and different space within Black radical aesthetics,” Charles Gaines, Artist4.

too much hate, in too many state, 2001. From the wall card: “This painting places the viewer in the vantage point of James Byrd Jr., a Black man who was abducted and murdered on June 7, 1998, in Jasper County, Texas, by three white supremacists who chained his ankles to the back of their pickup truck and dragged him to his death. The brutal murder led to a national outcry, prompting calls for stronger hate crime legislation.”

While it’s front and center in  THE TIMES THEY AIN’T A CHANGING FAST ENOUGH, and too much hate, in too many state, “social criticism” in Henry Taylor’s work is often equally subtle, but always sharply on point. On the other side of the wall was a large gallery centered around the Black Panthers, including this remarkable installation-

Untitled, 2022, Mannequins, leather jackets, and posters, including a Colin Kaepernick 49ers jersey.

The wall card informs us that Mr. Taylor created this installation to honor the Black Panthers and his brother, Randy, who was active in his local branch. Adjacent to it were Photographs of many of those recently killed by police, bringing past and present together. On the other two walls of the gallery were Paintings of former Panthers Huey Newton, and this remarkable rendering of Eldridge Cleaver, looking like you-know-who out of James Mc Neill Whistler.

Eldridge Cleaver, 2007.

Along with the outcast, B Side also showed figures who have gone on to attain and achieve: quite a few of them.

A counterpoint to his Portraits of the overlooked and outcast, was a room of Portraits of celebrities, that included Chuck Berry, Jay Z, and Haile Selassie, were this Portrait of Jackie Robinson, A Jack Move-Proved It, 2011, right, and Michelle & Barak Obama, Untitled, 2020, left, sporting a copy of the Henry Taylor Rizzoli monograph of their coffee table.

And then there was this remarkable pairing-

That Was Then, 2013, left, depicts an older Black man who has probably heard the racist slur surrounding him many times, and Watch Your Back, 2013,

Fresh, exciting, bold, beautiful, direct yet mysterious, subtle and powerful, the Art of Henry Taylor has something for everyone, and I suspect that people many years in the future will continue to find that in it. B Side was a show that honored “outcasts” and the inspiring achievements of icons side-by-side, while pulling no punches about the world both of them, and the rest of us, live in.

For all those reasons Henry Taylor: B Side was a landmark show. A near perfect mid-career Retrospective in my view.

Man, I’m so full of doubt, but I must Hustle Forward, as my daughter Jade would say, 2020. Ladies & gentlemen, the one and only Henry Taylor.

It seems to me that to be able to face ALL of this with dignity and empathy for others is a remarkable thing; something all-too-rare today. As great as Henry Taylor’s Art is, this says even more about Henry Taylor, the man.

*- Soundtrack for this piece is “Sign O’ the Times” by Prince, performed live here in 1987,  during Henry Taylor’s Camarillo days-

NighthawkNYC.com has been entirely self-funded & ad-free for over 8 1/2 years, during which 320 full-length pieces have been published! If you’ve found it worthwhile, PLEASE donate by PayPal to allow me to continue below. Thank you,  Kenn.

You can also support it by buying Art, Art & Photography books, and Music from my collection! Art & Books may be found here. Music here and here.

Written & photographed by Kenn Sava for nighthawknyc.com unless otherwise credited. To send comments, thoughts, feedback or propositions click here. Click the white box on the upper right for the archives or to search them. Subscribe to be notified of new Posts below. Your information will be used for no other purpose.

  1. Antwaun Sargent on Artsy in 2018 ↩
  2. Antwaun Sargent on Artsy in 2018 ↩
  3. Where Charlie Parker was famously sent for six months in 1946, and supposedly immortalized it in “Relaxin’ at Camarillo,” though he hated that title his producer gave it. It’s also rumored to be euphemistically referred to as “Hotel California” in the Eagles song of the same name. ↩
  4. Henry Taylor: B Side Catalog, P.60 ↩

Sarah Sze & Frank Lloyd Wright: A Match For The Ages

This site is Free & Ad-Free! If you find this piece worthwhile, please donate via PayPal to support it & independent Art writing. You can also support it by buying Art & books! Details at the end. Thank you.

Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava.

Show seen: Sarah Sze: Timelapse @ The Guggenheim Museum. This is Part 1, an overview. Part 2 looks at details from the show here.

Written on my soul. Frank Lloyd Wright’s signature adorning his trademark red square “cornerstone” on his round building. The dates attest to how long it took to get this building approved & completed, which every other of his many NYC projects weren’t. Seen September 5, 2023. Click any image for full size.

Those who have seen elements of Architectural design in some of the fantastic structures Sarah Sze includes in her impossible to categorize shows over the past few decades might be left with a sneaking suspicion the Artist has a desire to be an Architect. She would actually come by that honestly. Her father was an Architect, and Sarah, who began as a Painter, studied Painting & Architecture in school before graduating with degrees in both from Yale in 1991. After shows and Public Art installations all over the world, this past summer she met her match. To create work that holds its own in Frank Loyd Wright’s iconic Guggenheim Museum has been a standing challenge for Artists since it opened 65 years ago.

“It’s really a building that frames a void….How do you take on the most incredible void created in recent time in Architecture and talk to it in the slightest way?” Sarah Sze.

Installation view of 4 of the 8 Bays that made up the main section of Timelapse on the 6th (top) floor, September 5, 2023. Extra points if you see the very faint black string running from right to left against Wright’s Oculus (the skylight). It’s a unifying element of the show, though I’m not sure how many visitors spotted it as such. I’ll explain.

In Timelapse, Sarah Sze’s Art was installed outside and inside Wright’s masterpiece, the last major work of the Architect’s 7-decade career, and one that stands completely apart from everything else the he created, at least to my eyes. In it, she “dialogues” with Wright in the most innovative ways I’ve seen mounted in the Guggenheim, at least since Danh Vo’s spectacular show in 2018. Though the show “only” consists of projections on the building’s exterior, an installation in the ground-floor pool, 8 more installations in as many Bays on the Rotunda’s top floor, the freight elevator ramp, and the large rear gallery, I was told by a Guggenheim Staff Member it took five and a half weeks to install! That’s a long time for a significant part of the Museum to be closed. I can’t imagine the deinstallation was all that much quicker. Though it was up for only as many months (March 31 through September 10, 2023), it’s a show that’s hard to stop thinking about. Hence, it’s taken this long to complete this piece, which marks where I’m at in pondering it to this point.

“What I love myself about the experience of art is the sense of this moment of discovery when I’m seeing a work of art. And actually, that can happen a year after you see a work of art. You don’t always know how good a work of art is until you see it and you remember it in retrospect.” Sarah Sze.

Time is a river that flows on and on, through our lives. It may be that for most of us images mark time in our lives in any number of ways. We may remember our childhood & youth through a handful of images taken in the distant past, as we do so many significant events in our lives since. As time goes on, the pile of internal images gets edited down to those we feel are most significant. In a sense, this is something akin to “timelapse” Photography or Film/Video by which a succession of images are taken at intervals to record change over a given period, resulting in a simultaneously accelerated and collapsed sense of time. Timelapse considers “how we mark and measure time- constructing our own personal timelines of memory through images and fragments of experiences that are constantly evolving…a contemplation on how we mark time and how time marks us.” Sarah Sze (quoted in the press kit).

Media Lab, 1998, Mixed Media, installed along the wall adjacent to the freight elevator.

As such, it’s a show of Art that is focused on images. That marks an extraordinary transformation in the Art of Sarah Sze over her career. Early on, her work was object based and seemed to qualify as “Sculpture” to many people. Gradually, beginning with Media Lab, 1998, now in the Guggenheim’s collection, and almost hidden here in a corridor for the freight elevator, her work has come to include and feature images more and more, as I saw in her last NYC gallery show in 2019. The images start right away.

Cards without walls. The “wall card” for the video projections on the outside of the Guggenheim.

Timelapse begins with 2 video projections on the Museum’s exterior walls which I missed because the Museum closed at 6 and the sun wasn’t setting until 8 at the time. So, Timelapse started for me inside on the ground floor. The exterior projections turned out to be the first sign that images flow continually through all of Timelapse, showing how central they are to Sarah Sze’s work today. “Sculptor?” Good luck boxing her now!

  “The Renaissance, the Baroque, everyone was doing painting, architecture, sculpture that was Bernini, Michelangelo, that was par for the course,” Sarah Sze1.

“When is there water in a museum?,” the Artist asks on the audio guide. Inside, Timelapse begins in Wright’s pea-pod shaped ground level pool. Diver, 2023, First of two parts, Multimedia installation, and The Night Sky is Dark Despite the Vast Number of Stars in the Universe, 2023, First of two parts, Acrylic paint, string, paracord, and wood. A pendulum hovers over the hammock & the pool with a video projected onto it of Sarah Sze’s finger stroking water (in blue above). Note the string extending up from the pendulum extending into the void. (Gego: Measuring Infinity filled the rest of the Rotunda.)

Installed over Wright’s pool, the “hammock” looks like a restful place from which to ponder the river of images playing continually in your mind. The first video inside is a projection on the pool of Sarah Sze’s hand stroking water, taking “dialoguing” with Frank Lloyd Wright literally and with sublime subtlety! A pendulum “points” to this area, beckoning the viewer to look at it.  The pendulum is attached to a black string that extends up into the void, all the way to the top! Using this simple means of measuring with a plumb line, Sarah Sze at once measures the void, interacts with it, and leads the viewer to the main part of the show.

Sarah Sze, Guggenheim as a Ruin(!), 2009, Ink, string, collage on paper, 50 x 32 inches. (Exclamation mark mine.) An indication that Sarah Sze has been thinking about the Guggenheim for a long time. Notice the red string coming down from the top! It splits in two, and the right part seems to wind up over the ground floor pool, which has spilled on to the floor. Seen in the book Sarah Sze: Infinite Line. Not in the show.

“There is fragility in drawing a line through space; with this one simple powerful gesture, you can occupy an entire space.” Sarah Sze on the wall card.

The more I thought about it, though a mere speck compared to Wright’s huge open space, the string has come to “occupy” it in my mind.

While you’re lying on your back in the hammock, here’s your (approximated) view of Wright’s Oculus. See that small speck just south of 5 o’clock on the white glass (and the faint line running down from it to the right)? That’s the hub where the black string’s rise culminates before sending it off across the void to the main installation of Timelapse on the other side, (as shown in the 2nd picture). There are countless amazing details everywhere you look in the show. Therefore, I’ve decided to present an overview of the show in this piece and show details in a Part 2.

Taking Wright’s unique elevator to the top (as he intended visitors to do) and walking down, (usually, actually up in this case), visitors find the black string already there waiting in front of them. Following it still higher, I noticed it was anchored to a hub that sent it to multiple points all the way across the void to the other side of the 6th floor.

Bay 1. The Night Sky is Dark Despite the Vast Number of Stars in the Universe, 2023, Second of two parts, Acrylic paint, string, paracord, and wood and River of Images, Part two (white circle on the left). The near string holding the hammock is the continuation, and terminus, of the black string from the pea pod pool.

Walking to the beginning of Timelapse on 6, I had the deja vu experience of seeing another blue hammock, one end of which was anchored to the black string. Though dated 2023, the hammock and the one in the pea-pod pool are very similar to one she created in 2015 titled Hammock, down to the “confetti” on top of it (and similar to the one installed on the pool as we saw). Along side is a pile of A/V equipment, “enhanced” with torn analog Photographs, and a wide range of objects that make the viewer think, “Ah, this is not just A/V equipment, it’s part of the piece.” These equipment installations are to be seen at the beginning and end of each Bay, in varying degrees of complexity, and typically, with an inventory of a staggering number of items- generally her trademark common items, seen in most of her pieces, but also small, often very complex “Sculptures.” Since every Bay has a variety of these, they add a sense of unity and continuity to the entire floor as the viewer moves from Bay to Bay. 

Bay 2, Travelers Among Streams and Cascades, 2023, Oil paint, acrylic paint, inkjet prints, acrylic polymers, string, and ink on Dibond, aluminum, wood and paper on 6 panels, 114 x 245 inches. All the pieces on the 6th floor are dated 2023- including the Paintings! Since the show started going in around April, that means Ms. Sze must have been unimaginably busy earlier this year. More than likely, the show was in the works during the pandemic.

In an interview, Ms. Sze hoped that Timelapse would inspire a “I didn’t know you could do that in a museum,” reaction in viewers (especially young Artists)1. Meanwhile, River of Images (Part two), a continuation of the exterior projection, moved along each wall on 6, flowing from Bay to Bay and across all the Art as you stood and looked at it.

Closer to the extraordinary 20 1/2 foot Travelers Among Streams and Cascades, “mounted” on shims and a level, further reinforcing the “off-balance” experience of seeing Art in the Guggenheim. I wondered- Would Wright smile at this, or be offended?

Speaking of its focus on images, one thing I was extremely happy to see was that Sarah Sze has included four of her remarkable Paintings in Timelapse, each of which was dated 2023. Her style seems to have evolved since those seen in her landmark 400-page book, Sarah Sze: Paintings (a NighthawkNYC NoteWorthy Art Book of 2023). Though each Painting in Timelapse was quite strong, Travelers Among Streams and Cascades, in particular, struck me of attaining yet another level.

“The paintings for me are more about how I actually see in my head.” Sarah Sze1.

I was stunned when I heard her say that. In another interview, the Artist spoke of having them be a portal to the world beyond the walls. Given each piece in the show is newly created and site specific, it’s fascinating to ponder that when looking at the Paintings and how they’re installed. Each Painting is displayed in an exceptionally unique way. In fact, over the countless Paintings that have been exhibited in the entire, 65-year, exhibition history of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim I seriously doubt that ANY of these installation scenarios have been seen before.  

Bay 3. “Elements of Architectural design,” as I wondered in the first sentence? The massive and incredibly intricate Slice, approached from what turned out to be the back. In Timelapse, Ms. Sze continually plays on the “off-balance” feeling viewers have walking up and down Wright’s angled ramp. Here, notice the “shims” she’s placed under Slice to level it, which she’s chosen to leave visible for emphasis. Another way of dialoguing with Wright. Elsewhere, actual levels are seen are various points in the show. As in the prior picture, and as I show in Part 2.

Speaking of the installation, in spite of the numerous delicate assemblages and many small items installed on the floor, Sarah Sze reported during the run of the show that nothing had been broken, even after a weekend of 15,000 visitors. She attributed this to viewers moving slowly through the show.

Ms. Sze’s Art dialogues with Wright in numerous fascinating ways, while advancing her themes of time and memory in images. For one thing, as anyone who has been to the Guggenheim knows, the Rotunda’s Ramp is on a continual slope. Upward going up, and downward going down, creating a sense of being off-balance. “Tripping and catching yourself-a central idea of the Baroque1,” she said. Sarah Sze makes a point of showing the viewer how this affects her work, adding shims under parts of the huge Slice, or filling a large tank part way, making the fairly steep angle of the floor’s slope obvious . She equates this with creating a sense of being “off-balance” for the viewer who also often can’t tell if an image is digital or analog. “Equilibrium” is also reinforced by her use of 3 pendulums hanging from the black string at various points along its journey.

 

Slice, from its “front,” in dialogue with Wright’s Oculus. Barely visible behind the first step of the near ladder is her model of Slice in this Bay (which I show close-up in Part 2). I found the piece transcendent, and it wasn’t the only one that was. Timekeeper, 2016, installed in the large rear gallery, and displayed for the first time in NYC, seems to mark time on a grand scale. Here, the Artist dialogues with the building while giving us a “slice of time.”

As she has done in a number of recent works (like Crescent (Timekeeper), in her 2019 Tanya Bonakdar show), many of the images in Slice were actually miniature video screens so many of the images changed independently(!) as you watched. As for the images themselves, nowhere in the exhibition catalog, the check list, or the accompanying materials does it specify whose Photography we’re looking at. I’m assuming they’re by Sarah Sze.  

Bay 4, Diver, Second of two parts and Images That Images Beget on the back wall. In this work, there is a torn Photograph of the Sun, attached to the oscillating fan (shown close-up in Part 2). This image is followed by other images of the Sun on a a string  that make a trail to Images That Images Beget, which has a Sun in its center, as you can see below. Note the slope of the water in the tank. “Water in a museum,” part deus. In her Drawing for this piece, the Artist had the water in the tank right up to the top on the right.

All four Paintings were installed uniquely in my experience of 43 years of going to Painting shows. Bay 6 was one of two Bays that used strings with Photos mounted on them as a compositional device that either led to the Painting on the back wall, or referenced it. Installing them this way created an entirely new way of experiencing a Painting as you can see here-

Following the Suns. Images That Images Beget, 2023, 129 x 103 inches, Oil paint, acrylic paint, inkjet prints, acrylic polymers, and ink on Dibond, aluminum, wood and paper, on 4 panels, with a string, containing Photos, leading to it from the tank.

I found this a fascinating way of drawing the viewer into the space and making him or her consider individual elements, like the Sun, and countless small objects installed on the floor, along the way to seeing the Painting. It also occurred to me that it’s a way of both measuring the space, occupying the space, as she said, and dialoguing with Wright. The whole idea of installing objects on the floor, which has been done many times, is taken to a new level here with countless small, even tiny, objects lying on the floor, some you can see in this picture (and more in Part 2). I wonder if that’s been done here before.

Bay 5, Times Zero, 2023, Oil paint, acrylic paint, inkjet prints, acrylic polymers, and ink on Dibond, aluminum, wood and paper, on three panels. Total dimensions, 97 × 120 1/2 × 3 inches.

Regarding the Paintings in Timelapse, and specifically about Times Zero, the exhibition catalog says, “The paintings in this exhibition were created in Sze’s studio in New York, where the artist meticulously replicated the museum’s Bays in 1:1 scale, allowing her to work quasi-in situ. In the case of Times Zero, Sze was struck by the angle at which paint dripped on the sloping shelf that runs from the wall to the floor (familiarly referred to as the “apron”).”

Here the Painting itself is destabilized by having its mirror likeness begin to come apart. The catalog continues, “She later photographed the work and digitally manipulated it in perspective to the incline of the apron. The resulting full-scale print was then ripped and the shards arranged below the painting itself, like a reflection in water or an imprint; the debris was left to overflow at the edge like liquid5.” She will revisit this “overflowing” effect in a subsequent Bay.

Bay 6, A Certain Slant, 2023, Multimedia installation, including two-channel color video projection, with sound, various durations; video projectors; inkjet prints; and metal pendulum. A number of the torn analog Photos lying around the circle are of hands and forearms, as I show close-up in Part 2. Hands being a running theme.

A Certain Slant reminded me of Sarah Sze’s piece Triple Point, which I saw at MoMA a few years back, in that it has a center pendulum suspended over a pile of unspecified material. In Triple Point, however, the pendulum makes a much wider arc seeming to threaten the surrounding objects. In A Certain Slant, it confines its arc to the area of the salt mound.

Sarah Sze, Triple Point, Multimedia, 2013, seen at the opening of the latest “new” MoMA, October 21, 2018. A work that represented the U.S. at the Venice Biennale that year. The title is a reference to the “triple point of water,” a state where it exists simultaneously as steam, ice and a liquid.

Seeing Triple Point at MoMA left me amazed that Sarah Sze’s work can be installed (in Venice in the case of Triple Point), disassembled and reassembled (at MoMA and elsewhere). Given that Timelapse is site-specific for the Guggenheim, however, it would seem extremely unlikely it will ever be reassembled in full again.

Bay 7. Last Impression (on the back wall), 2023, Oil paint, acrylic paint, inkjet prints, acrylic polymers, and ink on Dibond, aluminum, wood and paper
84 × 56 1/4 × 2 inches.

In Bay 7, one of the highlights of the show for me, the strings were installed across the Bay, preventing the viewer from moving past a certain point, as seen below. Along the series of strings, numerous empty frames were hung, which is interesting since the Painting is not framed. This continued on a unique installation on the large blue ladder nearby to the right, which I show in detail in Part 2.

Closer. The strings strung across the bay limit how close the viewer can get to the Painting, which looks like it could contain an enlarged fingerprint. I’ve also never seen a Painting installed on/lying on the ramp, as the small one to the left is.

The Painting, installed on the back wall, was also accompanied by numerous drips and marks that appear to be on the wall, again mimicking a studio situation as in Bay 6. Unlike the “overflow” seen in Bay 5, Times Zero, this time it appears paint runs down the apron and on to the floor. It made me wonder if Ms. Sze was allowed to Paint on the walls and apron, or if this is part of the installation as well, though that is paint on the floor.

The final Bay, 8, Things Caused to Happen (Oculus), 2023, Multimedia installation, including color video projection, with sound, various durations; video projectors; wood; stainless steel; inkjet prints; toothpicks; clamps; ruler; and tripods. The natural light obscures the light from the projection which shines on the central structure then leaks on to the wall on the left, with strings running to it, indicating the breaking up of digital images. I show this in Part 2.

The showstopper was Things Caused to Happen (Oculus), installed in Bay 8, the final Bay on the 6th floor. Seen from a distance, above, it looked like an alien craft hovering in the space surrounded by cameras.

Close up. Each little square and rectangle appears to be a screen with images projected on each independently! How, I don’t know. I show a short video clip of this in Part 2.

Closer up, it seemed to mimic a human head, possibly imitating a number of images continually playing inside of one. I don’t know about you, but I only have one screen playing in my head at any given time. Once again, as in Slice, somehow, these tiny images changed as you watched- independently. Some appeared to be slide shows, some appeared to be video.

In the large rear gallery, which became a gallery as part of the non-Frank Lloyd Wright expansion, Sarah Sze’s monumental and monumentally complex Timekeeper, 2016, was on view.

Also included in the show were two older pieces; Media Lab, the Artist’s first piece to include video was kind of hidden on the ramp of the freight elevator, shown earlier, and the large Timekeeper, 2016, making its NYC debut. It was installed in the large rear gallery off the 6th floor, a space not designed by Wright to be a gallery, and like all the other spaces added in the controversial expansion (which I fought at the time, resulting in my first published Art writing in The New York Times, and which I remain no fan of), I find seriously lacking as gallery spaces. Her huge Timekeeper, now a part of the Guggenheim’s collection, was installed in the center of the darkened room and its video projections moved across all four walls. Between Media Lab, 1998, to Timekeeper, 2017, to Timelapse, 2023, the viewer can trace how long Sarah Sze has been interested in time, how images mark time, and memories, how long she has featured images in her work, and how her work has evolved.

Timekeeper, detail.

When Timekeeper was installed in Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum in 2016, their Press Release said that it, “blurs the line between organic and mechanical structure, its lifecycle marked by clicking and whirring and flickering images. It keeps a form of eccentric time that is entirely its own, remembering moments over and over again as time slips by. In this sense, Timekeeper has no relationship to the mechanical devices we use to mark the literal passing of time, but instead to the way we recall and replay our lives, in selected fragments that, strung together, account for the passage of years.”

In my February, 2020 piece on her most recent NYC gallery show, I called Sarah Sze a “genius,” the only time I’ve used that term on a living Artist in the 8 1/2 years of NighthawkNYC.com. I should point out that this was BEFORE I saw the Sarah Sze: Paintings book, OR her spectacular recent Laguardia Airport installation. Exactly 4 years since I wrote that, I’ve seen nothing to change my mind.

“I didn’t know you could do that in a museum,” she said, thinking of how viewers, particularly young Artists, might react to Timelapse, before adding, “now you take that ball and run.”

Part 2 of my look at Timelapse looks at some of the countless details in the show, here. 

*-Soundtrack for this piece is “I’ve Seen It All” by Bjork, another of the world’s most gifted Artists. If I were to use that “g” word on a living Musician, she might well be the one I use it on. She performs it here in Dancer in the Dark–

For Lana, whose favorite is building the Guggenheim Museum, and for Ben, a passionate lover & student of Wright’s Art.

NighthawkNYC.com has been entirely self-funded & ad-free for over 8 years, during which 300 full-length pieces have been published! If you’ve found it worthwhile, PLEASE donate to allow me to continue below. Thank you, Kenn.

You can also support it by buying Art, Art & Photography books, and Music from my collection! Art & Books may be found here. Music here and here.

Written & photographed by Kenn Sava for nighthawknyc.com unless otherwise credited. To send comments, thoughts, feedback or propositions click here. Click the white box on the upper right for the archives or to search them. Subscribe to be notified of new Posts below. Your information will be used for no other purpose.

  1. from her interview with Great Women Artists Podcast ↩
  2. from her interview with Great Women Artists Podcast ↩
  3. from her interview with Great Women Artists Podcast ↩
  4. from her interview with Great Women Artists Podcast ↩
  5. Guggenheim Museum, Timelapse Exhibition Catalog, P.129 ↩

Sarah Sze: Timelapse- Freeze Frame

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This is Part 2 of my look at Sarah Sze: Timelapse at the Guggenheim Museum. Part 1 is here.

Slice detail with Wright’s Oculus.

As I said in Part 1, there were so many amazing details in Timelapse I decided to devote a separate piece to them. I’m showing 40 as thumbnails. Click on any image for full size. There’s also a short video clip.

…and wonder about Timelapse I continue to…Show posters behind appropriate scaffolding, Seen on 10th Avenue, June 5, 2023.

The hub for the black string.

Following are Photos of details in the 8 Bays on the 6th floor. Please refer to the overall shots of each installation in Part 1 for orientation and where they are installed in each piece.

The following are details from Bay 1, The Night Sky is Dark Despite the Vast Number of Stars in the Universe

Detail of the Hammock in Bay 1. The Hammock over the ground floor pool and the Hammock Sarah Sze created in 2015 had a similar overlay. I believe the material on the floor is part of the installation, and hasn’t fallen through.

Detail of the far left corner of Bay 1, with a shadow from the Hammock and an image from River of Images.

The following are details from Bay 2, Travelers Among Streams and Cascades

Three details from the Painting, Travelers Among Streams and Cascades. This one from the left section…

Detail of the center section…

Detail of the right section.

The following are details from Bay 3, Slice.

Slice. Detail of the front.

Slice. Close up of the front. Shown here are a number of the recurring image “themes”: hands, birds, the Sun, fire, the sky and other aspects of nature.

Detail behind Slice with River of Images.

One of many levels and rulers.

Looking over a rung of a ladder to see the model of Slice in its Bay installed under it displayed next to the final piece.

Throughout Timelapse lamps were used apparently to draw the viewer’s attention to specific images or objects.

The following are details from Bay 4, Diver, Second of two parts and Images That Images Beget

The following are details from Bay 5, Times Zero

Times Zero, 2023.

The following are details from Bay 6, A Certain Slant,

Detail of the center surrounded by images of hands and objects.

Detail of the far right corner looking to the right from the image above. I imagine the salt from those blue containers is what is in the center of the circle.

Detail of part of the installation on the floor further to the right in the previous picture.

The following are details from Bay 7, Last Impression

An alternate, slightly closer view of Bay 5 from what I showed in Part 1. As you can see in the full size image, the empty frames to the right are attached to the strings that run across the gallery.

Some details of the ladder at the right side, front, of the Bay.

The following detail is from Bay 8, Things Caused to Happen (Oculus)

Short clip of Things Caused to Happen (Oculus).

The Artist points out that in the end, the digital images beamed on to Things Caused to Happen (Oculus) break up on the far wall.

*- Soundtrack for this piece is “I’ve Seen It All” by Bjork. This time in the version with Thom Yorke.

NighthawkNYC.com has been entirely self-funded & ad-free for over 8 years, during which 300 full-length pieces have been published! If you’ve found it worthwhile, PLEASE donate to allow me to continue below. Thank you, Kenn.

You can also support it by buying Art, Art & Photography books, and Music from my collection! Art & Books may be found here. Music here and here.

Written & photographed by Kenn Sava for nighthawknyc.com unless otherwise credited. To send comments, thoughts, feedback or propositions click here. Click the white box on the upper right for the archives or to search them. Subscribe to be notified of new Posts below. Your information will be used for no other purpose.

Contemporary Chinese Photography: New Directions

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Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava

Many might not associate China with Artistic freedom and free expression, but a number of Contemporary Chinese Photographers are making their mark, creating work that breaks all sorts of boundaries, and quite a bit of it in stunning fashion. (in) directions: queerness in chinese contemporary photography, up through the end of January at Eli Klein Gallery, long a leader in cutting-edge Contemporary Chinese Art & Photography, is nothing if not an eye-opener. Wonderfully curated by Phil Zheng Cai and Douglas Ray, the show includes the work of Artists not well-known, along with some that are better-known, including Ren Hang (1987-2017) and former East Village resident Tseng Kwong Chi (1950-90).

Walking through the show with Mr. Cai, who is a walking encyclopedia of knowledge on Contemporary Chinese Art, much of that knowledge based in personal experience with the Artists, I was again taken by the freshness on view in virtually every piece. It’s so rare to walk into a Photography show and see very little, or virtually no, influence of Western Photography, save for an image or two that echoed Nan Goldin, (but that’s possibly what I’m bringing to seeing it). At almost every turn, I saw things that were new, fresh, and exciting. Actually? That’s what I’ve come to expect from Contemporary Chinese Art. In 2018, after seeing the landmark Guggenheim Museum overview, I began exploring it for the first time. Shortly after, at Eli Klein’s prior gallery, Klein Sun’s, amazing Cai Dongdong: Photography Autocracy I discovered  the work of Mr. Dongdong, now one of the best known Chinese Photographers. It was a wake-up call to what was going on in Chinese Contemporary Photography, and I wrote an extensive look at the show here.

Of course, (in) directions: queerness in chinese contemporary photography revolves around queerness, which I readily admit to not being an authority on. Whether that interests you or not, there is much to discover and enjoy, particularly the range of styles and creativity on display.

Cai Dongdong’s work never fails to surprise or break new ground. From (in) directions, it seems he’s far from alone in bringing that in Contemporary Chinese Photography. See for yourself-

Leonard Suryajaya, Dead Duck, 2020, Arisan, 2017, Gold Condo Room, 2020, Sparrow, 2023 and Salem, 2014 from left. Archival inkjet prints.

Leonard Suryajaya, Gold Condo Room, 2020.

Tommy Kha, Stops (III) Oneonta, NY, 2020, UV print on vinyl.

Fang Daqi, Untitled (Bream), 2020, Archival pigment print

Tseng Kwong Chi, Washington, D.C., 1982, From the “East Meets West self-portrait series 1979-89,  and Tseng Kwong Chi with mannequins, 1980, From the “Costumes at the Met” series, right. Both Silver gelatin prints.

From left- Shen Wei, Bonsai, 2023, Chromogenic print, Blue Cave, 2023, Mixed media, Pixy Liao, Breast Ass, 2019, Digital C-print, Fang Daqi, Untitled (Bream), Untitled (Butterfly 2) both 2023, Shen Wei, Daises, 2022, Chromogenic print, Pixy Liao, Long Sausage, 2016, Digital C-print.

Zhang Zhidong, Object Lesson (II), 2023, Archival pigment print.

Mengwen Cao, Eddy, 2021, Archival pigment print.

From left, Xu Guanyu, SL-06172015-02112022, 2022, and Illumination, 2014, Zhang Zhidong, Reflection (II), 2023, Lumination, 2022 and Object Lesson (II), 2023, All Archival pigment prints.

Co-curator Phil Zheng Cai with two of his favorites in the show by Tseng Kwong Chi.

My takeaway is that, regardless of where they’re from, their age, orientation or medium, it’s always exciting to see Artists doing something different. Doubly so when it’s well done. Japanese Contemporary Photography has been very well-known in the U.S. for decades now, and some of its leading lights, like Daido Moriyama and Araki, are Art stars around the world. Chinese Photography is nowhere nearly as well-known here. With Artists and work like those on view in (in) directions:, I suspect that is about to change.

BookMarks- Books on Contemporary Chinese Photography are hard to come by here. Cai Dongdong’s 4 PhotoBooks (that I’m aware of) were all printed in small numbers (up to 300 copies each) and have all sold out. However, one new book that is available as I write is (in) directions:, the catalog for this show. It’s an excellent introduction to these Artists, often with texts in their own words, and including quite a few images of work not in the show (along with the work that is). Curators Cai and Ray, along with designer Mengyao Zhang, have done a very nice job of succinctly laying out quite a bit of material in a very accessible manner, producing a valuable upto-the-moment survery on 21 Photographers who deserve wider attention. Copies are available through Eli Klein Gallery.

*-Soundtrack for this piece is “Accept Yourself” by The Smiths from their classic Hatful of Hollow, seen here in a rare live, though grainy, video from the Hacienda, Manchester, on 6 July 1983-

NighthawkNYC.com has been entirely self-funded & ad-free for over 8 years, during which 300 full-length pieces have been published! If you’ve found it worthwhile, PLEASE donate to allow me to continue below. Thank you, Kenn.

You can also support it by buying Art, Art & Photography books, and Music from my collection! Art & Books may be found here. Music here and here.

Written & photographed by Kenn Sava for nighthawknyc.com unless otherwise credited. To send comments, thoughts, feedback or propositions click here. Click the white box on the upper right for the archives or to search them. Subscribe to be notified of new Posts below. Your information will be used for no other purpose.

Mohammed Sami: The Power of Invisibility

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Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava (*- unless otherwise credited)

Show seen- Mohammed Sami: Muzzle of Time @ Luhring Augustine

Mohammed Sami’s first U.S. show won’t be his last.

Refugee Camp, 2022, on the far wall and seen further below. All works are Mixed media on linen unless specified. Click any picture for full size.

I don’t know if I’m the first to say that, but I say it with confidence. I walked into Mohammed Sami: Muzzle of Time at Luhring Augustine on September 16th and immediately fell under the spell of his mysterious Paintings. I left realizing I’d “discovered” another rising Painter to be reckoned with. Of course, Mohammed Sami had already been discovered by numerous others before I saw his work. It turns out his Art was selected for the 58th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, followed in March, 2022 by his first solo show in London. This spring, that city’s Camden Art Centre mounted his first solo institutional show, Mohammed Sami: The Point 0, known to me through its excellent catalog. When it opened on September 8th at Luhring Augustine, one of NYC’s most forward-looking galleries, Muzzle of Time announced his arrival on these shores in full effect in his first solo show here.

Meditation Room, 2022, 110 1/4 by 90 1/2 inches. Note the portrait of Sadam, near the upper right.

His road to this point has been long and grueling for someone not even 40. Born in Baghdad in 1984, where he had the misfortune of being raised during Saddam’s regime, and the resulting wars. As a dyslexic schoolboy, he traded Painting murals and portraits of Sadam (which every house was required to have) for passing grades in school. In fact, during Mr. Sami’s life in Iraq, the country was involved in no less than EIGHT wars!1. Art would prove to be his way out. He studied Drawing and Painting at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad, graduating in 2005, before being granted asylum in Sweden in 2007. He lived there until 2015, leaving to continue his studies in the U.K., which he completed in 2018. He currently lives & works in London.

The Weeping Lines, 2022, 114 5/8 by 135 inches. “‘This is the type of signifier I use to hide the traumatic image behind something entirely different, like a cactus or the carpet on the floor, This helps to distract you from the main subject matter, which is trauma and conflict.’ In Arab culture, he says, euphemism and allegory are used as ‘a delusive strategy to not let the authorities understand what we’re saying.2.'”

Filled with Paintings that played it close to the vest, each revealed enough to be powerfully haunting, lingering in my mind to this moment. Since the show contained just 8 works (6 quite large), I needed to see more to get a feel for his accomplishment to this point. So, I went scurrying to find images of every other Mohammed Sami Painting I could locate. I was equally impressed by what I found, so I undertook this piece. Rendered in a similar style, each reinforced the initial impression though some upped the horror quotient.

A barricade against bombs … 23 Years of Night, 2022, Dimensions not known. Not in the show. *Photo by Robert Glowacki

In A barricade against bombs … 23 Years of Night, the reality of the seemingly innocuous scene is only really revealed in its title. In the process, it also provides a bit of insight into what we are seeing in the rest of his work.

Remnants. Reminders. Hidden scars. His Paintings provide small glimpses into his life that he says are born of “triggers” he came across, randomly, in Sweden, or now in London. The results are Paintings that are more like stills from a Film, leaving it to the viewer to fill in what came before in the story. Instead of hitting them over their heads, his work is characterized by a haunting subtlety that belies exquisite taste, and, it seems to me, supreme confidence in his abilities to communicate..

“The things I articulate in my artwork are memories hidden in the brain cells that are waiting for a trigger. So whenever the trigger is available, then the image comes2.”

Emotional Window II, 2023, 17 3/4 x 17 1/2 inches. Mr. Sami’s work is equally effective in mural size, or in easel size, as seen here.

The Artist Mr. Sami’s work comes closest to, for me, would be Thomas Demand, who constructs uncannily real-life recreations of scenes of historic or notorious import out of paper, leaving it to viewers to figure out what happened in these places. But, Mr Demand (as far as I know), did not grow up and live through, the hell and horror of war.

Moises Saman, A meeting room in an underground bunker used as a command center by Qaddafi’s security forces. Tripoli, Libya, 2011, Color ink-jet print. Not in the show.

As such, he’s, perhaps, closer to a conflict Photographer, like Moises Saman, of Magnum Photos, who covered the conflicts in Iraq, and elsewhere, as in this image he shot in Libya.

Electric Chair I, 2019-20, Acrylic on linen, 74 3/4 x 41 1/8 inches. Not in the show. *- Luhring Augustine Photo.

In fact, a few of his images echo a few of Mr. Sami’s. Im not introducing Mr. Saman here to compare their work. It’s interesting to see how their perspectives are different4.

Refugee Camp, 2022, 114 1/4 x 231 1/4 inches. “Several paintings titled Refugee Camp depict a house set deep within fenced woods, which we might be tempted to read as sinister. Sami, however, describes his stay there as ‘the most beautiful days in my life. It was a school of freedom where you’re free to pick your identity.’ He returns there every month. ‘It was a shock,’ he says. ‘You live in dust and deserts with the sound of bullets. And suddenly you open your eyes to gardens like heaven5.'”

Mohammed Sami had to move thousands of miles to have his life. Though Sadam is gone, the war is over, the scars remain, as they do after every conflict. It’s rare that a survivor expresses him or herself and their experiences in paint. Most History Paintings in Art history were done by Artists who were not eyewitnesses6. Even rarer to do so so subtly, relying on the power of the invisible to tell a visual story. Yet, it seems to me, that it is just this approach that allows him to tap into the collective unconscious. Everyone has things in our pasts that we are suddenly reminded of out of the blue by something we come across in the here and now, though they may not be war-related. In Mr. Sami’s work, we are transported by these triggers into what his experiences felt like, or feels like now, if not always the actual representation of events.

I can’t recall seeing this done, and done so effectively, in Painting before.

One Thousand and One Nights, 2022, 112 5/8 by 219 1/4 inches.

I haven’t been able to get Mr. Sami’s work off my mind these past two months. It haunts me the way I imagine his memories have haunted him. I haven’t read anything about whether these works are “therapeutic” for the Artist in some ways, or not. Having released these demons onto linen, I can only hope they exorcised them and help heal the scars. Still, there’s one thing that becoming apparent: his work is resonating with viewers. Mohammed Sami’s star is rising quickly.

*-Soundtrack for this piece is “Only the Dead See the End of the War” by Acrassicauda from Baghdad, who are, perhaps, best known as the subjects of the documentary Heavy Metal in Baghdad, 2007. One night a few years later, Acrassicauda’s guitarist, Tony Aziz, happened to sit down next to me at East of Eighth, on West 23rd Street- like Cecily Brown had a few years before. After I was introduced to him by my friend, Stephen, we had a fascinating, wide-ranging conversation. He was warm, well-spoken and quick to smile. He would leave the band in 2011. I hope he’s well.

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  1. Here ↩
  2. The Guardian 3.21.2022 ↩
  3. The Guardian 3.21.2022 ↩
  4. A bit like looking at Matthew Brady’s  or Alexander Gardner’s Civil War Photographs and then Winslow Homer’s Civil War Paintings. ↩
  5. The Guardian, 3.21.2022 ↩
  6. Goya may be an exception, though I haven’t seen proof that he was actually present at the events he is sometimes credited with witnessing. ↩