Ralph Lemon

The Alvin Ailey exhibit at the Whitney introduced me to to Ralph Lemon, an African American artist with no apparent boundaries.  "On Black Music, a notebook of his line drawings offered a window into his creative process, which includes keeping a daily visual journal based on other sources, including photos of news events, performances and art. 

 

Lemon, a year older than I, then combines them into collage-like works with the tongue-in-cheek goal of depicting "(The greatest [Black] art history story ever told."  He completed this one in 2022; there are probably a dozen more hanging, some bigger than others, in one gallery. As part of "Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon," MoMA PS1 will invite several writers and artists to interpret these jam-packed works.  Great idea.

He ripped at least one image from the headlines.  No doubt the next four years will provide a landslide of traumatic material from our borders.

Drawing may have been his first love but Lemon, who grew up in Ohio and attended the University of Minnesota, embraced movement as another form of artistic expression. He describes this video, created with Kevin Beasley as "a very loud site-specific sound movement voice, Brown/Black body cultural experiment in rage, freedom and or ecstasy." It was filmed in 2020 shortly before the covid 19 pandemic began.

Lennon calls an array of wooden statues clothed in outfits inspired by Beyonce and Jay Z "Consecration of Ancestor Figures."  Known as a frequent collaborator, Lemon borrowed several of the statues from Robert Wilson.  They were carved in West Africa in the mid-20th century, with the installation connecting generations of Black royalty across time.

You may recognize Queen Bey's outfit on this one from the "Apeshit" video the Carters filmed in the Louvre.

A guard stopped me from taking video of the ancestor figures, but there was no prohibition against shooting a couple of other works, including an animated drawing of James Baldwin (who was born a century ago this past August) that rightfully treats him as an oracular figure.  Lemon shows no such respect for Bruce Nauman who seems to personify the white male art establishment of the 60s, the same one that cried "foul" when Philip Guston began exhibiting his "hood paintings."

Lemon uses what he calls "mandalas" to decompress from his Black history project, painting objects that often inspire contemplation from both the natural and spiritual worlds. Prolific hardly begins to describe his artistic output.

Untitled 10 by Ralph Lemon (2022)

There's a sculptural component, too, which I found a little baffling.  It includes "The Spaceship #1," which he built in 2007.

And a new work, called "Godhead under the kitchen table"(2024).

He sets the table with "Hippo Head" 

. . . and "Hamburger and plate."  Weird.  But always interesting.  Kind of like Mike Kelley, if Kelley were a choreographer, too.

Mother

Not mine.  Mary may have been depressed, but she wasn't a paranoid schizophrenic like Sohrab Hura's, who has a multimedia show, his first in the United States, at MoMA PS1.  

Hura, born in West Bengal (the part governed by India), is best known for his photography. This series (2013-19), also published as a book, is called "The Coast."

I'm guessing he manipulates his photos, although I can't be sure.  What's up with that man's head?  Is he hiding behind the woman in red or is it just a cut-out of his face?

Some of the shots give me a Diane-Arbus-in-color-vibe, although the curators have indicated that partition and colonialism are among Hura's primary themes.  Foreigners may find these difficult to parse, but still find much to admire in his arresting work, as I did.

He shot a video (also called "The Coast") in Tamil Nadu during the Dasara festival which celebrates Kali, the Hindu goddess of time and death.  The festival encourages self-expression, with participants dressing up however they like, regardless of gender or caste, and ritually cleansing themselves afterward in the Bay of Bengal.  Hura scored it, too.  I saw ritual cleansing in the Ganges when I visited Varanasi a decade ago.  Hopefully this water was less polluted.

The drawings on these walls comprise a work he calls "Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed" (2022-24).  "Timelines (Delhi, Mother, Sheila, The Bus, The School, The Olive Tree, Bees, Protest, and Mail)" occupies the center of the gallery.

"Summer trip with A"

"Guest"

"The Green Dress"

Other images in the show emphasize the solitary.  They definitely struck a chord, although before I knew Hura's gender, I would have guessed he was a she.

"Far from the madding crowd"

"Everyone in school was in love with her"

"Last Night"

Artists Make New York

What can I say?   It's true, or maybe it used to be. 

Plenty of non-New Yorkers were on view at PS1, the MoMA satellite in Long Island City that's free for residents.  Yto Barrada, scattered her building block sculptures in the courtyard. She calls the commissioned work "Le Grand Soir (The Big Night)."

"Fistful of Love," the first museum show for photographer Reynaldo Rivera, drew me to PS1.  His work, shot in Los Angeles and Mexico, where he was born, reminded me of Nan Goldin's with its (mostly vanished) demimonde vibe.

"Patron, Silver Lake Lounge" (1995)

"La Plaza" (1997)

You barely can see Rivera behind the lens in this photo at the right.  Now in his early 60s, he once hung out in a lot of gay clubs and befriended more than one Latinx drag queen.

Paquita and Reynaldo Rivera, Le Bar (1997)

Somehow I can't imagine them hosting library story hours.  They employed soulful transgression in service of tips, not acceptance. 

Traditional weaving techniques are enhanced by digital technology in Melissa Cody's "Webbed Skies."  The fourth-generation Navajo artist also updates her work with pop cultural references.  

"Scaling the Caverns" (detaill, 2023)

Cody's Germantown Revival style originates from wool blankets manufactured in the Pennsylvania town of the same name, given by the U.S. government to indigenous Americans when they were expelled from their native territories in the mid-19th century.

"Power Up" by (detail, 2023)

The Navajos tore up the blankets and used the wool to create their own textiles in a subversive act of reclamation.  But Cody tweaks her culture, too; this work depicts a taboo reptile--associated with bad omens and health problems--in four colors that evoke Navajo sacred land.

"Path of the Snake" (2013)

Somehow, I managed to miss the James Turrell room on previous visits.  He actually lived in the museum while he created "Meeting," one of his early Skyspaces, during the late 1970s.  

The work encourages visitors to look at the framed sky, not their i-Phones.

It's a contemplative place, closed during stormy weather.

Hands down, PS1 has the most interesting stairwells.

Most of the work in "Hard Ground" was too abstract for my taste but I did enjoy the back story of Jerry the Marble Faun, a Brooklyn boy.  The budding sculptor was nicknamed by "Little Edie" Beale when he did odd jobs for her and her sister at Grey Gardens in the early 1970s, when the Maysles brothers were filming their classic documentary.  He also worked as an assistant to Wayland Flowers whose performances with Madame, a puppet, delighted New York City cabaret audiences during the same period.

"Tecumseh" (2007-14)

Given my affinity for bicycles and the role feet play in powering them, I decided to leave mine in this photo of rings cast from the steel of a smelted Citi Bike.  Although the work purports to comment--in artspeak--on "the cycles and circulations of property relations that manifest through simple everyday forms," I think the rings also offer an excellent tool for shackling clueless cyclists who go the wrong way.

"Always Something to Remind Me" by Dora Budor (2023)

Untitled by Gianna Surangkanjanajai (partial, 2024)

Filipina-American artist Pacita Abad, whose participation in anti-Marcos demonstrations forced her to  flee Manila for New York at the age of 26,  provided the "wow factor" of this PS1 visit. 

 

"African Mephisto" (1981)

Abad, who died two decades ago at the age of 64, painted often enormous, almost always colorful, canvases before embellishing them with fabric and other objects--including cowrie shells and buttons--in a process known as "trapunto."

"Marcos & His Cronies" (1985-95)

Sadly, this has had the effect of marginalizing her work in the art world because trapunto is more often associated with women's crafts, like quilting and embroidery.

"L.A. Liberty" (1992)

"Caught at the Border" (1991)

"Freedom from Illusion" (1984)

This is Abad's first American retrospective.  The patriarchy dies hard.

"Cross-Cultural Dressing (Julia, Amina, Maya and Sammy)" (1993)

"Homeroom" by Little Manila Queens Bayanihan Arts showcases the work of some local artists.

 

"Oras Na" by Karl Orozco (2021)