# data[].attributes.body
April, 2019

Carla Chammas
Lonti Ebers
Marty and Rebecca Eisenberg
Kathy Fuld
Eric Green
Hilary Hatch
Tina Kim
Jill Kraus
Michael Ringier
Jerry Speyer
Alice Tisch
Dian Woodner
Laurie Wolfert

# data[].attributes.headline
WELCOME TO THE APRIL ISSUE OF THE DIRECTOR'S CIRCLE NEWSLETTER

# data[].attributes.subject
WELCOME TO THE APRIL ISSUE OF THE DIRECTOR'S CIRCLE NEWSLETTER

# data[].attributes.body
We are still using PADLET for this newsletter, but please tell me if you are experiencing any issues accessing the links I send by email. Although I include a PDF, the newsletter's readability is very much improved if you look at the electronic version. Plus, you can PARTICIPATE, by commenting, opining, or sharing information simply by typing in a comment in the grey comment area below each jpeg illustration.

A few tips for using PADLET:

TO COMMENT: Just type in a comment in the grey area under each jpeg. There should be the words "Add comment" in that area.

DID YOU KNOW that you can enlarge the jpegs in this newsletter simply by clicking on them?

IF YOU ARE EXPERIENCING A PROBLEM accessing the electronic version of our newsletter, please let me know!

As I see our newsletter as a platform for ideas in liberty, I am again including Experimental Jetset's brilliant poster from 2011 which combines Filippo Tomasso Marinetti's famous "Parole in Liberta" collage with John Lennon and Yoko Ono's "War is Over (If You Want It)."

# data[].attributes.headline
This month in museum quality drawings...

# data[].attributes.subject
This month in museum quality drawings...

# data[].attributes.body
MoMAPS1 just opened a much-awaited Nancy Spero retrospective, curated by the independent curator and art world denizen Julie Ault. The show, which consists primarily of drawings, reminds us that Spero (1926-2009) was one of America's foremost political artists, and one who took drawing to epic levels, with series and installations that combined delicate watercolor, stencil and sometimes even collage. Her style often conjured cave painting, or even archaic Greek vases, but her subject matter was consistently timely. One of her best known subjects was the U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam. This work, from 1968, is from her imitable WAR series. It comes from Spero's longtime art dealer, Mary Sabbatino at Lelong Gallery.

P.E.A.C.E., Helicopter, Mother + Children
1968
Gouache and ink
24 x 19 inches (61 x 48 cm)

# data[].attributes.body
Just as you knew, suspected, or intuited, it is an actual fact- at least when it comes to drawings- that new drawings by sought-after contemporary artists are very often more expensive than historical, museum-quality drawings. The upside of this strange phenomenon is that it encourages the dying art of connoisseurship, which encompasses both really seeing, and really knowing.

I saw this beautiful "Ornamental Sketch" by Josef Hoffmann at the Arnoldi/Livie Gallery booth at the "Salon de Dessins," at the Bourse in Paris last week. It's price is virtually the same as for a drawing by a lesser known American artist showing in a Chelsea gallery.

Ornamental Sketch (c. 1912?)
Pen and brush in blue ink over pencil
28 x 12,3 cm
Signed with monogram on mount

# data[].attributes.headline
REBECCA BRICKMAN'S favorite drawing (this month)

# data[].attributes.subject
REBECCA BRICKMAN'S favorite drawing (this month)

# data[].attributes.body
Rebecca is our new Director of Development, but in fact she is also an artist, and when she visited her old stomping ground of MoMAPS1, she came upon this massive work on paper by HOCK E AYE VI EDGAR HEAP OF BIRDS, which is in his solo exhibition that just opened there. Heap of Birds is a Native American from the Southern Cheyenne Tribe and is enrolled in both the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes. This drawing- really an amalgam of the signs that Heap of Birds is known for, is the size of a billboard, and dates to the exact period when Heap of Birds' work became internationally relevant, born in on a wave of new interest in issue oriented art by artists from marginalized communities. This period in American taste culminated in the infamous 1992 Whitney Biennial which featured strong, and some thought offensive works by a record number of women and people of color.

Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds
American Policy II 1987

# data[].attributes.body
New York and environs:

Hugo Boss Prize 2018: Simone Leigh, Loophole of Retreat. Leigh won the Hugo Boss prize last year, and this show is part of the award (Guggenheim Museum, Fifth Avenue at 89th St. Opens April 19). If you cannot get enough of Simone's sculptures, there is an enormous one looming over the Highline, installed there for the next several months.

Anohni: Love (The Kitchen, 512 W. 19th St.Through May 11). For those who loved this artist when he was the singer Antony of Antony and the Johnsons, (As I did!) the Johnsons will perform April 19-22 at The Kitchen.
https://thekitchen.org/event/the-johnsons-present-she-who-saw-beautiful-things

And, IMHOP, this is perhaps the most beautiful YouTube video you will ever experience:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QQ-Rd-ul4E

"Josh Smith: Emo Jungle" (Opens April 25) on display in all the gallery spaces at David Zwirner on 19th St. is Josh's first exhibition in this new gallery. I'm rooting for him!

Neo Rauch: From the Floor and As If: Alternate Realities from Then to Now (The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster St. Opens April 11). Our Spring Shows! Please visit, and if you do, please ask for me so that I can come and greet you.

Charlotte Posenenske: Work in Progress (DIA Beacon,  3 Beekman St, Beacon, NY. Until Sept. 9).

Dallas:
Jonas Wood (Dallas Museum of Art, 1717 N Harwood St, Dallas, TX through July 14). A retrospective of the paintings of this wildly popular Los Angeles artist

Frankfurt:
There are a few artists with whom curators dream to work, but because of their fragility, their temperament, or their desires, they cannot. David Hammons, Isa Genzken, Trisha Donnelly come to mind, but the true "white whale" of contemporary curatorial practice is CADY NOLAND. Famously retiring, and infamously unable to acknowledge that she doesn't own all of the work she ever made, Noland has refused all offers of exhibitions for the past 20 years. Except one. And that show is on display now, at Frankfurt's MMK, (Domstraße 10
60311 Frankfurt am Main. Until May 26). If  you have ever been interested in Noland's work, this show is worth the special pilgrimage.

https://www.mmk.art/en/whats-on/cady-noland/

# data[].attributes.body
YES, a new generation of art historians is re-evaluating the the notoriously decorative work of some artists of the late 1970s and early 1980s,  leading to exhibitions at MOCA LA (the upcoming, "With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985", opening October 27, 2019) and Le Consortium, in Dijon ("Pattern, Decoration and Crime", opening May 16, 2019).

And NO, this new found interest in work by NED SMYTH, ROBERT KUSHNER, AND MIRIAM SHAPIRO among others does not extend to drawings by designers, even though the history of ORNAMENT has produced  joyous works on paper that show amazing skill, and eye-popping pattern. The Drawing Center is primed to re-connect Decoration with Ornament in Spring, 2021 when we open A NEW GRAMMAR OF ORNAMENT, a history of the ornamental in design from the 19th century to the present as told in DRAWINGS.  FUN FACT: Many of the greatest drawings of ornament, especially in the 20th century, were made by female designers. This incredible design for a frieze was drawn by Rose Fuchs, c. 1920 and is part of the collection of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.

# data[].attributes.body
It is a truism passed down from older to younger writers that the only way to write a masterpiece is to write what you know. The New York contemporary literary canon is littered with authors who write thinly veiled stories about their New York lives; from Jonathan Franzen to Gary Shteyngart, from Josh Ferris to Elif Batuman. It is rare that a young author can also write what they can never know. In her recent novel, Asymmetry, Lisa Halliday does a tour de force job of just that, spending the first half of her book spinning a roman a clef based on her own May/December affair with Philip Roth, and the second half imagining herself into the body and the mind of an Iraqi American man called Amar.
Asymmetry is a brilliant literary achievement by a young writer,  but it is also a cultural bellwether of sorts. How did Halliday, so convincingly create a character (written in the first person!) whose experiences were of a kind that the author could never experience? More pertinently, how, in an age of the Dana Schutz Emmett Till controversy, and the Rachel Dolezal masquerade, did Halliday- an American from Medford, MA-   dare to claim such radically empathy with the character of Arab man? Is it empathy, or is writing in the first person from the perspective of an Arab man a sort of Semitic blackface? The second half of Asymmetry doesn't so much as ask if it is okay to imagine oneself into the mind of an Other, but does it so consumately, so seamlessly, so as to prove that it is possible to imagine beyond who one is as an artist.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/why-asymmetry-has-become-a-literary-phenomenon

# data[].attributes.headline
DEPARTMENT OF LEARN SOMETHING NEW EVERY DAY

# data[].attributes.subject
DEPARTMENT OF LEARN SOMETHING NEW EVERY DAY

# data[].attributes.body
The artist Javier Tellez is curating what promises to be an astonishing drawing exhibition which will open at Frieze, New York within the fair itself. Called "Doors of Perception," the show features work by some of the greats of the self-taught art world, including Martin Ramirez (whose work will be featured in our upcoming exhibition "The Pencil is a Key: Drawings by Incarcerated Artists" at TDC in October), Minnie Evans, and many others. The drawings of Indonesian artist, Angkasapura (b. 1979, Jayapura, Indonesia) will also be featured in Tellez's show. Self-taught, Angkasapura has been drawing his visions of creatures that he has seen since he was a child. I was unfamiliar with Angkasapura, but his drawings left me speechless; and then to find out that he was a contemporary artist! Attention might need to be paid...

Untitled, 2016
Ink and graphite
12 x 15 3/4"

# data[].attributes.body
If you were an art student at The Cooper Union from the 1970s through the 1990s and you were a PAINTER, you probably studied with ROBERT BREER. Breer was a titan of modernist independent film, the creator of landmark animated films that feature biomorphic abstractions, dancing, cavorting, uniting, transforming, or just sauntering across the screen. Works like Form/Phases #4, (1954)  and A Man and His Dog Out for Air (1957) are independent cinema classics, but, as his students soon found out, Bob knew painting in and out, as he had studied it in Paris on the G.I. bill in the early 1950s under Jean Arp. In that first decade of his artistic career, pre film, he created a body of abstract, post-Mondrian, pre Helio Oiticica, neo-concrete canvases where the shapes which starred in his animated films originated. Back in New York in the early 1960s, Bob- now an animator and independent filmmaker of some repute, began to experiment with kinetic sculptures in the same shapes made familiar by his paintings and films. These works, which ranged from tiny to monumental, were equipped with motors and motion sensors, allowing them to travel very slowly and in complete silence around the gallery floor. Although  the official name of the series was "Floats," Bob called them "Creepies," because of their tendency to startle viewers who did not expect them to move as they did. This drawing, undated, but probably from 1965-66, is of an assortment of Creepies. Because Bob was an animator, his oeuvre necessarily contains thousands of drawings. This work, drawn in conjunction with his sculptural oeuvre, is an outlier, but a delicate and graceful one. I spotted it in Paris at GB Agency, Bob's gallery in life and in death.

Form Phases #4:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkmgIwFZ5ks

A Man and His Dog:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkmgIwFZ5ks

Untitled (n.d., c. 1965-66?)

# data[].attributes.headline
MEET GUO FENGYI  and her astonishing drawings  

# data[].attributes.subject
MEET GUO FENGYI  and her astonishing drawings  

# data[].attributes.body
Rosario Guiraldes, Assistant Curator at TDC has just gotten back from a week in Beijing choosing work for our upcoming Guo Fengyi (1942-2010) retrospective set to open in February, 2020. Self-taught, Guo began drawing as an older person, to pass the time while she minded her grandchildren. She began drawing maps of pressure points in the body, but progressed to larger works depicting zodical signs, Buddhas, and finally, a group of enormous Gods, heroes, and self-portraits on scrolls of up to three meters in length.  Guo's drawings have had limited exposure internationally, almost exclusively through biennials like Venice, where her large scrolls were featured in 2015, and at the Carnegie International in the same year. Guo's estate was represented in the U.S. by Andrew Edlin, but in December, 2018, Barbara Gladstone has added her to her roster.

Untitled, 2010
Pen and ink on rice paper scroll

# data[].attributes.body
Well I hadn't until I stopped in at Jack Tilton Gallery (8 East 76th St. until April 20) where Connie Tilton has on display a panoply of works by David Hammons, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, and other L.A. based artists working in loose concert with one another in the 1960s.

This is a body print by Hammons, but one that the artist has cut out and mounted on a shaped board then covered with shaped Plexiglas. The result is a strange object; a work on paper and a sculpture at the same time. The body print dates from 1969, the same year that Hammons made two other body prints on experimental supports: one cut out and mounted on a board as a kind of relief portrait, and another printed on a readymade puzzle. Neither of those though, have the odd, almost martian-like presence of this work.

Untitled (1969)
Body print under Plexiglas

# data[].attributes.body
Isa Genzken was just awarded the prestigious Nasher Prize for excellence in sculpture, but over her fifty-year career, she has consistently made drawings, most preparatory for her three dimensional work. The 1985 pencil drawing pictured below is part of a series of visionary drawings of sculptures. The sculptures were executed in plaster at a small scale, but Genzken dreamed of producing them as monumental in size. This drawing depicts one of her plaster works monumental and in situ, jutting from a wall that abuts a staircase. The drawing is notable for its realism, and its quite credible perspective; both observations not necessarily made about any other work by Genzken. Those familiar with her sculptures from the 1980s might guess that the subject of the drawing was a Genzken sculpture, but could anyone guess it was a drawing by the artist herself?

# data[].attributes.body
We are sold out of Gala tickets. Thanks to all who have participated, and see you at the Gala on April 24!