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February, 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
Laurie Wolfert

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Omar Ba (b. 1977 Senegal) lives in Dakar and Geneva, and he makes large, decorative paintings on corrugated cardboard repurposed from heavy duty packing boxes. Below, a detail from an impressively large work from 2018. A survey of Omar Ba's recent paintings on cardboard, "Omar Ba: Same Dream," can be seen at The Power Plant in Toronto until May 12.
http://www.thepowerplant.org/Exhibitions/2019/Winter-2019/Same-Dream.aspx

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Department of LEARN SOMETHING NEW EVERY DAY

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Department of LEARN SOMETHING NEW EVERY DAY

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As many of you probably know, Frieze is a 2019-2020 corporate sponsor of The Drawing Center. In return, I am curating the "Spotlight" section at Frieze, New York and Frieze Masters London. Spotlight focuses on monographic displays of 20th century art, and it is well known for surprising displays of work that is not often seen internationally.

During one of my reviews of gallery applications, I came upon the collages of Benode Behari Mukherjee, (1904-1980) a muralist, an influential teacher, and a major figure in Indian Modernism. Mukherjee was also partially blind, and then completely blind from 1956 until his death, but he continued to make art. This astonishing biographical fact inspired one of his students, the great filmmaker Satyajit Ray to make a documentary about him called "The Inner Eye" (1972).

As a result of his blindness,  Mukherjee turned to paper collage in 1957, continuing his work in this medium into the 1960s. The work below is called "The Conversation" (1960) and is in the collection of Tate.

The gallery that represents Mukherjee's estate, Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi, is planning to exhibit a group of these absolutely remarkable collages at Art Basel, and I can't wait to see the display. I'm sure it will be a huge hit.

http://www.vadehraart.com/new-page-1

https://frieze.com/article/paper-chase-0

https://www.artslant.com/ny/articles/show/31220-the-blind-master

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AMY SILLMAN's FAVORITE DRAWING (this month)

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AMY SILLMAN's FAVORITE DRAWING (this month)

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We all know Amy Sillman as an influential teacher, and an enthusiastic booster of her artistic peers. Thomas Eggerer (b. Munich, 1963) occupies the studio next to hers in Brooklyn, and she has been watching his progress towards an exhibition that will open in New York at Friedrich Petzel Gallery later in the Spring. Eggerer is a painter, but this show will concentrate on large scale drawings as well as these "paper dolls," that Amy fell in love with and snapped in his studio.

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Maybe because we are living through a somewhat surreal time in our civic life, maybe because experts have given personkind 12 years until the effects of global warming radically change daily life for large populations, maybe because AI and CGI have advanced to levels that truly mimic life, science fiction, particularly the sub-genre of "alternate realities," has become an urgent thematic in American literature, film, and art. Responding to an upcoming show at TDC ("As If," opening on April 11) Huma Bhahba gave us this drawing to hang amidst the book covers, magazines, posters and Commix that the exhibition focuses on. Part human, part animal, part alien, its hard to suss out whether the figure is fiercely protective or threatening, but it's a fantastic drawing!

Untitled (2016)
Ink, pastel, acrylic paint,collage,

30 1/4 x 22 3/4"
Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York

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WELCOME TO THE FEBRUARY ISSUE OF THE DIRECTOR'S CIRCLE NEWSLETTER

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WELCOME TO THE FEBRUARY ISSUE OF THE DIRECTOR'S CIRCLE NEWSLETTER

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Welcome to the second Director's Circle Newsletter. This month, we welcome two new members: Kathy Fuld and Jerry Speyer. For Kathy and Jerry's benefit in particular, below please find instructions for interacting with the other members via this newsletter using PADLET. The simplest way to participate is to add a comment in the comment section below every story. Please remember to identify yourself as your name won't appear automatically unless you join PADLET. It's free, and if you do this, your name will automatically appear when you comment. Here are the very simple instructions to join PADLET:

1.       Access the newsletter by clicking this link or copying the address into your browser:
https://padlet.com/lhoptman/cugvyjyjp3ae

2.       Once there, you can read through the Director’s Circle Newsletter and make comments anonymously.

3.       If you would like to make comments under your own name, click the gray “sign up” text in the top right hand corner of the screen

4.       Type in your preferred email and password, and check the “I’m beautiful” box (this is their way of checking you aren’t a robot)

5.       Click the pink “sign up” button.

6.       Select the “Basic” version of the account. The pro version is for businesses and others who want to make their own Padlet page and posts. You do not need Pro to read and comment on the Director’s Circle Newsletter.

7.       Read, comment, like, and chat to your heart’s content!

8.       If you would like to change your profile name and image, click the circle in the top right corner of the page, and select “profile” from the drop down menu. Click “edit profile” and you can write in your preferred name, change your profile image, and so on.

Below is a 2011 poster from the Dutch design team Experimental Jetset  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)." I include it as a welcome fanfare to Kathy and to Jerry.

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Drawing For Print: The Illustrious Robert Crumb, Curated by original Crumb fanboy, Rob Storr. David Zwirner, 519 W. 19th St. Opens Feb. 21.

David Weiss Drawings, Matthew Marks, 523 W 24th St. The other half of the duo Fischli/Weiss who passed away several years ago. Opens Feb. 9.

Nancy Graves: Mapping, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 534 W 26th St. Attention must be paid to Nancy Graves! (1939-1995) She created a strange and beautiful oeuvre that included video, sculpture, paintings and lots and lots of drawings. All of it is strange and ecologically prescient. Opens Feb. 21.

Walter Price has curated a show called Techniques of the Observer, at Greene Naftali, 508 West 26th St. It's probably not a drawing show, but it is notable that this young, promising African American painter is doing a show at this gallery. Closes March 9.

Notebook, 56 HENRY, 56 Henry St. A group exhibition of notebooks and notebook pages from many, many contemporary artists including Monica Baer, Kerstin Bratsch, Mary Heilmann, Matthew Higgs, Cady Noland, and more. Opens February 9.

MARTY EISENBERG reminds me to remind all of us not to forget to stop in at DIA Chelsea on 22nd St. and see "To the People of New York City," an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Blinky Palermo. The front room is all paintings in the eponymous installation that was last shown in New York at DIA in 1987. The back room has drawings! Closes March 9.  (thank you Marty!)

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WHO ARE LOUISA SAROFIM AND JANIE C. LEE AND WHY ARE THEY BEING HONORED AT THE DRAWING CENTER'S 2019 GALA ON APRIL 24?

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WHO ARE LOUISA SAROFIM AND JANIE C. LEE AND WHY ARE THEY BEING HONORED AT THE DRAWING CENTER'S 2019 GALA ON APRIL 24?

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Houston native, Chair Emerita and life Trustee of The Menil Foundation, Louisa Stude Sarofim is a drawing collector and a titan of philanthropy in her home town and nationally.  Some of the institutions she supports include The Morgan Library, The National Gallery of Art, SITE Santa Fe, Smith College and Princeton University Art Museums, and The Drawing Center. She is a member of MoMA’s International Council, and is a trustee of the American Academy in Rome as well.

Born in Shreveport, LA, and based in Houston, Janie C. Lee has partnered with Louisa Sarofim in philanthropic activities centered around drawing. With Ms. Sarofim, Ms. Lee is a co-founder of the Menil Drawing Institute, a new building on the campus of the Menil Foundation in Houston dedicated to the collection and the study of drawings. In addition, Ms. Lee, with Ms. Sarofim donated more than 100 drawings to the Institute. This trove includes 15 drawings by Jasper Johns, dating from 1954 to 2012. Other notable names in the collection include drawings by Helen Frankenthaler, Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Lee Krasner, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, and Jackson Pollock; Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly; Frank Auerbach, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Joseph Beuys, Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, and Rachel Whiteread.

The Drawing Center's April 24th Gala, (which will also honor the artists Amy Sillman and Nathaniel Mary Quinn) promises to be a celebration of drawing the likes of which New York has not seen. To show your support of drawing as a medium, and TDC as an institution, become a member of the Benefit Committee by purchasing tickets or a table right here:

http://www.drawingcenter.org/en/drawingcenter/20/events/24/special-events/2191/2019-benefit-gala/

Anyone purchasing two tickets before Feb 22 will be added to the Benefit Committee automatically.

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TDC has historically created programs for emerging artists; i.e. promising, often young artists whose work has not become a part of the art marketplace. Thousands of artists have participated in  TDC residencies, group shows, charity auctions, and the like, and even though they might have "emerged" since their time with us, we still follow the progress of their careers. Here's one who is just finishing our residency program, and is already making waves (her work was recently acquired by Tate and she was in the last Berlin Biennale). She's called Johanna Unzueta (b. 1974, Santiago, Chile) and her monumental drawings are visionary in a way that conjures artists like Hilma af Klint. Here's an example of a recent one:

April, May 2016 NY. (2016) Watercolor, pastel, pencil on tinted paper 35 1/2 x  52"

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IS TRISHA DONNELLY THE BRUCE NAUMAN OF OUR MOMENT? 

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IS TRISHA DONNELLY THE BRUCE NAUMAN OF OUR MOMENT? 

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Trisha Donnelly has had a robust drawing practice, which, if not exactly secret, is not nearly as well known as her sculptures, videos and performances. They are related to these better known bodies of works, but they can also seem at first quite different in aspect. The best drawings, executed in pencil, are painstakingly and quite realistically rendered. They depict forms which can be hard to identify though they are definitely not abstract. Not unlike the forms in the videos she makes, which are conjured inside the camera, Donnelly's drawings don't so much represent something, as create something on paper. Many works are not titled, but they all have specific functions.

Her most recent exhibition that closed recently at Air de Paris consisted entirely of drawings, with the exception of a single floor sculpture. Below is a drawing from that show. It is an object floating in an atmosphere that may or many not be part of the gallery's architecture (note the overlap of figure to vertical line denoting the "wall" on which the figure sits). The form is unrecognizable, but somehow, not really abstract either. It is something; a shield, a torso, or a bit of both, and it is meant to function in the world, maybe by blocking or commanding space both real and imagined.

Donnelly has been accused of being intentionally obscure in her work. She doesn't see it that way, but she does admit to be very, very serious. "I am not so secretly extremely intense in all truth..." she wrote to me recently apropos of her drawings. Like Nauman, she doesn't just make art; she has a life project, in which every work she makes plays a role and has a logic inside the world she creates. Drawings for Donnelly are as important as her massive marble sculptures. In fact, to her, her drawings are sculptures.
This new one pictured below is part of a set of 11 drawings in plastic sleeves, and one sculpture featured at Air de Paris.

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GRACE WALES BONNER, BEN OKRI, DAVID HAMMONS, ARTHUR JAFA AND KERRY JAMES MARSHALL: the convergence of style

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GRACE WALES BONNER, BEN OKRI, DAVID HAMMONS, ARTHUR JAFA AND KERRY JAMES MARSHALL: the convergence of style

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There are trends in fashion, literature, contemporary art, but when fashion, literature and contemporary art converge and join forces, playing off and influencing one another, that's a zeitgeist!

Art representing the African diasporic experience is at the center of the American, and now European discourse, but it is interesting - and maybe important- to understanding that artworks Kerry James Marshall's paintings and Arthur Jafa's videos have been created in dialog with a rich carpet of innovation in literature, in music and even fashion that together, is taking American and European culture in exciting directions that reflect more of our real world experience.

Several recent exhibitions  have made this point. In New York, the writer Hilton Als' "God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin," (At David Zwirner on 19th St., closing Feb. 16) combines painting, film, music, and daily life to create a portrait of the literary powerhouse and influential American thinker, who was a strong, radically moral voice during the civil rights movement and beyond.

At London's Serpentine Sackler Gallery (closing February 16)
the very au courant fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner has curated  "A Time for New Dreams," an exhibition about her work as an artist/designer. Bonner juxtaposes her designs with examples of works by Kerry James Marshall, Arthur Jafa and David Hammons, all of whom she feels influenced her, as well as other artists, musicians, videographers and authors whose work across media and in concert with her point of view.

Shows like these are notable not only for their bold assertion that contemporary art is more accurately contemporary arts, but that it invites artists- in this case a British artist of color- to define and contextualize her own work, rather than be contextualized by the institution hosting the exhibition. The prestigious envelope of The Serpentine then, is used by Bonner as a viewing platform, rather than as the only context for her artistic vision.

An anecdote that shows how this kind of cultural synergy works, and how, hopefully, future art historians will understand the arts of the beginning of our millennium follows: Among other inspirations, Bonner cites the sartorial choices of David Hammons- (in a pink Indian linen scarf, a pork-pie hat and an ice cream linen suit and sandals the last time I saw him) as an inspiration for her fashion line. Hammons, who may or may not know Bonner, is a devotee of the Nigerian novelist Ben Okri. Okri, an admirer of Bonner, wrote the text panels for Bonner's Serpentine exhibition!

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/feb/02/grace-wales-bonner-im-a-fashion-designer-making-art-it-could-be-seen-as-silly

http://griotmag.com/en/grace-wales-bonner-heritage-and-hisotry-on-the-runway/

https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/ben-okri

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This month in museum-quality back room drawings...

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This month in museum-quality back room drawings...

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Peter Freeman has a doozy of a Robert Rauschenberg drawing in his back room. It's from 1958, and he reports that it is known to be the artist's first transfer drawing. That alone makes it important, though the date and the size of it do make one sit up and pay attention.

Robert Rauschenberg
A-Muse (1958)
Solvent transfer, graphite pencil, watercolor, and oil pastel
23 5/8 x 35 1/2" (60 x 90.2 cm)

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Dan Schutz. "Imagine Me and You," Friedrich Petzel 456 W. 18th St. (closes Feb. 23) Did you like it? Hate it? My opinion: A good painter, a good draftperson; I wonder about her subject matter. I know that there are passionate Schutzians amongst us, so let's discuss!