Will Arbery’s latest play, Heroes of the Fourth Turning, having been extended two times by popular demand, is now running Off-Broadway through Sunday, November 17, at New York’s Playwrights Horizons. With more religious, personal, and political exposition (read talk) than many a mind can absorb at one sitting, Heroes of the Fourth Turning is essentially a snapshot of the current divisive state of affairs in this country. It is a play that not only digs deep but demands one’s fullest attention. In short, this is not a play that one can sit back, relax, and let it gently waft over you.
Patrick Dougherty is motivated to work with stick materials because of increased massive urbanization and the destruction of forests all over the United States. Knowing that sticks have been a foundation for human survival across cultures and throughout time –being used for building shelters, ladders, and tools for hunting in addition to keeping warm and cooking—he finds them a universal material for his work. Since the early 1980s Dougherty has been fabricating huge environmental installations that he calls Stickworks. The majority of his large, quirky and temporary pieces take approximately three weeks to construct and each monumental sculpture is distinctly unique. Prior to starting a work he takes time getting to know the milieu in which it will be created, oft visiting the place several times prior to its actual construction. The installation’s final shape results from Dougherty’s observations about the overall locale, the interaction of the volunteers in the community who help build the work, as well as the specificity of the site where it is erected.
In the late fifties my parents purchased a 1956 edition of the American Peoples Encyclopedia. I vaguely remember their being stressed about affording the encyclopedias, since my family had just moved into a home my father built himself, and we didn’t have much money left over, even for furniture. Despite his trepidations over the purchase price, my father carefully measured and built a bookcase for the encyclopedias so they would be safely stored until their future use. One day, when I was about three or four years old, I pulled down one of the books, opened it, and saw an image of Picasso’s anti-war masterpiece, Guernica (1939).
Whistling Bird, 1998, Wood, acrylic and plastic laundry soap bottle, 16.5 x 17 x 13.5 inches
At that time I had
no idea what I was looking at, but when I saw the image, a painting that
expressed the collateral damage of the Spanish Civil War in one Basque town as
an abstracted event, I was mesmerized. Right then and there, I knew on some
deep level that I was face to face with a most significant and meaningful
picture, not only based on the feeling I got from it, but that it was found in
one of those very important books that seemed to both disturb and enhance my
family’s lives. Later, I must have visited that painting, then located at the
Museum of Modern Art, at least twenty times before it was sent back to Spain in
1981. I cherished every moment I spent with that painting, as it taught me so
much about the power of art.
On
view at Elga Wimmer PCC, the exhibition “Pink Dreams in a Land with No Name,”
curated by Roya Khadjavi, presents nineteen visual art works comprised of twelve
mixed media pieces and nine laser cut canvas collages, created by Iranian
born artists Sara Madandar and Shahram Karimi, who both currently reside in the
U.S. The show explores the strategies the artists have
conjured in order to come to terms with their experiences as immigrants living
a demanding cross-cultural existence, intensified by the anti-immigration political
climate in the U.S. and the social constraints inherent in Iran. Through the creative process of confronting, sorting,
and clarifying painful memories and impulses, elucidating notions of place, nation,
gender and self, the artists forge the essence of their inner identities and
current personas, in works that speak to the feelings and difficulties of
displaced people worldwide.
In
a time when exhibitions about gender, race and politics have become repetitive,
one is habituated to seeing political art in museums and galleries. Despite the prevalence of such shows, few offer
much depth beyond routine media coverage or reveal substantive significant
works of art. The poignant survey
titled “Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965-1975,”
organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum is an
exception to political shows not only because of the extraordinary selection of
115 works by 58 visionary artists of the time but also because of the diversity
of the art and artists. The inclusion of
African-Americans, Asian American, Latinos and many women artists is admirable!
In a letter written to her husband John on March 31, 1776, Abigail Adams enjoined him to “remember the ladies” as the Founding Fathers defined the rights of Americans under independence. “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands,” she continued, for women did not want to be “bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”
Adams and his cohort
didn’t abide by Abigail’s words, and even as we currently celebrate the
centennial of the 19th Amendment’s passage this year—and ratification next
summer—Suffrage remains but a landmark in the ongoing fight for equal pay and
equal rights for women.
The
Smithsonian American Art Museum’s exhibition “American Myth & Memory, curated
by Joanna Marsh features the uncanny fictional photographs by American
photographer David Levinthal. Born in
San Francisco, California, in 1949 he was shaped by the United States ‘Golden
Age’ of television and the proliferation of commercial advertising during the prosperous
economy of the 1950s and 1960s.
Editor’s Note: Recently, a number of young art critics were asked to discuss the particular challenges contemporary art writers face, including student debt, material precariousness, an oversaturated job market, a general lack of editorial attention or guidance, the prevalence of online publishing, and more. Panelists presented in partnership with the School of Visual Arts (SVA), their BFA in Visual & Critical Studies and MFA in Art Writing. Among the presenters was, Will Fenstermaker, an editor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and an associate editor at the Brooklyn Rail. His comments at that New York City event, presented here as a Guest Editorial, consider what possibilities exist for art criticism in our moment.
A few weeks ago, we were given prompts for our opening remarks.
One was the question, “Do you think there is a crisis in the field of art
criticism?” I first learned that criticism was in crisis when I was enrolled at
the MFA Art Criticism & Writing program at SVA (School of Visual Arts) in
New York City.
Gilded Age industrialist Charles Lang Freer met artist James
McNeill Whistler in London in 1890. Whistler was an American expatriate artist
who had reinvented himself in the previous decade after suffering a serious fallout
with his chief patron, Frederick Leyland, over Whistler’s resplendent but
over-the-top design for Leyland’s “Peacock Room.”
The Peacock Room, designed by James McNeill Whistler for shipping magnate Frederick Leyland in 1876 More
The Smithsonian’s Freer/Sackler Museum has opened a stunning exhibition that showcases the Empresses of China’s long-lived Qing Dynasty (1644-1912). A collaboration with the Peabody Museum and Beijing’s Palace Museum, “Empresses of China’s Forbidden City” is intended to address the neglected history of these women: the press release argues that “male officials who wrote Qing court history recorded very little” about the Empresses’ activities, and this exhibit is meant to tell the little known stories of how these women lived and how they influenced politics and international diplomacy.
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