The Art of D. Dominick Lombardi: Deciphering the Unconscious
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.
MoreNew York Gallery, Elga Wimmer PCC, with: ‘Pink Dreams in a Land with No Name’
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.
MoreBroadway’s Sea Wall/A Life: Love and Loss on a Bare Stage
Sea Wall/A Life, two extraordinarily, powerful, one-act plays, presented in monologue form, are holding court at the Hudson Theatre on Broadway. Fueled by strong reviews, and the star power of film and stage actors, Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Strurridge, it is one of the most deeply moving productions currently gracing the stage here in New York City. With word-of-mouth religiously shouting hosannas! this starry-eyed production is already being touted (by those that tout) as a Tony contender in several categories, acting and direction (Carrie Cracknell) among them. Closing night is Thursday, September 26 and tickets are tight. Just Saying!
MoreSmithsonian AAM’s “Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965-1975,”
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!
More‘Love, Noël: The Songs and Letters of Noël Coward’—Elegance of Yesteryear
“There are probably greater painters than Noël. Greater novelists than Noël, greater librettists, greater composers of music, greater singers, greater dancers, greater comedians, greater tragedians, greater stage producers, greater film directors, greater cabaret artists, greater TV stars, and so on. If they are, they are fourteen different people. Only one man combines all fourteen different talents The Master, Noël Coward”— Lord Louis Mountbatten’s toast to Noël Coward on his 70th birthday.
More?Three Washington, D.C. exhibits: Women’s Suffrage at 100—Equal Rights Delayed
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.
More?New York’s Lincoln Theater with ‘The Rolling Stone’: Deadly Plight of Uganda’s Gays
While New York City recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising with much hoopla and an enormous traffic-stopping Gay Pride parade that went on well into the night, New York’s Lincoln Center Theater chose to feature the other side of the coin by mounting the American premiere of playwright Chris Urch’s The Rolling Stone. Sensitively directed by Saheem Ali – the play, an import from London – is scheduled to run through Sunday, August 25th.
More?D.C.’s Smithsonian with David Levinthal Photos: “American Myth & Memory”
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.
MoreNew York’s Playwrights Horizons: ‘A Strange Loop’—Revealing!
In the past year or three there have been a healthy number of beautifully crafted, wonderfully acted, and solidly produced black-centric plays both on Broadway and Off that have examined from every conceivable angle – historically, sociologically, and psychologically – what it means to be black in the United Sates, both past and present.
To joggle my mind as well as yours New York theatres have hosted Father Come Home From The Wars, Choir Boy, The House That Will Not Stand, Fabulation, The Color Purple, An Octoroon, American Son, Daddy, The Secret Life of Bees, The Slave Play (previewing on Broadway this coming September), and the still running The Rolling Stone, and Pulitzer Prize winning Fairview. Most all were favorably reviewed. However, not since A Strange Loop which is currently running thru July 28th at Playwrights Horizons have we come across a many faceted in your face gay male character like Usher (the extremely talented Larry Owens) who spares no detail, however raw, intimate, personal, scatological and sordid–and it is all of those and more–in the telling and showing of his life.
MoreNew York’s Laura Pels Theatre: ‘Toni Stone’ Knocks It Out of the Ballpark
April Matthis, as Toni Stone (1921-1996) the first woman to play professional baseball in the Negro League, is knocking it out of the ballpark every night at the Laura Pels Theatre through August 11, 2019.The play, lightly based on Martha Ackmann’s book “Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone,” is overwhelmingly inspirational, deeply humane, and totally moving.With Toni Stone, the bases are loaded with the crème de la crème of the theatrical world – from Lydia R. Diamond’s poetically crafted play to Tony Award-winning director Pam MacKinnon’s direction and the inventive choreography by Camille A. Brown – all of whose finely calibrated work radiate a deeply ingrained brilliance.
MoreCelebrating Fame in Black and White: Alfred Eisenstaedt and LIFE Magazine
Alfred Eisenstaedt was one of the four original photographers Henry Luce hired to launch LIFE Magazine in 1936. Born in Poland in 1898, Eisenstaedt became a professional photographer in the 1920s and ‘30s, working for the Associated Press to document the transformation of Europe. With the rise of Hitler, he immigrated to the United States in 1935, and would work for LIFE Magazine from its inception until its final publication in 1972. More than 90 of his photographs were LIFE covers, and over 2,500 of his photo essays were published by the magazine.
The November 5, 1965 LIFE featured Eisenstaedt’s elaborate photo essay on businesswoman/socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post, an occasion that has now inspired the Hillwood Museum to organize an exhibition centered both on that article and on Eisenstaedt’s work at LIFE–Mid-Century Master: The Photography of Alfred Eisenstaedt.
MoreSins of the Father
THE MINUTE I SAW HIM IN THE WAITING ROOM I knew this wasn’t going to be an easy case. Stefan was wearing sunglasses; he was slow to put down his magazine. Trudging several paces behind me, he hesitated at the threshold of my office, where he insisted that I choose which chair he should sit in. He waited to be interviewed.
MoreEditor’s Letter, June 2019: Towards a Critical Insurgency
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.
More?Washington’s Freer Gallery with Whistler’s Watercolors: a Rare Look
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.”
Geva Theatre Center’s ‘The Royale’: A Simple but Stunning Production
Virtually all of our leading contemporary repertory theaters now include non-traditional experimental techniques in staging not only original new work but also – even especially – to perform and reconsider revivals of historic classics. Canada’s great Stratford Festival now regularly gives us Shakespeare revivals with actors playing characters of the opposite sex, six or seven actors performing plays written to have a cast of more than 30 characters, and realistic people and animals played by puppets. Understandably, their audiences are sharply divided in response.
Stratford’s recent very popular and admired version of Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors” not only presented the required characters of the two sets of twin-brother masters and servants who confuse everyone they meet about which twin brother is which, but also cast women as male twins and men as women in most of the main roles. The multiple mix-ups got much amused approval; but I thought them to be just wrong and not confusing enough to have fooled Helen Keller. But I have to admit that my local theater is currently turning abstraction into a knockout punch.
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