photography

Jennifer Lantzas and New York’s Arsenal Gallery Experience—’Natural Impact’

The Arsenal Building. (Daniel Avila/NYC Parks). Located at 64th Street and Fifth Avenue in Central Park, the Arsenal is the NYC Parks headquarters, and one of two buildings within the park’s borders that predate the park itself. (image: NYC Parks)

Jennifer Lantzas is one of those very important people you never hear enough about, someone who helps to fulfill our cultural and aesthetic needs at a time when urban living can be a bit challenging and at times overwhelming. As the Deputy Director of Public Art for NYC Parks. Ms. Lantzas is responsible for managing temporary public art exhibitions in city parks throughout the five boroughs, which includes such events as artist workshops, lectures and film screenings. Parks are our most important city refuge. They bring us back to a place of calm, when we can experience a slice of nature amidst the calamity of city life. By adding art carefully and selectively in our many beautiful parks, we can achieve a further enhancement of the spirit at a time when we need it most.More

David Hockney at The Met 5th Avenue: “Intoxicating Exuberance”

David Hockney, A Bigger Splash (detail), 1967. Acrylic on canvas. Tate, purchased 1981. © David Hockney. Photo © Tate, London, 2017

While described as a retrospective in eight galleries with just 60 paintings, 21 portrait drawings and five of his ground-breaking “Joiner” photo collages the David Hockney exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met 5^th Ave.) is a bit of a tease.

It has been installed by Ian Alteveer, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Met, which collaborated on the exhibition with Tate Britain and the Pompidou Center in Paris. Through February 25 it remains on view in New York.More

Book Review: Matthew Hahn, ‘The Animated Marx Brothers’—A Look at Humor’s Social Value

Immersed in wintery gloom and headlines of doom, perhaps it’s time for us to take a deep breath and remind ourselves to laugh! Humor –remember that?!–is the perfect prescription for sanity.

From slapstick to Seinfeld, America’s popular culture has always embraced humor. Composers of the classic American songbook extolled happiness in such songs as “Make ‘Em Laugh”, which Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed wrote for Singin’ in the Rain. Who can forget Donald O’Connor’s romp (left) while singing, “You start off by pretending you’re a dancer with grace,/You wiggle till they’re giggling all over the place,/And then you get a great big custard pie in the face,/Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em laugh, make ‘em laugh!”More

New York Gallery, Lichtundfire with ‘Counterpoints to the Narrative’

Martin Weinstein, “Kenoten, October Evenings,” 2016, acrylic on multiple acrylic sheets, 27 x 20 3/4″.

Counterpoints to the Narrative is on view until the end of this month at Lichtundfire. It provides a thoughtful exploration of contemporary mediums, color theory, and depth of field, featuring three artists who engage unique materials to bring an idiosyncrasy of observation in traditional approaches to balance and color. The exhibition is a revelation on more than one level from its curator Dominick Lombardi; and Lichtundfire, a gallery I have come to admire as sage to the world of objective theory through its exploration of new approaches in the rapport of material to expression.More

Nashville’s Frist Center for the Visual Arts with ‘Phantom Bodies: The Human Aura in Art’

www.artesmagazine.com — Adam Fuss (British, b. 1961). Untitled, 2006. Unique Cibachrome photogram, 40 x 30 in. Courtesy of the artist and Cheim & Read, New York. © Adam Fuss.

Located just a few blocks from the pulsing retail heart of America’s country music capital and its cathedral, the original Grand Ole Opry’s Ryman Auditorium, in Nashville, Tennessee, the Frist Center for the Visual Arts is at the crossroads of the contemporary art scene. Not a collecting museum in the traditional sense, the Center nevertheless manages to offer a wide variety of exhibitions—everything from Italian classic fashion design to Michelangelo drawings. Their goal, according to Ellen Pryor, Director of Communications, is to “’keep the wake churning behind the tugboat,’ adhering to an exhibition philosophy aimed at new and expanding audiences in a changing demographic.” With that objective in mind, the current exhibition, third in a series about the human body in contemporary art organized by Frist Center Chief Curator, Mark Scala, Phantom Bodies: The Human Aura in Art includes provocative artworks that address themes of trauma, loss and transformation. xxxxxMore

Smithsonian American Art Museum with Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty

“Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty” is the first museum retrospective to be organized since the master photographer’s death in 2009. Drawn from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s extensive collection of Irving Penn photographs, the exhibition spotlights 146 photographs that describe the full arc of the artist’s entire career, from his early Surrealist-influenced work, to the modernist icons for which he is best known, to the iconoclastic late work that both incorporates and renounces fashion. The exhibition features 100 images recently donated by the Irving Penn Foundation, including several that are previously unseen or never exhibited. xxxxxMore

New York Hall of Sciences, “October Waves: Photography by Sandra Gottlieb”

The New York Hall of Sciences, in Queens, presents Sandra Gottlieb’s powerful 2013 photographic series “October Waves,” curated by Marcia Rudy. Twenty-five large scale photographs (30 x 40”) and five smaller scale close-up shots feature images of pristine waves with patterns of foam and strongly moving undercurrents in an homage to the ocean’s majesty and its ever changing inexorable might. xxxxx More

‘Mangle Boards of Northern Europe’: Scholarly Examination of an Overlooked Folk Art Form

Surprisingly, the term “mangle” is not unfamiliar to me. As a young man, I would deliver our household laundry to a commercial cleaners at an old brick factory on the edge of town. The building was always sweltering—winter or summer—as heat and steam escaped from windows and ducts into the cool air above the swift river cascading beside the building. One distinctive feature of the scene was their phalanx of manglers: large, flat ironing machines with rotating, heated rollers that pulled in and pressed bed sheets and other large, flat fabrics in a continuous action. Through my youthful eyes, these apocalyptic wringer-like devices appeared equally poised to “mangle” their subservient operators as anything their vulnerable hands might feed into them. xxxxxxMore

Washington’s Phillips Collection and Its 20th C. Photography Collection: ‘American Moments’

The Phillips Collection is a lovely alternative to Washington, D.C.’s massive museums strung along the National Mall. Founded by Duncan Phillips in 1921, this private museum is nestled among row houses and restaurants in the vibrant Dupont Circle neighborhood. Known as America’s first museum of modern art, the Phillips today continues its founding vision to be known as an “intimate museum combined with an experiment station.” xxxxxxMore

Elga Wimmer PCC with “Resonance and Memory: The Essence of Landscape”

The exhibition at the New York City gallery, Elga Wimmer PCC, “Resonance and Memory: the Essence of Landscape,” organized by Katharine T. Carter & Associates and curated by Robert Curcio, displays eight distinctive artists whose fresh perspective on landscape reinvigorates the genre by infusing it with issues that span time, real space, digital intervention, and altered observed reality. This diverse show includes paintings, sculpture, digital drawings, photography and glass works by Kathleen Elliot, Sandra Gottlieb, J.J. L’Heureux, John Lyon Paul, Rebeca Calderón Pittman, Gerry Tuten, Gail Watkins and Martin Weinstein.