Dear Friends,
I am giving a talk at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU this Thursday. If this topic seems interesting to you, you can register through the IFA main website.
This lecture examines the documentary photography of Lawrence N. Shustak and Alexander Alland, who at different historical moments portrayed Rabbi Wentworth Arthur Matthew and his Harlem congregation, known as the “Commandment Keepers.” A powerful advocate of the belief that African Americans were descendants of the ancient Israelites, Matthew drew inspiration from Marcus Garvey and articulated Ethiopian Hebrew identity as a pathway to both spiritual salvation and racial autonomy. While Alland’s 1940s images underscore Matthew’s project of constructing a distinct Ethiopian Hebrew identity, Shustak’s 1960s portfolio presents the congregation as embodying a fluid interweaving of Black and Jewish cultures. Considered together, their work illuminates shifting intersections of race, religion, and identity in New York over the course of three decades.
I hope to see you!
Sincerely,
Matt
CAPTIONS:
Alexander Alland, Wentworth A. Matthew, 1940. Gelatin silver print. 8 x 6 inches (image), 14 x
11 inches (sheet). Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History
and Culture.
Lawrence N. Shustak, Black Jews (New York: Lawrence N. Shustak, 1964). Portfolio of 12
mounted photographs. Mount: 11 × 8 7/16 inches, Image 8. The New York Public Library.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books
Division. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
I’m looking forward to Sheida Soleimani’s upcoming exhibition, Panjereh, opening June 17 at the International Center of Photography in New York. One of the many things I admire about her work is its dimensional, almost sculptural quality. Here are a few studio shots from 2015 that give a sense of what I mean.
To my wife on our 20th wedding anniversary, I feel like I’m the luckiest man alive. Thank you, you complete me, and here’s to much more happiness together! @bev_fishman
I’ve just returned from a magical trip to Finland courtesy of the Serlachius Museum in Mänttä, where I gave a keynote talk on Anselm Kiefer and environmental art. From the woods and lodgings around the museum, where the seminar was held, to the Eliel Saarinen-designed hotel at Helsinki’s central train station, every stop along the journey was eye opening.
Anselm Kiefer, Väinämöinen Ilmarinen, 2018, emulsion, oil, acrylic, shellack, rope and lead on canvas, 280 x 380 cm.
Serlachius Museum
Samira Elagoz and Z Walsh, You can’t get what you want but you can get me, 2024. Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma
Daido Moriyama, ACCIDENT 1: IMAGES OF A CERTAIN 7 DAYS / LONGEST WEEK OF 1968.
THE FINNISH MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Thank you: Pauli Sivonen, Tomi Moisio, and everyone else at the Serlachius Museum and Seminar.
Vija Celmins: Winter
Vija Celmins’s Winter at Matthew Marks Gallery is an intensely observed mix of realism and romanticism largely focusing on images of dark, snow-filled skies. Uncanny in their melancholy monochromy, these painted night scenes seem perfect allegories for our unmoored and turbulent moment. The gallery lists the works as “nine paintings, four sculptures, and one print,” but there is also a surprise video, which is equally haunting and disorienting. Like Celmins’s works in other media, the all-over video annihilates the division between realism and abstraction. Are we seeing the end of the world?
Call for Papers:
ART UNDER DURESS: DEAI STRATEGIES FOR TEACHING AND EXHIBITING ART UNDER GOVERNMENTAL AND INSTITUTIONAL CENSORSHIP
The United States has witnessed unprecedented attacks on academic freedom in the past year, directly impacting art exhibitions and classroom curricula. Bans on Critical Race Theory (CRT) are underway in Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, lowa, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, and Tennessee, with at least sixteen other states considering similar legislation. Eight states have passed anti-LGBTQ curricular laws: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Texas. These attacks on freedom of expression are not limited to the extreme right, as attacks from the left are also being observed. For instance, Hamline University dismissed a well-regarded contingent art historian for showing historically important depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, and the Art Institute of Chicago has received criticism for “straight-washing" the queerness of Felix Gonzalez Torres's work, along with several other institutions that downplay identity politics in explicitly political work.
This panel invites papers that analyze these programs of governmental and institutional censorship. Contributions from art historians, artists, designers, lawyers, and freedom of speech activists are welcome. We are seeking papers that offer strategies to maintain crucial conversations and advance visibility of diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusivity initiatives in our schools, museums, and cultural institutions.
Chairs:
John Corso-Esquivel, Davidson College and Matthew Biro, University of Michigan Art History Department
Submit by August 31:
go.davidson.edu/ArtUnderDuress
#ArtUnderDuress
#CensorshiplnArt
#DEAIStrategies
#ResistSilence
#ArtisticFreedom
#UnmuteTheMuted
#ArtAcademicFreedom #AgainstArtCensorship
#EquitylnArt
#ArtinCrisis
#DefendDiversity #felixgonzaleztorres
#crt
Glenn Ligon, Untitled (1992)
Etching, aquatint, spitbite, sugarlift on Rives BF. (4 works).
The text-based works of U.S. conceptual artists like Lawrence Weiner in the 1960s were intended to dematerialize art and undermine its status as a commodity. They were also resolutely formal. Glenn Ligon’s appropriation of conceptualism continues the movement’s formalism as well as its critique of the art market, but overlays these characteristics with social criticism. The appropriated texts comment on the traditionally black-and-white nature of the printed word, but also the structures of racial classification built into the English language. The black-on-white prints quote two sentences from Zora Neale Hurston’s essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" (1928); the black-on-black prints repeat a single passage from the prologue to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). The viewer’s struggle to read these texts as written by Ligon mirror the difficulties Black Americans have historically confronted when asserting their humanity in U.S. society. They also suggest the social constructedness of the concept of race.
On exhibition at University of Michigan Museum of Art, and tied into a course, “Contemporary Art and Resistance,” that Professor Joan Kee and I will be teaching in the fall.
#glennligon
Two large paintings face one another in the first room of The Barn, Luc Tuymans’s new show at David Zwirner Gallery. The first, The Barn, 2022, is a capital realist-like abstraction of a New England covered bridge, surrounded by foliage and water. A riot of domesticated American nature, the painting appears simultaneously overflowing and flat. Tuymans appropriated the image from a YouTube video using his iPhone, repainting the scene along with a predella of thumbnails depicting additional pictures stored on his device. The phone, Tuymans here suggests, has become a visual frame or a mode of seeing: a sometimes overwhelming storehouse of information that is simultaneously exciting and numbing.
Across from The Barn stands Creature, 2023, a nearly abstract image of a Ukrainian soldier—or is it two of them?—aiming a gun in a material, linearly-articulated environment. Here, the malformed, spotlit figure appears both menacing and in danger. The air seems to ripple with energy waves, and the mode of seeing that is evoked by the painting seems to be that of bystander videos or surveillance cameras. Digitally augmented vision, the painting suggests, is a means of surveillance, objectification, and control.
Throughout his show, Tuymans juxtaposes European and American images. The United States, allegorized by The Barn and Bob, 2022 (a trippy, cosmic rendition of TV-star Bob Ross on the set of his show, The Joy of Painting), evokes kitsch and alienation, but also energy and plenitude. The European world—as signified by Creature, and Bucha, 2022, a washed out scene of a forensic investigator examining a site of Russian war crimes—seems on the precipice of destruction.
#luctuymans
I am happy to announce that my latest review just appeared in the Brooklyn Rail. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Hito Steyerl, who, since the late 1990s, has developed a significant body of politically engaged art: a heterogeneous corpus of works that attempt to empower and collaborate with their audiences, while exploring the “posthuman” conditions towards which our worlds increasingly tend. Check it out in this month’s issue of the Rail.
#hitosteyerl
