THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER2, 2019 5
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“Garry Winogrand: Color”
Brooklyn Museum
Winogrand once defined a photograph as “what
something looks like to a camera.” Keep that
in mind when viewing this fiercely pleasur-
able, if somewhat flawed, show, consisting
mainly of hundreds of digitally projected Ko-
dachrome slides, most from the nineteen-sixties.
Winogrand, the all-time champion of street
photography, died in 1984, at the age of fifty-six.
He is most famous for his hyperkinetic shots
of unaware pedestrians, taken with high-speed
black-and-white film. The relatively long ex-
posures required by color film steered him
to subjects more static: people seated rather
than walking, or at a beach instead of on the
street. The problem here is that Winogrand
didn’t take digital images; he took color slides.
Sixteen sequences of big digitized images,
projected onto the walls of a long room, go
by at clips that pander to present-day atten-
tion deficits. Winogrand worked fast, but to
absorb the results takes time, first to register
the subjects and then to have the form and the
drama, the intelligence and the beauty, of his
vision sink in.—Peter Schjeldahl (Through Dec. 8.)“Urban Indian”
Museum of the City of New York
This concise exhibition, subtitled “Native New
York Now,” gives equal weight to memorabilia
and art works—from local flyers protesting the
Dakota Access Pipeline to “Hanging Out on
Iroquois and Algonquin Trails,” a mixed-media
sculpture by Pena Bonita, in which burlap bags
filled with shredded money and strings of beads
bear the names of New York City streets. In a
short film completed this year (and co-produced
by Rebecca Jacobs and Nate Lavey), Louis Mof-
sie discusses the Thunderbird American Indian
Dancers’ forty-first annual midsummer pow-
wow, at the Queens County Farm Museum, and
the evolution—and endurance—of traditional
dance forms. Ancestral craft meets feminist
experimentation in a quilt made by women from
the Onondaga Nation territory, upstate, for the
Spiderwoman Theatre, an indigenous-women’s
troupe founded in the nineteen-seventies. In a
1987 videotape, the poet Diane Burns, whose
parents were Chemehuevi and Anishinabe,
delivers a withering rebuke to settler-colonial-
ist landscapes as she strolls through desolate
stretches of the Lower East Side while reciting
her “Alphabet City Serenade,” drawing parallels
between Manifest Destiny and urban gentrifi-
cation.—Johanna Fateman (Through March 8.)Olive Ayhens
Bookstein
UPTOWN If the American modernist Florine Stett-
heimer had crossed paths with Greta Thunberg,
her paintings might resemble the colorful, com-
posite works of this Brooklyn-based artist, who
brings a charmer’s touch to climate concerns.
Ayhens has been working (mostly under the
radar) since the nineteen-seventies, when the
American Pattern and Decoration movement
held sway; its influence lingers in her recent
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND 47 CANALkaleidoscopic paintings, where whimsy tends
In 2000, an autistic boy wandered across Hong Kong’s border into mainland
China and was never heard from again. In 1981, workers were buried alive
in quick-drying cement during the hasty construction of a film center in
the Philippines—a twenty-five-million-dollar boondoggle of the Marcos
regime. Between 1837 and 1887, hundreds of Seminole, Kiowa, Cheyenne,
and Apache people were incarcerated in a Colonial-era fort on the northeast
coast of Florida. These disparate histories haunt Cici Wu, Yason Banal,
and Sky Hopinka (respectively) in “Miffed Blue Return,” an engrossing
omnibus of moving-image works at the 47 Canal gallery (through Dec. 20).
Wu’s wistful 16-mm. film “Unfinished Return of Yu Man Hon” imagines
the disappeared boy as a grown wanderer of the in-between; in a grace note
of magical realism, he rides a ferry with a white cow. Banal’s installation
(pictured) conveys the noxious pageantry of the Marcoses’ art patronage
through a colorful cacophony of live feeds and closed loops. Hopinka’s
two-channel video “Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer”—pairing footage
of the sea, the fort, and the prisoners’ drawings with text, voice-over, and
a hypnotic score—is beautiful and quietly devastating.—Andrea K. ScottAT THEGALLERIES
to outstrip dread. In “Camelid in the City,” a
prehistoric mammal perches on the banks of
the East River, which is rendered as a flurry
of acid greens; the camel’s yellow-and-orange
hide echoes the glinting lights of the Manhat-
tan skyline in the distance. Ayhens favors pic-
torial games in which interiors and exteriors
flip; in the captivating watercolor “Downstairs
Deluge”—an endearingly wobbly grid made of
bridges and buildings, rippling currents and
clouds—it’s hard to tell whether the surging
water flanking a skyscraper is reflected in its
glass façade or flooding its floors.—Andrea K.
Scott (Through Dec. 20.)Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg
Bonakdar
CHELSEA Entering a gallery to encounter a field
of enormous painted epoxy flowers feels a
bit like landing on the outskirts of Oz—but
Dorothy’s poppies weren’t being assailed by
diabolical pollinating birds. In their first solo
show in New York since 2013, this Swedish duo
exhibits four of their phantasmagoric stop-mo-
tion animations, whose characters hail from a
strange, hand-modelled realm. (They’re ac-companied by hypnotic electronic scores.) In
one nonnarrative piece, titled “How to Slay a
Demon,” a train of monstrous lovers approaches
a supine woman, from whose point of view
the action is seen. The fluffy clouds in “This
Is Heaven” belie the attendant grotesquerie;
in one scene, a ghoulish protagonist plucks
piglets from a sow’s teat in order to nurse in
their place—a picture of fecundity, avarice, and
aggression typical of the show’s nightmarish
nursery-rhyme themes.—J.F. (Through Dec. 20.)Alina Szapocznikow
Hauser & Wirth
UPTOWN The radical final decade of this Polish
sculptor—who survived the Holocaust as a
teen-ager only to have her life cut short by
cancer, in 1973, at the age of forty-seven, while
living in Paris—is the subject of a sprawling,
revelatory show. (It’s a coda, of sorts, to MO-
MA’s lauded 2012 Szapocznikow retrospective.)
The vestiges of classical figuration surface in
fragmentary objects, which combine Surrealist
influence with a macabre strain of Pop and
often incorporate casts of her own body. A
group of haunting lamp sculptures reveals an