THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019 9
ILLUSTRATION BY NHUNG LE
In 1984, a young photography student
named Lisa Spellman (pictured) opened
an ad-hoc gallery on Park Avenue South
and named it 303, for its address. (By
chance, it was also the room number
of a storied gallery founded by Alfred
Stieglitz in 1925.) As 303 evolved from
upstart to stalwart—its current home is
an elegant two-story building in the heart
of West Chelsea—it retained a renegade
air, evident in the wonderful anniver-
sary exhibition “303 Gallery: 35 Years”
(through Aug. 16). Works by thirty-two
artists (the painter Mary Heilmann’s
“Two Spot Charm,” from 1995, will
make you happy on sight) are joined by
cases filled with ephemera. Note a letter
to then Senator Joseph Biden, written
by Andrea Fraser, in 1987 (included in
a group show that year), a bull’s-eye of
institutional critique.—Andrea K. Scott
AT THEGALLERIES
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Julie Becker
MOMA PS
Becker was a Los Angeles artist in every
sense. Born and raised in the city, she made
its unglamorous structures and defining
mythologies the subjects of her idiosyncratic
work until her death, in 2016, at the age of
forty-three. The earliest piece in this fasci-
nating show (the artist’s first museum sur-
vey), titled “I Must Create a Master Piece
to Pay the Rent,” is the photographic series
“Interior Corners,” from 1993. Lurid, flash-
lit intersections of wallpaper and carpeting
evoke cropped views of crime scenes, film
sets, and vacated apartments. The images
are made even more compelling by a mystery
of their production: Becker shot both real
spaces and doll-house-size models, and it’s
hard to tell which are which. Her mazelike
installation “Researchers, Residents, a Place
to Rest,” from 1993-96, with two miniature
models of semi-furnished rooms at its cen-
ter, plays a similar game with shifts in scale.
(The rooms are unpopulated, but Becker
envisioned the children’s-book character
Eloise, and Danny Torrance, the little boy
from“The Shining,” living there.)“Whole,”
which Becker started in 1999, is her unfin-
ished magnum opus; it concerns her own
apartment, in a run-down building in Echo
Park. Composed of drawings, photos, and
video, it’s an unruly, fantastical rumina-
tion on gentrification.—Johanna Fateman
(Through Sept. 2.)
Mrinalini Mukherjee
Met Breuer
Vegetal, sexual, exquisite, and strange, the
fibre sculptures by this Indian artist, now
casting their spell on the museum’s third
floor, are so emphatically haptic that, in their
presence, you might stop thinking and just
feel what you see. At once fluid and rough,
and often taller than a tall human being,
the densely knotted works are made from
hemp or jute ropes, a laborious process that
yielded just a few pieces a year through the
nineteen-seventies and eighties. (The art-
ist’s later ceramics and bronzes are also on
view.) Dyed jungle greens, gloaming blues,
marigold yellows, and a frankly erotic array
of pinks, they suggest newly discovered ob-
jects of worship from some fecund alternate
world. Mukherjee—who died in 2015, at the
age of sixty-five, days after opening her first
major retrospective at home, at the National
Gallery of Modern Art, in New Delhi—makes
her overdue U.S. museum début.—Andrea K.
Scott (Through Sept. 29.)
“Nature: Design Triennial”
Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian
Design Museum
During a summer of record-breaking tem-
peratures, the endeavors of more than sixty
international design teams offer assurances
that, on some fronts, at least, the climate
crisis is being addressed with urgency and
ingenuity. This expansive, user-friendly ex-
hibition showcases an inspiring array of new
materials and fabrication techniques, from
the mosaic corn-husk veneers of the Mexican
designer Fernando Laposse to the algae-de-
rived polymer raincoat of the interdisciplin-
ary Brooklyn researcher Charlotte McCurdy,
a zero-carbon “Biocement” replacement for
fired bricks, and a floor lamp powered by bac-
teria. The broad theme of nature allows for
the inclusion of some gimmicky, unsettling
uses of biotech (such as a gown of glowing
silk, the result of worm eggs that have been
injected with jellyfish DNA), along with
critiques of such engineering. “BioMess,”
a conceptual work by Oron Catts and Ionat
Zurr, presents natural-history specimens in
luxury display cases, the better to examine
what the duo terms “DNA chauvinism” and
the fetishization of life-forms. The most
impressive objects here are the models and
prototypes with the most far-reaching appli-
cations. The elegant “Warka Water Tower,”
made from bamboo, netting, and rope, is
designed to collect potable water from dew,
fog, and rain while also providing a canopied
space for people to gather.—J.F. (Through
Jan. 20.)
“Whitney Biennial 2019”
Whitney Museum
You can’t accuse this exhibition—call it the
Post-Traumatic Stress Edition of the eighty-
seven-year-old ritual event—of lacking cur-
rency. Its mood runs to petrified anxiety
and halfhearted defiance: artists, with their
sensitive antennae, have picked up the worst
of the maddening static. Thus Kota Ezawa’s
vast projected animations of football players
kneeling to the soundtrack of a dirgelike na-
tional anthem, and Carissa Rodriguez’s slow
video pans inside the punishingly luxurious
homes of ultra-rich collectors in New York
and California. The cause of all the anguish
is obvious: Trump. The predominant effect
is one of creative entropy, a defensive hud-
dling in political or coterie formations that
are pointedly indifferent when not hostile to
outsiders. If politics is about winning power
through persuasion, much of the art at hand
hardly qualifies as political. Instead, it sug-
gests the virulence of the classic American
malaise: loneliness, the toxic by-product of
freedom that generates ad-hoc, fragile com-
munities among people who have escaped
conventional backgrounds and who, after
dreaming of a cosmopolis, wake up atomized.
My spirits were revived on the museum’s
sixth-floor outdoor terrace by a suite of hi-
larious figure sculptures by Nicole Eisenman,
who, at the venerable age of fifty-four, comes
off as the show’s sole Old Master.—Peter
Schjeldahl (Through Sept. 22.)
Curtis Davis
White Columns
CHELSEA Breadbox-size constructions coated
in thick layers of acrylic paint, as if dipped
in cookie icing, have a curiously magnetic
presence in this Cincinnati-based artist’s
first New York solo show (presented in
collaboration with the nonprofit arts or-
ganization Visionaries + Voices). Arranged
on utilitarian tabletop platforms, Davis’s
sculptures, composed of humble materials—
rocks, scrap wood, pinecones—have simple
silhouettes that recall modernist maquettes
and architectural models. The vaguely pro-
pulsive, matte-green “Tree Log” might be
the star of the show, resting casually atop
a piece of warped cardboard. The artist’s
small, scratchy flower paintings are a little
less wonderful, but they succeed as charm-
ing, understated foils to Ed Baynard’s pris-
tine watercolor compositions of vases and
blooms, which are the subject of a concurrent
s h ow.—J.F. (Through Sept. 14.)
