12 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019
© ZILIA SÁNCHEZ / COURTESY GALERIE LELONG & CO., NEW YORK
“Soy Isla” is the title of a buoyant retrospective of Zilia Sánchez at El
Museo del Barrio (through March 22), and, indeed, a trio of islands—
Cuba, Manhattan, Puerto Rico—shaped the career of this soulful
hybridist, who is finally in the spotlight she has so long deserved. (The
show arrives after a triumphant run at the Phillips Collection, in Wash-
ington, D.C.) Born in Havana in 1926, Sánchez lived in Manhattan for
a few years, in the early nineteen-sixties, where her efforts shifted from
competent, earthy abstractions, inflected by Art Informel (seen early in
the exhibition), to radical shaped canvases, which she has continued to
refine for the past fifty years in her longtime home of San Juan. These
pared-down bicolor symmetries, which protrude and recede—imagine a
Rorschach test co-designed by Lee Bontecou and Ellsworth Kelly—are
at once carnal and cosmic. Not exactly paintings but not really sculptures,
they float something new, in a restrained palette of black, white, peach,
and fathomless blues. The untitled canvas above, from 2000, is on view
through Jan. 17 at Galerie Lelong, in an exhibition of Sánchez’s more
recent works.—Andrea K. ScottINTHEMUSEUMS
polyethylene, aluminum, and steel. Suspended
from the ceiling, the works initially suggest
alien pods on the verge of hatching, but, when
viewed up close, their torsolike forms are more
mammalian than extraterrestrial. (The asso-
ciation is underscored by the show’s title, “
Animals.”) They’re mostly transparent—with
occluded areas of bright colors, patterning,
and opaque shapes, including a riff on the Nike
swoosh—but these qualities don’t outweigh the
corporeal references. Moss exploits the viscous,
membranous potential of her plastic mate-
rials to emphasize interior space; the pieces
contain other sculptural elements, like bodies
housing organs. The addition of hand-scrawled
texts—“alarm alarm,” “making contact”—can
strike angsty or saccharine notes when viewed
straight on, but, from other angles, they gain a
murky dimension or a sardonic edge. Moss’scurious objects invite, even demand, three-
hundred-and-sixty-degree consideration.— J. F.
(Through Jan. 26.)Matthew Wong
Karma
DOWNTOWN In this Canadian painter’s two-part
show “Blue”—titled for both its palette and its
melancholic undertow—moonlit landscapes
and interiors are rendered with hypnotic
pointillism, rhythmic stripes, and seamlessly
blended areas. The effect is both crisp and
somnolent. (One gallery is filled with large
canvases; the other space, on the same block,
presents small works on paper.) Wong wore his
influences on his sleeve: the dramatic vista of
“Starry Night,” from 2019, nods unabashedly
to van Gogh, with its turbulent sky over a bu-
colic village, though it is more restrained and
methodical than its famous precursor. Painted
from memory and inspired by walks in Sic-
ily with his mother, Wong’s unpeopled noc-
turnes often feature streamlike paths, serenely
winding their way to a vanishing point on the
horizon. Wong died in October, at the age of
thirty-five, making this transporting body of
work from his brief blue period a tragic swan
song.—J.F. (Through Jan. 5.)“Otherworldly”
Parsons School of Design
DOWNTOWN Performa, the three-week triennial
of live-action art, ended last month, but its
spirit endures in this marvellous adjacent show,
organized by the art historians Francesca Gra-
nata and Charlene K. Lau. A concise selection
of costumes and videos unites three shamanic
New York-based performers whose medium is
masquerade. Rammellzee, who died in 2010,
at the age of forty-nine, is a cult legend—a Far
Rockaway native and a linchpin of the graffiti
scene of the nineteen-eighties, his pantheon of
alter egos (Gasholeer, Crux the Monk, Vain)
inhabited handmade junk-yard-chic costumes
so elaborate that they could be Afrofuturist
robot replacements for the Big Chiefs in a
Mardi Gras parade. Machine Dazzle (who
was profiled in this magazine by Hilton Als,
in 2018) bends gender and genre in wearable
sculptures so creatively realized (and politi-
cally pointed) that they leave no question that
drag is high art. Narcissister—surely the only
masked avant-gardist to be promoted to the
next level on “America’s Got Talent”—steals
the show in a videotaped performance of her
2016 piece “Forever Young,” which compresses
a woman’s path from cradle to grave into five
comic, heartbreaking minutes.—Andrea K. Scott
(Through Dec. 15.)1
THETHEATREA Christmas Carol
Merchant’s House Museum
One reason for the popularity of “A Christ-
mas Carol” is that you can present it in many
ways. This season, for instance, New Yorkers
can see it padded with lengthy backstories
and a star-studded cast on Broadway, or in a
one-man show at the Merchant’s House Mu-partial reconstruction of the frieze. Charcoal
rubbings of thirty-two carvings (housed in
Aleppo, Paris, Baltimore, and Berlin, as well
as in New York) are arranged to represent
their original placement on the palace exte-
rior. These rough, dark imprints render the
imagery—of mythological creatures, hunters,
and trees—shadowy and semi-abstract, an apt
visual metaphor for the frieze’s history and
the mystery of its missing elements.—Johanna
Fateman (Through Jan. 18.)
Ragen Moss
Donahue
DOWNTOWN The Los Angeles sculptor follows
up her appearance in the recent Whitney Bi-
ennial with an intriguing new series in acrylic,