6 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST 5 &12, 2019
BOB ADELMAN, PEOPLE WALL, WORLD’S FAIR, NEW YORK, 1965; COURTESY THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM; © BOB ADELMAN ESTATE
Summer is not a season of solitude. It’s a time for barbecues in back yards,
crowds at Coney Island, and campers in bunks. The Morgan Library &
Museum observes togetherness with a dazzle of pictures and photo-based
oddments, in a small sprawl of a show titled “Among Others: Photography
and the Group” (through Aug. 18). Focussed it’s not, as it ranges from a
Civil War-era salt print of medics gathered on a hillside in a Union camp,
by Mathew Brady, to a keepsake metal wastebasket embellished with the
faces of Presidents, manufactured in honor of Richard M. Nixon around
1970, to a 1981 lineup of the punk band the Clash and some friends, by Amy
Arbus. Longtime readers of this magazine may spot a familiar face in the
open pages of a 1950 high-school yearbook from Shillington, Pennsylvania:
John Updike was on the debate team. (The town inspired the setting of his
breakout novel, “Rabbit, Run.”) Best of all are the compilations of anony-
mous snapshots of baseball teams, burlesque troupes, trick-or-treaters, and
human pyramids—joyful portraits of life as a group effort.—Andrea K. ScottINTHEMUSEUMS
1
A RT
Fred W. McDarrah
Museum of the City of New York
McDarrah, who died in 2007, was the first staff
photographer of the Village Voice. His beat was
Manhattan, and his photographs showed a
maze of streets and ideas snaking their way
down to the Hudson and the East River, streets
filled with so many stories that I still see in
black-and-white because of his pictures. He
initially became known for capturing the start
of the Beat scene—a new world, filled with
that era’s youth, all those cigarettes and tough
attitudes that were somehow O.K. with the
immigrant families in the tenements near the
Café Wha?. Both before and after he and his
wife, Gloria, became parents, McDarrah was
interested in the city’s improvised families,
how New Yorkers take up with one another
and forge living and uncomfortable bonds that
last for a night or forever. Those alliances are at
the heart of his pictures of gay life in the city’s
pre- and post-Stonewall days, when things
were on the verge of change. But that was long
ago, before Manhattan started to heave at its
center, as it struggled to contain many people
and institutions that would have disturbed
McDarrah; he was a wanderer who loved New
York, but a New York based on creativity and
freedom rather than on commerce.—Hilton Als
(Through Dec. 1.)“Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion”
Brooklyn Museum
The French designer, who turned ninety-seven
last month, is best known for his streamlinedspace-age designs. His bright faux-utili-
tarianCosmocorpscollection, introduced
in 1964, was an obvious inspiration for the
originalStar Trekuniforms. But, as imprac-
tical as some of Cardin’s designs might have
been (helmets with Plexiglas face shields, an
A-line sheath with grommeted cutouts at the
breasts), his forward-thinking vision, show-
cased on brown mannequins throughout this
edifying retrospective, still comes across as
inclusive and wearable. In 1959, Cardin was
the first-ever couturier to launch a ready-to-
wear collection. His sculptural garments from
subsequent decades, meant to be layered over
body stockings, are customizable statements
that were compatible with both modesty and
freedom of movement. In Cardin’s geomet-
ric silhouettes and cutting-edge fabrics, one
can spot the roots of contemporary fashion
trends, from Eileen Fisher’s fluid staples to
athleisure wear, and his metal-collared eve-
ning dresses and oversized necklaces might
mark the birth of a now ubiquitous fashion
formula: chunky modernist hardware plus
black fabric equals effortless chic. The show
ends, appropriately for a man consumed with
the race for space, in a room that suggests an
intergalactic disco, installed with highlights
from his evening-wear collections.—Johanna
Fateman (Through Jan. 25.)“Do You Love Me?”
P. P. O .W.
CHELSEA These recent works by six artists—
which coalesce around the messy theme of
desire—are strong without exception. The
subject is brooding in the hands of Sophia
Narrett (whose Boschian embroidered piece
“Wishes” is set in a haunted Victorian man-
sion) and Martine Gutierrez (seen with
mannequin doppelgängers in eerily erotic
self-portraits). The photographs of Elliott
Jerome Brown, Jr., are studies in intimacy’s
atmospherics; he captures the nape of a neck
and a domestic interior with the same tender
gaze. The painter Gerald Lovell also dotes
upon his subjects—his impasto “Kiante and
Charletta” conveys the easy, natural connec-
tion of a young couple, whom he portrays in a
bucolic, natural setting.—J.F. (Through Aug. 9.)Sam Gilliam
Flag Art Foundation
CHELSEA Twelve large vertical paintings on
paper hang, vibrant against dark walls, in
this concise and elegant show of the Wash-
ington, D.C.-based artist’s new works. Gil-
liam is known for his tactile approach to
abstraction: in the late nineteen-sixties, he
began to drape, fold, and rumple unstretched
canvases, a provocation against color-field
painting’s then dominant strain of soak-and-
stain formalism. Although the artist presses
his new, handsomely striped compositions
flat, they maintain a corrugated sense of
depth through the process of being pleated
and stained. Their bleeding, pooling, and
marbleized surfaces—in colors that are by
turns murky, verdant, and fiery—are charm-
ing foils to their geometries. These untitled
pictures are unarguably abstract, but they
have pleasant affinities with flags, patchwork
quilts, tall thickets of grass, and stained-
glass windows. (On Aug. 10, an exhibition