THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020 5
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Art 21
Ten days after 9/11, when people’s spirits desper-
ately needed a lift, PBS aired the first episode
of “Art in the Twenty-first Century,” a fly-on-
the-wall documentary series that bet (with all
due respect to Sister Wendy) that artists are the
best guides to their own work. Maya Lin, Sally
Mann, and Kerry James Marshall were among
those who welcomed cameras into their studios
for the first season. So did the sculptor Andrea
Zittel, whose functional sleeping pods in the
California desert now look like enviable spots
for social distancing. Today, after nine broadcast
seasons—a tenth arrives later this year—two
Peabody Awards, an Emmy nomination, and
many digital shorts produced for its Web site,
Art 21 is streaming more than five hundred
films. Subjects range from household names
(Marina Abramović and Ai Weiwei) to young
painters on the rise (Aliza Nisenbaum, Avery
Singer) to the Bay Area-based social-practice
artist Stephanie Syjuco, whose most recent proj-
ect was sewing COVID-19 masks for food-bank
volunteers, the families of medical workers,
and others in need. Art 21 also bundles its films
into visual “playlists,” with running times of
one to two hours; to combat cabin fever, watch
fourteen artists take to the open road in “En
Route.”—AndreaK. Scott (art21.org)
The Frick Online
Why does the art of what we term the Old
Masters have so much more soulful heft than
that of most moderns and nearly all of our
contemporaries? I think the reason is a routine
consciousness of mortality. Never mind the
explicitness of that time’s memento mori, all
the skulls and guttering candles. I am talking
about an awareness that’s invisible, but pal-
pable, in Rembrandt’s nights—his fatalistic
self-portrait in the Frick comes to mind. The
peculiarly intense insouciance of a Boucher or
a Fragonard—the sensuous frolics of France’s
ancien régime—protests, in favor of life, rather
too much. Young folk dallying at court provide
the sole but turbulent drama in “The Progress
of Love,” the museum’s marvellous suite of
Fragonard paintings. When we are again free
to wander museums, the objects won’t have
altered, but we will have, and the casualties
of the coronavirus will accompany us spec-
trally. Until, inevitably, we begin to forget,
we will have been reminded of our oneness
throughout the world and across time with all
the living and the dead. (The Frick is undergo-
ing renovations; next year, it will temporarily
relocate to the former Met Breuer. Guides
to Boucher, Fragonard, and Rembrandt are
available on the museum’s Web site.)—Peter
Schjeldahl (frick.org)
Gordon Parks
This great Black photographer, who was born
in Kansas to tenant farmers, chronicled Jim
Crow America with devastating insight. In
a 1942 portrait commissioned by the Farm
Security Administration, a government char-
woman holds a broom in front of an out-of-
focus American flag—an enduring emblem of
inequality. In another famous image, a lush
color scene from 1956, a chic Black woman
and a little girl stand outside a department
store, under a sign that reads “Colored En-
trance.” The pair face in the opposite direction
of the sign’s neon arrow—an unintentional
moment, perhaps, but a symbol of resistance
nonetheless. The particular focus of this “Vir-
tual Views” exhibition on MOMA’s Web site
is a moody, meditative photo essay titled “The
Atmosphere of Crime,” published in Life mag-
azine. Assigned in response to a purported
national crime wave, Parks’s investigation took
him to the streets of New York City, on raids
with Chicago cops, and to San Quentin prison,
during the execution of Thomas L. Johnston.
An illuminating video of a recent discussion
with the scholars Khalil Muhammad and Ni-
cole Fleetwood, moderated by Sarah Meister,
underscores the photographer’s complex depic-
tion of policing and incarceration—a view at
once critical and empathetic, which survived
the predictable narrative forwarded by his
white editors at the time and remains terribly
germane today.—Johanna Fateman (moma.org)
“Noplace”
The five artists in this exhibition at the P.P.O.W.
gallery work in the terrain between absurdism
and speculative fantasy. Although the gallery
offers an engaging facsimile on its Web site,
the show’s through-the-looking-glass quality is
best appreciated in person. Near the entrance,
Devin N. Morris’s arborlike construction of
found doors suggests a portal to the makeshift,
queer world of his art, which is also represented
by a second installation made of salvaged mate-
rials and a colorful, figurative painting. The col-
laborative duo Ficus Interfaith makes a striking
impression with an elongated riff on the Stars
and Stripes; the twelve-foot-long composition,
fashioned from inlaid terrazzo, feels at once
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND KARMA
“There is nothing you can see that is not a flower,” a haiku by Basho begins.
Karma, the enterprising gallery and bookstore in the East Village, takes
those words to heart in an uncommonly good summer show (through
Sept. 13) with a simple conceit: floral paintings by fifty-nine artists. The
gallerist Brendan Dugan is also an accomplished book designer (a cata-
logue, with essays by Hilton Als and Helen Molesworth, is coming soon),
and the visual intelligence of the exhibition, the flow and the syncopation
of images, delivers almost as much pleasure as the paintings themselves.
The arch melancholy of “Broken Flowers” (above), from 2020, a study in
opacity and transparency by the Finnish-born Parisian newcomer Henni
Alftan, becomes sharper and stranger in the intimate company of Susan
Jane Walp’s trance of a still-life—blueberries offset by a hollyhock blos-
som—from 2000, which opens into the lemon joys of a Peter Doig oil on
board, from 1989. Sometimes flowers mark mourning. In 2017, Jennifer
Packer painted a lush, nearly abstract arrangement in green, blue, and
gold, to honor Sandra Bland, who died in a Texas jail. The picture’s title
is as intensely simple as any haiku: “Say Her Name.”—Andrea K. Scott
AT THEGALLERIES
