THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020 7
COURTESY METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART /
© THE JACOB
AND GWENDOLYN KNIGHT LAWRENCE FOUNDATION / ARS
Who made America great when America began making itself? That
question is at the heart of an exhibition of exquisite and harrowing
paintings by Jacob Lawrence, now on view at the Met (through Nov. 1).
Organized by the Peabody Essex Museum, the show reunites the twenty-
six extant panels of Lawrence’s thirty-part cycle “Struggle: From the
History of the American People,” created between 1954 and 1956,
which illuminates episodes from the country’s foundational years, from
the Revolutionary War to the construction of the Erie Canal. Transcen-
dentally rendered in tempera on board—in an earthy palette of brown,
blue, mustard, and green, almost always violently disrupted by red—each
work compresses the dynamic sweep of a history painting into a modest
twelve by sixteen inches. Unsung American heroes are Lawrence’s ulti-
mate subject. In the tenth panel, “We Crossed the River at McKonkey’s
Ferry.. .” (above), he relays the story of George Washington crossing
the Delaware River, replacing the figure of one triumphant general with
a collective of anonymous, wave-battered soldiers.—Andrea K. Scott
INTHEMUSEUMS
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Katherine Bradford
This resourceful painter’s online exhibition,
on the Canada gallery’s Web site, is a studio
visit of sorts: a glimpse into Bradford’s scaled-
down workspace and her vibrant, if pensive,
output during a mandatory fourteen-day quar-
antine in her Maine home. A photograph from
early April, with snow visible through a big
kitchen window, documents a whirlwind of ac-
tivity: a table covered in velvety paintings on
paper. Echoing the themes of her much larger
canvases, these small works present soft-focus
figures—she favors swimmers—in colorful
dream worlds. A nod to the pandemic appears
in the form of a Red Cross nurse, standing
alone in the night. But it’s “Lap Sitters,” an
orange, yellow, and blue composition, that is
the keystone of Bradford’s lockdown series. A
strange hybrid—equal parts chair and human
being—appears in profile, embracing a seated
woman, in whose lap sits a spectral figure. In
an accompanying video, Bradford explains
that the painting is a meditation on the sym-
bolic space of a mother’s lap—exactly the kind
of place, she explains, “where you want to
be during a pandemic.”—Johanna Fateman
(canadanewyork.com)
William Scott
William Scott dreams of the future, of “Beau-
tiful Peace on Earth,” as he titled the video
that introduces his inspired new show, at
Ortuzar Projects. The piece, made in 2013,
reimagines the “Star Wars” villain Darth
Vader—played by Scott, in an impressive
hand-fashioned mask—as a gentle champion
of urban landscape, an Afrofuturist St. Fran-
cis, patron saint of pigeons. Inside the main
gallery are nineteen of the dynamic acrylic
paintings, on canvas and paper, that have
earned the fifty-seven-year-old Bay Area art-
ist an international following, from MOMA
to the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris. Since 1992,
Scott has worked out of a studio at Creative
Growth, a nonprofit center in Oakland for
the self-taught, whose imaginations are un-
restricted by art-world dictums and fads. This
is not to suggest that Scott is oblivious to
pop culture: Janet Jackson and Diana Ross
appear in his crew of time travellers, ready
to board—or perhaps delivered by—U.F.O.s
in a bright future, in which sci-fi and Sunday
church socials go hand in hand.—Andrea K.
Scott (ortuzarprojects.com)
Storm King
This marvellous sculpture park with a metal-
band-worthy name—some five hundred acres
in Cornwall, New York, hosting roughly a
hundred art works—has reopened to visitors
with timed tickets. Few installations in this
pandemic summer are new—the park’s chang-
ing light, breezes, and theatre of clouds will do
for novelty. Some installations are vista-domi-
nating, including two maximum-sized stabiles
by art’s foremost bejeweller of air, Alexander
Calder, and arrays of mostly steel elements
by Mark di Suvero, which at times suggest
playground facilities for giants. (There are
also major works by David Smith, Richard
Serra, Andy Goldsworthy, and, most recently,
Maya Lin.) Repeatedly, medium-sized objects,
spotted from a distance and drawing you to
them, precipitate new relations of yourself to
the landscape. It’s like a recurrent bonus for
tiny pilgrimages. Louise Bourgeois’s “Eyes”
(2001), a writhing cluster of silvered-bronze
eyeball shapes, whose pupils electrically flash
now and then, requires a bit of a climb to be
viewed properly. You may then be reluctant
to move along, so engrossing is the work’s
rambunctious grotesquerie and smack-on-
the-ground adamancy at the edge of a lovely
wood. That’s a happenstantial quality of the
finest things at Storm King: art that, beyond
looking good, feels keenly aware of where it
is and what it’s doing there.—Peter Schjeldahl
“Hope Wanted”
In April, when New York City was quiet save
for ambulance sirens and the evening applause
for essential workers, the photographer Kay
Hickman and the writer Kevin Powell set out
on a two-day tour of the city. The results of
their collaboration are now gracing mural-size
banners on the walls of the New-York Histor-
ical Society’s grassy courtyard. (The museum
fully reopens on Sept. 11.) Powell’s poems—
paeans to the five boroughs—accompany Hick-
man’s portraits and empty street scenes. (Ex-
cerpts of audio interviews the duo conducted
on their sojourn can be accessed by scanning a
QR code.) Among the people they met were
the activist Tanya Fields, a founder of the
Black Feminist Project; a young nurse, who
travelled to New York from Oklahoma during
the crisis; and a worker on Hart Island, where
many of New York’s unclaimed COVID-
casualties are buried. That man chose not to
be identified; a black rectangle replaces his
image, and his painful story accrues even more
power when conveyed through his voice alone.
As a document of the pandemic, presented
under pandemic conditions—outside, with
timed entries and temperature checks—“Hope
Wanted” is evidence of the city’s courage and
resilience.—J.F. (nyhistory.org)
