6 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020
COURTESY ARTISTS SPACE
Is it possible for a project to be a flash in the pan while playing a long game?
Yes, judging by an engrossing retrospective of the short-lived New York-based
collective Art Club 2000, whose meta-critical photos, videos, and installations
look both dated and prescient at Artists Space (through Jan. 9). In 1992, seven
ambitious undergrads at the Cooper Union found an ally in the downtown art
dealer Colin de Land, whose American Fine Arts, Co. was as much an anti-
commercial subversion as it was a gallery. For their first show there, “Com-
mingle,” the group staged a faux ad campaign (including “Time Square/Gap
Grunge 2,” above) mocking youth-obsessed collectors and curators with blank
expressions and matching outfits from the Gap (normcore avant la lettre).
The series forecast a near future in which the meaning of “downtown” would
shift from haven of misfits to retail mecca; it also attracted the very hype it
derided, minting Art Club 2000 as an art-scene brat pack. The collective
deployed its best-of-both-worlds approach until it disbanded, in 1999. Now,
as New York’s mega-galleries operate like publicity-hungry big-box stores
themselves, Art Club 2000 is ready for the spotlight again.—Andrea K. ScottAT THEGALLERIES
album, “African Giant.” Wizkid’s feel-good
duets with the enigmatic Vallejo-born per-
former H.E.R. and the mellow London-based
vocalist Ella Mai display a mastery of a fused
international product. But it’s on such songs as
the understatedly groovy “True Love” and the
sashaying, Burna Boy-assisted “Ginger” that
he embodies the album’s title—a home-town
kid fine-tuning a local style that transcends
borders.—S.P.
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A RT
Leilah Babirye
For her solo show with the Gordon Robichaux
gallery, this prolific artist fills two spaces (in-
cluding a sunny new annex) with her magnetic,
the objects share an inspired quality of proud,
even divine, idiosyncrasy.—Johanna Fateman
(gordonrobichaux.com)David Hockney
This great portraitist has had a very large and de-
voted following in his pocket for years. The chief
reason for this is the enormous pleasure Hock-
ney gives to his viewers. Since he first began
showing his work, in the early nineteen-sixties,
the openly gay painter and photographer has
excitedly shared his autobiography in countless
canvases and sketches. In 1973, after a move to
Paris, Hockney’s exquisite drawings of his chosen
family acquired a new depth and intimacy. It was
as if the Ingres-inspired academicism of Hock-
ney’s work safeguarded the British artist from
whimsy. Unfortunately, whimsy overtook him
with the introduction of modern contrivances
(Xerox machines, iPads) into his process, and
the subjects of his portraits became subservient
to his love of gizmos. Although there are many
terrific examples of Hockney’s works on paper,
both early and late, in the stately and romantic
show “David Hockney: Drawing from Life,”
at the Morgan Library (through May 30), one
returns to his Paris years as a hallmark of his
style, feeling, and poetic directness. Hockney
revisits that mode in his 2019 portrait of the
textile designer Celia Birtwell, whose love and
gifts help hold the artist’s un-tricked-out eye,
and his admiration.—Hilton Als (themorgan.org)Jordan Nassar
“I Cut the Sky in Two,” the title of this New
York-based artist’s solo début at the James
Cohan gallery, underscores the lyrical, first-per-
son sensibility of Nassar’s precise, melancholic
works. (It is taken from a line in the Lebanese
artist Etel Adnan’s book-length poem “The
Arab Apocalypse.”) On the walls, a series of
embroidered-cotton compositions, the largest
of which were made in collaboration with crafts-
women in Ramallah, derive their geometric
patterning from the centuries-old Palestinian
practice of tatreez, into which Nassar inserts
dreamy abstracted landscapes. These stylized
vistas are echoed in vibrant sculptures—made
from jewel-like glass beads, flame-worked in the
tradition of Hebron artisans—that suggest min-
iature screens. With their variations in opacity,
the gleaming objects have a seductive, soft-focus
depth. In Nassar’s quietly moving show, dias-
poric Palestinian identity is expressed through a
reverent engagement with craft, entwined with
inherited longing for a beloved but unfamiliar
land.—J.F. (jamescohan.com)“Vida Americana”
This thumpingly great show at the Whitney
picks an overdue art-historical fight. The usual
story of its subjects, the great Mexican muralists
of the mid-twentieth century, revolves around
young, often immigrant aesthetes striving to
absorb European modernism. A triumphalist
tale composed backward from its climax—the
postwar success of Abstract Expressionism—it
brushes aside the prevalence, in the thirties, of
politically themed figurative art: social realism,
more or less, which became ideologically toxic
with the onset of the Cold War. What to do
with the mighty legacy of the era’s big three
Mexican painters, Diego Rivera, José Clem-
ente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros? As
little as possible has seemed the rule, despitegeometric sculptures, hybrids of abstract and
figurative forms. Babirye’s impassive yet per-
sonable characters are made of glazed ceramic,
wood, and found materials (braided rubber for
hair, a padlock for an earring), achieving a scav-
enged, composite effect that’s both weathered
and ageless. Babirye, who lives in Brooklyn, is
from Kampala, Uganda’s capital, which is situ-
ated in the kingdom of Buganda. Fleeing the
country’s draconian anti-L.G.B.T. legislation
and hostile political climate, she was granted asy-
lum, as a lesbian, in the U.S. These works draw
upon the clan structure and sculptural traditions
of her culture, grafting onto them a world of
queer kinship. The statues, which range in scale
from miniature to larger than life, represent a
panoply of alternative clans that Babirye calls
kuchu (the Luganda word is used as an endonym
among Uganda’s gay and transgender people).
Although their personalities are wildly diverse,