8 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY8, 2021
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DANCE
A.B.T. Studio Company
During an upstate residency last fall, the junior
troupe of American Ballet Theatre rehearsed and
filmed two performance programs, each including
at least one première by a notable choreographer.
On the evenings of Feb. 9 and Feb. 10, those
programs are broadcast for free on the company’s
YouTube channel. Created just before studios
closed in March, “La Follia Variations,” by Lauren
Lovette, of New York City Ballet, is a classical
piece, full of hope. “For What Is It All Worth?,”
by the recently retired Alvin Ailey star Hope
Boykin, was made months later and responds to
young, protesting voices.—Brian Seibert (abt.org) COURTESY APEXARTCan you spot the superpower of the wonder women in “Sisters of War”
(pictured), a wall-filling vinyl mural by Jolene Nenibah Yazzie, on view
(through March 6) in the dynamic group show “Native Feminisms,” at
Apexart? It’s the power to shatter taboos. Yazzie, whose tribal affiliations
are Diné, Comanche, and White Mountain Apache, has outfitted the
trio in hats historically worn by male Diné warriors. Her own experience
competing in the traditional men’s category at powwows—the liberation
she feels, the bullying she encounters—is the subject of another piece
here, the Ojibwe filmmaker Marcella Ernest’s dreamlike documentary
collage “Because of Who I Am.” The film alternates on a monitor with
two hypnotic animations by the Anishinaabe-Métis digital visionary
Elizabeth LaPensée, who treats ancestral imagery of the natural world
with an eco-poetic futurism. Nearby, an exquisite miniature fringed-
leather tipi by Sheldon Raymore, an artist from the Cheyenne River Sioux
Nation, memorializes “two-spirit” people of fluid gender. If the show,
which was curated by Elizabeth S. Hawley with an eye for beauty and a
heart for politics, has a rallying cry, it’s supplied by a lively poster from
the Diné artist Demian DinéYazhi’ and R.I.S.E. (Radical Indigenous
Survivance & Empowerment): “Decolonize Feminism.”—Andrea K. ScottAT THEGALLERIES
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A RT
“Albers and Morandi”
In this show, subtitled “Never Finished,” the
Zwirner gallery pairs two artists who can seem
bizarrely mismatched: Josef Albers, the starchy
German-American abstract painter and color
theorist, who died in 1976, at the age of eighty-
eight, and Giorgio Morandi, the seraphic Italian
still-life painter, who died in 1964, at the age
of seventy-three. Albers, who was wedded to
a format of three or four nested, hard-edged
squares, is academic in spirit—easy to admire
but hard to like. Morandi, transfixed by the
bottles and vases in his studio for fifty years, is
deeply poetic. Yet viewing them together electri-
fies—this is one of the best-installed shows that
I’ve ever seen—as their works’ extremes play off
each other. Think of it as a pas de deux of a drill
sergeant (Albers) and an enchanter (Morandi).
Most of the pieces in the show (twenty-three by
each artist) are small. This was Morandi’s habit-
ual scale and Albers’s most successful one. The
soft cosmos of Morandi is both relieved and re-
freshed by the architectonics of Albers, and vice
versa. Neither artist looked over his shoulder
at trends of the day. They were brothers in per-
severance.—Peter Schjeldahl (davidzwirner.com)“Downtown 2021”
Downtown New York is the Walt Whitman of
places: it contains multitudes and contradicts
itself. If you think it begins and ends in lower
Manhattan, Sam Gordon wants to open your
mind. The artist-curator organized the inspired
polyphonic group show “Downtown 2021,” at La
Mama Galleria, to propose that the downtown
spirit may be best reflected at galleries—many
of them artist-run—in Brooklyn and Queens.
(The exhibition is on view Fridays and Satur-
days, through Feb. 20.) Works by about thirty
painters, ceramicists, photographers, choreogra-
phers, filmmakers, and installationists advocate
for the outer-borough spaces that have shown
them, from the nonprofit feminist coöperative
A.I.R., established in 1972 and now housed in
Dumbo, to Zak’s, which the young sculptor-to-
watch Zak Kitnick began as a lark in his studio,
in 2015. (The show includes a handsome, ifgnomic, game table by Kitnick, made of bronze,
brass, copper, and steel, from the Bushwick
gallery Clearing.) Most of the art here is new; a
noteworthy exception is the elegant formalism
of the established, but under-recognized, Black
sculptor Helen Evans Ramsaran, whose 1996
bronze “The Seat of Power” is a testament to
the discerning vision of the Bed-Stuy gallery
Welancora.—Andrea K. Scott (lamama.org)Raven Halfmoon
“Okla Homma to Manahatta,” the title of this
young sculptor’s striking show at the Ross +
Kramer gallery, pairs the Choctaw phrase that
gives Halfmoon’s native Oklahoma its name with
the Lenape word for Manhattan. Her ceramics
are similarly hybrid: a citizen of the Caddo Na-
tion, Halfmoon draws on indigenous pottery
traditions that date back thousands of years
using a distinctly personal and contemporary
approach. Some of the big, expressive works here
feature riveting figurative imagery. The rough-
hewn rectangular block of crimson-and-black
glazed stoneware in “ONE’-TEH” is composed
of human faces; in “Quarter Horse, Quarter
Indian,” the eyes of a riderless Appaloosa are en-
circled in dripping red. The latter marks echo the
artist’s signature, which is painted prominently
on each of her works, a splatter effect that evokes
both real violence and, acerbically, pop-horror
aesthetics.—Johanna Fateman (rkgallery.com)Reggie Burrows Hodges
Using matte-black paint to render the back-
grounds of his canvases, as well as the bodies and
faces of his figures, this Black American painter
makes ingenious use of so-called negative space
as both a metaphor for hegemonic white culture
and an expression of memory’s blur. (The artist’s
impressive New York début is currently on view
at Karma.) Hodges’s scenes—which also employ
a beautiful, muted palette of violet, yellow, green,
orange, red, and blue—are consistently compel-
ling, thanks to his paint handling and to their
seductive narrative quality. But the subject mat-
ter and the pictorial scope vary dramatically. The
intimate “Danale’s Mirror” captures a private
moment: a woman sits cross-legged on the floor,
holding a mascara wand, tilting her head with
the graceful, straight-backed posture of a dancer.
“Hurdling: Green” portrays a leaping athlete
and, at first glance, might suggest an abstract
study of motion, but fuchsia shorts and reaching
limbs soon emerge from the dark background—
evidence of the painter’s alchemical command of
gesture and color.—J.F. (karmakarma.org)