THENEWYORKER,MARCH8, 2021 7
COURTESY BRUNO DECHARME
In the aftermath of the Second World War, the French painter Jean
Dubuffet began to champion the unrecognized geniuses making art on
the streets and in psychiatric institutions, labelling their raw passion “art
brut.” But photography was still considered subpar by high culture, so
the visionaries with cameras remained unseen. “Photo | Brut: Collection
Bruno Decharme & Compagnie,” an overwhelming, exciting, disturbing,
and inspiring exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum (through
June 6), corrects that omission with some four hundred pieces by more
than forty artists, made between the late nineteenth century and the
past few years. (Advance tickets, available via folkartmuseum.org, are
required.) A few names may be familiar: Mark Hogancamp, an American
world-builder who stages gritty and tender wartime tableaux with dolls,
inspired a 2018 Hollywood movie. (Dolls, sex, and alter egos are among
the show’s recurring themes.) And the legendary Lee Godie, an Illinois
native and a self-proclaimed French Impressionist, had a thirty-year show
at the Art Institute of Chicago—on the front steps, where, starting in
the late sixties, she would attach the embellished self-portraits she made
in a bus-depot photo booth (such as the undated image above) to her
paintings, or gift one to a lucky admirer.—Andrea K. Scott
INTHEMUSEUMS
1
A RT
“Grief and Grievance”
This terrific show, subtitled “Art and Mourn-
ing in America”—whose starry roster includes
Kerry James Marshall, Glenn Ligon, Lorna
Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, and Theaster
Gates—was originally intended to open at
the New Museum last October, amid the fu-
rors leading up to the Presidential election.
The pandemic scotched that. But “Grief and
Grievance,” the brainchild of the late Nigerian
curator Okwui Enwezor, doesn’t have a use-by
date, because it celebrates what artists are good
at: telling personal truths through aesthetic
form. Works by thirty-seven artists emphasize
interiority and the patterns of feeling that at-
tend Black experience in America, channelling
the emotional tenors of the history, and the
future, of race in this country. Playing in a
darkened room near the start of the show is Ar-
thur Jafa’s video-montage masterpiece “Love
Is the Message, the Message Is Death.” The
quantity of rapid clips, ranging from violent
scenes of the civil-rights movement to chil-
dren dancing, overloads comprehension—so
many summoned memories and reconnected
associations, cascading. The experience is like
a psychoanalytic unpacking, at warp speed, of
a national unconscious regarding race. Irre-
sistibly exciting and profoundly moving, the
piece will induce a heightened state of mind
and heart to accompany you throughout the
exhibition.—Peter Schjeldahl (newmuseum.org)
Becky Kolsrud
With a limited palette and a strict lexicon
of images, this Los Angeles-based painter
brushes into existence a mythic, metaphysical
realm of O’Keeffian horizons, blobby clouds,
high heels, and salmon-colored women. The
centerpiece of her exhibition “Elegies,” at the
JTT gallery, is a fifteen-foot-long panorama,
completed in 2021. Titled “The Chorus,” it can
be read as an allegory of the past year of isola-
tion and mourning. A body of water is dotted
with small islands, populated by cypress trees
whose trunks are human legs; an open casket
floats in the center of the composition. In
another, smaller landscape, bordered by a
band of sky blue, a neon-pink skull rests on
the curve of a green planet as a lemon moon
blares from the corner. On the floor, Kolsrud
has installed a sculptural counterpart to her
canvases—an expanse of mannequin feet in
clear plastic mules—as if to suggest that every
utopian Eden or Lesbos has a dystopia lurking
beneath.—Johanna Fateman (jttnyc.com)
“Threads”
The four artists in this winning exhibition
at Foxy Production enjoy an easy rapport:
each repurposes a craft or textile tradition to
envision an alternate, queer lineage of domes-
ticity and décor. The multicolored shapes of
Ulrike Müller’s handsome wool rug float in
a burgundy field, the composition’s scattered
pink triangles evoking a history of political
reclamation. Steve Reinke’s needlepoint “doo-
dles” (the artist is best known as a filmmaker)
are displayed in acrylic frames that reveal
their messy versos, transforming a deliberate,
prim pastime into a form of spontaneous ex-
pression. Jonathan Payne’s intricate, gridded
constructions, made from acrylic and thread
on shredded paper, recall stained glass and
spiderwebs, and have the humble charm of
summer-camp string-art projects. One of
Tuesday Smillie’s lush hanging works, which
loosely resemble both quilts and pennants,
may be the show’s keystone: trimmed with a
long curtain of gold beads, it proposes a new
adage with a line of cutout text: “your wound
is a blessing.”—J.F. (foxyproduction.com)
James M. Stephenson. Also on the program
are Ratmansky’s “Symphony #9,” a rollicking,
tongue-in-cheek piece set to Shostakovich,
and Yuri Possokhov’s meditation on Cheever,
“Swimmer.”—M.H. (sfballet.org)
1
MOVIES
Before Summer Ends
The Swiss director Maryam Goormaghtigh
reinvigorates the road movie with this lyrical,
acute political comedy, from 2018. It stars three
thirtysomething Iranian men living in Paris—
Arash, Hossein, and Ashkan, nonprofessional
actors playing versions of themselves—who
take a sentimental journey through France
two weeks before Arash moves back to Iran.
Hossein is ironic and artsy, Ashkan is earnest
and solitary, and Arash is socially awkward,
an obese student who, as a teen-ager in Iran,
deliberately gained weight to avoid military
