THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019 5
ILLUSTRATION BY PETRA ERIKSSON
The Jazz Age never ends at the Whit-
ney Museum. Duke Ellington recorded
his last live album there, in 1972; more
recently, in 2016, the quicksilver pianist
Cecil Taylor (who died in 2018) was the
subject of a ten-day jubilee. Jason Moran
(pictured) is best known as a composer
and a pianist, but his interdisciplinary
experimentations extend to the visual
realm. On Sept. 20, the Whitney opens
an exhibition of his solo works alongside
many of his collaborations with other art-
ists, from Joan Jonas to Lorna Simpson.
(The show originated at the Walker Art
Center, in Minneapolis.) A trio of Mo-
ran’s sculptural installations revisit leg-
endary jazz haunts—the Savoy Ballroom,
the Three Deuces, and Slugs’ Saloon—
and double as stages for a concert series
he’s arranged: “Jazz on a High Floor in
the Afternoon.”—Andrea K. Scott
INTHEMUSEUMS
1
A RT
“Apollo’s Muse”
Metropolitan Museum
This absorbing exhibition celebrates, largely
through photographs, the fiftieth anniversary
of Apollo 11’s moon landing. Chronologically
organized, it begins before the advent of pho-
tography, when Galileo’s seventeenth-century
drawings (based on his observations through
a homemade telescope) shattered the Western
world’s image of the moon as a smooth orb,
commencing the quest to document its craggy
topography. Early attempts include the first
lunar daguerreotypes, from 1840, which possess
a talismanic beauty but little detail; illustrations
by James Nasmyth, who photographed plas-
ter models of his telescopic views to produce
such breathtaking illusions as “Normal Lunar
Crater,” from 1874; and Charles Le Morvan’s
moon atlas, from 1914, comprising four dozen
photogravures of the Earth’s satellite waxing
and waning in closeup. Among the pop-cultural
representations on view are a charming grid of
“Man in the Moon” postcards, which show the
customers of boardwalk photo studios perched
on smiling crescents, and Chesley Bonestell’s
sweeping gouache moonscape, a study for a
backdrop used in the groundbreaking film
“Destination Moon,” from 1950. Of course,
nothing captures the imagination quite like
the radio-transmitted panoramas from NASA’s
lunar orbits, or the Apollo astronauts’ epipha-
nic window views.—Johanna Fateman (Through
Sept. 22.)
Elliott Jerome Brown, Jr.
Beauchene
DOWNTOWN This young artist’s titles are poetic
companions to his lyrical photographs. “Sylla-
bles of joy and devastation” portrays a young
person lounging in bed, regarding the camera
with almost closed eyes. Neither posed nor can-
did, the shot captures an attitude of trusting
indifference—an air of true intimacy. Many
of Brown’s subjects are shown from behind, a
perspective that might come off as voyeuristic,
but instead seems deferential to their privacy.
In “Oftentimes, justice for black people takes
the form of forgiveness, allowing them space to
reclaim their bodies from wrongs made against
them,” a woman sits in church as comforting
hands reach out to rest on both sides of her
back. The point of view implies that Brown is
attending the service, too.—J.F. (Through Oct. 6.)
Teresa Burga
Gray
CHELSEA In the delightful centerpiece of this
exhibition, the octogenarian Peruvian Concep-
tualist presents two new sculptures based on
her “Máquinas Inútiles” (Useless Machines)
drawings, from 1974. The details of her careful
schematics—a shapely vase that could never hold
water, an ornate table lamp without a light-bulb
socket—might escape notice on a smaller scale,
but as Brobdingnagian welded-steel objects
they are elegantly comic. A third piece, a mural
depicting a checkered origami-like abstraction,
dated 1989/2019, is based on one of Burga’s “In-
somnia Drawings.” The artist executed such
hypnagogic works during her long career in a
customs office, an experience that informs her
interest in labor, utility, and bureaucracy. Her
recent drawings feature vibrant figures in tradi-
tional Andean dress, accompanied by strings of
numbers in the margins—a log of the hours she
spent making each one.—J.F. (Through Oct. 12.)
Mitch Epstein
Sikkema Jenkins
CHELSEA After completing his epic project “Amer-
ican Power,” about the presence of the energy
industry in the landscapes of twenty-five states,
this photographer spent a year at home, in New
York City, taking pictures of trees. He was look-
ing, he wrote, for a subject “to honor, rather than
mourn.” The twelve magnificent images in his
new series, “Property Rights,” do both as they
reflect pressing issues ranging from immigration
to our threatened environment. Epstein com-
memorates activists protecting their land during
a snowy vigil on the Standing Rock Sioux Reser-
vation, in North Dakota, and reveals the spartan
conditions in a refugee halfway house in El Paso,
Texas. This past year, in Lancaster, Pennsylva-
nia, he photographed the high-school student
and Sunrise Movement leader Ashton Clatter-
buck, secured to a tree with a homemade tool
of resistance.—Andrea K. Scott (Through Oct. 5.)
Judith Hopf
Metro Pictures
CHELSEA In this Berlin artist’s début with the
gallery, smooth boulder-size pears, carved by
a machine from stacks of bricks, rest on the
concrete floor, looking more like austere mete-
orites than like fallen fruit. They seem to belong
outdoors. The title of a matching wall sculpture,
“A Hole and the Filling of the Hole,” references
a circle that’s been excised from it; the cutout
piece lies close by, suggesting a surreal narrative:
Is someone coming to reunite these elements?
Has someone already tried to do so and failed?
In the back gallery, a number of red aluminum
tongues arc off the wall, darting out like a short
carpet or standing upright to lewdly lolling ef-
fect. This bright series is a bracing complement
to the more gnomic works it accompanies.— J. F.
(Through Oct. 5.)
Josiah McElheny
Cohan
DOWNTOWN The profoundly beautiful work of
this American sculptor—a 2006 MacArthur
Fellow whose mediums are glass and reflec-
tion—inaugurates the gallery’s new moth-
ership, in Tribeca, a neighborhood that has
become an undeniable force in the New York
art scene. On the walls, McElheny hangs
magic-trick pictures of infinite galaxies, fash-
ioned with lapidary precision from thousands
of translucent rods. If the past two years
of American life have left you feeling blue,
you’re not alone: the show’s centerpiece is a
sixteen-foot-long curved wall of glass bricks,
a glimmer of azure, cerulean, cobalt, midnight,
and sapphire. The artist conceived the nearly
nine-foot-tall arc as a haven for listening: music
and poetry performances, organized by the
invaluable nonprofit Blank Forms, take place
there on Wednesdays at 6:30 and on Saturdays
at 2.—A.K.S. (Through Oct. 19.)
1
THETHEATRE
American Moor
Cherry Lane
Who is Othello to a black actor? The famous
Moor, a character who is now almost exclusively
played by a black man (the Laurence Olivier
