12 THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 18, 2019
ILLUSTRATION BY JULIA ROTHMAN
Weaving has existed since the Neanderthal age, when paintings were
created in caves. Yet for centuries textiles have been seen as the inferior
medium. Happily, the useless old wall separating high art from craft is
finally crumbling. The Bauhaus doyenne Anni Albers (pictured)—per-
haps the most influential textile artist of the past century—took her first
weaving workshop, in Weimar, Germany, in 1922, and went on to create
subtly dazzling abstractions that prove that a loom’s warp and weft are the
undeniable equals of a paintbrush. “Maneuver,” a six-person show curated
by the perspicacious Lynne Cooke, at the Artist’s Institute at Hunter
College (through Dec. 14), traces both Albers’s ongoing influence and
the staying power of modernism’s pet format, the grid. Polly Apfelbaum,
Sarah Charlesworth, Zoe Leonard, and Rosemarie Trockel exhibit works
that incorporate (respectively) velvet, color adhesive, iPhone snapshots,
and wool—all as cerebral as they are tongue in cheek. The venturesome
Bay Area weaver Ed Rossbach is the closest to Albers in haptic spirit and
also the most far-out in form.—Andrea K. ScottAT THE GALLERIES
to finding a place in more stable, legal ven-
ues (including, recently, the Metropolitan
Museum of Art). In “What Time Is It?,”
at Abrons Arts Center, the dancers share
their talents and stories with the help of
the actor-choreographer (and the artistic
director of the company) Adesola Osakalumi
and the videographer Kash Gaines.—B.S.
(Nov. 14-16.)
Dimitris Papaioannou
BAM Howard Gilman
Opera House
Trained as a painter, this Greek director works
smoothly and slowly, creating portentous the-
atrical images. The uneven floor of “The Great
Tamer,” made of removable panels, is a kind of
cultural graveyard, where much can be buried
and exhumed. This excavation unearths dirt,
naked bodies, and a skeleton, but also an in-
flatable globe, astronauts, some gymnastics
and comical-bizarre entwinings, and multiple
skewed allusions to European art, such as
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A RT
“A New MOMA”
Museum of Modern Art
The Vatican, Kremlin, and Valhalla of modern-
ism has reopened, after an expansion that adds
forty-seven thousand square feet and many new
galleries. Far more, though still a fraction, of
MOMA’s nonpareil collection is now on display,
arranged roughly chronologically but studded
with such mutually provoking juxtapositions as
a 1967 painting that fantasizes a race riot, by the
African-American artist Faith Ringgold, with
Picasso’s gospel “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”
(1907). Some of the rehangs electrify, nota-
bly in the first room of the permanent collec-
tion, where a sequence of Symbolist work—by
the likes of Redon, Vuillard, Ensor, Munch,
Gauguin, and Henri Rousseau—leaps, after a
de-rigueur pause for van Gogh, to Cézanne, who
comes off more than ever as revolutionary. (The
room also has six lyrical ceramics by George
E. Ohr, the nineteenth-century “Mad Potter
of Biloxi”—one of several invigorating nods to
formerly scanted outsiders.) Piet Mondrian’s
“Broadway Boogie-Woogie” (1942-43) is freshly
recontextualized as an outrigger to an eye-open-
ing historical show of Latin-American art, which
includes work by the ingenious Brazilians Lygia
Pape and Hélio Oiticica. The best time to visit
the revamped MOMA is your first, punctuated
with reintroductions to old artistic companions.
Masterpieces dulled by overfamiliarity in an
account that had become as rote as a college
textbook spring to second lives by being repo-
sitioned.—Peter Schjeldahl (Ongoing.)Sarah Amos
CUE Art Foundation
CHELSEA This dense show of large prints on felt,
titled “Chalk Lines,” was curated by Barbara
Takenaga, a painter who shares Amos’s talent
for voluptuous, galactic compositions. Amos,
who splits her time between Vermont and her
native Australia, achieves rich surfaces and pic-
torial depth by combining the printing process
of collagraphy with sewing; she uses collaged
and abraded cardboard to ink abstract designs
on textiles, then hand-stitches thread over her
shadowy patterning. This raised layer, a mix of
cross-hatching and filigree, provides dynamic
structure to the large works and evokes mo-
saics, weaving, and quilting. Amos’s abstract
imagery can also conjure botanical deities,
unknown sea creatures, and architecture from
a lush, mythic dimension.—Johanna Fateman
(Through Dec. 11.)Holly Coulis
Von Nichtssagend
DOWNTOWN The ebullient still-lifes in this win-
ning show recall both the radiant geometric
abstractions of Sonia Delaunay and psyche-
delic game boards. The Athens, Georgia-based
painter renders her overlapping vases, pitchers,
and bowls of fruit—as well as levitating pears,
bananas, cherries, and other shapely produce—
as flat forms outlined with vibrating bands
of color. These are rapturous, space-bending
compositions, but the unexpected showstoppers
are Coulis’s jigsawed wooden constructions,the doctors of Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy
Lesson” turning cannibal.—B.S. (Nov. 14-17.)Martha Graham
Alexander Kasser Theatre
If there were a competition for the greatest
American dance score, the honors might go to
Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” with its
expansive sense of space and its variations on
the bracingly plain Shaker melody of “Simple
Gifts.” Before becoming a staple of symphony
concerts, the piece was composed, in 1944, for
Martha Graham, who translated its limpid melo-
dies into her masterly and moving depiction of a
frontier couple on their wedding day. It may well
be her most popular work, and is often referred
to as iconic. At Peak Performances, in Montclair,
New Jersey, the Martha Graham Dance Com-
pany will perform it alongside a new dance by
the young choreographer Troy Schumacher—a
soloist at New York City Ballet—called “The
Auditions,” which is set to a commissioned score
by Augusta Read Thomas.—M.H. (Nov. 14-17.)