THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021 7
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND CHAPTER NY
The most enthralling period piece onscreen right now isn’t streaming on
Netflix (sorry, “Bridgerton”)—it’s the six-minute marvel “Salacia,” by the
artist, filmmaker, and activist Tourmaline, making her solo gallery début at
Chapter NY (through Jan. 24), which has opened a pop-up location, at 126
Madison Street, for the occasion. Combining magic realism and historical
fact, the 2019 film concerns the true story of Mary Jones (superbly played
by Rowin Amone), a Black trans woman and sex worker in New York
City, who was sentenced, in 1836, to five years in Sing Sing prison. By
setting the film’s domestic scenes in Seneca Village, a community of Black
landowners razed in the mid-nineteenth century to make way for Central
Park, Tourmaline dreams of a freedom for Jones that the world denied her.
No spoilers here, but one climactic scene puts an Afrofuturist spin on “The
Wizard of Oz,” replacing Dorothy’s mantra, “There’s no place like home,”
with an incantation of self-invention. Five enticing self-portraits (including
“Morning Cloak,” pictured above), which Tourmaline photographed in
2020, serve as both establishing shots and an epilogue.—Andrea K. Scott
AT THEGALLERIES
1
A RT
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)
Meg Lipke
This Hudson Valley-based artist refers to her
wall-mounted soft sculptures, on view at the
Broadway gallery, as “paintings.” Fair enough—
Lipke’s brightly colored, stuffed works are cut
and sewn out of canvas, bridging diverse textile
traditions and modes of painterly abstraction.
(In particular, they recall the springy, ebullient
shaped works of Elizabeth Murray.) Bigger is
sometimes better in these padded compositions
of woozy grids and amoebas, which can have a
wacky throw-pillow quality; scaled up, they be-
come formal experiments in the limits of the ab-
surd. A case in point is the eleven-foot-tall “Black
and White Vibrations,” whose slumping rectan-
gle is lent a jolt of buzzy energy by the expressive
doodles on its surface. The smaller “Rainbow
Hanger” is charming, too—an effortless balance
of countercultural craft and pop references (as
well as art-historical allusion). Its simplified
pretzel shape, stained with pigment in a My
Little Pony palette, boasts a floaty, psychedelic
grace.—Johanna Fateman (broadwaygallery.nyc)
Hannah Whitaker
In a new suite of highly stylized portraits at the
Marinaro gallery, Whitaker departs from her
previous methods of elaborate in-camera mask-
ing and multiple exposures. Instead, the photog-
rapher achieves spectacular effects—dark stripes
of shadow and laserlike flares of color—by
carefully staging each shot of the same female
subject. Sometimes the woman appears in sil-
houette; other times, she emerges from shadow
or is revealed in a slice of light. Her naturalistic
presence seems at odds with the pictures’ stark
techno-futurism, which might otherwise call
for android perfection. A second intriguing
series is installed in the gallery’s lower level—
assemblages of jigsawed, brightly painted,
photo-printed shapes are outfitted with light
bulbs. These lamp sculptures recall the designs
of the Memphis Group, but, arranged in a con-
spiratorial cluster on the floor, they are clearly
more than mere décor.—J.F. (marinaro.biz)
“100 Drawings from Now”
This invitational show, at the Drawing Center,
in SoHo, speaks to our lockdown epoch with
startling poignancy. All but one of the works
were created since the pandemic’s onset. Few are
thematic. There are scant visual references to the
spiky virus, though there are some good jokes on
homebound malaise. Among the better-known
artists, Raymond Pettibon pictures himself
bingeing on episodes of “The Twilight Zone”
and Katherine Bernhardt reports a homeopathic
regimen of cigarettes and Xanax. Stylistic com-
monalities are scarce, aside from a frequent tilt
toward wonky figuration. The show confirms a
deltalike trend—or anti-trend—of eclectic ec-
centricities without any discernible mainstream.
What unites Rashid Johnson’s grease-stick ab-
straction, conjuring a state of alarm in a pigment
that he has invented and dubbed Anxious Red;
Cecily Brown’s pencilled carnage of game an-
imals after a seventeenth-century still-life by
Frans Snyders; and a meticulous, strikingly
sombre self-portrait by R.Crumb? Isolation. In-
tended or not in individual cases, the melancholy
gestalt is strong, as is its silver-lining irony of
satisfying all artists’ ruling wish: to be alone in
the studio. Alone with themselves. Alone with
drawing. I found myself experiencing the works
less as calculated images than as prayers.—Peter
Schjeldahl (drawingcenter.org)
1
MOVIES
Compensation
Zeinabu irene Davis’s boldly original indepen-
dent drama, from 1999, is a film in two parts,
set at both the start and the end of the twenti-
eth century in a Black community of Chicago.
The deaf actress Michelle A. Banks stars as
the earlier era’s Malindy Brown, a dressmaker
who migrates from the South and is courted
