"Joe Zucker: Armada," the exhibition I organized at The National Arts Club, is reviewed by Harrison Tenzer in The Brooklyn Rail
Joe Zucker has avoided the limitations of working in a cohesive style, instead embracing logic to produce diverse bodies of work that seek to unite subject, technique, material, and support. From his cotton-ball paintings depicting the ills of slavery with the very commodity that fueled the trade in human flesh to his lake paintings, the result of paint being poured and hardening in a shallow container to create monochrome works about their own creation, Zucker constantly intertwines art history with practical craft, logic, and wit. Much has been written about this formal and conceptual balancing act, but relatively little attention has been paid to Zucker’s subject matter in itself. Armada, the recent retrospective of his works on paper and studies from the 1970s to the present that feature nautical themes curated by James Panero offers an opportunity to consider a specific topic that has proven particularly fruitful to Zucker over the decades: piracy.