Gallery Chronicle (June)

Loren Munk, Bushwick Map (Study), 2013

THE NEW CRITERION
JUNE 2014

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

On "Peak Bushwick" and Bushwick Open Studios.

Next to my desk I keep a print by the artist Loren Munk called Bushwick Map (Study), based on a drawing he made between 2010 and 2013. Munk should be a familiar name, to readers of this column certainly, and to anyone who follows contemporary art beyond brand names and auction headlines. A self-described “informationist,” Munk loads the ephemera of the art world into his work, preserving his knowledge and research of creative activity in hallucinatory maps and flowcharts (and his DIY video documentaries called The James Kalm Report).

Bushwick Map captures an alternative arts neighborhood at its most radiant. Small galleries and studio addresses burst forth from the street grid in first bloom. Yet for me the image also serves as a warning: a reminder of how short the growing season can be for a creative place of any importance. Already, a handful of influential galleries on Munk’s map, with evocative names such as Factory Fresh, Famous Accountants, and Pocket Utopia, have closed up or moved on.

Now we come to learn that the leases for all of the gallery spaces in the enormous Ridgewood–Bushwick building 17-17 Troutman Street will not be renewed. The Troutman building currently hosts the largest and most experimental concentration of neighborhood galleries outside of the must-see spaces at 56 Bogart Street, including Regina Rex, Parallel Art Space, Ortega Y Gasset Projects, Bull and Ram, Underdonk, and Harbor.

Of course, the closing of Bushwick galleries might register up there with “Small Earthquake in Chile, Not Many Dead,” Claud Cockburn’s famous example of a headline that is factually accurate but exceedingly uninteresting to most people reading it. Still, the goings-on at Troutman have a way of signaling the next chapter in the Bushwick story. One night back in October 2007, this same Troutman building saw a small humanitarian crisis, Red Cross and all, as a raid by the fire department sent hundreds of artists and other residents into the streets, unable to return. The event served as a wake-up call for how uncertain the future of the neighborhood would be, with landlords, the FDNY, and the Brooklyn political machine all keyed into the area’s rising value. And artists realized it too, becoming more serious and organized, accelerating the growth of Bushwick’s small exhibition scene.

With the latest developments at Troutman, and more dislocations soon to follow, the question is: Have we reached “Peak Bushwick”? Of course, the question is not to suggest that neighborhood development will abate. If the history of other one-time arts communities is any indication, growth is sure to accelerate, just with less artistic consequence.

All vital artistic activity has a way of becoming quickly absorbed into the background of lifestyle advertising and new-age spirituality—the transcendence we contemplate through the ingestion of grass-fed beef hand-butchered by hipsters. Such a thought came to mind last month as I savored a $38 lunch plate of brisket served by Marlow and Daughters, the Williamsburg-based butcher, at the art fair Frieze New York. Located in a bespoke encampment on Randalls Island for a weekend in May, Frieze is a lifestyle caravan and new-age tent revival in one. Decorous contemporary art awash in an iPad glow serves as a backdrop for hip catering à la plage. A book I spotted in the checkout line of one celebrity vendor, Blue Bottle Coffee, summed up the nature of this delectation: Modern Art Desserts: Recipes for Cakes, Cookies, Confections, and Frozen Treats Based on Iconic Works of Art. The cover depicted a Battenberg cake in the form of a Mondrian.

Artistic Bushwick itself is traversing from lifeless to life-filled to lifestyle at a remarkable clip. Last month, local newspapers announced that a Bushwick building known as “Hacienda Villa” is being developed into the city’s first “polyamorous-only” apartment house and “judgement-free zone” catering exclusively to the “libertine community.” Not to judge the cohabitation of libertines, but with lifestyle tourists at the gate, the time might be right to catch the full (and final?) flowering of the arts of Bushwick.

A year before that Troutman raid in 2007, the neighborhood’s artists and eighty-five participating spaces came together to host the first Bushwick Open Studios. Under the auspices of the volunteer organization Arts in Bushwick, BOS became a yearly event, with the neighborhood throwing open its doors over the first weekend in June. (By the way, the Munk print I mentioned earlier was created as a benefit for BOS and is still available from its Bushwick printer, Supreme Digital. Three new benefit editions have also been issued this year, of work by Lisa Corinne Davis, Meg Hitchcock, and Alice Mizrachi.)

Meg Hitchcock, Lamentations (BOS benefit print)

This year’s BOS will kick off on the evening of Friday, May 30 and continue through Sunday, June 1. If you are coming to this column after that date, do not fear: Some of the larger shows will continue for a few weekends thereafter. With 532 studios and gallery spaces by last count now participating, BOS provides an extensive if overwhelming access point for viewing art in the neighborhood. It also gives us a stress test of the neighborhood’s continued vitality.

I once did a calculation of how long you could spend at each BOS venue if you wanted to see it all. The answer is less than a minute and a half, and that includes transportation time. So some winnowing is in order. Each year, artsinbushwick.org becomes more sophisticated with its interactive online listing. This year, the map includes ten “hub” locations to serve as gathering places and spots to catch your breath. I like to start at Norte Maar to see the singular private collection of the curator Jason Andrew. Bushwick’s great impresario, steeped in the histories of modernism, is now also the co-owner of Outlet Fine Art, a gallery that is pioneering the neighborhood’s eastern limits. A week after BOS, Outlet will open an ambitious summer show that will link a 1946 drawing by Arshile Gorky with work by thirty modern and contemporary artists, including Gregory Amenoff, William Anastasi, Judy Dolnick, Hermine Ford, Margrit Lewcuk, Michael Prodanou, and Joan Snyder. Based on the visual connections made in Andrew’s 2013 match-up, with a drawing by Giacometti, this should be a particularly strong exhibition. This summer, Andrew’s non-profit Norte Maar will also continue its excellent project series in performance and dance: an evening “sound event” on June 21 on the water at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City with the artists Andrew Hurst, Shona Masarin, and Audra Wolowiec, among others; and a site-specific dance residency in the park over weekends in August.

Rob de Oude, studio

There are numerous artists exhibiting at BOS who have appeared in this column, or should have and will. The Troutman galleries deserve a proper sendoff: Parallel Art Space has an especially good group show, including works by Don Voisine, Katrin Bremermann, and Douglas Witmer. I am particularly keen to see the studios of obsessively detailed artists such as the collagist Meg Hitchcock and the optical linesman Rob de Oude. Then there’s the intimism of Louisa Waber, the gimlet-eyes of J. Robert Feld, the haunting realism of Fedele Spadafora, the flotsam and jetsam of Eliot Markell, the urban vignettes of Kerry Law, the Bauhaus-riffing of Björn Meyer-Ebrecht, and the copyright-infringing of Adam Simon. The painter Julie Torres continues her great mitzvah work of bringing like-minded painters from across the country together at BOS with a forty-artist show at the former home of 3rd Ward.

Bushwick, of course, is particularly rich in abstraction, with open studios by Enrico Gomez, Nancy Baker, Patricia Satterlee, Vincent Romaniello, Lisa Corinne Davis, Brent Owens, Matthew Neil Gehring, Jeanne Tremel, Jay Gaskill, Shingo Francis, Lauren Collins, Kurt Steger, MaryKate Maher, and Christina Kee. My magazine colleague Rebecca Litt, who paints psychologically charged portraits and landscapes, is exhibiting with her studio-mate, the abstractionist Gili Levy.

The gallery Lorimoto, which will have a promising group show of Bushwick artists, will also open the studios of the owners Nao Matsumoto (who recently terrorized the Volta art fair with apocalyptic contraptions) and Lori Kirkbride (who creates surrealist close-ups in polymer and resin). The cavernous gallery Signal, which tends to mix arresting work with music and performance, will show Jesse Hlebo, Nicholas Gottlund, and Andrew Laumann. The Bushwick stalwart Centotto always deserves a visit.

James Reeder, vitrine series, 2013

The analogue (i.e., not digital) photographer James Reeder will open up his studio and gallery Silver Projects (named after the photochemical silver nitrate) along with his entire creative row house known as Hotel (which was the sleeper hit of Bushwick Beatnite when I curated a gallery evening last fall). Meryl Meisler, arguably the original Bushwick artist, will exhibit her photographs and launch her book on “A Tale of Two Cities,” documenting life in New York in the disco era.

And no BOS would be complete without a visit to Bushwick’s grand visionary Deborah Brown and her studio gallery Storefront Ten Eyck. In her luminous paintings, Brown has gone from depicting the streetscapes of Bushwick to the historical landscapes of literature and portraiture. Storefront will also feature the surrealist sculptures and drawings of Hans van Meeuwen and a site-specific group show curated by Karin Bravin. Brown and the gallerist Lesley Heller are again curating an outdoor sculpture show called “Real on Rock Street” (although here I could do without the kitsch-artist dog killer Tom Otterness).

Deborah Brown, Tete: Dutch Master

The heart of BOS is the studio visit, so let me conclude with a few words of advice about it: The chance to see an artist’s studio space, the fons et origoof creation, is foundational and intimate, but it can also be intimidating and time consuming. The open doors of BOS lower the barriers to entry. Trust me: There are no dumb questions you can ask in an artist’s studio, because I’ve tested them all. Point, get up close, tap into childlike wonder: Artist studios are fantastical places. And if you like it, buy it. Use eyes, not ears. Don’t wait for Gagosian, Christie’s, or The New York Times to tell you what to do. “We are our own art history” is the inspiring phrase that Loren Munk once printed on a bumper sticker. If you admire something but ask, Who likes this?, Who collects this?, the answer is: You do. If Bushwick has a future at all, it will depend on the connections made over this one weekend in June.

Gallery Chronicle (May)

Centerpiece at the Hispanic Society of America: Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, The Duchess of Alba, 1797; Oil on Canvas, 210.2 x 149.2 cm

THE NEW CRITERION
May 2014

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

On the Hispanic Society of America and “William Powhida: Overculture,” at Postmasters, New York.

There is something antediluvian about the story of Theodore S. Beardsley Jr., the director of the Hispanic Society of America from 1965 to 1995. What? Never heard of Beardsley’s trove of Spanish art, artifacts, and literature sequestered in an alcazar in Washington Heights? Good, went his reply, and why should you. “We’ve been here since 1904 and one of the things we’ve learned to do is lie low,” Beardsley said to Grace Glueck ofThe New York Times in 1989, “I’ve sat on a lot of boards, and bigness is always worse.”

Founded in 1904, opened in 1908, the Hispanic Society was the first of several institutions to anchor the beaux-arts campus of Audubon Terrace, the great and distinctly American cultural vision of the philanthropist Archer M. Huntington located on 155th Street and Broadway. (I wrote about the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Terrace’s other remaining institution, in last month’s column.) Motivated by a love for Spanish storytelling, Huntington created a jewel-box that was as fanciful as the tales he read, filling it with books, art, and artifacts from Iberian history. He bought masterworks by El Greco, Goya, José de Ribera, Velázquez, and Francisco de Zurbarán along with 800 other paintings, 6,000 watercolors and drawings, 1,000 sculptures, 6,000 decorative objects, 15,000 prints, and 175,000 documentary photographs of Spanish life. Much of this he stuffed into the Society’s main court hall. He ringed a tight second-floor balcony with his most significant paintings, which are still not shown in ideal light. Goya’s Duchess of Alba (1797) greets visitors upon arrival with an hauteur that recalls the work of John Singer Sargent (whose studies from the Prado are included here as well). He also gathered a significant collection of over 250,000 books and manuscripts on the Iberian Peninsula—20,000 printed before 1701, including rare hand-drawn maps of Spanish exploration (a singular example is kept behind a curtain in the Society library) and a first edition of Don Quixote.

The Society’s art, architecture, and sculptural program spoke to the high-minded wonder of Huntington’s vision. Charles P. Huntington, Archer’s cousin, drew up the master plans for the beaux-arts campus and designed the buildings of the Hispanic Society itself (Cass Gilbert and William M. Kendall of McKim, Mead & White were other architects for the site). In the 1920s, the celebrated sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington, Archer’s wife, designed a grand outdoor program, after the site’s orientation was turned east to Broadway, for what was at first a staircase leading up from 166th Street. Here her bronze equestrian statue of El Cid, the medieval Castilian knight, rides beside a monumental relief of Don Quixote. Huntington also commissioned the painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida to create a fourteen-painting cycle of “Visions of Spain,” recording regional scenes of Spanish life, which he installed in their own hall in the Society.

Audubon Terrace with The Hispanic Society of America at center.

Yet Glueck’s article, “Major Hispanic Museum Lies Low and Likes It,” was as much about exposing Huntington’s successor’s unreconstructed attitudes towards museum governance as drawing attention to the treasured collection in his trust. Blessed with Huntington’s endowment income and tasked with strict rules about how the institution should be run, Beardsley showed little interest in serving anything more than the founder’s wishes. When it came to donor intent, he was an unreconstructed originalist. There was the issue of loans, for instance. Huntington never wanted his masterworks to leave the building, nor that outside works be shown among the collection, and Beardsley agreed. ‘’We love them,” he said of such restrictions. ‘’You put pieces in jeopardy by moving them around. The whole loan thing is a mixed bag.’’ There was also the library, where Beardsley strictly limited the hours and forbade patrons from making copies. “A lot of our consultation is by mail and telephone,” he explained to Glueck. “We’re much more famous in Madrid than we are here.”

And then there was his approach to fundraising. “We have never blatantly courted donors,” he admitted. “We find it tacky. Mr. Huntington felt it was not very gentlemanly, and until he died if we needed money, he wrote a check.’’ Beardsley refused to publish the names of his board. Even as his endowment dwindled, his curatorial staff shrank in number, and his building was in need of repairs, he had little desire for an infusion of funds. “Our maintenance is slow, but if someone gave me a check for $10 million, I wouldn’t do it faster,” he concluded, “there’s a danger in having too many workmen in the building.”

Given Beardsley’s antiquated ideas, it’s remarkable he lasted as long as he did. Five years after Glueck’s article, reality caught up with him. It was merely chance that, largely after World War II, a Hispanic population settled in the neighborhood around the Hispanic Society. For Beardsley, the only time “town and gown” came together was when they came for him. In 1993, Robin Cembalest published an interview with Beardsley in Art News in which he stated that he didn’t reach out to his local community because they had a “low level of culture.” In the same piece, George S. Moore, a retired chairman of Citibank and the Society’s octogenarian president, blasted the neighborhood as “nontaxpaying slums.” When word of this interview got out, according to Cembalest, protesters gathered to chase the director as he crossed the Terrace courtyard, chanting “Beardsley,racista!” A year later, it was over for Beardsley, and Mitchell Codding, the Society’s current director, was installed.

The main court hall of the Hispanic Society of America. Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

It’s easy to mock a figure like Beardsley. Across the cultural world, his notions of museum stewardship, curmudgeonly and narrow, have now been eclipsed by nearly the direct opposite. Today our model of cultural governance looks to reinterpret a founder’s wishes, encapsulate original buildings in new construction, maximize turnstile numbers and revenue, and make fundraising the metric of institutional success, all the while lavishing the administration with six- and seven-figure salaries. Yet with so many institutions, from the New York Public Library to the Museum of Modern Art, now pursuing this destructive extreme, it must be said that the crustiness of Beardsley’s tenure left us an institution that was unspoiled. For now, we can continue to enjoy a free institution as its founder intended while appreciating an artifact of American museology that is nearly untouched.

For an institution as anachronistic as the Hispanic Society, rich in art and artifacts but out of line with contemporary museum standards, the future is never certain. For a time after his arrival, Codding announced his intentions to relocate the Society further downtown. It would have been a move that mirrored the departure of several other of the Terrace’s original inhabitants. In the 1970s the American Geographical Society left for Wisconsin. In the 1990s the Museum of the American Indian went to Washington. In 2008 the American Numismatic Society relocated to downtown Manhattan. For the Hispanic Society, picking up stakes was a predictable idea, but it would have been a disastrous one, curing the institution by killing it. Fortunately, these plans never materialized, and now, it appears, Codding has doubled down on his current location, acquiring an annex from the former American Indian museum and repairing his infrastructure (although he has come under fire for auctioning off a multi-million-dollar coin collection).

The Hispanic Society of America, with original entrance gate facing 166th Street.

Today’s museum directors have a habit of mistaking solutions for problems. The remote setting and idiosyncrasies of the Hispanic Society are not what drive people away. They make the place a wondrous attraction. The challenge is to find a golden path of leadership that understands and nurtures the soul of an institution, rather than carving it out and replacing it. While at the helm of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philippe de Montebello understood this course better than anyone, and fortunately he has now been serving as an advisor to the Hispanic Society. One of his suggestions, a good one, has been to add the words “museum” and “library” to the Society’s name. Such modest and smart proposals are just what the Society needs to continue broadening its outreach without becoming a community center, a shopping mall, or a blockbusterKunsthalle—and the Society can still do more. Its outward appearance is weedy and uninviting. Whoever heads up its social-media outreach is doing yeoman’s work, but an overhauled website would be nice too. The courtyard is in need of a facelift, and the entryways could use better signage. Frankly, even while walking within Audubon Terrace, I passed by the Society for years without realizing there was a remarkable and free museum just inside those doors. A broader advertising and media campaign would go a long way—along, of course, with a grant for it. So too would further outreach to the local community, which Codding has already initiated (although as an outsider I would welcome a guide to the area’s Hispanic restaurants, such as the delicious and affordable Margot). And why doesn’t the MTA do more to spread the word of this unsung venue, which, after all, is only a subway ride away?

As the dynamics of New York culture are being driven out from the center to the peripheries of the city, 155th Street and Broadway offers a welcome reprieve from the big-money bustle of our more establishment institutions. The adopted son of a railroad baron, Archer M. Huntington assumed that high culture would follow the new subway lines uptown. It may have taken a century longer than he expected, but Audubon Terrace may suddenly find itself in the right place at the right time.

William Powhida, "Overculture," exhibition installation view

One of my most anticipated exhibitions last month, and certainly related to the discussion above, was “Overculture” by William Powhida at Postmasters.1 Powhida mixes information-rich diagrams (also called “Informationism”) with institutional critique. He is famous for his cranky public persona, which he widely broadcasts through Twitter. For a younger man, he has cultivated a surprisingly high level of dyspepsia and bile. Yet his work succeeds for two very obvious reasons: the humorous intelligence of his criticism and the craft of his draftsmanship. Both aspects were on display at Postmasters. They were even knowingly divided into two distinct sections. On one side, there were the hand-drawn lists of art-world quibbles for which he is best known. Some were drafted to look like they were scribbled on enormous lined spiral paper, such as How To Try To BeOK With The Contemporary Art Market and How To Make An Auction Ready-Made (both 2014). Others riffed on classic diagrams of art history. The best example took the branching tree motif from Ad Reinhardt’s How to Look at Modern Art in America from 1946 and turned it into How to Look @ The Contemporary Art-Industrial Complex in America. In Powhida’s take, name-brand artists are the big leaves growing from the trunk of “Auctions and Big Box Franchises,” while a smaller branch of emerging and mid-level artists has been eaten away by a beaver labeled “rent,” and the smallest branch for “non-profit artist run alternatives” has been shot through and bandaged up while waving a white flag labeled “culture war.”

William Powhida, How To Look @ The Contemporary Art-Industrial Complex In America, 2014; graphite on paper, 31 x 23 inches 

The other half of Powhida’s exhibition sublimated his criticism in his craft. The painted spiral-bound sheets went abstract and blank, or they were turned into sculptures of metal that resembled God-sized crumpled notebook pages, created with remarkable verisimilitude. A final work at first looked like nothing but screws in the wall and leveling lines, as though a piece had been removed. But a closer inspection revealed it to be trompe l’oeil, drawn directly on gallery drywall. Had Powhida sold, or had he sold out?

The self-awareness of this show and its high level of skill left me with a sense for Powhida that was ultimately more profound and somber than comic. The nature of his criticism reminded me that our cultural problems are far more endemic than we like to admit. A critic of the left, he would find common ground in much of what appears in these pages. The fact is, our cultural establishment is now unswayed by criticisms shared across the political spectrum. Which leaves the rest of us tilting at windmills.

1 “William Powhida: Overculture” was on view at Postmasters, New York, from March 15 through April 19, 2014.

Gallery Chronicle (April)

Sculpture by Abbie Miller, wool hanging by Anna Betbeze, and paintings on panel by Gary Petersen in the Invitation Exhibition at the American Academy of Arts and Letters | image: James Panero

THE NEW CRITERION
April 2014

Gallery Chronicle
by James Panero

On the “Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts” at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, the “2014 Whitney Biennial” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and “Volta NY” at 82 Mercer Street, New York

Go see this year’s “Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts” at the American Academy of Arts and Letters.1 Then go see it again. First off, this restorative show of more than 120 paintings, sculptures, photographs, and works on paper by thirty-seven contemporary artists offers an excuse to visit Audubon Terrace, one of New York’s most unexpected spaces, and one that deserves renewed attention. Located on a hillside of what was once John James Audubon’s family farm, this block west of Broadway between 155th and 156th Streets in upper Manhattan was purchased and developed as a cultural complex in the beaux-arts style by Archer Huntington, beginning in the first

decades of the twentieth century. Its unusual location was perhaps a real-estate miscalculation, based on the belief that Manhattan’s center of development would continue to sweep northward, rather than skyward, as it soon proved to do through the development of the high-rise. But the relative remoteness of Audubon Terrace must now be seen as its saving grace. The pull of the skyscraper has never stretched the complex out of recognition like so many other institutions. Moreover, as the city’s peripheral places, extending in an arc from industrial Brooklyn to northern Manhattan and the Bronx, have now become new centers for living art in New York, Audubon Terrace feels like an old spirit with renewed vitality.

El Cid, 1927 sculpture by Anna Hyatt Huntington in Audubon Terrace, outside the Hispanic Society and the American Academy of Arts and Letters | image: James Panero

Little has changed since Huntington first commissioned his cousin, the architect Charles Huntington, to draw up plans for the site, save for the shifting ownership of some of the buildings (the Hispanic Society remains a must-see). A central sculpture plaza runs west down the middle of the block and provides access to an inward-facing limestone campus, far removed from the bustle of the street. Here, the most prominent work is the 1927 equestrian statue of El Cid by the trailblazing, and underappreciated, American artist Anna Hyatt Huntington, Archer’s wife, who also crafted the monument to Joan of Arc in Riverside Park.

At the far west of the courtyard, now regrettably looking onto the back of an apartment house, are the three buildings that make up the American Academy: on the right, one designed by Cass Gilbert, on the left, one designed by William Mitchell Kendall of McKim, Mead & White, connecting to a third building designed by Huntington that, until a decade ago, was the home of the American Numismatic Society. Together these three buildings provide extensive and gorgeous exhibition space for the American Academy. But heed this word of warning before making the trip to Audubon Terrace: the complex’s limited schedule (no doubt brought on by limited resources) means that the American Academy must keep European hours. The “Invitational Exhibition” remains on view through April 12, but for only three hours a day, from 1 pm to 4 pm, Thursday through Sunday, and a visit could easily take up that entire time.

The “Invitational” quality of this exhibition speaks to the benefits we still receive from the private associations and societies that came out of the beneficent American spirit of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Artist selection for the show is made through nomination by the 250 members of the Academy, who then award prizes on the chosen work and can also tap a fund, started by the American Impressionist Childe Hassam, to purchase and donate pieces to an American museum. Little is revealed to the public about the Academy’s exhibition process, other than the ten names on the “art award and purchase committee,” which this year includes Lynda Benglis, Catherine Murphy, Philip Pearlstein, Paul Resika, and Eric Fischl as chairman.

Paintings by Joanne Greenbaum, Keltie Ferris, and Kayla Mohammadi, and sculpture by Karl Burkheimer, at the Invitation Exhibition at the American Academy of Arts and Letters | image: James Panero

The fact that the “Invitational” is oriented towards the internal membership of the Academy as much as to the outside public gives this show its focus and reserve. With only a stapled checklist to go by, the display is a private assembly, not a didactic presentation. Without extensive labels and explanatory texts, the exhibition allows the visual and tactile quality of the art to speak for itself. Several artists have multiple works on view, allowing them to take on a narrative arc. Even more impressive are the visual conversations that take place in the arrangement among different artists’ work, with sculptures in dialogue with paintings in dialogue with works on paper.

The light-filled South Gallery, for example, with windows overlooking the Hudson River and the sloping hillside of Trinity Church Cemetery, positions the striped vinyl sculptures of Abbie Miller, Modern Duration(2014) and Currently Untitled (2013), which seem like they could unzip to reveal bodies beneath, against the tunneling color-lines of Gary Petersen’s acrylic and oil on panel. Petersen’s work in turn reflects the hollowed-out frames in Heide Fasnacht’s Room of Martyrs (2011–12), a sculpture made from a patchwork of photographs of a Nazi exhibition room of stolen art.

From here the exhibition winds through a warren of atriums, corridors, and smaller rooms. The mirrors by the artist Ultra Violet seem out of place, but I particularly liked the paintings by Rachel Malin, Trypophobia Tripping Phobia (2013) and Summer Warms (2013), whose gestural dots subtly dissolve into a unifying pattern. Cordy Ryman offers up five works of rough, painted blocks of wood with a sublime tactile quality. At the far end of these galleries is Wraith (2012), Ellen Driscoll’s haunting sculpture in suspension, a work of recycled white plastic that resembles an industrial landscape as seen through the Earth’s crust.

Bronze figures by Bruce Gagnier at the Invitational Exhibition at the American Academy of Arts and Letters | image: James Panero

One detour among these rooms takes you to the studio of the composer Charles Ives (1874–1954). The room is preserved as it appeared at his home in Redding, Connecticut. As the recipient of both his royalty rights and over 3,000 personal artifacts, the Academy now awards several prizes for musical composition in his name each year. On April 13, at 3 pm, the Academy will host an Ives concert of his Violin Sonata #2 and his “Concord” piano sonata in its acoustically pristine auditorium. Free tickets are available by writing to events@artsandletters.org.

Across the courtyard, past an army of bibulous bronze figures by Bruce Gagnier, hard-edge sculptures by Don Gummer, and a diorama of an island cabin in miniature by Donna Dennis, is the large North Gallery room, divided into a central corridor and four radial spaces. The center space offers a tour de force of large gestural painting, with work by Joanne Greenbaum, Keltie Ferris, Kayla Mohammadi, and a hollow-core sculpture of wood by Karl Burkheimer. The side galleries show how an interest in form can be extended through a range of materials. I was especially mesmerized by Engulf (2013), a “two channel video of circles projected onto a nylon mesh” by Christine Tarquinio Sciulli, which carried over to the radiating wooden wall sculptures of Martha Clippinger and the dizzying abstractions of Sarah Walker.

It may just be coincidence that this exhibition opened in the first week of March, during the juggernaut of New York art-fair season known as “Armory Week.” If the timing was more than chance, it speaks to the pull of the market over the world of contemporary art. This is not to lament the convergence. The “Invitational Exhibition,” so set apart from the long march of the fair scene, offered welcome relief from Armory Week’s enervating din of conspicuous self-consumption. But it also wouldn’t be the only entity to be pulled in and compressed by the gravity of “The Armory Show,” located on the Hudson River piers. The ADAA “Art Show” at the Park Avenue Armory, which used to move freely over the calendar, now circles Armory Week in geosynchronous orbit. Meanwhile, an unaccounted mass of satellite fairs looks to draw a few pennies from deep space. This includes the punk Independent, with its herd of independent minds, the magic school bus of the SPRING/BREAK Art Show, and the (thankfully) “Last Brucennial,” with its laddish interpretation of a group show for women artists. Not since the Venice Biennale, Documenta, Art Basel, and the Muenster Sculpture Project aligned in 2007 have so many celestial bodies of art converged.

Whitney Biennial 2014, fourth floor, curated by Michelle Grabner | photo: Jonathan Fickies

For me, one surprise came with the opening of the “Whitney Biennial” at the start of that week.2 Here is the exhibition we love to hate, whether it be too political, too apolitical, too insider, too out there, feature too few women, or display some combination of other grievances. I have gone from loathing the event to feeling sorry for the Whitney, which must play host to the art world’s rancorous jamboree every two years whether it would like to or not. This year, in what I consider a smart move, three outside curators were chosen to make the selection, and rather than collaborating on a single show, they each oversaw their own floor of the museum. The result added much-needed air to the hothouse of Biennial politics. It also gave us different perspectives and something of a choice.

I found little out of the ordinary as Stuart Comer, now the chief curator of media and performance art at MOMA, raised his freak-flag on the third floor. Meanwhile Anthony Elms, associate curator at the Institute of Contemporary art in Philadelphia, looked like he ran out of time on the exam on the second floor (although he must get extra credit for letting Zoe Leonard turn Whitney’s oculus into a camera obscura).

On the fourth-floor galleries, Michelle Grabner, an artist and teacher at the Art Institute of Chicago, presented what she hoped would be a “curriculum for other artists.” The surprising result was more induction than deduction, leading you into her ideas. Here I was impressed by how many artists were mining the history of modernism, not for postmodern ends, but for their own modernist means. A number of women artists, such as Alma Allan, Louise Fishman, Jacqueline Humphries, Pam Lins, Dona Nelson, and Amy Sillman, could be seen hacking into the machismo of Abstract Expressionism. Meanwhile, Philip Hanson created synesthetic paintings from the poems of Dickinson and Blake.

Grabner and her husband, Brad Killam, are the founders of two artist project spaces, one called The Suburban in Oak Park, Illinois, and the other known as The Poor Farm in northeastern Wisconsin. In case you didn’t realize it, these are not insider hotspots. They are not even “outsider” in an insider way. They are merely out there—which must account for why Grabner’s selection has been so successful. In the heartland, she taps a true art-world periphery and distills the Midwestern avant-garde. At the Whitney, she has found a similar truthfulness, and I was grateful for it.

Robert Walden and Henry Chung of Robert Henry Contemporary at Volta NY | image: James Panero

Another surprise: the art fair called “Volta NY.”3 I had never seen this one before, but it went right where other fairs go wrong, and will be my first stop next year. Arranged in a loft space in SoHo, Volta puts the artists before the galleries, with each booth presenting a solo show. So rather than blending together, the artists stayed distinct, and each could tell a story. After seeing her work at Storefront Bushwick, I was happy to see more of the dense narratives of Jennifer Wynne Reeves at BravinLee. The same goes for the storied illustrations of Josh Dorman at Ryan Lee. Gallery Kogure, from Tokyo, exhibited remarkable trompe l’oeil drawings of family photographs by Takahiro Yamamoto. Asya Geisberg featured the whimsical abstract still lifes of Todd Kelly. HPGRP Gallery displayed the comic-book weapons of Nao Matsumoto, who is also the mild-mannered co-owner of Lorimoto gallery in Ridgewood, Queens. And three galleries from the Bogart Street building in Bushwick were there too: Slag Gallery with the fractured scenes of Tim Kent, Robert Henry with the obsessive woven drawings of Robert Lansden, and Studio10 with the intense remixing of religious texts by Meg Hitchcock. Which goes to show: vital art is all around us, even during Armory Week.

1 “Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts” opened at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, on March 6 and remains on view through April 12, 2014.

2 The “2014 Whitney Biennial” opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, on March 7 and remains on view through May 25, 2014.

3 “Volta NY” was on view at 82 Mercer Street, New York, from March 6 through March 9, 2014.