How Brooklyn Missed Brooklyn

The best of Brooklyn: Gleich dancers in "The Brooklyn Performance Combine,” produced by Norte Maar in the Beaux-Arts Court of the Brooklyn Museum. Photo: James Panero

THE NEW CRITERION
December 2014

How Brooklyn Missed Brooklyn
by James Panero

For years, the Brooklyn Museum has overlooked the art happening in its own backyard.

“The persons now in this room have it in their power to decide whether in the future intellectual progress of this nation, Brooklyn is to lead or to follow far in the rear.”

—George Brown Goode, “The Museum of the Future” (1889)

On the afternoon of Saturday, November 1, a small U-Haul truck pulled up to the loading dock of the Brooklyn Museum. Behind the delivery was Jason Andrew, the director and curator of Norte Maar, a Bushwick-based nonprofit at the crux of Brooklyn’s artistic renaissance. The Brooklyn Museum’s education department had invited Norte Maar to produce a “performance by sound artists and dancers” for its free “Target First Saturday.” The show, “The Brooklyn Performance Combine,” was a two-hour event Andrew and the choreographer Julia K. Gleich had planned to take place in the museum’s Beaux-Arts Court that evening. Hidden among the cargo that Andrew was expected to deliver in the truck—sound equipment, costumes, and props—were unsolicited canvases and sculptures by Brooklyn artists he planned to sneak into his performance.

The museum brought in the “Combine” to promote “Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Beyond,” its self-described “major survey” of thirty-five borough artists currently on view. Yet for many observers, this exhibition, which opened in October, continues through January, and had been touted as “reflecting the rich creative diversity of Brooklyn,” turned out to be anything but.

“An exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum billed as a ‘major survey’ of Brooklyn-based artists should be exciting and revelatory,” wrote Ken Johnson in The New York Times. “Disappointingly, it’s not.” Led by extensive wall labels, “Crossing Brooklyn” looked almost exclusively to artists working in what’s known as “relational aesthetics,” the art of context over content, some whimsically, others with heavy social agendas. One artist focused “on the need for nutritious food in economically disadvantaged urban neighborhoods.” Another explored “the culture of mass consumption, overproduction, and waste” along with “the exploitation of workers and natural resources.”

“Evidently counted out from the start,” Johnson observed, “were artists who toil in studios making paintings, sculptures and other sorts of objects intended just to be looked at.” In other words: many of the accomplishments you now see in the borough’s open studios and gallery shows had been excluded from the museum. By zeroing in on a small subset of artistic production (mainly created by artists with tenuous connections to Brooklyn at best), “Crossing Brooklyn” accomplished just the opposite of displaying the borough’s “rich creative diversity.” Johnson’s conclusion reflected the feelings of many: “Brooklyn artists deserve better than this too-small, ideologically blinkered exhibition.”

For “Crossing Brooklyn,” the museum claimed the curators Eugenie Tsai and Rujeko Hockley “drew upon their extensive knowledge of the borough, as well as a wide-ranging network of unofficial advisors composed of artists, colleagues, and other creative professionals.” Yet Andrew, who has curated a decade of local exhibitions and programs through Norte Maar, says that no one from the museum came to observe what he does, despite talking to Tsai. “I don’t think those curators have enough pride in what is happening in Brooklyn. That is reflected in their curation. They can’t keep up with the pace, the spontaneity. But in order to keep the historical relevance, you have to keep up with the art.”

Brooklyn artists protest the Brooklyn Museum at “The Brooklyn Performance Combine" with painting by Loren Munk. Photo: James Panero

Andrew’s account of the Brooklyn Museum’s indifference to the studios and galleries of contemporary Brooklyn gets repeated across the borough’s artistic communities. “It’s Brooklyn’s time, now,” the painter, videographer, and art historian Loren Munk told me, but “the Brooklyn Museum is so wedded to their petrified state, they are going to miss it. The community has busted their buns for years. Slowly through the work of thousands of people, people started coming out here. Yet the curators are not familiar with the art community. A lot of their direction comes from academia, so they don’t do the hard-ass work, do the legwork, talk to a lot of people, go to a lot of places. These people don’t have the inclination.”

“There should be studio buzz,” Munk told me of the lead-up to “Crossing Brooklyn.” Instead, there was “nothing. None of that. There was zero outreach. We were frustrated. The disengagement. The elitist approach.” A Red Hook-based artist since the 1980s, Munk believes the Brooklyn Museum has been failing its own creative community for years, and in fact “the museum has gotten worse. A lot of significant people have been ignored by the Brooklyn Museum for decades. People having international influence, and the Brooklyn Museum has blown them off.” The Brooklyn Museum could be at the center of the borough’s creative renaissance, Munk concluded, “but it would take work. They need to reach out to the community.”

As the “Brooklyn Performance Combine” took shape in the weeks leading up to its November evening, many of its local artists saw the performance as an opportunity to demonstrate the burgeoning energy of Brooklyn that the museum had long ignored. Although the “Combine,” which was let in through the side door by the education department rather than by the curators of “Crossing Brooklyn,” was billed as a live performance, with art works and art making officially excluded, Andrew stretched the invitation into a “mashup of Brooklyn-based poets, painters, and performers.” Mixed in with his performance equipment, that afternoon he brought the canvases and sculptures of artists that he saw as indicative of Brooklyn’s artistic energy but which had been ignored by the museum: Amy Feldman, Ryan Michael Ford, Rico Gatson, Tamara Gonzales, Susanna Heller, Brooke Moyse, Jessica Weiss, Rachel Beach, Ben Godward, and Jim Osman.

For two hours that evening, in an electrifying synergy that was part celebration, part exorcism, all of these canvases and sculptures became the props for the musicians, dancers, and poets of the “Combine.” Carried out and positioned in the middle of the Beaux-Arts Court, the angular sculpture of Rachel Beach resonated with the vectored choreography of the Gleich dancers and the Brooklyn Ballet Youth Ensemble. The artist Jeff Feld and the cellist Mariel Roberts reflected the performance traditions of Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage. Ben Godward built up a towering abstract sculpture of plastic cups and poured materials, which he then sawed up and distributed to the audience. Sarah Schmerler, with deadpan delivery, read the descriptions and sponsor names of the museum’s own stilted exhibition program, contrasting it with the energy of the room and formative personalities such as Deborah Brown and Richard Timperio who were left out of “Crossing Brooklyn.” Before the event, Loren Munk had put out a call to Brooklyn artists who felt “somehow excluded from ‘Crossing Brooklyn.’ ” During the performance, he watched as his work incorporating nearly one hundred names on a painted map of the borough, covered with an X, was unveiled. Titled RE-CROSSING BROOKLYN, “this is a small reminder to the Brooklyn Museum that they are in the center of one of the greatest art enclaves in the world,” he promised his respondents. “They should open their eyes and engage with this unique community.” During the unveiling, the artist William Powhida joined the stage and delivered a monologue on the painting: “I happen to be on Loren’s list of artists not included in the exhibition. I never had a studio visit. And a lot of the artists on that list never had studio visits. . . . This list is long. Take a look at it and study it.” To which an audience member shouted: THANK YOU! Even if the Brooklyn Museum chose not to feature significant elements of the arts in “Crossing Brooklyn,” Andrew and his performers would not let them go unnoticed. “It is a borough of immense creativity,” Andrew explained to me, “and the Brooklyn Museum has missed the boat.”

Brooklyn Museum's stately original building with its Grand Staircase.

For an institution that has long prided itself as a community center and public accommodation rather than an elitist repository of art, such accusations would seem to cut against the promises of the museum’s progressive leadership. Yet the criticism in fact speaks to the Brooklyn Museum’s deep-seated misapprehension around its own history and what a great museum of art should be.

It wasn’t always so. The Brooklyn Museum was born in 1823, in an era of rising civic confidence in what would become America’s third largest city. The acquisitions of American paintings by the Brooklyn Institute, the museum’s forerunner, reflected this outlook. Francis Guy’s Winter Scene in Brooklyn (ca. 1819–20) entered the institution’s collection in 1846 as an immensely popular view of Brooklyn’s bustling and diverse mercantile port, a reflection of the city’s transformation from old Dutch farmland into a modern metropolis—and one that could now fuel its own civic institutions. Today such an acquisition demonstrates how the Brooklyn Museum was once open to local contemporary art, in an age when other nascent museums were fixated on the Old Masters.

Following the Civil War, as great museums took shape across the East River in Manhattan, the call went up for the city of Brooklyn to build “an Institute of Arts and Sciences worthy of her wealth, her position, her culture and her people.” Situated at the intersection of the grand new parks and parkways designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, and soon to be linked by subways, the museum’s new classical edifice designed by McKim, Mead & White in 1897 reflected the ideals of nineteenth-century Brooklyn. It also spoke to the ambitions of the director Franklin Hooper, who planned an institution some four times larger than the museum we see today. The current Eastern Parkway wing is but one side of what was designed to be a square building and the largest museum in the world.

Drawing of the fully realized original plan of the museum.

Yet rather than following through on this grand vision, the Brooklyn Museum has for a century remained one of the world’s great unfinished institutions—with a large parking lot on what was meant to be its footprint. Some of this can be attributed to the changing fortunes of Brooklyn. With Brooklyn’s consolidation into greater New York City in 1898, the once independent city lost much of the energy behind its own civic mandates as it fell into the shadows of twentieth-century Manhattan. But the museum’s leadership is also to blame, especially for a radical shift instituted by its progressive director Philip Newell Youtz in the 1930s.

Believing that the “museum of today must meet contemporary needs,” Youtz attacked the founding mandates of his own institution as a citadel of artistic achievement. He vowed to “turn a useless Renaissance palace into a serviceable modern museum.” Praising the educational practices of museums under the Soviet regime, Youtz undertook the transformation of his museum from a temple of contemplation into a school of instruction, where the arts were put in the service of progressive ends, and funding would derive from the state rather than private philanthropy. Youtz sought to transform his institution into a “socially oriented museum” with, as he stated, “a collection of people surrounded by objects, not a collection of objects surrounded by people.” He hired department store window-dressers to arrange exhibitions and transformed the collection of his composite museum into a parade of teachable moments.

He then turned his programmatic assault into a physical one. Historians question the ultimate motivation behind his demolition of the Brooklyn Museum’s exterior Grand Staircase, which resembled the entrance of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was meant to elevate the museum-goer from Eastern Parkway into the refined precincts of the museum. What is not in doubt is Youtz’s belief that his iconoclasm, pushing the museum lobby down to street level, “improved” upon the McKim, Mead & White design. Recalling this destruction of the museum’s patrimony, Linda S. Ferber recounts how Youtz intended it “as a socially responsible gesture, eliminating the grand ceremonial entry, which literally elevated the visitor to the level of the arts, in order to facilitate public access directly from the street.” Continuing in this way, Youtz went about mutilating much of the museum’s ornamental interior.

Floorplan detailing what has been built of the original museum plan.

As the director of the Brooklyn Museum since 1997, Arnold Lehman has closely followed Youtz’s lead. He has championed exhibitions with either heavy social components or populist appeal—or both, as in the case of 1999’s “Sensation” show. He has taken the lead in demanding public funds while importing demotic displays on the costumes of STAR WARS, photographs of rock stars, and (currently) “killer heels.” He pumped attendance statistics with free late-night weekends filled with fashion shows, jewelry sales, music, and drinks. He gave ticket-buyers free rein to run through his halls, for example by hosting a regular scavenger hunt—billed as “part scavenger hunt, part obstacle course and ALL Brooklyn Museum”—with contestants “competing for classes at StripXpertease and Babeland.” He destroyed the independence of the museum’s traditional curatorial departments—tasked with maintaining what remained of the collections that the museum hadn’t traded away—in order to centralize exhibitions under his administration. He even made his own mark on the museum’s entrance, pushing Youtz’s populist assault out towards Eastern Parkway with a radiating glass canopy. “I like people to think of [the museum] as their favorite park,” he says.

Yet as with Youtz, Lehman’s approach undermined rather than strengthened the foundations of the museum by mistaking the greatness of art for mere programmatic utility. At the same time, an intelligent public that Lehman had underestimated, far from rallying around their own edification, largely stayed away both as ticket buyers and museum supporters. “Brooklyn Museum’s Populism Hasn’t Lured Crowds,” read a New York Times headline in 2010. Trustees resigned. Lehman even disbanded a community committee of supporters that had dated back to 1948.

This posture helps explain why the Brooklyn Museum has been slow to appreciate Brooklyn art, especially those artists who work without clear didactic agendas. For the museum, their art serves little use beyond fodder for contests, such as the reality television program “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist,” or social experiments, such as “Go: A Community-curated Open Studio Project.” To expect the museum to appreciate local art as a connoisseur, studying, guiding, and elevating the best to public attention, would be an affront to this progressive vision.

The once-grand staircase of the Brooklyn Museum has been replaced by a glass atrium.

Yet just as Brooklyn art has flourished, so too has Brooklyn been reborn. The borough has shaken its defensive posture to become once again a leading metropolis, perhaps exceeding its nineteenth-century reach and confidence. This past September, Arnold Lehman announced he will step down in a year, and the search is on for the next leader. Lehman has been a likeable showman, perhaps the only sort of director who could survive in an overshadowed institution of diminishing returns. But the changing fortunes of the borough now call for a director who can draw on Brooklyn’s civic strengths to build the museum into what its founders intended. The time has come for a Brooklyn Museum that is truly “worthy of her wealth, her position, her culture and her people”—and her artists.

Not Like Ike

Model of the Eisenhower Memorial looking at Independence Ave. GEHRY PARTNERS, LLP

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
November 13, 2014

Not Like Ike
by James Panero

Plans for the Eisenhower Memorial have turned into another Washington boondoggle.

Imagine if the great Lincoln Memorial had been designed today. No longer would we feature our 16th president enthroned in a Doric temple. No more would we contend with an off-putting set of stairs as we strain to look up at cold, noninteractive marble.

Instead, Lincoln could be brought down to our size. In an immersive multimedia environment, tapping the latest technologies to recall log-cabin life, here we might help Lincoln as a child contend with his humble beginnings. The native vegetation of Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois could be planted on site, part of a LEED-certified green drainage plan. Through the Lincoln E-Memorial app, visitors could test their strength against the famous rail splitter through a game that posts scores directly to Twitter (hashtag: #RailedIt). Just be sure to duck when visiting the “Ford’s Theatre Experience.”

Thankfully, there is little risk of seeing the Lincoln Memorial recast this way. For Marian Anderson, Martin Luther King Jr. and many others, it has served as one of the most famous backdrops of the past century despite its antiquated marble technology. Yet since 1999, Washington’s master planners have been at work on another presidential memorial on the National Mall—for Dwight D. Eisenhower—that will pursue the opposite of the tried and true: a plan that was touted in its 2008 prospectus as a “21st Century memorialization,” using “new avenues” and “the widest possible range of innovative concepts and ideas,” with a “very significant electronic component,” leading to a “new vision for memorialization.”

National memorials have a history of long gestation and partisan controversy. Even the Lincoln Memorial, designed by Henry Bacon with sculpture by Daniel Chester French, completed in 1922, saw its share of criticism. Yet in this classical city, in hindsight, Washington’s traditional monuments have stood the test of time. So why must new mean “new”?

The congressionally authorized Eisenhower Commission certainly believes it got “new” in Frank Gehry, its chosen architect. With a proposal that subverts many of the classically based traditions of memorial design, the core of Gehry’s plan is the periphery: a 447-foot-long metal screen, suspended between 80-foot-tall columns, interwoven with images of trees. “The setting for Eisenhower Square,” reads the Commission website, “will be framed by transparent stainless steel tapestries, which depict the plains of Kansas, representing Eisenhower’s humble beginnings.” This device would serve as the backdrop for the sculptural program playing out in front of it.

In the initial proposal, since amended to include a greater cast of characters, this program centered on a statue of Eisenhower as a barefoot boy. The memorial would also be designed around an app that “will enable visitors to view historical footage, speeches, and events within the context of the physical memorial through augmented reality.”

Should we be surprised that the plan has become more bogged down than the Battle of the Bulge? The design has received widespread criticism—from Justin Shubow of the National Civic Art Society to Sam Roche of the group Right by Ike, not to mention members of Eisenhower’s own family—that has resonated with lawmakers and the general public. The site would also imperil the historic L’Enfant Plan by overlaying Maryland Avenue, between the Air and Space Museum and the Department of Education. In the New Yorker last year, Jeffrey Frank said the design “has managed to achieve something rare in Washington: in true bipartisan spirit, almost everyone hates it.”

This past summer, congressional members of the Committee on Natural Resources issued a 60-page report damning the project as a “five-star folly.” It is easy to see why. Congress has already appropriated $65 million for a project that would cost $100 million or more. Yet without a stone—or screen—in place, $41 million of this funding has already been spent or obligated, including almost $16.4 million for the designer and $13.3 million for administrative support. A $1.4 million fundraising effort slated to generate $35 million in private support has taken in less than $500,000. Meanwhile, the Commission maintains nine full-time employees and six full-and part-time contractors.

Beset by criticism, Congress has rightly halted future funding, some commissioners have resigned and calls have been mounting to scrap the Gehry plan altogether. Bruce Cole, the former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities who was appointed to the Commission a year ago, remains a skeptic. “A great memorial is an exclamation point, not a question mark,” he recently testified.

Yet led by its chairman, Rocco Siciliano, the Commission has dug in. Recent approvals by the National Capital Planning Commission and the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts have been hailed by Gehry defenders as the green light, even if the project has only enough gas to idle at the curb. Of course the bureaucrats behind the wheel still get their salaries. That’s right: Commission staffers will continue to draw down millions of tax dollars regardless of whether anything gets built.

Yet a greater force than self-interest has propelled the memorial to this point: the sometimes blinding mythology of the “new,” where widespread criticism can be mistaken for vindication, and pushback ennobles a self-anointed vanguard. Mr. Siciliano and others may believe they are following the example of the Vietnam Memorial, an unconventional design that overcame initial controversy to win the public over. But criticism alone does not authenticate avant-garde success. An unconventional design may just be bad, and design à la mode risks falling from fashion.

Eisenhower deserves a great national memorial, and it would be wrong to see this battle reduced to a mandate for one style over another. But the critics are right to demand something genuinely revolutionary—a design that is not simply “new,” but new, and that successfully communicates the essence of the man it claims to honor.

After all, here is the Supreme Allied Commander who oversaw the most complex amphibious assault in history. He liberated Europe, went on to become the president of Columbia University and the commander of NATO. As the American president who ended the Korean War, he ushered in a period of peacetime prosperity, connected the country through the Interstate Highway System, created NASA and the agency that would invent the Internet, while pushing civil-rights legislation and sending federal troops to desegregate the schools. When he died in 1969, he was buried, by his request, in his green World War II jacket in an $80 government-issue casket. Does this say “8-story-high, $100 million metal screen” to you?

Gallery Chronicle (November)

Chris Martin, Untitled, 2014; Acrylic, oil and glitter on canvas, 88" x 77"

THE NEW CRITERION
November 2014

Gallery Chronicle
by James Panero

On “Chris Martin” at Anton Kern Gallery; “Doppler Shift” at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey; and “Matthew Miller: Can’t You See It, I Am One” at Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden Pocket Utopia.

If there’s a Godfather to the Bushwick painting scene, it’s Chris Martin. Let me disambiguate this statement by clarifying, first, that I don’t mean Chris Martin, the premier New Zealand cricketer, Chris Martin, the “Play” of the rap duo Kid n’ Play, or Chris Martin, the frontman of the English pop band Coldplay. I mean Chris Martin, the artist born in Washington, D.C. in 1954, who has been a Brooklyn fixture since sharing a studio building with Katherine Bradford in Williamsburg in 1980. This Chris Martin has been around for a while—he dropped out of Yale to move to Soho in the prehistorical year 1976—but his paintings only seem to get younger with age. And the kids love him for it.

Perhaps more than any other Williamsburg painter who moved east to Bushwick, Martin brought an insouciance that has clearly impressed the neighborhood’s younger set. His appearances in Bushwick group shows always seem to be cause for excitement. His exhibition program in Chelsea is celebrated and closely watched. Now, after several years at the gallery Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Martin has arrived at Anton Kern for his first solo show under new representation.1

Martin’s youthfulness is both felt and cultivated. He inherited the boldness of Soho’s 1970s post-minimal painters and processed it through 1980s neo-expressionism (especially the work of the German polyglots Sigmar Polke and Anselm Kiefer) to arrive at an abstract aesthetic that radiates outer-borough otherness—while still appearing big enough for Chelsea. In 2011, the writer and painter Sharon Butler identified the style of abstraction Martin inhabits as a “new casualism,” where a “studied, passive-aggressive incompleteness” and “multiple forms of imperfection” lead to work that is “off-kilter,” “overtly offhand,” and “not-quite-right.” Butler meant this as praise. Other critics have been less flattering. “Crapstraction” has been one label of opprobrium. For this style, “Zombie formalism” is another. Coined by Walter Robinson, popularized by Jerry Saltz, “Zombie” may one day be transformed from insult into the style’s top-shelf brand name, following the trajectory of nearly all enduring terms in modern art.

Good paintings are often the results of bad mistakes. So Martin paints like he knows nothing, and he knows he knows nothing, deliberately fumbling towards the end zone. He says he stashes his many failed canvases in the boiler room while mixing the winners and the best efforts into an oeuvre of quixotic could-have-beens. Of course, you can’t “de-skill” a painting without skill, just as you can’t take the “story” out of art history (or something like that). So it helps that Martin starts with ample reserves of artistic ability and historical awareness. As a boy in Washington, he grew up surrounded by art and artists. In an interview with The Brooklyn Rail (which has long championed his work), he describes growing up in a home featuring a life-size portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence, which his mother had inherited and displayed in an elaborate wooden frame. Art teachers, artists he encountered along the way, the music of James Brown, and a magic mushroom he swallowed forty years ago, all seem to influence his paintings.

Chris Martin, Installation view at Anton Kern Gallery, New York.

At Kern, Martin’s latest paintings are particularly indebted to the bold figure-ground dynamics of the Soho school. Certain motifs seem to come right out of recent work by Thornton Willis and other masters of the hard edge and the dissolving form. But then Martin funks them up. In a new monograph published to accompany the current exhibition, Martin describes his affection for Bill Jensen, who would leave his paintings outside to “season” them in the snow and rain.

Here Martin takes this literally, not only rough-handling his canvases, dragging them around his place in the Catskills, probably dropping them once or twice, but also dashing them with copious amounts of glitter to season the mix. On several paintings, overlaying the studied edges, he works in whole bands of the sprinkled stuff. Sometimes his glittery forms take on their own sculptural shape, as Martin adds a gradient shadow, recalling Yves Tanguy’s surrealist landscapes and his own recurring mushroom motif. Elsewhere, as in Chameleon (2014), they streak across the compositions like drippy bedazzled brushstrokes. Sometimes he leaves them out, as in Tree(2014), where Martin allows hard-edge acrylic underpainting to stand on its own. In his largest work, Space is the Place (2014), over eleven feet tall by nine feet wide, set in its own gallery, the glitter becomes an all-over rainbow abstraction. And sometimes Martin does something else entirely. One painting here is on aluminum foil. Others mix in images from magazine pages and whatever else happened to stick to them. I especially like one painting that incorporates a diagram of the human gastrointestinal system languishing in Pepto-Bismol pink.

One could see these desultory compositions as an untucked insult to abstract art. But one can also see Martin as celebrating the history of painting like an Uncle Sam juggling on a unicycle. He’s the most patriotic guy at the Fourth of July parade. He’s over the top. He’s having fun. “Sometimes a bad painting is a brave and uncharted investigation beyond one’s own good taste,” he explains in an interview in the Kern monograph, “and sometimes it’s just a really bad painting. Humor is a serious indicator that something interesting is happening.” Similarly, sometimes tackiness is just tacky, sometimes it can be overly tactful, but sometimes it clears out space for other possibilities. Or at least it gives us license to wear polka dots with plaid.

Edgar Diehl, Jupiter Landung IV, 2014.

One heretofore undiscussed avenue of Martin’s painterly trip has been his work in art therapy. After riding the ups and downs of the Eighties art market, Martin went back to school to train as a therapist at the School of Visual Arts. He then worked for fifteen years on the front lines of an AIDS day treatment program with a population that could be homeless, mentally ill, and chemically addicted. The experience clearly affected him. It also wiped him of a great deal of artistic angst while broadening his sense for materials. The process of painting can be its own restorative balm, glitter and all.

More should be said about those who work in this unsung vanguard. I don’t mean the calculated avant-garde of the contemporary salon aesthetic, or some token outreach program that looks just good enough for the Annual Report and an NEA Arts Education grant. What I mean are those artists and institutions that use art to reach people who are genuinely in need and underserved by our rich visual culture.

This thought occurred to me while visiting the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, an institution that forgoes the glamour of auction-name artists and starchitect build-outs for serious art and serious work. Founded in 1933, inhabiting a building that got the short end of the Brutalist stick (was there a long end?), the Visual Arts Center is nothing to look at. Nor did I find much to see between highway interchanges on my hour-long drive from New York City to the town of Summit. Yet behind its corrugated concrete exterior, as New Jersey’s “largest institution dedicated exclusively to viewing, making, and learning about contemporary art,” the Visual Arts Center is a hive of artistic activity, with teachers giving stand-and-deliver sermons and young artists making and engaging with the art on display. One of the missions of the Center is to “provide quality education programs to underserved audiences, such as the elderly, persons with special needs, and children from low-income families.” Check, check, and check.

Yet the Center also demonstrates a particular respect for its constituency by mounting an exhibition program, curated by Mary Birmingham, that is rigorous, vigorous, and uncompromised by any false sense of cultural relevance and equivalency. Now on view (and a perfect example of this program) is “Doppler Shift,” a smart group show of what might be considered contemporary optical art.2

Gary Petersen, Tilting Points (panorama), Visual Arts Center of New Jersey.

“Doppler Shift” began as a suitcase exhibition that the artist Mel Prest packed through Europe in 2012. A version went on view at Brooklyn’s Parallel Art Space in 2013. With every stop it became enlarged and refined. The current exhibition brings together many of those underappreciated artists who interest me most these days: Steven Baris, Rob de Oude, Gabriele Evertz, Enrico Gomez, Gilbert Hsiao, Stephen Maine, Don Voisine, and (upstairs in a related installation) Gary Petersen. I was dazzled by the well-handled triangles of Joanne Mattera’s Chromatic Geometry 21 (2014), the rippling starburst of Edgar Diehl’s Jupiter Landung IV (2014), and the trompe l’oeil skills of a delicate sculptor whose birth name, she insists, is Gay Outlaw (she was born in Alabama).

The term “optical art” never looked right to me. “Anti-optical” might be better. First used in the mid-1960s, optical or “Op Art” refers to paintings and sculptures that elicit some kind of sensory effect in the viewer. In fact, through particular arrangements of color and line, here is art that is united in cutting against straightforward opticality by challenging how our brains process visual information.

Back in June 2009, in this column, I looked at how “Op,” a term that was coined in the mid-1960s, quickly went from the art world’s next chapter heading—Pop to Op—to an historical footnote. You might say that Op was co-Opted by the design industry, which found its patterns easy to reproduce, and the drug industry, which saw a kindred spirit in its cognitive short-circuiting.

But Op may be our most immediate contemporary style, requiring little prior understanding of what good art is supposed to be. As Dave Hickey wrote for “Optic Nerve,” a 2007 exhibition that brought some depth to the dazzling surfaces of Op (and quoted in the current catalogue by Thomas Micchelli), “Optical art introduces us to an order of experience that is less voluntary and less dependent on education and conscious knowledge than one might wish.” All the more reason to join the broad constituency of the Visual Arts Center in appreciating “Doppler Shift” firsthand.

Matthew Miller, self-portrait at Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden Pocket Utopia.

We live in selfie times. With the advent of the front-facing camera, it should be safe to say that humanity has not seen such a period of self-reflection since the invention of the mirror. The young self-portraitist Matthew Miller has been wrestling with this fact since even before the development of the flip phone. His stunning Old Master abilities are straight out of the Northern (Bushwick) Renaissance. In June 2011 I led this space with a discussion of his blockbuster show that just about blew up the basement of the formative Ridgewood gallery known as Famous Accountants. Now the gallerist Austin Thomas has brought Miller to her new Chelsea outpost Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden Pocket Utopia.3

After the 2011 show, I wondered how Miller would move along from his oddly furrowed self-portraits over oily black background. I am glad to see he never did, instead doubling down on the intensity of his painterly self-analysis, which might see him lay down dozens of thin layers of oil over a single image, microscopically shifting it through every pass. His self-portraits continue to haunt with their skewed glances that track your movements no matter where you go (to answer how he makes this possible, he will be in the gallery for a talk on November 15). I am glad Miller has dispensed with attempting to portray others, which always lacked the same intensity. In some paintings, he has also brought some of his self-making tools into the frame—a paint brush that touches an edge, a carved block of wood. If only he had included an iPhone 6, he might have created the image of the century.

1 “Chris Martin” opened at Anton Kern Gallery, New York, on October 9 and remains on view through November 15, 2014.

2 “Doppler Shift” opened at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey on September 28, 2014 and remains on view through January 18, 2015.

3 “Matthew Miller: Can’t You See It, I Am One” opened at Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden Pocket Utopia, New York, on October 16 and remains on view through November 22, 2014.