The New York City Ballet 'Family Saturday'

Corps de ballet members performing an excerpt from Peter Martins’s Swan Lake as part of a NYCB "Family Saturday."

James writes:

A cultural highpoint of classical music must be the development of engaging programs for children. Such events combine just the right mix of performance and narration to captivate and educate future generations (while also delighting the parents in tow).

The "Young People's Concerts" series at the New York Philharmonic offers the best, longest, and most consequential example of how this can be done right. The YPCs started as weekend children's matinees back in the late nineteenth century, became a regular feature in 1926, and reached their zenith (and "the Zenith") in the televised broadcasts of Leonard Bernstein starting in 1958. Some years ago, I watched the full run of these TV broadcasts, which is now available in a nine-DVD set from Kultur video, and wrote about it here.

I grew up attending the children's concerts at Lincoln Center (just after the Bernstein era). Now that I have a young daughter, I am back again. But as we've found, just because they are aimed at children, such concerts are not easy to perform well. A good children's concert is not a short, poorly orchestrated, dumbed-down version of an adult concert, which was what we unfortunately found last summer on the lawn at Tanglewood. All the Boston Symphony Orchestra did with that performance was drive a generation away from live performance, or at least the BSO's approximation of it, and back to YouTube. (If you didn't already know, some of the most captivating classical performances for children can now be found online. Just take a look at our current favorite--the Mariinsky's Nutcracker in flawless HD).    

Coming off the BSO experience, we were unsure what we'd find at last weekend's New York City Ballet "Family Saturday." Billed as a one-hour presentation "designed especially for family audiences," the performance promised "short works and excerpts from New York City Ballet's diverse repertory" with narrative instruction by NYCB artists "offering insights on the music and choreography." 

The answer was the finest children's performance I could imagine. Kept to a captivating, fast-paced hour, the NYCB performed excerpts from the season's repertory. This meant Emeralds with music by Gabriel Fauré, The Concerto Barocco with music by J. S. Bach, Who Cares? with music by George Gershwin, Barber's Violin Concerto, Dances at a Gathering with music by Frédéric Chopin, Todo Buenos Aires with music by Astor Paizzolla, and excerpts from the second and third acts of Coppélia with music by Léo Delibes.

Of the entire selection, the opening performance of Emeralds was the one letdown. At least one of the dancers was off a beat, and viewed from left orchestra, some of the staging was obscured by the musicians who were performing stage right.    

But it all came together as soon as the morning's emcee, Silas Farley, stepped on stage. Farley may for now just be a young member of the corps de ballet, but his star quality can already outshine the principals of the company. My daughter and I first got to know about him through the NYCB's new online reality show, a high-production-value if slightly clichéd web series produced by AOL of life inside the company, with Sarah Jessica Parker narrating and ballet master Peter Martins acting as the heel (he would make a great villain in a 1970s-era James Bond film).

Here's a tip for next season's videos: less talking, more dancing. But between the catty gripes, the show did give us a glimpse of Farley, who was filmed the moment he received his contract to join the company. Taking bets now: With his great poise and bright attitude, Farley may one day be, what, Principal Dancer? Ballet Master? President of the United States? Until then we were lucky to catch him leading the NYCB's Family Saturday.

On stage, Farley's enthusiasm for dance was infectious as he (and the show's writers) made intelligent and fun comparisons between the programs--such as the differences between the choreography of George Balanchine in Jewels (with its performance directed at the audience) and Jerome Robbins in Dances at a Gathering (played more towards the other dancers on stage). He helped us appreciate the fun of Martins's choreography in the Barber Violin Concerto (with ragdoll moves by Megan Fairchild). He introduced us to an accordion-like instrument called the Bandoneon, played by JP Jofre, in Todo Buenos Aires. Finally, for Coppélia, with its robotic doll, he had the children of the audience stand up and move like marionettes.

It seems to be just the right metaphor. Here was a concert that pulled every string to further a child's appreciation of ballet.  

The NYCB's next Family Saturday is May 10, 2014, hosted this time by Principal Dancer Daniel Ulbricht. Tickets are for general admission and $20 each.  

The Real Reason School Stayed Open

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
February 14, 2014

The Real Reason School Stayed Open
by James Panero

Ideology trumps safety and common sense

In Bill de Blasio’s New York, apparently, you do need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

How else to explain the rash decision to keep city schools open during yet another dangerous blizzard, which slammed the city Thursday just as predicted?

When it comes to declaring a snow day, the safety of city parents, children, teachers, school staff and caregivers should come first. But that’s not what happened during this current storm — and the reason is ideological.

Wednesday evening, Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña declared that schools would stay open despite the “anticipated inclement weather conditions.”

The strange logic of this decision was made even stranger by what de Blasio had said earlier in the day: “Because of its timing and intensity, this storm is going to make both the morning and evening rush hours extremely difficult. If you do not need to drive, you will help yourself and everyone else by staying off the roads.”

So, adults should stay off the roads, but kids need to come to school?

The paradox left families scratching their heads. Judging by the online reaction, it also gave some young de Blasio supporters a bit of buyer’s remorse.

 

“It is pouring snow and de Blasio says no snow day, my 7y old just said ‘I miss Bloomberg,’” school parent Richard Bonneau wrote on Twitter Thursday.

Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, had harsher words: “I understand the desire to keep schools open. The only thing that trumps that is safety. Having students, parents and staff traveling in these conditions was unwarranted. It was a mistake to open schools today.” Public Advocate Letitia James agreed.

What they’re not saying is that there’s a philosophical reason why de Blasio and Fariña have now kept school open despite several severe storms.

Fariña believes in the social-justice mission of city schools. This means that for her, schools are the custodians as much as the educators of children.

“My decision is where the kids are safest and the most taken care of, and the answer to that is in schools,” she has argued. When schools are closed, “Many of our kids don’t get a hot lunch and, in many cases breakfast.”

Such logic appears to have led Fariña to declare that schools would be open before waiting to see conditions on the ground. Her indifference to meteorological reality even continued through the storm: “It is absolutely a beautiful day out there right now,” she said Thursday morning.

The problem is that, while some city families may indeed be safest inside school, Fariña put all families in danger by deciding they should attempt to come to school in such hazardous conditions. What’s worse: missing breakfast, or breaking your leg trying to get it?

The street-side danger of heavy snow is no joke. Last week, the video of a man getting knocked down by the spray of a speeding plow in Sheepshead Bay went viral. And Thursday, a 36-year-old pregnant woman was killed by a snowplow in Brooklyn.

There’s a reason why the city’s independent schools, which in the past tied their closings to the city’s decision-making process, now largely make their own calls.

Thursday morning, my wife and I made our own decision to ignore the city’s illogic, and kept our daughter home from nursery school. Statistics show that a majority of public-school families did the same thing: Attendance Thursday was a dismal 44.65%.

Last month, de Blasio said that pedestrian safety would be a top priority of his office. He also renewed his campaign pledge to work for the elimination of traffic-related injuries and deaths through an initiative known Vision Zero.

Unfortunately, when he keeps school open despite serious street hazards, he merely demonstrates zero vision.

Gallery Chronicle (February)

Rendering of the planned 54th Street entrance for the Museum of Modern Art | Diller Scofidio + Renfro

THE NEW CRITERION
February 2014

Gallery Chronicle
by James Panero

On “Sideshow Nation II: At the Alamo” at Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn; “Paperazzi III” at Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, Brooklyn; “Clouds, organized by Adam Simon” at Lesley Heller Workspace, New York; “Eight Painters” at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, New York; “Lori Ellison” at McKenzie Fine Art, New York; “Angelina Gualdoni: Held in Place, Light in Hand” at Asya Geisberg Gallery, New York; and “Mel Kendrick: Water Drawings” at David Nolan Gallery, New York.

New York’s Museum of Modern Art is one of those miracle products that turns out to have been a virulent carcinogen. How else to explain 53rd Street’s transformation from a vital home for living art into the malignancy it is today? Tumorous expansions have turned the block the pallor of sheetrock. Glass polyps sprout from every surface of Edward Durell Stone’s original building. At today’s MOMA, growth is not a sign of life but of continued decay; each development signals a more debilitating stage than the last.

This past month the downward spiral continued. MOMA announced its next expansion would doom the former home of the American Folk Art Museum, a building of recent vintage by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects. Folk Art had the misfortune of being built adjacent to the current Modern on land MOMA wanted for future development, in this case a tower designed by Jean Nouvel. (The proximity of the two institutions was no coincidence: Both museum properties were the products of Rockefeller philanthropy, reflecting the family’s shared interest in modernism and Americana. So much for donor intent.)

I’ve had mixed feelings about the Folk Art building, itself a symbol of the build-and-bust mentality that ends up ruining otherwise fine institutions. Construction of the Folk Art in 2001 broke the back of that museum, a problem that MOMA “fixed” by purchasing the property in 2011. Yet the townhouse-sized building, with its textured bronze facade, is also one of the more remarkable designs of the past several years. For a museum with a department dedicated to architecture, it stands to reason, one might think, that MOMA should first want to preserve the Folk Art by incorporating it into a larger structure—as the Metropolitan Museum has done with its many expansions throughout the years—before moving on to constructing the next glass shard.

MOMA’s demolition plans have drawn criticism from all sides, save for the schadenfreude of those who resent Williams and Tsien for their roles in relocating the Barnes to Philadelphia. That MOMA hired Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the celebrated architects behind the High Line, to deliver the coup de grâce did little to soften the blow. In the end it came down to real estate. Folk Art stands in the way of MOMA’s destiny to become a development complex that happens to have a Kunsthalle attached—a luxury apartment sprawl with restaurants, spa, and massage services offered by the Marina Abramovic Institute.

At the same time, and perhaps even more significant for today’s institutions, the MOMA build-out now proposed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro speaks to another alarming development: the mandate that large-scale work places on museums dedicated to contemporary art. In MOMA’s current plans, the Folk Art Museum, with its intimate interior spaces, must make way for a triple height “art bay” topped with a double height “gray box” space for exhibitions and performance.

What we see here is the endgame for large-scale work that began with Minimalism in the 1970s. Whether by accident or design, a movement that was supposed to liberate the avant-garde from the walls of the bourgeois salon has instead taken art away from the people and given it over to ever expanding institutions, which have become sick and bloated as they attempt to swallow all that mass and volume. (Just look to the current troubles at the Dia Art Foundation.)

Of course, truly revelatory work has never been size-specific. Alfred Stieglitz did not need a Tilted Arc. Gertrude Stein did not have a Rain Room. And rather than making work more radical, largeness now mainly makes art more institutional, since only multimillion-dollar museums with art bays and gray boxes are equipped to display, store, and commission it.

Installation view at Janet Kurnatowski

So it stands to reason that the real action these days is where the small stuff is: with smaller work that can be made more easily, collected, exhibited together, shared among artists, and transported for the cost of a subway swipe. The New Year welcomes two annual group shows to Brooklyn that present the smaller scale at its best, by bringing many of the talented artists in the New York studio scene together. With over 500 paintings and sculpture now at Sideshow Gallery in Williamsburg and over 100 works on paper at Janet Kurnatowski Gallery in Greenpoint, these exhibitions offer an unparalleled overview of a vital network of artists that largely gets overlooked by the museums and mainstream press.1

Both exhibitions follow a similar program, with work arranged salon-style, and with an eye to the rhythm of the walls rather than the names on the labels. They also share many overlapping artists; both gallery owners, artists themselves, are exhibited in each other’s shows. The broad scope of each of the exhibitions means that they have evolved from a single vision into a crowdsourced installation, where artists invite other artists and the display takes on a life of its own. The result works out because each gallery started with a core group of impressive painters and sculptors—largely those who came of age in the Soho studio scene in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Thornton Willis, Peter Reginato, Joan Thorne, and Tom Evans. Here they connect to younger artists in the outer boroughs and across the country working through similar strategies. The worthy artists are too numerous to mention, but let me single out a few I spotted at both exhibitions: Loren Munk, Kim Uchiyama, Chris Martin, Dee Shapiro, Dana Gordon, Louisa Waber, Gary Petersen, Lauren Bakoian, Louise Sloane, Anne Russinof, Joanne Freedman, Elizabeth Riley, Kylie Heidenheimer, and Carol Salmanson.

Deborah Brown, Cloud , 2013; oil on panel; 11 x 17 inches

This past month saw two other group shows that sent me skyward. At Lesley Heller Workspace, the artist Adam Simon organized an exhibition called “Clouds” that pushed an old theme through endless new permutations, from paintings of cloud studies to sculptures of cloud bubbles.2 It helps that Simon, one of the founders of Four Walls, an influential alternative space that began in Hoboken in the 1980s and moved to Williamsburg in the 1990s, continues to be connected to many of the most interesting artists in New York. His group exhibition “Burying the Lede” at Momenta Art last fall turned the tables on the news cycle with artists ranging from Austin Thomas to William Powhida. With “Clouds,” he took many of the disparate artists of the Bushwick scene and uncovered their similarities, with work by Eric Heist, Deborah Brown, Brece Honeycutt, Sharon Butler, Paul D’Agostino, Kerry Law, Thomas Micchelli, Matthew Miller, Hermine Ford, Loren Munk, Edie Nadelhaft, Rico Gatson, Ben Godward, Larry Greenberg, Cathy Nan Quinlan, and Fred Valentine, among others.

Julie Torres at Kathryn Markel

At Kathryn Markel in Chelsea, the Bushwick painter Paul Behnke organized an exhibition of eight abstract painters who “hold the personal, the intuitive, the nuanced, and the hard-won in high regard,” as he writes in his catalogue essay.3 The selection pulled together artists from different scenes—Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Tennessee, and London—who would not regularly show together but clearly share a common sentiment for the power of paint “to best communicate the artist’s appetite and inventiveness.” With work by Karen Baumeister, Karl Bielik, James Erikson, Matthew Neil Gehring, Dale McNeil, Brooke Moyse, and Julie Torres, in addition to Behnke, the exhibition demonstrated abstraction’s ability to take in new energy and inventiveness, drawing on the artists of the past while mixing in the influences of the street and its rough, paint-soaked, paint-flecked, painted-over environment.

Lori Ellison, Untitled, 2013; Gouache on wood panel; 10 x 8 inches 

At McKenzie Fine Art on the Lower East Side, Lori Ellison again demonstrates how small scale and simple materials can have the largest impact.4 With little more than ink on notebook paper and gouache on small board, Ellison shows how “compactness and concision can be a relief in this age of spectacle,” as she says in her artist statement (in addition to her paintings and drawings, Ellison is a pithy aphorist; her Facebook feed could fill a volume of Bartlett’s). This is Ellison’s second show at
McKenzie and her first in its new space, a change that, for me, brought out different qualities of her art. Ellison is able to work any doodle into an obsessive eye-catching skin, but this time I appreciated the simplest patterns most: the diamonds and hashtags that at first might appear dull compared to her more twisting, tentacle-like compositions but which captivated me the longer I looked. While their secrets remain a mystery, my guess is that the subtle variation in these drawings animates the repetition of shapes, leading to a surface that shimmers and images that come forward from beneath.

Angelina Gualdoni, Ballast, 2013; Oil and acrylic on canvas; 38" x 36"

At Asya Geisberg Gallery, Angelina Gualdoni, one of the founders of the influential Ridgewood gallery Regina Rex, reflects the polyglot practice we see in much painting today, moving from realism to abstraction and back again.5 A decade ago, Gualdoni was painting highly realistic scenes of decaying modernist architecture, inspired by Brasilia and elsewhere. Then the abstract components of these paintings overtook her compositions, which became all-over stains. Now, with her latest exhibition, she settles somewhere in the middle, which is a mélange of still-lifes and paint-pours. While I admire the uncertainty and adventurousness of these motions, what results in the latest work is a visual betwixt-and-betweenness, with aggressive compositions of color and light that nevertheless seem overwrought. Looking over the totality of her work, I get the sense Gualdoni is more at ease working in figurative space than on the picture plane, and she is certainly better at it. So when combined together in the same painting, the depth wins out, pulling us down into the work right past the pours. Her collages, which I’ve observed online, appear to balance better, with images floating more solidly on the surface.

Mel Kendrick, Double Water Drawing, 2013; cast paper with carbon black pigment; 80 x 60 in, 203.2 x 152.4 cm

A final word about “Mel Kendrick: Water Drawings” now at David Nolan.6 I reported on these creations last month in my chronicle of the Miami fairs, where David Nolan first brought them to market at Art Basel. Like everything Kendrick touches, they are created through an intense internal logic that at first seems fully laid out but becomes more mysterious the more you observe. Like his sculptures made of positive and negative volumes, the “water drawings” are created through positive and negative molds, with shapes from a machine-age boneyard that Kendrick arranges flat before slopping on the paper pulp and squeezing out the water under pressure. The resulting “drawing” is itself a negative of the molds and exists in relief on the paper surface, which Kendrick also highlights with graphite. Now at Nolan, where several of these sheets are arrayed in the main gallery, we can see the evolution of the process. By increasing the complexity of the molds and lowering the contrast of the graphite, shapes not only sit on one another but thread together in a visual play, which was only enhanced as I walked around them and took in the surfaces undulating in relief. As with his sculptures, Kendrick knows he’s on to something. He may not know what just yet, but he knows it’s great.

1 “Sideshow Nation II: At the Alamo” opened at Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn, on January 4 and remains on view through March 3, 2014; “Paperazzi III” opened at Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, Brooklyn, on January 17 and remains on view through February 15, 2014.

2 “Clouds, organized by Adam Simon” was on view at Lesley Heller Workspace, New York, from December 15, 2013 through January 26, 2014.

3 “Eight Painters” opened at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, New York, on January 4 and remains on view through February 1, 2014.

4 “Lori Ellison” opened at McKenzie Fine Art, New York, on January 10 and remains on view through February 16, 2014.

5 “Angelina Gualdoni: Held in Place, Light in Hand” opened at Asya Geisberg Gallery, New York, on January 9 and remains on view through February 15, 2014.

6 “Mel Kendrick: Water Drawings” opened at David Nolan Gallery, New York, on January 16 and remains on view through March 1, 2014.