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.

Eighth Annual Young Poets' Evening at the National Arts Club

 

Dara writes:

On Monday, April 7, 2014 at 8pm, I am delighted to host the eighth annual evening of young poets at the National Arts Club. This year's event brings together four poets who, in different ways, engage the visual arts in their work: Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Dan Magers, Farrah Field, and Jared White. The reading is free and open to the public and takes place in one of New York's coolest clubs. I hope you will join us for this special evening.

Be sure to RSVP here. 

Rachel Eliza Griffiths, a poet and visual artist, teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn. Her forthcoming collection of poetry, Lighting the Shadow, will be published by Four Way Books in 2015.

 

Dan Magers’s first book of poems, Partyknife, is published by Birds, LLC. He is co-founder and co-editor of Sink Review, an online poetry journal, and founder and editor of Immaculate Disciples Press, a handmade chapbook press focused on poetry and visual arts collaborations. He lives in Brooklyn.

Farrah Field is the author of the 2009 book Rising and Wolf and Pilot, out in 2012, both from Four Way Books. Two of her poems were selected by Kevin Young for the Best American Poetry 2011.

Jared White published two chapbooks in 2013, This Is What It Is Like To Be Loved by Me from Bloof Books and My Former Politics from H-NGM-N Books; both are permanently available to read online. Together, Farrah and Jared run the small-press poetry bookstore Berl's Poetry Shop.

Thank you Alice Palmisano of the literary committee of the National Arts Club for supporting poetry and particularly this event for eight years running.

Net Gains

New York's Flatiron district, main street of Silicon Alley.

CITY JOURNAL
Winter 2014

Net Gains
by James Panero

Silicon Alley rises again.

Starting up in 2011 as a cross between a for-profit vocational school and a caffeinated tech clubhouse—with open co-working space mixed with classrooms, break rooms, and broadcasting studios—General Assembly now has campuses spanning nine cities on four continents, all offering a “pragmatic and multidisciplinary education at the intersection of technology, design, and business.” In New York, where it occupies two loft floors along the former Ladies’ Mile at 21st Street on either side of Broadway, GA is a feeder school for the city’s burgeoning tech industry. Much like the 34,000-member New York Tech Meetup, a nonprofit organization that hosts monthly events at New York University, and Techstars NYC, a mentorship and seed accelerator for new tech firms, GA seeks to strengthen network ties within the New York tech community, while providing an environment entirely unlike the sprawling office parks of Silicon Valley.

“What makes New York so interesting as a tech hub is that technology and design are now intersecting with so many different industries,” says Matthew Brimer, GA’s 27-year-old founding partner. “New York is already such a big commercial hub,” he says. “So many industries have amazing creative business talent. Take a place that is super dense with these different types of talent, bring those people together, and they can start to transform these different industries—that’s a perfect petri dish for interesting stuff to happen.”

Gotham’s tech sector keeps finding ways to make interesting stuff happen, showing surprising resilience even as the New York economy has had its ups and downs during the Bloomberg years. Since 2007, billions of dollars have poured into New York’s “Silicon Alley,” which recently vaulted ahead of the greater Boston area to become the nation’s second-largest tech hub behind California’s Silicon Valley. For a city that has long relied on its financial industry to spur growth and innovation, the resurgence of the tech sector is welcome news.

In just a few years, “New York’s tech sector has emerged as an increasingly powerful economic driver for the city,” wrote authors Jonathan Bowles and David Giles in “New Tech City,” a May 2012 report for the Center for an Urban Future. “At a time when few other industries were growing in New York, more than a thousand new tech start-ups were formed in the city.” This influx of capital and tech talent has pumped new life into New York City’s economy. Data from the New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC) showed that there were 90,273 people working at 7,147 high-tech companies in New York in 2010—a 30 percent increase from 2005. Using the Bloomberg Technology Summit’s broader definition of a “tech/information sector,” New York has 262,000 workers in the industry, accounting for $30 billion in wages—and the sector added 11,000 workers in 2012.

According to a MoneyTree report published by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, the New York area also saw a 32 percent jump in venture-capital deals from 2007 to 2011—the only increase for any U.S. region. Some of these start-ups have already been acquired by larger firms; the microblogging platform Tumblr, for example, founded in 2007 and based on East 21st Street, gained $125 million in funding before being purchased last year by Yahoo for $1.1 billion. Others continue to raise funds as private companies: the online retailer Fab.com, founded in 2010 and based in Greenwich Village, has raised $336 million; the online shopping club Gilt Groupe, founded in 2007 and based in Midtown South, raised $221 million; the online medical-scheduling service ZocDoc, founded in 2007 and based in SoHo, raised $95 million; the location-based social-networking site Foursquare, founded in 2009 and based in SoHo, raised $112 million; and the arts and crafts commerce platform Etsy, founded in 2005 and based in Dumbo, raised $91.7 million. Chelsea-based virtual-journalism firm BuzzFeed raised $46 million.

It’s not the first time that tech has surged in New York, but this new crop of tech entrepreneurs is making smart use of an old tool—the brick-and-mortar density that has nurtured entrepreneurship in the city since the early eighteenth century. The urban experience promotes unplanned encounters, often resulting in a mutually enriching phenomenon known as “knowledge spillover.” Multiple industries tie into the city’s tech revival: advertising, fashion, publishing, retail, art and culture, finance, and food constantly retool their traditional businesses with online technology. Unlike the hardware and computational focus of West Coast tech, Silicon Alley is focused on exploiting synergies among the entrepreneurs, artists, developers, and dreamers who live and work in the Big Apple.

Today, the tech landscape is different from in the 1990s, in ways that favor New York City’s native strengths. In the past, Silicon Alley relied heavily on expensive traditional advertising campaigns to sell products that often required millions of dollars—for everything from server racks to programmers—just to get up and running. But many of the components that start-ups need today are readily available, in part because the commercial Internet has evolved since those pioneering early days. Coding can be done remotely, with work bid out to programmers in India and former Eastern Bloc nations. Inexpensive, off-the-shelf solutions exist for a variety of once-costly and challenging problems. A viable app can be created in weeks for under six figures. Indeed, apps, which provide virtual solutions to real-world problems, neatly illustrate New York’s trademark blend of creativity, commerce, and technology. It’s no surprise that apps have been a particular focus of this latest iteration of Silicon Alley.

For years, critics have predicted that technology—particularly communications technology—would replace the face-to-face interactions that city life facilitates. Yet in a 1996 paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Jess Gaspar and Edward Glaeser (a City Journalcontributing editor) showed how historical advances in communications technology have, in fact, increased the need for direct human contact. The telephone, for example, extended a person’s network of connections, which, in turn, fed the need for more face-to-face interactions. Further improvements to communications technology, Gaspar and Glaeser concluded, would foster ever-larger networks, leading to ever more face-to-face exchanges. These days, technological advances have cut down on development costs and vastly expanded connectivity, and what Gaspar and Glaeser prophesied in 1996 is coming to pass in Silicon Alley.

Indeed, if the nineteenth century saw New York mapped out in two dimensions, through the Commissioner’s Plan of 1811, and the twentieth century saw New York take on a third dimension, through the development of the skyscraper, the twenty-first century, through the Internet, is rapidly mapping Gotham into a fourth, virtual dimension. New York’s latest generation of tech entrepreneurs has found success by extending the city’s real-world, three-dimensional space into an increasingly complex network, where real, virtual, and mobile density all integrate together.

Departing mayor Michael Bloomberg deserves credit for helping to expand New York’s tech economy. During his three terms in office, he made improving technology education a priority. “Since the 2008 financial crisis, no other industry has enjoyed more attention from the Bloomberg administration than tech,” wrote Bowles and Giles. The EDC has supported tech incubators and shared work spaces from the Bronx to Brooklyn. In 2011, Bloomberg named Rachel Sterne Haot New York’s first chief digital officer to oversee the city government’s web accessibility and serve “as an advocate for the digital media industry.” Bloomberg himself was one of New York’s original tech successes. In 1981, he was forced out of his position as a general partner at the investment bank Salomon Brothers. With his severance package, he set up a company to sell high-quality business information to Wall Street via computer technology. In 1987, his Innovative Market Systems became Bloomberg L.P.

The Bloomberg administration’s biggest investment in the city’s future as a tech hub occurred in 2012, when it awarded $100 million and 11 acres on Roosevelt Island to Cornell University and the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology to build a 2 million-square-foot campus called Cornell NYC Tech. Construction is scheduled to begin this year and will continue through 2037, according to Cornell, with the campus opening in 2017. At full capacity, by 2043, the campus will have room for 2,500 graduate students taught by a 280-person faculty. The city has also announced plans for a new tech campus for NYU in downtown Brooklyn. It broke up the failing Paul Robeson High School in Crown Heights to create the Pathways in Technology Early College High School (P-TECH), a partnership between the Department of Education, City University, and IBM that offers a six-year curriculum for high school students, leading to an associate’s degree in applied science and an inside track to employment at IBM. And the city has partnered with the venture capitalist Fred Wilson to create a new Academy for Software Engineering inside the failing Washington Irving High School, one block from Union Square. This past year, 1,400 high school students applied for its 125 slots. The city is rapidly developing an additional Academy for Software Engineering in the Bronx and rolling out a pilot program in 20 middle schools and high schools, offering computer-science classes in coding, web design, and 3-D printing.

Ensuring the health of New York’s maturing tech industry will require strengthening the city’s real-world Internet infrastructure and tech “ecosystem,” say tech-industry leaders. They want to see improvements to the city’s broadband pipes and, in general, a New York more fully integrated into the tech economy. New York’s lackluster broadband infrastructure is limiting growth in outer-borough neighborhoods. “Look at Kansas City, where they’ve got Google Fiber,” says tech entrepreneur Jack Hidary, referring to Google’s initiative to lay the pipelines for an Internet 100 times faster than cable-modem broadband. “It is a great case study, and has seen a tremendous influx of entrepreneurship. The lesson we need to learn from that is that broadband needs to be available across the five boroughs, not just in Midtown Manhattan.”