Art
I try to remember to pack a few black washcloths when I travel for work. I place them next to the hotel sink, ready to be used when I get back from a shoot, sparing the provided pristine towels from smears of jet black mascara and kisses of Dior 999. When I forget, the association is immediate. A face imprinted on cloth. An unintentional self-portrait—not of my own face, but of the one I wear to do my work…
Read MoreThe marquee image for the 2020 MoMA PS1 exhibition “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration” curated by Dr. Nicole Fleetwood, is from a mixed-media portrait titled “Locked in a Dark Calm,” by the artist Tameca Cole. Though in digital reproduction it appears substantial, it is a relatively small piece—only about the size of a standard sheet of printer paper. In the work, the fragmented figure of a Black woman looks out from the center of a swirling charcoal and graphite cloud which extends to the edges of the page. The head and torso of the woman appear in a gray shadow, mostly obscured by a charcoal maelstrom that swirls in haphazard loops around and through the central figure, mummifying the silhouette. Collaged over the whorls in the center of the page are the parts of a face cut from magazines: a pair of full unpainted lips, a nose, and a pair of dark brown eyes—one stoically gazing off-center into the distance. The other, significantly larger, and side-eyeing directly out from the canvas as if keeping a skeptical, watchful eye on the viewer…
Read MoreThe sunlight streaming through the sepia-red corton steel bars of Edra Soto’s GRAFT (2024) installation at Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park decorates the asphalt terrace with geometric patterns of light and shade that bring forth a flickering rush of memories.
Morning sun rising through the window grates of my cousin’s teenage bedroom while someone brews coffee down the hall. The coolness of the damp golden sand shielded by palm frond silhouettes. Fading light sinking down textured terracotta walls in my aunt’s Ocean Park courtyard.
Though the work itself also feels familiar, reminiscent of so many homes and places in my family’s native Puerto Rico, there is something specifically about the way Soto’s art interacts with the space it inhabits that strikes a particularly resonant chord.
Read MorePeering through the frosted glass door, the gallery looks closed. It’s a few minutes past five and only a handful of people remain on the street, ducking into doors one or two at a time. Most have wandered off to meet friends for happy hour or settle in for an early dinner. Inside, the light feels dimmer than it should be, but I assume it’s intentional and say nothing.
Moments later, a mother hesitates at the door before walking in with her young son. “We thought you were closed!”
The gallery sitter apologizes. I catch only bits of it: Something about how the lights keep flickering. Less annoying to keep them off. It’s better when it’s sunny, but the clouds are thick today.
“We’re just scraping by without light” (I write this part down.)
The boy races to the opposite side of the gallery. The mom laughs like a bell and follows him. He’s free in his movements yet knows enough not to touch.
The brightest part of the room is in the center under a paneled glass skylight that sits directly above a polyurethane copy of…
Read More“There was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.”
I chose Bluets because I wanted to learn how to let go of a dream.
In the first version of that sentence, I wrote: a dream that no longer fit, but then went back and removed that part because it’s not really that the dream doesn’t fit; it’s simply that I want to wear something else, regardless of how good the dress looks.
(Then again, multiple things can be true because I can also think of all the ifs that would have made me want to keep wearing that dress.)
I try to explain this to my best friend, but he doesn’t understand because so many of the ifs went his way. Our conversation keeps getting interrupted because HBO and Hulu are in a bidding war over one of his films. When he returns to the table I say: it doesn’t make sense to you because the same people who keep offering you more, keep offering me less.
Read MoreIt takes me a few minutes to understand why I feel so uneasy in front of Josiah McElheny’s “From the Library of Atmospheres II.” a sculptural glass assemblage at James Cohan’s 48 Walker Street gallery. It is, I finally realize, because though I am fully aware that I am peering into a world of glass and mirrors, my reflection is missing. Like a child or a puppy encountering an unfamiliar object, I keep stepping closer and further away from the work, tilting my body from side to side, as if convinced that by finding the correct approach I will solve the puzzle presented.
My efforts are in vain. I feel like a vampire. A ghost in the gallery.
McElheny achieves this haunting effect with a simple trick; the clear glass window I am looking through is in fact a two-way mirror like the kind in tv detective show interrogation rooms (perhaps also real ones; I’ve not had the pleasure). Observing this work, I’m intensely hyperaware of my presence in relationship to the art. I am removed, on the outside looking into an enclosed world where McElheny’s carefully arranged hand-blown bottles exist in their own mirrored isolation. It is also an interrogation room of sorts; the bottles in ongoing conversation and observation with themselves—a self-interrogation, an, as McElheny describes, “infinite narcissism.”
Read MoreIt’s only on the third visit that I finally see it. The tiniest little figures, barely larger than matchsticks, on a field filled with large swaths of black and brown. During my first and second views I’d assumed the painting was an abstraction, the black mountainous streaks standing in for the mother and child. A comment on mother nature and the earth, I surmised. It’s not until I wandered past and looked closer that I realize the truth of it; the tiny little streaks of white are the point. In an instant, the piece has become my favorite.
They remind me of worry dolls. The tiny matchstick dolls clothed in scraps of colorful knit fabric my grandmother bought for me from a museum gift shop during a family vacation. They came in a little yellow box, smaller than my childhood palm, tucked along an instruction card explaining that I could whisper my worries and concerns to the dolls before bed at night, leaving them to rectify the situation as I slept.
On the walk home from the gallery I think about the miniscule mother and child, and wonder what it is about it that I find so enchanting. It reminds me of one of my favorite paintings, Virginia O’Keefe’s Black Abstraction, which depicts a tiny white dot in a black abyss. Forever attracted to the horror of the sublime, terrifying reminders of just how small and inconsequential we are.
(In my early 20s, I moved to Firenze to attend culinary school. After sleeping most of my first day, I woke up in the morning and turned on the TV in time to catch a meteorologist giving the weather report on a news program. She wore a blue dress and pointed to a boot-shaped map I’d previously only seen in textbooks and globes in my high school classrooms. I knew where I was, but it was only seeing the map that I realized I had crossed an ocean alone and for the first time in my life didn’t know a single other person anywhere on that entire continent.)
My husband Eugene had surgery last Tuesday. It was a long-planned, minimally invasive procedure that went extremely well, but which did require a few days of post-surgery hospitalization at NYU-Langone Hospital. As his support person, I also spent the better part of last week at this hospital, which I quickly learned (much to my surprise and delight!) has a rather extensive visual art collection of paintings, collages, photographs, murals, and sculptures installed throughout its campus.
The most well-known piece in the hospital’s collection—even to those who have never stepped foot inside the building—is Spot! by Donald Lipski (2018). A four-story sculpture consisting of a giant Dalmatian puppy balancing a yellow taxi on his nose. The dog portion was made from a modeled frame, while the yellow cab is an actual ready-made Prius taxi that was donated by Toyota to use in the sculpture. Located at the children’s hospital entrance on 35th street, the dog is meant as a playful and encouraging welcome for the children coming in for procedures. In an interview about the piece, Lipski explained that the sculpture of a brave doggy “achieving the impossible” was meant to inspire children during a frightening moment in their lives. (When reading about the piece, I learned that during the height of Covid-19, they added a large NYU-purple mask over the dog’s mouth to encourage children to do the same.)
Glissando, 2013
I spent a lot of time thinking about what kind of art one would want in a space like a hospital; a place where events wonderful and terrible, mundane and terrifying, joyful and heartbreaking are constantly and simultaneously occurring. Unlike the usual bland wall décor typically found at corporate hotels or standard doctor’s offices, the pieces at NYU-Langone don’t exist just to fill wall space. This is art that feels engaging, varied, and thoughtfully selected. It is work that seems to have things to say, though never so much that it pulls focus or takes over the room. The art is there to support the mission; it is not the purpose itself.
Unlike the deliberately bold Spot!, the majority of the works I saw in the adult spaces of the hospital avoided the figurative and leaned toward total abstraction. Like the iridescent twisting waves of The Moon’s Eyelid by Alyson Shotz (2018), the bright screen-printed color stripes of Royal Curtain by Gene Davis (1980), or the Turkish onyx twists of the sculpture In Pursuit by Leon Axelrod. Emotionally, the works are overwhelmingly calming, often encouraging, playing with color, shape, texture, and light in ways that allow for joy without demanding it.
My absolute favorite of the pieces I saw while my husband dozed in his anesthetized stupor is the sunlight-catching Glissando, a 2013 mixed-media installation of clear polycarbonate Lexan squares suspended with thin stainless steel and aluminum wires. By the artists Tim Prentice and David Colbert, the piece stretches and cascades over the sunny lobby connecting the hospital’s Kimmel and Tisch buildings. In many ways, this silent musical performance seems to best capture the spirit of a collection that is ready to come alive and share its stories with anyone interested enough to pay attention, but just as easily recede into silence for those with other, more pressing, concerns.
