These five exhibitions cover a wide range of topics—from nightlife to war to queerness—but they each take time to absorb. Some are delicate and require careful meditation, such as Tanya Merrill’s airy paintings of her new bucolic life after decades spent in New York City. Others are so forceful that the art needs space to settle before you can approach it with clarity, such as Käthe Kollwitz’s prints depicting the destitution of war. All are worth seeing, but please be patient with them. Even if you think you understand after just a short while, stay a bit longer so you can let the simmer come to a boil.
Gordon Parks: Born Black at Jack Shainman through April 20, 2024
Jack Shainman Gallery’s exhibition Born Black clearly shows why Gordon Parks was one of the greatest photographers of the Civil Rights Era. His photos fit their subjects—both physically and thematically—like shoes that are two sizes too small. In one, the usually tall and imposing Mohammed Ali uncomfortably sticks his head above a crowd of fans holding up pictures of him. In photos of children playing, the backdrop of segregation looms over as a constraint on how long they can live in innocence. My favorite photo is one of a man at his desk facing away from the viewer, squeezed by a tight composition. His wall is decorated with photos of the Black Panthers and Malcolm X, and he grips the back of his neck as if he’s racking his brain to personally find a solution to the injustice. In these photos, the fight for freedom and equality is at once highly personal and universal. One trio of photographs shows a Black man getting ready for his day, combing his hair in the mirror, putting on a tie, and then looking out his broken window at the world he’s about to encounter. Meanwhile, many other photos show crowds of Black men, squeezed cheek to cheek, who have to do the same thing every morning.
Nightlife at Marlborough through April 20, 2024
Nightlife is an exhibition of photos by six of the most highly regarded photographers of the twentieth century depicting a version of the night that seems not to exist anymore. It was a time when you were allowed to have private unconscious desires—before AI could figure out your deepest secrets through your search history or the paparazzi posted pictures of every party. Back then, people could release the nervous energy of a day job in a night of forbidden kissing in an alleyway... or tying each other up and locking the door. At night, you could adopt an alter ego, peacocking in crowded rooms in a glamorous dress or maybe wearing nothing at all. Some photos show people sitting alone in a restaurant or at a bar, despondently double-fisting a cigarette and a glass of wine. Whereas the epidemic of loneliness today happens at home, staring at phones in solitude, even lonely people could find companionship back then.
Käthe Kollwitz at MoMA through July 20, 2024
Käthe Kolwitz is unshakably on the side of the most wretched people on Earth— mothers who have lost their children, victims of rape, the poorest of the poor. She relays their experience with emphatic and compassionate draftsmanship that reflects she is acutely aware of every ounce of misery and misfortune. Her famous print Woman with Dead Child shows a mother turned into a creature swollen with grief as she buries her face into the chest of her lifeless child. In one woodcut print, a mother marches forward into death, wide-eyed and duty-driven, dragging a screaming child by the hand. There’s not much hope in these pictures, but Kolwitz’s subjects accept death and suffering with steadfast resolve, as if they are on equal footing with their fate. I left the exhibition scared of taking my life for granted. For all the talk about war these days, unless you have witnessed the horrors of conflict first hand, everyone has an obligation to see this exhibition so they can know what it really means.
Tanya Merrill - Watching Women Give Birth On The Internet And Other Ways Of Looking at 303 Gallery through May 18, 2024
Tanya Merrill’s paintings at 303 Gallery are a much needed respite from the anxieties of city life. They are pale and sketchy—more like pencil drawings filled in with dabs of color than full-blown paintings. At first, I wished for more authoritative mark-making, but patience paid off as I meditated on the images. Eventually, they start to feel breezy and calm. After growing up in New York City, Tanya has performed the disenchanted urbanite fantasy of buying a plot of land and building a prairie home life. Of course, hers involves a painting studio. The paintings of pregnant women suggest the start of a new life, and that’s born out in the rest of the show. The paintings she’s made over the past year or so feel like a decided release of anxiety and a conscious turning over to nature. My favorite painting is one of a cat lying asleep on top of a fish tank—so at peace with giving up ambition that he’ll sleep right above an easy target. Tanya mentioned to me that her new home makes an appearance in one of the paintings. It’s one with a couple of winged skeletons dancing mid-air before a green pasture. A memento mori perhaps? A surrender to fate? Or a eulogy for a life left behind?
Marcel Alcalá - Gallo Gallina at Marlborough Gallery through April 20, 2024
The title of Marcel Alcalá’s exhibition at Marlborough Gallery, Gallo Gallina, is a phrase used to describe roosters born with female plumage. The exhibition includes paintings of both gender-bending people and chickens. They’re painted in a style reminiscent of Mexican folk paintings with thick outlines, simple—almost cartoonish—faces, and stark color choices. The goal of these paintings seems to be to reclaim macho culture for the queer community it has historically excluded. In one painting, Alcalá reproduces The Cock Fight (a 1889 painting by Belgian painter Remy Cogghe) with queer people huddled behind the ring of a cock fight instead of disgruntled old white guys. But this new version still carries an air of reckless violence—portraying a biker-gang-looking group vicariously living out unsavory urges through poor animals they’ve made to fight to the death. Another painting also recreates a prototypically heteronormative Western painting of a man staring at a woman posing for him in a bar, except Alcalá’s version makes drag queens do the uncomfortable ogling. If Alcalá’s project is to historicize the queer experience and stake ownership over a culture that has been historically discriminatory, why continue to perpetuate the impulse for passing harm onto others? A couple paintings of Gallo Gallinas suffering (one of two fighting each other on a mountain and another of a single gallo writhing alone) suggest an answer: pain can metastasize into a self-destructive or even violent impulse, which is hard to contain.