How visibility doesn't mean authenticity

The inner sanctums of artists through the centuries are shown in a new book

Independent 20th Century—the newest venture from the Independent art fair—makes a compelling argument that the typical fair set-up, a multi-story sprawl of the art historical canon, needs rethinking. There are just 32 booths featuring famous and unfamiliar 20th-century artists. It unfolds over a single floor of the Battery Maritime Building, steps from the Staten Island Ferry send-off. It’s intimate and tightly curated, and a blessed departure from Spring/Break and the Armory Show, which both opened this week. 

The baseline of quality here is high, chock-full of highlights, and many galleries matched the unusual circumstances with ambitious offerings. Below, a look at six stellar artists getting their due there.

Norwegian artist Ane Graff is becoming increasingly known for her works that consider the body’s internal world and the countless outside forces that might interrupt it.

In a new group of works presented by Oslo-based dealer OSL Contemporary at the 2022 Armory Show, Graff undertakes a close examination of materials found in household spaces and outdoor repositories. The works, all made this year, trace the ways in which such materials are capable of wreaking silent havoc on bodies and natural settings.

Situated in the booth, alongside four silk-printed paintings, is a series of Graff’s glass sculptures expanding on her 2021 work The Goblets (Chronic Fatigue, Brain Fog, Depression, Memory Loss, and Generalised Anxiety Disorder), each of which is named for various disorders related to mental ailments. In the installation, a group of crystal cups have been filled with vibrant concoctions that appear like the kind of poisonous matter found only in natural settings. Cased in glass bell jars and displayed on painted white tables like clinical experiments, these works draw on Graff’s research into the environmental factors that can have corrosive effects on a person’s mental states.

“It did take me quite a while of experimentation to come to a place where I could start to make visible how both the materials and our bodies become something new through their exposures through a mutual touch,” Graff told ARTnews. “For me, that’s what the goblets make visible—they are materials coming together creating new growths.”

The artist’s sleek aesthetic adds to the works’ dystopian tones. Each cup is filled with material pollutants linked to disease that are found in everyday materials, ranging from medications and cosmetics to food and road dust. Graff invokes feminist thinkers, considering the ways in which materials interact through various channels with the body’s functions. A core tenet of the relatively recent feminist “new materialist” thinking is that matter is multiple, without hierarchies, and that it moves between nature and culture, as well as bodies and environments.

Typically, organizations stow their archives away, keeping them far from public viewing. But the Kitchen has taken a different approach at the Armory Show, where it’s turned its archive outward.

This year at the fair, the Armory’s organizers launched a new section devoted to art nonprofits, inviting the 51-year-old alternative arts space to inaugurate the new series dubbed Armory “Spotlight.” Founded as an artist collective in 1971, the Kitchen is one of the most esteemed organizations of the kind in New York. Its Chelsea home currently undergoing a multiyear renovation, it has temporarily relocated to a loft in Westbeth Artist Housing.

Its booth acts as an informal guide to some of the Kitchen’s greatest hits, with audio recordings and printed posters acting as stand-ins for performances, exhibitions, and events that the organization has staged over the decades.

Playing over three speakers are recordings of a selection of experimental music by John Driscoll, David Tudor, and others; they compete with the background noise of the fair for visitors’ attention. These recordings were previously released through albums between 2004 to 2015 in an archival preservation project. The endeavor made the audio clips available to the public after being long held in storage.

Making up some of the Kitchen’s archive of printed materials referenced on the booth’s wallpaper are programming calendars, posters, and flyers for individual events. It’s a nod back to a previous pre-digital era; the practice at the time was to wheat paste those materials around the city in various contexts.

Since its opening on Thursday, the 2022 edition of the Armory Show has seen a good number of sales. Though the sums here are more modest than those of other international fairs, a lot did sell at various price points, showing that the fair is still attracting collectors who are eager to acquire work by closely watched artists as well as by emerging ones whom they are likely still learning about.

[See the best booths at the 2022 Armory Show.]

With nearly 250 exhibitors across some 250,000 square feet at the Javits Center, just north of Hudson Yards in Manhattan, there is a lot of art to see at the fair, which runs until Sunday. Below a look at highlights from the dozens of sales that occurred.

The Netherlands has returned a trove of pre-Hispanic artifacts to Panama, aiding the country as it works toward its goal of reclaiming looted cultural heritage from international collections.

Some 343 ceramic objects were returned on August 29 in what Panama’s Foreign Minister, Erika Mouynes, has called the “largest repatriation of archaeological pieces in the history of Central America.” The Foreign Ministry also reported that another repatriation of heritage objects is set to be received from Italy. 

According to the ministry, this past March, Panama’s ambassador to the Netherlands, Elizabeth Ward, discovered the ceramic artifacts in the collection of the Leiden University, which supported their return. They will join the collection of the Reina Torres de Arauz archaeological museum in Panama City.

The Minister of Culture, Giselle González Villarrué, said in a statement that “the recovery of this Panamanian cultural good shows with facts, the fulfillment of our responsibility and commitment to rescue our identity, of our history as a source of social cohesion and collective pride.”

He added that “the archaeological assets recovered, as well as those that rest in different museums in the country, serve as an economic engine for cultural tourism that we develop, hence the importance of preserving them, restoring them and providing them with the value that allows an exhibition of these with their historical context.”

Remnants of a turret from Hadrian’s Wall were unearthed by archaeologists during construction work for student accommodations in Ouseburn, near Newcastle, England.

Hadrian’s Wall was a defensive fortification that spanned 73 miles across Roman Britain. Sixteen stone forts were built every 1,000 paces, with 80 milecastles, turrets and 6 supply forts set in between. Construction along the Stanegate Road route began in 122 CE and took seven years to complete.

The turret is the only known example of its kind that has been found east of Newcastle. Additionally, the team uncovered a wall ditch and six berm obstacle pits. The finds were announced on Wednesday in a press release by Pre-Construct Archaeology.

Turret 3a, as the structure is now known, is roughly 39 feet long, with foundations that run as long as 8 feet wide.

No remnants of a clay or flagged floor surface were found within the structure, and the archaeologists said this loss may have resulted from construction or leveling undertaken during the 19th or 20th century. They did, however, find a single fragment of a tegula, a tile used in roofing by Romans, among the foundations of the northern wall. 

A towering mother is stationed at Central Park’s mouth. She’s 18-feet-tall with a body of painted bronze. The heads of her 23 children sprout from her womb, belly, shoulders, and back. Her expression is kind: all passersby—and any who may spot her from the distance—are welcome within her embrace. Titled, Ancestor, she’s the work of Bharti Kher, a New Delhi– and London-based artist whose practice collapses daily ritual and ancient symbol, sacred objects and ephemera into new forms. Her creations—sometimes painting, sculpture, or installation—explore individual and collective relations to the cultural past. If we’re not content with history, Kher proposes, manifest a better future.

Ancestor is the most monumental entry in Kher’s practice that spans two decades. It belongs to the artist’s ongoing “Intermediaries” series, mostly surreal clay chimeras—a mix of human, animal, and mythical creature whose fluid identities mirror Kher’s own cross-cultural journey. The work is presented by the Public Art Fund, a nonprofit organization that has been transforming New York’s communal spaces with incisive works of art, and its presentation is curated by Daniel S. Palmer, who was named the chief curator of SCAD Art Museum earlier this year.

Ancestor will be on display in Doris C. Freedman Plaza, near the Fifth Avenue and 59th Street entrance of the park, until next August, after which it will travel to the United Kingdom. Its forever home, however, will be the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi. Nadar, the collector who founded the eponymous institution and who has ranked on ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors list since 2019, has been collecting Kher for around 10 years and considers her one of the “foremost contemporary artists in India.”

“The vision for my collection,” Nadar said upon the sculpture’s unveiling on Thursday, “is to archive memories and preserve the creativity of our culture for future generations. Bharti says her work Ancestor is the keeper of all memories and time. The narrative that this sculpture brings forth has been my trajectory of building KNMA over the last 12 years as a leading institution for the arts of South Asia. This work succinctly captures all of my dreams and wishes and much more.”

To learn more about the work, ARTnews spoke with Kher via email.

At this year’s massive edition of the Armory Show, numbering nearly 250 exhibitors, a moment of reflection comes courtesy of two booths in the fair’s Presents section, for galleries in business for fewer than 10 years. The works on view are by two artists—Joiri Minaya (at Calderón) and Nona Faustine (at Higher Pictures Generation)—whose practices have long explored what our relationship to the land we live on.

Minaya’s works often reflect on how white people imagine the Caribbean landscape, specifically that of the Dominican Republican, and what their misconceptions mean for those who actually inhabit it. Two untitled examples from her ongoing “Divergences” series are hung over a printed wallpaper showing impressionistic lush greenery; Minaya photographed mid-century wallpaper and then digitally altered it in Photoshop to create a non-repeating pattern that seems to glitch.

Other examples from this series went on view at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri, in 2020 as part of a commissioned installation. As with her past work, which saw Minaya in a full-cover bodysuit printed with a tropical design blending into the landscapes, these recent pieces are about “both agency and opacity” as a way to “escape notions” of tropical landscapes like those in the Caribbean simply as vacation vistas in the minds of Americans and Europeans, the artist said during the fair’s VIP preview. She added that she wants to “deconstruct that baggage of respite” as a way to think about the colonial legacies of these places.

Minaya’s Kemper installation was, in part, influenced by the local history of Quindaro Townsite, an abolitionist community in Kansas City that had a short-lived history but served as a safe site for enslaved people who had escaped from the South. Faustine’s work similarly looks at sites throughout New York that are entangled in the city’s under-known and frequently erased history with slavery in the U.S.

A small booth by Higher Pictures Generation, 20 photographs from the artist’s 40-image portfolio “White Shoes” are on view. (The portfolio was published as a monograph with essays by Pamela Sneed and Jessica Lanay last year.) Faustine has previously shown several of these images, which often show her wearing nothing but the titular white pumps at these sites, but when seen alongside the new works, these older pictures still feel as fresh and poignant as when they debuted.  

Isn’t it amazing? That will likely be the case for a new exhibition opening Friday at David Zwirner in New York, titled “A Maze Zanine, Amaze Zaning, A Mezzaning, Meza-9” that brings together the work of 50 artists benefiting Performance Space New York. Proceeds from sales made through the exhibition, which is organized by four artists—Kerstin Brätsch, Ei Arakawa, Laura Owens, and Nicole Eisenman—will allow the nonprofit to expand its programming and offer artist fellowships.

“As soon as Jenny Schlenzka and Pati Hertling at Performance Space enlisted these four artists to organize this show, it was clear this would be something more than just another benefit,” Thor Shannon, a director at Zwirner, told ARTnews in an email. “I think everyone was eager to somehow capture the guerrilla attitude of Performance Space with each creative decision. There was immediate consensus to take the (let’s admit) slightly tired, if noble, format of the benefit group show, and elevate it, complicate it, dial it up to 100. “

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The concept of the group show quickly ballooned in proportion as the organizers kept inviting artists (all painters) until they reached a gobsmacking 50. Artists featured in the show include Mickalene Thomas, Giangiacomo Rossetti, Marilyn Minter, and Dana Schutz, whose vivid work Painting with a Gun (2022) of a fire-breathing artist painting in a black void will be on offer.

In addition to those works, Brätsch, Arakawa, Owens, and Eisenman will also debut their own collaborative work, which they created over the summer at Zwirner’s space on West 19th Street in Chelsea, which Shannon said the four artists used “as an art studio for the end of the summer, with carte blanche to do whatever they wanted to it.”

He continued, “I think the art world and market really discourages these kinds of acts of collaboration between artists—demanding a kind of almighty mono-ego—so everyone said it felt special to work alongside peers they admired without external market pressure, given the show is a benefit.”

Virginia Dwan, a dealer whose short-lived gallery propelled many Minimalist and Land artists to fame during the late ’60s and early ’70s, died on September 5 after a battle with cancer. She was 90, a representative for her archive said.

In the past decade, Dwan has been canonized as one of the 20th century’s great American dealers for her risk-taking sensibility and her willingness to put money behind game-changing artworks.

Her gallery, which opened in Los Angeles and later moved to New York, was in operation for only a little over a decade, but in that time, it helped spur the careers of artists like Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria, Fred Sandback, Carl Andre, William Anastasi, and more. Along the way, she amassed a rich collection of art from the era, which she pledged as a gift to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 2013.

Dwan has been feted by museums, beloved by artists, and touted by dealers who are influenced by her. But she has always kept a low profile, and New York Times critic Holland Cotter reported that curator James Meyer had to persuade her to agree to a 2016 show surveying her gallery. The show ended up appearing at the National Gallery of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and was widely praised.

That all may explain why prior to the 2016 retrospective, Dwan was considered an underrated figure. The New York Times interviewed her in 2003 for an article titled “The Forgotten Godmother of Dia’s Artists.” Writing in X-TRA in 2011, critic Jessica Dawson asked, “Why has Dwan gone largely uncredited in the development of postwar Los Angeles art?”

July 29 – September 10, 2022

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