The Summer Scene
ONCE SPRING HAS SPRUNG at our latitude, then baby it's hot out and prime time for the city's Galleryvilles, where cultural clamor teems and AC break time beckons. The map that follows hinges on the power of suggestion, best served by a highlighter and a good web browser for addresses. Just let the better senses lead you once you're in one of these neighborhoods.
CHELSEA SET THE LOOK a decade back and may still set the pace, chock-a-block with leanly designed contenders from 14th St. up to Hell's Kitchen. Plus, there's the riverside wharf with a hamburger shack serving longnecks and cups of wine, where evening screenings flicker after a day of art-going-and when's that Hudson mini-beach coming, to balance the multitier driving range?
At street level, plenty of keynote galleries are Chelsea establishments now. Paula Cooper got in when the getting was good, though for her Claes Oldenburg show, the enviably high rafters are obscured by a scrim-topped chamber. Notebook drawings hang in this temporary intimacy, one-offs Oldenburg did for partner Coosje van Bruggen, of foods she wasn't allowed to eat.
Deft, superbly nonchalant, the sketches have you watching yourself watch rarefied simplicity take its subject matter from-well, one wedge of blueberry pie teeters at the edge of a cliff, another tumbles into its parts, and two sledge-sized slices balance on vanilla globes as big sculptures by the front window. Framed ice cream cones tip with architectural exactitude onto hewn pediments, just the stuff of summertime contemplation. In Cooper's annex, DJ Spooky highlights problem passages in D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation with stills and remix footage, through June 18.
Gagosian follows De Kooning in late June with Dexter Dalwood's idiosyncratic interiors, while Robert Miller fits a Milton Resnick homage into Ground-Field-Surface, non-objective paintings and photos that open June 10 with work by Krasner, Rothko, Serra, Soulages. Pace/MacGill has Michal Rovner's videos and installations (Rovner was retroed by the Whitney in '02), and Jack Shainman shows Elizabeth Crawford's closely observed and tiny paintings plus photos of Louisiana prisoners that Deborah Luster printed on black aluminum plates.
Chelsea Art Museum continues Surface Tension, a show exploring technology and painting, then opens the digital art survey Convergence in early June, with a see-through wall and a 3-D Display Cube among its features. CAM remains strong on the music front: Electronic Music Foundation shows, the St. Luke's Chamber Orchestra in residence. Daniel Guzman's obsession with LP rock and Mexican pirate culture does an A/B take, with sculpture and video at Lombard-Freid until early June and his NY Groove jukebox continuing around the corner at TRANS until month's end. Rachel Urkowitz's garden/architecture collages and sculptures continue at Michael Steinberg until mid-June, when Richard Aldrich's small, patterned abstractions come to Oliver Kamm's 5BE Gallery. And Monya Rowe opens her group show Mystery Blaze in Holiday Cottage on June 18, after showing L.A. artist Kevin Christy as the inaugural exhibit since moving from Williamsburg in the spring.
Down at Prospect Park, the Brooklyn Museum's Open House surveys Brooklyn artists and is the season's bulky must-see. Charlotta Kotik and Tumelo Mosaka's wide net of a show assumes the Whitney Biennial's lightning rod presence, the sort of why-who's-in-is-in babble that will, in the best case, draw more viewers to discern. Which leaves the Biennial getting petted-but alongside the Brooklyn Museum are the Botanical Gardens, as charming year-round as Christo, Jeanne-Claude and their 7500 Gates will make Central Park in February.
Further out in Red Hook, the BWAC Pier Show runs weekends through June 27 at the wet end of Van Brunt St. In one massive renovated dockside warehouse, art shows and performance schedules display admirable enthusiasm and delicious harbor views, with NY Water taxis arriving from other boroughs. Up in Long Island City, summer kicks off with weekend festivities June 12-13. LIC rocks even steadier since MOMA took up temporary residency. Institutions include the Museum for African Art with the Niger Delta's Urhobo traditions, and the Museum of the Moving Image where Cary Grant films, presidential campaign commercials and Tim Burton drawings recall the adage "no significance where none intended." Down along the East River, Vernon Blvd. has a restaurant fest on June 12 and runs up past the renovated Noguchi Museum and the waterfront Socrates Sculpture Park, where summer solstice is celebrated June 21. Tall Buildings comes to MOMA QNS in mid-July, along with the much-anticipated retro for Lee Bontecou's steel sculptures and recent suspensions, opening at the end of that month.
The concentrated photo frenzy at Ubu gets ameliorated at PaceWildenstein where cool's living maestra, Agnes Martin, adds geometrics to recent pale grids in a show running simultaneous to the early work at Dia:Beacon (Dia gets another nod once this survey gets out of town). For fashionistas, Sweet & Sour at Salvatore Ferragamo includes semi-nudes of Natasha Law and an Amy Jenkins installation. Newsflash: Ferragamo squirmed then cancelled a video of Jenkins nursing her daughter Audrey wearing their red Hepburn shoes.
Further uptown, Zwirner & Wirth has Gerhard Richter landscapes, and C&M Arts exercises their impressive pulling power for a loan show of contemporary painters from Julie Mehretu to Thomas Scheibitz. Skarstedt Fine Art shows photographer/Artforum founder John Coplans' faceless self-portraits (Coplans' Serial Figures is at Andrea Rosen, also through June 26), while Janos Gat has Frank Horvat's vintage photos in his compact, second-floor space on Madison Ave.
The institutional big guns boom reliably when the mercury really soars and galleries tend toward group shows or holiday breaks. In mid-June, the Guggenheim weighs in with Brancusi in stone, marble and wood in a show aptly titled The Essence of Things, plus hand photos from Julia Margaret Cameron to Cindy Sherman and Thomas Struth. To end June, the Whitney opens two exhibitions of Ed Ruscha, L.A.'s main man of Pop/Conceptualism, with his word/object drawings and his documentary photos, then starts Ana Mendieta's Sculpture and Performance, 1972-85 on July 1. The Met has Andy Goldsworthy's 18-foot wood/stone domes in its roof garden, and recent gifts indoors from gallerist Pierre Matisse's modernist collections. Also at the Met are an exacting documentation of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's saffron Gates project (which will be installed this winter for two weeks over 23 miles of Central Park paths) and Dangerous Liaisons, Harold Koda's wry, Costume Institute influx, all a-tumble in the staid, 18th-century furniture rooms.
When it's time to get outdoors, Lincoln Center's Summer Festival screens Un Chien Andalou four times on July 22, with the crack Ensemble Sospeso accompanying the Buñuel/Dali mindbend with commissioned soundtracks from the likes of Wolfgang Rihm and Elliott Sharp.
Then when it's time to get out of town, Dia:Beacon's just over an hour up the Hudson, wrapping its first year as the world's largest contemporary arts museum. Louise Bourgeois' spider and cell lurk in the attic, and their early Agnes Martin show pares optical effects down to her signature fields. Robert Irwin's gardens have filled through their sophomore spring, and Metro-North's riverbank route is under $30 roundtrip, including museum admission, with the town of Beacon a hive of gallery and cultural activity (regional info, diacenter.org) and Storm King Art Center on the Hudson's west bank, for those who made the drive.
Art action's wherever you may be: The Drawing Center just above Canal St. shows emerging artists in June, the Dream House just below Canal St. glows and resounds magnificently after 10 years-at least until the weather gets too hot for Marian Zazeela's powerful lights. The East Village's Issue Project Room, a new venue for sounds (from spoken word to Cremaster composer Jonathan Bepler) has a big June 10 benefit at Angel Orensanz Center with Marc Ribot, Rebecca Moore and Mr. E. Sharp. Should you be in the market for photos everybody's not after (yet), Jose Picayo's works are at Robin Rice Gallery on W. 11th St., with Rice getting best-buy buzz from my source, a former Sotheby's executive VP, who should know.
Then art as social force greets the Republican National Convention in late August, when Imagine Festival and the annual Howl Festival rev the personal into the political, from street theater to Mary Gordon and E.L. Doctorow at Symphony Space, including a 24-hour HQ of activities at the Bowery Poetry Club. Check your head and your voter registration, and check Howl's plethora of events at howlfestival.com.
As a parting glance among the ever-molting Galleryvilles: Bruno Marina Gallery continues what had been a fruitful if isolated foray into graphic precision and decorative beauty with Bradley Wester's taut collages and digital drawings. Wester's run wraps on June 6, by which time Metaphor Contemporary Art will have migrated from Dumbo to Boerum Hill, arriving a couple of doors down Atlantic Ave. from the Marina Gallery. Metaphor inaugurated their new space May 19 with Charles Yeun's whimsical Psychographic paintings, with Marina staying open late for the Metaphor debut. Marina then hangs a group show opening June 9; half of their artists have work in Open House at the Brooklyn Museum.