The election results among staff at the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM) were unanimously in favor on June 6. Voting with UAW Local 2110 occurred a month after workers at the institution announced their intention to organize for a variety of issues including fair wages and better benefits.

AFAM was created in 1961 and changed its name from the Museum of Early American Folk Arts in 2001. The institution’s public galleries are located near the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts in Manhattan, while its administrative offices, archives, and collections center are located in Long Island City, Queens. The museum’s collection of approximately 8,000 works of art from the United Stated and abroad, with the oldest examples from the turn of the eighteenth century. The union will include curatorial, retail, education, and information technology staff.

Other institutions located in New York City and across the Northeast that have unionized with UAW Local 2110 include the Dia Art Foundation, the Jewish Museum, the Museum of Fine Art in Boston and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

On June 6 and 7, hourly-wage employees at the Glenstone Museum held their own vote, joining Teamsters Local 639. A press statement said the group of 89 workers included all of the institution’s hourly guides, café workers, registration, grounds, engineering and maintenance, community engagement, and housekeeping staff. 

Glenstone staffers have called for livable wages, better benefits, and safer working conditions. A press statement on the vote said that many of the hourly workers had second jobs, part-time employees did not receive health care benefits, and that staff had been forced to work outdoors “during extreme heat and cold”.

A private museum, Glenstone was founded by billionaires Mitchell and Emily Wei Rales for the couple’s personal collection in 2006. The couple live across a pond from the institution’s galleries and have appeared on ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors List since 2010. A expansion of the museum, designed by architect Thomas Phifer, was completed in 2018 at an estimated cost of $219 million.

According to the Washington Post, staffers faced union-busting strategies from museum leadership, including an appeal signed by Mitchell and Emily Wei Rales delivered to the homes of workers on June 3. The letter stated, “It is our sincere hope that you give due consideration to voting NO and keeping the Teamsters out of this special place we’ve built together.”

“We have said from the beginning of this process that we respect the right of our associates to decide whether to join a union,” the museum said in a statement to The Washington Post, which first reported the news of the union election results. “We accept the results of this election and intend to negotiate in good faith with the goal of achieving an equitable contract for the members of this new bargaining unit.”

“These workers defeated a sophisticated union-busting assault personally waged by some of the wealthiest people in America,” Local 639 president Bill Davis said in a statement. “I want to welcome them to our local union, and I look forward to helping them negotiate a first Teamsters contract.” 

Take, for example, a landscape painting dating to 1796 by Ralph Earl that comes about halfway into the show. Measuring about 45 by 52 inches and now in the collection of Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, the work depicts a house and village shop in New Milford, Connecticut, owned by Elijah Boardman, a wealthy white textile merchant. “This piece usually gets talked about in terms of the architecture and Elijah Boardman because he owned the architecture,” Emelie Gevalt, AFAM’s curatorial chair at AFAM, told ARTnews.

But, the full story behind this painting might come as a surprise to many, even today. “When I first saw [this painting], it really took my breath away because it just looks very sterile. It looks very white. I can’t imagine my ancestors being there,” Bonnie Johnson, a descendant of a Black family (the Phillipses) who worked for the Boardmans, says in a recording that accompanies the piece’s display.

On view until March 24, “Unnamed Figures” was, in part, organized around the idea that most people would imagine a typical New England town, especially in the late 18th century, as consisting of only white people. In reality, Gevalt said, “These paths were being walked by everyone in the community who was going to the general store, and from the Boardman account books, we know numerous Black community members were going.”

Curated by Gevalt; RL Watson, a professor of English and African American studies at Lake Forest College in Illinois; and Sadé Ayorinde, an American art fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, “Unnamed Figures” reconstructs stories of Black people living in the North from the late 1600s to the early 1800s. The historical lack of critical engagement with these narratives has ultimately resulted in deep-rooted misconceptions about the nature of Black life, the curators argue; this show then serves as a much-needed corrective in recovering those legacies and histories.

The curators set that intention very early in the exhibition, with a series of pieces by Francis Guy dedicated to the Hall family, who were enslaved on the Perry Hall plantation in Baltimore County, Maryland, from the 18th to the early 19th century. In one version of the scene (now owned by the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library in Delaware but not included in the AFAM exhibition), a Black nursemaid, whose name the curators believe could be Sib Hall, is visible. Another version, which is included in the exhibition, shows the Hall family walking on rolling hills with the plantation house in the background. None of the Black figures in the other works in this section yet have recoverable identities.

The exhibition also contextualizes images of towns in the North—primarily in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and New York—that include few, if any, Black figures in them by recognizing the influence of Black labor. For example, instead of simply including an 18th-century painting depicting the Massachusetts home of Joshua Winsor, a wealthy merchant and shipbuilder, the curators use it as an entry point to discuss how Black labor, even where slavery had receded, continued to be a defining feature in many areas throughout the Northeast. “I and other scholars have suggested New England should be thought of as a slave society because its entire economy was the triangle trade,” Gevalt said.

For the Perry Hall estate, “we are using it as an example to say to folks: ‘There are all of these absent figures, all of the enslaved Black people who were working this land, and actually creating this landscape,’” Gevalt said. An animating question that doubles as an organizing principle for the entire exhibition, she said, was “Why don’t we gravitate toward that story?”

That small, almost peripheral image of Sib Hall served as the basis for the reconstruction of her genealogy, which is represented by a suite of portrait photographs of her descendants at the end of that section in the exhibition.

Black figures are more clearly displayed later on, mainly through portraiture, but also in sculpture and drawings. There is very little information available on the lives of these individuals, so the curators used materials—from account books and other records, like censuses and wills, to correspondence with enslavers—to sketch out biographies that, while speculative, are still substantial enough to serve as the basis for a new, more robust archive on Black heritage.

“That’s the only way we can proceed with telling these stories in an archive that is full of gaps,” Gevalt said. “The alternative is to just not tell the stories at all.”

Early depictions of Black Americans reflect dehumanizing tropes developed in 17th-century Europe that colonial settlers used to assert their worldliness.

The images of Black figures in this section, titled “White Portraits, Black Lives,” have been so clearly manipulated to satisfy an agenda that has nothing to do with Black life that viewers could find it hard to imagine an alternate reality centered on it. In John Potter and Family (1740), a young Black boy is represented with a head cocked to one side and a sly smile, almost as comic relief next to the emotionless refinement of the Potter family, who Gevalt describes as prominent slaveholders in Rhode Island.

“This is from a pocket of Rhode Island where there were large plantations, but still very small in comparison to the South,” Gevalt noted. “In the North, though it was much more typical for a family to enslave one person, as many as 25 percent of households were enslaving, so that is still very significant.”

Glimpses of racial agency are depicted through pieces like a needlework sampler by Sarah Ann Major Harris—a Black child who fought to integrate a girls’ boarding school in 19th-century Connecticut—that details her family history, or another of a house and garden by a free Black woman named Ann Plato, who made sure to sign her work. Other pieces that may appear to be pioneering, like a frontispiece depicting Black poet Phillis Wheatley writing at a desk (included in a section of Black makers) have been reexamined by the curators, along with a team of outside contributors, as examples of still narrowly-conceived portraits of Black life.

In that way, the most harrowing part of the show is seeing how often white people used Black figures—drawn from real people living in different eras, communities, and circumstances—as tokens to reinforce their own influence.

Portraits with central Black sitters emerged in the early to mid-19th century. Examples of Black portraiture, however, are still few and far between, perhaps because many Black people could not afford to commission them, as many have suggested. Gevalt has another idea. “I think oil on canvas was being treated as a white form,” she proposed.

In a section titled “Progress and Obstacles in Nineteenth Century Portraiture,” there are also two portraits of white sitters by Ammi Phillips, a portrait artist who worked for years in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York, that include nods to Black labor through images of cotton and watermelon. In all that time, though, no one has discovered any painting by Phillips of a Black subject, including Agrippa Hull, an extremely prominent Massachusetts landowner whose portrait, rendered after his death by an unknown artist, is on view in the exhibition.

Following the gradual dismantling of slavery in the North before 1865, white Northerners began to feel uneasy with the shift in power dynamics. “White folks start saying, ‘Well, if slavery and Blackness are not intrinsically linked, can a white person become a slave?’,” Gevalt explained. This sentiment is evident in the series of drawings and other ephemera from the 19th century depicting Black figures as racist caricatures. This sentiment is evident in the series of drawings and other ephemera from the 19th century depicting Black figures as racist caricatures.

Even genuine attempts to represent the Black community with dignity miss the mark—especially by today’s standards. A doll depicting a free Black man who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was so crudely rendered that the show’s organizers wondered if it would be too triggering to include. “He’s not meant to represent a negative stereotype of Blackness, but yet his face obviously draws on all these negative stereotypes,” Gevalt said. After receiving permission from the family and the curatorial team’s own internal discussions, they decided to include it because they felt the doll “should be seen,” Gevalt added.

The final section of the show, titled “A More Perfect Likeness: Black Portrait Photography,” is a stunning display of Black figures, who have posed before the camera, long considered a medium of Black empowerment. After confronting up to this point how often images of Black life have been ignored or mishandled, stepping in front of this culminating tableau, with Black picture often pictured in stately dress and exhibiting a range of emotions, feels like sweet relief: seeing how Black people saw themselves.

Sonya Clark Wins $35,000 Rappaport Prize
Sonya Clark has won this year’s Rappaport Prize, which comes with $35,000 and is awarded annually by the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, to an artist with ties to New England. Clark is known for her work paying homage to contemporary craftspeople and hairdressers, as well as to Black figures throughout history. “Good news these days is a tender seedling pushing through hard concrete,” Clark said in a statement.

Thursday, September 3

MFA Boston Appoints Senior Director of Belonging and Inclusion
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has named Rosa Rodriguez-Williams as its first-ever senior director of belonging and inclusion. Joining the institution on September 9, Rodriguez-Williams, who has served as director of the Latinx Student Cultural Center at Northeastern University for over a decade, will work with the museum’s division of learning and community engagement. Matthew Teitelbaum, the MFA Boston’s director, said in a statement that Rodriguez-Williams “will be integral in reimagining how we welcome and engage historically underrepresented audiences, truly reflecting the communities we serve.”

Speed Art Museum Director To Step Down
Stephen Reily, who has served as director of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, since 2017, will depart his post in spring 2021. During his tenure, Reily created the museum’s monthly event “After Hours” and forged connections connections between the institution and its surrounding community through programming and free family memberships. The Speed Art Museum has initiated a national search for Reily’s successor, whom it hopes to identify early next year.

Giggs Kgole’s Boshielo (2020) will be included in the London version of “Say My Name” at Signature African Art.

Wednesday, September 2

London Gallery to Host Exhibition Benefiting Ava DuVernay’s LEAP
Signature African Art, a gallery specializing in contemporary African art with locations in London and Lagos, Nigeria, will host two iterations of an exhibition titled “Say My Name.” The show is curated by Khalil Akar and presented by filmmaker Ava DuVernay, with 40 percent of the proceeds from work sold being donated to DuVernay’s Law Enforcement Accountability Project (LEAP), which launched in June. The first version of “Say My Name” will be staged at the gallery’s London space from October 27–November 28 and include new work by Adjaratou Ouedraogo, Ejiro Owigho, Anthony Nsofor, Giggs Kgole, Ayanfe Olarinde, Moufouli Bello, Dandelion Eghosa, Oluwole Omofemi, Demola Ogunajo, Samson Akinnire, Dennis Osakue, Taiye Erewele, and Djakou Nathalie. The second version will take place in Los Angeles in February. In a statement, DuVernay said the exhibition will “showcase the galvanizing work of thirteen dynamic Black artists as they tackle issues of justice and dignity through their art practice.”

Gauri Gill Is Now Represented by James Cohan Gallery
New York’s James Cohan Gallery has added Gauri Gill to its roster. Gill is known for her photographs of everyday life in India, most notably for images as part of a series called “Acts of Appearance,” in which her sitters appear wearing traditional sacred masks. Gill’s work was the subject of a 2018 solo show at MoMA PS1 in New York, and her photography has also been shown in editions of Documenta, the Venice Biennale, and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. James Cohan Gallery is now featuring her work in an online viewing room on its site.

National Gallery of Art Names 2020–21 Visiting Professors
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. has named the visiting professors joining the museum’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts for the 2020–21 period. Among the scholars selected to teach at the center, which will be offering its studies virtually this year, are art historian Huey Copeland and Museu Calouste Gulbenkian director Peneleope Jane Curtis. A full list is available on the National Gallery of Art’s website.

Arcmanoro Niles, Does a Broken Home Become a Broken Family, 2019.

Tuesday, September 1

Lehmann Maupin Takes on Arcmanoro Niles
Arcmanoro Niles, an up-and-coming artist known for his figurative paintings featuring men and women in everyday settings rendered in brilliant colors, has joined the roster of Lehmann Maupin gallery, which has spaces in New York, London, Hong Kong, and Seoul. Niles, who is based in Brooklyn, will have a solo show at Lehmann Maupin’s New York space in June 2021, and is slated to appear in a group show at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. He has previously had solo shows at Los Angeles’s UTA Artists Space and New York’s Rachel Uffner Gallery.

Getty Establishes Post-Baccalaureate Internships in Art Conservation
The Getty in Los Angeles has created new post-baccalaureate internships in art conservation with an aim to address the lack of diversity in the field. The yearlong pilot program will offer $30,000 grants and hands-on experience to students planning to apply to graduate programs in art conservation. Interns participating in the 2020–21 program in the antiquities and paintings departments of the Getty Museum and the conservation department of the Getty Research Institute are Cheyenne Caraway, Kiera Hammond, and Michelle Tenggara.

Clementine Keith-Roach, Mantle, 2020, terracotta vessel, jesmonite, paint, silver rings.

Monday, August 31

P.P.O.W Now Represents Clementine Keith-Roach
Sculptor Clementine Keith-Roach, who creates terracotta vessels featuring limbs, breasts, and other human body parts, has joined the New York–based gallery P.P.O.W. The artist’s practice centers explorations of labor, and she has previously shown work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Ben Hunter Gallery in London, and other international venues.

Michael Birchall Named Curator at Migros Museum
The Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich has named Michael Birchall as curator. Birchall has been a curator of public practice at Tate Liverpool in England since 2016, and he replaces Raphael Gygax, who departed the Migros Museum to become director of Zurich University’s B.F.A. program in 2016. Birchall starts in his new position on October 1.

American Folk Art Museum Receives Grant to Digitize Henry Darger Collection
The American Folk Art Museum in New York has received a Save America’s Treasures grant to preserve and digitize part of its Henry Darger Collection. The grant is administered by the National Park Service in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services, National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The project will culminate in a research portal on Darger that will be available for scholarship worldwide. The American Folk Art Museum houses the most comprehensive archive of materials by Darger, who is best known for his epic graphic novel In the Realms of the Unreal. “This project reaffirms the museum’s commitment to Darger’s archives,” said Valérie Rousseau, AFAM’s senior curator, in a statement.

Correction, September 3, 2020: An earlier version of this article misspelled Ava DuVernay’s surname in two instances. This article has been updated.

Hollander in 2018.

STEPHEN SMITH/ART ZEALOUS/COURTESY AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM

After 34 years at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, deputy director of curatorial affairs, chief curator, and director of exhibitions Stacy C. Hollander will step down at the end of June. The museum said in a news release that Hollander, who served as interim director of the museum last year, is departing “to pursue independent curatorial work and writing projects.”

Hollander has organized more than 50 exhibitions at the museum, including “Ammi Phillips/Mark Rothko Compositions in Pink, Green, and Red” (in 2008), “Women Only” (2011), “Self-Taught Genius” (with Valérie Rousseau, 2013–16), “Securing the Shadow: Posthumous Portraiture in America” (2016), and “Charting the Divine Plan: The Art of Orra White Hitchcock (2018).

AFAM’s director, Jason T. Busch, said in a statement that Hollander “is a curator with deep knowledge and boundless curiosity; her exhibitions have been critical in establishing the American Folk Art Museum as the leading institution of self-taught art.”

The museum noted that hundreds of work entered its collection during Hollander’s tenure, including pieces by Sheldon Peck, Joseph Whiting Stock, William Matthew Prior, and many more.

“Stacy has been a mainstay of AFAM for decades,” Monty Blanchard, the president of the museum’s board of trustees, said in a statement. “We are most fortunate to have benefited from her exceptional curatorial creativity, scholarship, diligence, and taste.”

Martha Rosler, Cleaning the Drapes, from the series “House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home,” ca. 1967–72, photomontage.

©MARTHA ROSLER

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 30

Exhibition: John Dunkley at American Folk Art Museum
The late John Dunkley is one of the most highly regarded Jamaican visual artists of the past century. Never before, however, had his work been the subject of a major show outside his home country until last year, when the Pérez Art Museum Miami opened a version of this retrospective. The New York edition of the show consists of 45 works, including a series of brooding landscape paintings made in the 1930s and ’40s, and rarely shown sculptures in carved wood and stone. Taken together, the exhibition reflects some of the larger political and cultural shifts that occurred in Jamaica during Dunkley’s lifetime.
American Folk Art Museum, 2 Lincoln Square, 11:30 a.m.–7 p.m.

Talk: Rachel Kushner at New Museum
For the 10th edition of the New Museum’s annual Stuart Regen Visionaries Series, Rachel Kushner will talk about her work with the poet and novelist Ben Lerner. Both writers are well-known to those involved with art. Kushner, who previously wrote 2013’s The Flamethrowers, a novel about an up-and-comer in New York’s art scene during the 1970s, sometimes contributes to Artforum; her latest book, The Mars Room, is shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Lerner is a former MacArthur fellow who this year has published two books in collaboration with artists—The Polish Rider, written with the painter Anna Ostoya (who now has a show at New York’s Bortolami gallery), and The Snows of Venice, with the writer and director Alexander Kluge.
New Museum, 235 Bowery, 7 p.m. Tickets $20/25

Tomie Ohtake in her studio, São Paulo, ca. 1980s.

COURTESY THE ESTATE OF TOMIE OHTAKE AND GALERIA NARA ROESLER, NEW YORK

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 1

Opening: Tomie Ohtake at Galeria Nara Roesler
This exhibition, the third in a series of Tomie Ohtake shows at different Galeria Nara Roesler spaces, includes paintings, photographs, engravings, and other objects by the late artist from the 1960s and 1970s. Included will be an installation of Ohtake’s archival materials showing how she mapped her paintings and engravings by first making colorful collages. “By paying attention to the nature of Tomie Ohtake’s process here we are granted access to the connections her painting has with chance, gesture and chromatic boldness,” Paulo Miyada, chief curator of the Instituo Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo, said in a statement.
Galeria Nara Roesler, 22 East 69th Street, 3R, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Catherine Opie at Lehmann Maupin
Los Angeles has long served as a source of inspiration for the photographer Catherine Opie. In her early photos from the 1990s, she captured freeways and mini-malls in the city, and she later went on to produce a series about the actress Elizabeth Taylor, a longtime Angeleno. (Opie has called L.A. home since moving there in 1988.) The photographer’s latest exhibition showcases a new series as well as a connected film—Opie’s first cinematic work. Titled The Modernist, it focuses on the California countercultural legend Pig Pen and addresses major issues in contemporary politics and culture.
Lehmann Maupin, 501 West 24th Street, 6–8 p.m.

DAVID ZWIRNER BOOKS

Talk: Jarrett Earnest, Peter Schjeldahl, and Paul Chaat Smith at the Strand
At this talk, writer and artist Jarrett Earnest will be discuss his new book, What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics, published by David Zwirner Books. He will be joined by two acclaimed art critics whose words are featured in the book: the New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl and Paul Chaat Smith, associate curator at the National Museum of the American Indian.
The Strand, 828 Broadway, 7:30–8:30 p.m. Tickets $5/$32.50

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 2

Exhibition: Martha Rosler at Jewish Museum
Martha Rosler’s first major New York museum show surveys her career by way of installations, photographs, videos, and sculptures. Among the themes addressed are war and consumerism, with a special eye toward gender norms and oppression. Curator Darsie Alexander said of the exhibition, “Martha Rosler’s direct, unvarnished take on current social and political circumstances is rooted in her belief in the capacity of art to teach, provoke, and ultimately motivate action in the people it reaches.”
Jewish Museum, 1109 5th Avenue, 11 a.m.–5:45 p.m.

Exhibition: Betye Saar at New-York Historical Society
Titled “Keepin’ It Clean,” this show showcases work by Betye Saar, who is best known for her assemblage and collage works and has been a prominent figure in the Black Arts and feminist art movements since the 1960s. The exhibition’s title alludes to the works on view: washboards made between 1997 and 2017. Much of Saar’s output functions as a reclamation of racist caricatures from throughout American history, which she transforms into symbols of strength and power.
New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West, 10 a.m.–9 p.m.

Hélio Oiticica, Untitled, 1958.

©PROJETO HÉLIO OITICICA, RIO DE JANEIRO

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 3

Opening: Hélio Oiticica at Galerie Lelong & Co.
This exhibition presents early gouache drawings and a yellow “Relevo Espacial” (“Spatial Relief”) wooden hanging sculpture by the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica. Also featured are two large-format works from his 1957–58 “Metaesquemas” series that have never been shown in the United States. With his three-dimensional constructions, Oiticica, who played a pivotal role in the development of Brazil’s Neo-Concrete movement, created a participatory experience stemming from his long-term interest in the role color and space play in the ways we view art.
Galerie Lelong & Co., 528 West 26th Street, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Stanley Whitney at Lisson Gallery
Stanley Whitney’s new show, “In the Color,” features four paintings from his transitional period in the 1990s along with drawings from made between 2013 and 2014 in both locations of Lisson Gallery in Chelsea. Drawing on African-American quilting traditions, the Abstract Expressionist movement, and other sources of inspiration, Whitney’s work has taken the form of a sustained exploration of space, rhythm, and color.
Lisson Gallery, 504 West 24th Street and 138 Tenth Avenue, 6–8 p.m.

Still from Jennifer Reiland The Arena ARTIST

The downtown bar Madame X advertises itself on its website as the “Sexiest Bar in New York City.” I am in no way qualified to comment on whether that claim has any basis in fact, even after attending Realms of the Unreal, a spring benefit party for the American Folk Art Museum thrown at the venue last Thursday, but I will say that the space was quite dark, and punctuated with harsh red lighting.

Lansing Moore, the co-chair of Young Folk (the “official young supporters group” of the institution, which threw the party), told me that when looking for a venue, they desired “something dim with dramatic lighting” to accommodate perhaps the centerpiece of the night: The Arena, a video by the organization’s annual art commission winner, Jennifer May Reiland.

The 10-minute, hand-drawn animation loosely follows a chaotic battle in a bullfighting arena and was inspired in part by the famous American folk artist Henry Darger, to whom the night was dedicated. (The party’s title, Realm of the Unreal, came from a book and a documentary about the artist). “I was kind of worried about showing the video in a bar setting but it actually works really well,” Reiland told me. “All art videos should just be shown in bars so people can drink and hang out and then resume watching.”

Moore said that Reiland’s video is “similar to Darger in that it is very epic in scope, there are sort of historical figures and even brief bursts of violence.” Indeed, for an event whose press release invited guests to “pass through the looking glass and ascend into a Realm of the Unreal; populated by fanciful beasts and outrageous vegetation, a war wages on between good and evil,” brutal red lighting and a cramped room full of socialites seemed fitting enough. (It should be noted that the same release also promised specialty cocktails.)

That brutality translated to Reiland’s dense video, which centered on representations of bullfighters and princesses and included everyone from Princesse de Lamballe to JonBenét Ramsey. Reiland mentioned that the day of the opening, her boyfriend gave her a “sick” plate adorned with the many faces of Princess Diana, who is also included in the animation. “I love Princess Diana,” she said. “I have read the Tina Brown book about her like four times. Also I read Princess Diana: Her True Story by Andrew Morton in a single sitting once. I was in Spain and for some reason it was the only book I had with me other than Don Quixote.”

Moore told me that he hopes that Young Folk can assist in opening New York’s art world to work that falls outside of certain institutional norms and “make people reconsider what folk art is, what the vernacular is and what outsider art is.”

Towards the end of my stay at Realms of the Unreal, I thought back to the lyrics of the song “Shatter My Harmony Joy Ride” by another important American folk artist—Wesley Willis, whose music and drawings of the Chicago cityscape touch on an eternal American feeling that seems spiritually in conversation with an artist like Ed Ruscha. When Willis sings about turning “my rock n’ roll joy bus tour into a nerve-wrecking hell ride,” I couldn’t help but think about gala season in New York City. After leaving Madame X, I went on a fast anxiety-ridden stroll around the Lower East Side. Then I went home and took some PM cold medicine.

The assemblage paintings and sculptural objects of Ronald Lockett (1965–1998) often depict animals or figures, constructed of found tin and wood, nails, paint, and sealing compound. With titles like Civil Rights Marchers, Hiroshima, Verge of Extinction, and Dream of Nuclear Destruction, the works often address social and environmental themes, and many convey palpable emotion. “Fever Within: The Art of Ronald Lockett,” the first museum survey devoted to the artist, debuted at the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM) but was organized by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Ackland Art Museum (where it opens in late January) and curated by professor Bernard L. Herman. It features fifty of the approximately four hundred works Lockett made in his ten-year career, which was cut short by his death from AIDS, at age thirty-two. (Concurrent to the AFAM presentation of the show, the exhibition “Once Something Has Lived It Can Never Really Die,” organized by AFAM curator Valérie Rousseau, compared Lockett’s art with a selection of works from the museum’s permanent collection.) 

Although Lockett did not train formally, he grew up surrounded by creative relatives, neighbors, and friends in Bessemer, a rural town in central Alabama. In the mid-1980s, he was one of the few people permitted in the studio of his cousin Thornton Dial (1928–2016). As Lockett embarked on his own pursuits in the late 1980s, outdoor installations by his friends Lonnie Holley and Joe Minter were just receiving national attention. Less raw than works by Dial and others in his community, Lockett’s efforts suggest a correspondence to mainstream art trends, like 1980s Neo-Expressionism. At the time of his death, he was attracting art-world notice, having been lauded by William S. Arnett, founder of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which loaned many pieces for the show. 

Among the earliest of the mature works on view was the freestanding sculpture Untitled (Ram), ca. 1987. At approximately two feet square and seven inches thick, it presents a ram carefully cut from a piece of tin and mounted on an irregular wood plank. A small tree branch rises from the plank, and splatters of brown and white paint cover the whole assemblage. This work, as with many of Lockett’s best pieces, has a kind of talismanic quality.

The theme of entrapment, which relates to both the artist’s concern for the environment and his own struggles with racism, became central for him in the late 1980s and early ’90s. The wall-hung “Traps” consist of delicate renderings of animals collaged over with sticks and sections of chain-link fencing. The image of a deer predominates, a kind of avatar for the artist, as Herman asserts in his catalogue essay.

Following the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people, Lockett made a series of wall pieces. One gritty composition overlays sections of rusted sheet metal and fencing on a fifty-two-inch-square panel. In these later works, Lockett eschewed the delicate drawing and painting characteristic of his 1980s efforts. However, two very late pieces in tin and paint on wood from 1997, Sarah Lockett’s Roses and England’s Rose—memorial tributes to his beloved great-aunt and Princess Diana, respectively—reintroduce graceful, calligraphic lines in the flower and leaf emblems that decorate the quiltlike arrangements of painted metal. 

Since the apex of the AIDS crisis in the early 1990s, the prognoses of its survivors and people who are newly diagnosed with HIV have shifted dramatically, along with the art and artistic discourse around the disease. The traveling exhibition “Art AIDS America,” on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts through September 25, features a varied selection of art from the earliest days of the crisis to the present. The exhibition coincides with other shows and events that can be seen as augmenting its perspective by giving additional visibility to AIDS-affected individuals and communities that have been neglected due to racial, gender, or institutional bias.

“Fever Within: The Art of Ronald Lockett” at the American Folk Art museum is a sensitive and rich survey of the little-known vernacular artist, Ronald “Ronnie” Lockett (1965-1998). Though Lockett’s artistic career was brief, spanning just over ten years, he made over three hundred sculptures, paintings, and other objects in that period. He was born and raised in rural Alabama to parents who saw little value in their son’s interest in art. But his cousin, Thornton Dial, already an established artist, became his mentor and supplied him with materials when resources were short. In the early ’90s, Lockett made wall-mounted assemblages incorporating sheets of heavily rusted tin from a demolished outbuilding on his cousin Dial’s property. He hammered, cut and in some instances painted the battered tin surfaces, creating works reminiscent of Lee Bontecou’s metal assemblages or Rauschenberg’s Combines. Lockett made Coming Out of the Haze (1994) during a period of deep depression, shortly after he was diagnosed with HIV. An embossed image of a young buck appears amid furrows and folds of oxidized tin. The buck recurs throughout Lockett’s work as a corollary to the ideal black masculinity, which Lockett, slight and shy, failed to conform to. The artist feared that news of his HIV status would confirm his community’s suspicion that he was gay. Whether he was in denial about his illness or he willingly embraced a premature death, Lockett ignored the symptoms that led to the pneumonia that killed him in 1998.

Stories like Lockett’s are tragic examples of how fear and shame compounded with a lack of advocacy can prevent people with AIDS from receiving appropriate medical and emotional support, even to this day. Whether referring to the stewardship of artists’ archives or to the direct medical, spiritual, and emotional needs of people with AIDS, the notion of care has been a common topic of several programs this summer. During the crisis, artists often assumed the roles not only of activists and advocates but also of caregivers as their friends became sick and began to die. On July 14, Visual AIDS, a nonprofit that has used art to shape the discourse around AIDS since 1988, held a panel discussion at The 8th Floor, where the group exhibition “In the Power of Your Care” is on view through August 12. Titled “IV Embrace: On Caregiving and Creativity,” the discussion included Rafael Sánchez, an artist who acted as caregiver to Mark Morrisroe and others; Joy Episalla, an artist and ACT-UP member; Lodz Joseph, a healthcare worker who has worked extensively with HIV/AIDS patients; and Ted Kerr, a writer and organizer whose work and research focuses on HIV/AIDS. Both Joseph and Kerr are members of What Would an HIV Doula Do, a collective of artists, writers, activists, and chaplains who work with individuals recently diagnosed with HIV. Kerr moderated the discussion, during which Sanchez and Episalla relayed their personal stories of acting as caregivers to friends, while Joseph offered a more clinical presentation about the importance of “self care” as a necessary precondition to rendering service to others. Kerr described this renewed attention to AIDS and those affected as indicators that we have entered the “revisitation phase;” when issues including women’s health, senior care, poverty, and racial inequality are finally given their due after a long period when HIV had the image of a gay men’s disease.

One of the works in “In the Power of Your Care” was a video titled Medication Reminder (2015) by Hunter Reynolds, an artist-activist who gained recognition for his Memorial Dress performance (1993-2007), which involved donning an evening gown printed with the names of more than twenty thousand people who died of AIDS. For the recent video, Reynolds compiled a series of recorded voice messages of his friend, artist Kathleen White, who called him daily for a year and a half beginning in 2011 to remind him to take his antiviral medications. Her raspy, gentle voice accompanies animations of pills morphing into kaleidoscopic designs, and glitter-encrusted hands gesturing as pearls spill into containers overflowing with multicolored pills. White died of lung cancer in 2014, transforming Medication Reminder into a memorial.

In June, Reynolds joined artist Vincent Tiley for a performance at the fledgling Christopher Stout Gallery in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood. The two artists wore a neoprene suit that conjoined their bodies. The performance was titled Knast, after an iconic, defunct Berlin fetish club. Reynolds was given a leather sling salvaged from Knast by a lover who died shortly thereafter. Before the performance, Reynolds passed the relic to Tiley, a gesture that suggested a call to a younger generation of artists who will inherit the memory and object history of AIDS.

“A Deeper Dive,” on view through September 25 at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in Soho, presents the work of nine artists who are included in “Art AIDS America.” It is organized by Jonathan David Katz, one of the curators of the bigger show, in collaboration with Andrew Barron. As the title suggests, “A Deeper Dive” features a more comprehensive array of the selected artists’ work. The first images one sees when entering the museum are Ann P Meredith’s black-and-white photographs of HIV positive women and children from the mid- to late 1980s. Most arresting was Eleana y Rosa, the Ellipse at the White House, Washington, DC (1988), which depicts a gaunt, exhausted-looking young girl in the embrace of her mother, who crouches beside her. Meredith said in an interview that when she visited women with AIDS in San Francisco in the early 1980s to take their portraits, she was “asked by a security guard at the apartment building to leave her ID in case they needed to identify her body.”

“A Deeper Dive” also includes two 1993 works from Anthony Viti’s “Elegies” series that include the German Iron Cross, an image taken from Marsden Hartley’s Portrait of a German Officer (1914). Like Hartley, Viti used the image of the cross as a reference to his own grief and anger. But he raised the stakes by incorporating his own blood into the painted surface. Corpse (1986) by Brian Buczak comprises five panels with a combined width of 165 inches. The painting depicts a human skeleton festooned with various objects and symbols—a flaming human heart, an urn, a flayed snake, a tea kettle—that confront the horror of illness and death while also expressing an acceptance of it. In retrospect, Corpse looks like a harbinger of the artist’s own death in 1987.  

“Art AIDS America” has prompted institutions and younger artists to rethink the ways in which AIDS is represented in art. But other artists, activists, and institutions have taken the exhibition as an opportunity to call attention to who is represented. We need to see the images of HIV-positive women of color in Meredith’s photographs. The supportive care work being carried out by What Would an HIV Doula Do is equally important. We need to know how to talk to a friend or relative who might have been recently diagnosed with HIV. But we can’t do that without a diverse and inclusive frame of reference.

Ronald Lockett, Poison River, 1988, wood, tin, nails, stones, industrial sealing compound, and enamel on wood.

STEPHEN PITKIN, PITKIN STUDIO/COLLECTION OF SOULS GROWN DEEP FOUNDATION

TUESDAY, JULY 19

Panel: “Speaking of Gold and Rust: The Artistic Legacy of Ronald Lockett” at American Folk Art Museum
Until recently, Ronald Lockett was a fairly unknown name to many. But, with an American Folk Art Museum retrospective positioning him as an important artist, Lockett’s legacy needs to be corrected. How did his found objects—typically found plywood, with some added drawings—depict being black and impoverished in the American South? To contextualize Lockett’s work, curator Michael Berube, artist Kevin Simpson, and Christie’s outsider art specialist Cara Zimmerman will discuss the artist’s career.
American Folk Art Museum, 2 Lincoln Square, 6:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m. Tickets $35

Ydessa Hendeles, Partners (The Teddy Bear Project), 2002.

ROBERT KENZIERE

WEDNESDAY, JULY 20

Opening: “The Keeper” at New Museum
From Arman’s shoe accumulations to Mike Kelley’s collection of stuffed animals, art history is riddled with artist-hoarders. But why do artists save things in the first place? What’s with all that junk they may never use again even for, anyway? This show, fittingly titled “The Keeper,” looks artists whose work involves the archiving and collection of objects, whether on purpose or not. Featuring a cut-and-paste anthology of images about LGBTQ art by Henrik Olesen and abstract paintings by Hilma af Klint, this exhibition has as a centerpiece Ydessa Hendeles’s Partners (The Teddy Bear Project), 2002, which includes 3,000 teddy bears, each meant to be like an individual artwork, with its own personal meaning.
New Museum, 235 Bowery, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

Party: Warehouse Sale Kick-Off Party at Printed Matter
Printed Matter is hosting this party to celebrate the beginning of its annual warehouse sale, which typically has some good, cheap finds. As you peruse the books on sale, some of which are almost half off, Momo will perform selections from her debut album, Intl Style, which was released last fall. An invite also notes that refreshments will be served.
Printed Matter, 231 11th Avenue, 6–8 p.m.

Elisabeth Condon, Fear of Life Can Be a Subtle Thing, 2015, acrylic and glitter on linen.

COURTESY LESLEY HELLER WORKSPACE

Opening: “Splotch” at Lesley Heller Workspace
In the second half of “Splotch,” whose other part is currently on view at Sperone Westwater, there will be more art that, despite its freeform look, has a very calculated process. The show takes its name from Sol Lewitt’s sculpture series, in which fiberglass blobs of color seem to undulate, as though they were organic, living forms. On view in this show, curated by Eileen Jeng, will be work by Lynda Benglis, Walter Biggs, Elisabeth Condon, Nene Humphrey, Andreas Kocks, Sol LeWitt, Riad Miah, Jamie Powell, Taney Roniger, Karen Tompkins, Julia von Eichel, Aaron Williams, Magdalen Wong, and Jian-Jun Zhang.
Lesley Heller Workspace, 54 Orchard Street, 6–8 p.m.

Benefit Reception: “Memory Forms” at Art in General
Taking the loose theme of how memory functions for artists, “Memory Forms” is a group show where every work benefits Art in General. The show includes a pretty nice grouping of artists—it runs the gamut from Alfred Jaar to Xaviera Simmons to Ezra Wube. The show will have a special ticketed benefit reception this week that also includes drinks, music, and opportunities to speak with the exhibited artists.
Art in General, 145 Plymouth Street, Brooklyn, 6–8:30 p.m. Tickets $35

Performances: “It Gets Better IV” at Artists Space
In the third performance program that Stewart Uoo has organized for Artists Space, Shelley Hirsch, Ian Isiah, La’Fem Ladosha, Ashland Mines, and Bailey Stiles will participate. No word yet on what it’s about, but Uoo has a good eye for artists—past performers in his “It Gets Better” series have included K8 Hardy, Juliana Huxtable, and Jacolby Satterwhite—so this seems like a good one.
Artists Space, 55 Walker Street, 7 p.m. Tickets $5

Screening: America Is Hard to See at Brooklyn Academy of Music
Emile de Antonio’s 1970 documentary America Is Hard to See was one of two inspirations for the Whitney Museum’s inaugural show, which took its name from the film and a Robert Frost poem. De Antonio’s film documents Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 campaign for presidency—one that, during the time of the Vietnam War, was able to spur young, liberal voters to action. Shown here on 16mm, the film is rarely screened, and makes for relevant viewing as this election season heats up.
Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, 7 p.m. Tickets $14

Still from Robert Frank and Danny Seymour’s Cocksucker Blues (1972).

©PROMOTOUR BV

THURSDAY, JULY 21

Screening: Cocksucker Blues at Film Forum
Robert Frank may be best known for his photo-book The Americans, but he also had quite a career as a filmmaker. In 1972, with Danny Seymour, Frank made Cocksucker Blues, a film about The Rolling Stones that was commissioned during their North American tour following the release of Exile on Main Street. Using a vérité style, Frank and Seymour were able to capture rarely-screened footage of the Stones performing such hits as “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and “Brown Sugar.” This screening should be nice preparation for BAM’s upcoming Robert Frank films series, which starts in August.
Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, 9:50 p.m. Tickets $14

Anna Glantz, Waiting for Paul Revere, 2016, oil on canvas.

COURTESY THE ARTIST

FRIDAY, JULY 22

Opening: “Daydream from 2013” at Canada
“Hand sanitizers with aloe. Dreams with a breeze. Chicken and waffles. Where were you when you were 22?” This is from the wacky press release for this show, which focuses on fantasies and dreaming. (A tip: don’t read the full press release, if you don’t want the twist ending of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris to be spoiled.) Curated by Matthew Flaherty, the show will likely feature the surreal, largely figural painting that Canada typically shows. Works by Sam Anderson, Olivia Erlanger, Anna Glantz, Rose Marcus, Alissa McKendrick, Marlie Mul, and Libby Rothfeld will be on view in this show.
Canada, 331 and 333 Broome Street, 6–8 p.m.

Independent Order of Odd Fellows, Inner Guard Robe, The Ward-Stilson Company, New London, Ohio, 1875–1925, velvet, cotton, and metal.

COURTESY AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM

Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday. This week’s shows are selected by artist Mark Dion. Read more about this week’s “Pictures” here.

Today’s show: “Mystery and Benevolence: Masonic and Odd Fellows Folk Art from the Kendra and Allan Daniel Collection” is on view at American Folk Art Museum in New York through Sunday, May 8. The exhibition, which is the first to present objects from fraternal organizations in the United States, brings together over 200 artifacts spanning from the late 1700s to the early 1900s.

Mark Dion writes:

This exhibition highlights the imagination and pictorial and sculptural ingenuity of fraternal societies that inherit the “mystery school” tradition of ritual and elaborate visual language. The galleries look marvelous, and the collection, with its semiotic sophistication, leaves viewers puzzling and asking for more.

01

Masonic Knights Templar Shade, artist unidentified, United States, 1875–1900, paint on canvas.

COURTESY AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM

Independent Order of Odd Fellows, Apron, artist unidentified, United States, 1840–60, paint, gold paint, and ink on silk satin with cotton fringe and bullion trim.

COURTESY AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM

Improved Order of Red Men, Altar, artist unidentified, United States, 1875–1925, paint on wood.

COURTESY AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM

Independent Order of Odd Fellows, Banner, artist unidentified, United States, 1900–20, paint on canvas, with wood and metal.

COURTESY AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM

Independent Order of Odd Fellows, Inner Guard Robe, The Ward-Stilson Company, New London, Ohio, 1875–1925, velvet, cotton, and metal.

COURTESY AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM

Fraternal Hourglass, artist unidentified, United States, 1875–1925, paint and gold leaf on wood, with metal.

COURTESY AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM

Independent Order of Odd Fellows, Marquetry Table, James J. Crozier, probably Islip, New York, 1933, wood

COURTESY AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM

Masonic Appliqué Quilt, artist unidentified (grandmother of Wayne Robb), United States, 1885, cotton.

AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM, PROMISED GIFT OF KENDRA AND ALLAN DANIEL