Hilarie M. Sheets

“The history of land formation is also the history of migration,” said Fernández, 51, at her studio in Brooklyn, where the Miami-born, MacArthur award-winning artist has been based since 1998. Her work and career are now being celebrated in her first comprehensive survey exhibition at the Pérez Art Museum Miami.

“Island Universe” was inspired by R. Buckminster Fuller’s “Dymaxion Map” that peeled the globe like an orange, she explained, and sought to undo our cultural biases based on north and south. “All this up/down, privilege/third world, modernity/primitivism is based on these cardinal directions,” said Fernández, who stripped such assumptions from her representation of the world. She is interested in how viewers inevitably try to locate where they’re from within this disorienting landscape.

The Miami exhibition, titled “Elemental,” brings together more than 20 years of the artist’s large-scale sculptures, installations, drawings and wall reliefs and seeks to challenge viewers’ perceptions, both optically and culturally. Shimmering works suggest gardens, pools, waterfalls, clouds and fire, and are often composed of clusters of mirrored glass cubes or metallic steel shapes or glazed ceramic tiles that flicker and reflect people moving through, around or under them.

“People are very seduced by their own image and the exercise of looking for themselves,” said Fernández, who uses that as a strategy to hold viewers’ attention as they may contemplate what kind of landscape they’re experiencing.

In recent years, she has frequently incorporated radiant gold on panels evoking nighttime horizons — a direct reference, she said, to the extraction of gold by Spanish conquistadors who ravaged the land of indigenous people in the Americas.

“Teresita’s beginning to zero in on facets that relate very specifically to landscape in terms of colonial history,” said Franklin Sirmans, director of the Pérez, which organized the exhibition with the Phoenix Art Museum, where it will travel before going to the New Orleans Museum of Art. “That’s part of the evolution of Teresita Fernández as an artist. Those things were always there, but they were hidden and shrouded in some ways.”

The artist has never wanted to limit the interpretation of her deeply researched and layered work. But in recent years she has been more forthcoming about its personal and political content, including prompts in the titles such as “Charred Landscape (America)” (2017).

“Neutrality is no longer an option,” she said in a lecture shortly after the 2016 presidential election.

In New Orleans, she recently completed a 60-foot mosaic of glazed ceramic tiles for the museum’s sculpture garden titled “Viñales (Mayombe Mississippi),” part of a series begun in 2015 after her first visit to Cuba, her parents’ homeland. The lush, swirling greens and browns of the piece reference the rural valley of Viñales, with its system of caves where indigenous people had lived, and where runaway slaves from surrounding plantations once took refuge.

But Fernández’s abstract-looking image was in fact based on a CT scan of a green malachite rock from Mayombe in Congo, a site of Africans’ forced migration and a landscape that reminded her of Viñales.

“The landscape inside the rock was exactly like the big landscape outside,” said Fernández, who likes to conflate different scales. She noted that Congo Square in New Orleans was once the heart of the slave market and where people would celebrate Mardi Gras.

“Here’s this place that’s Africa, Cuba and New Orleans,” she said of the piece she calls a “stacked landscape.” “You can actually see your own reflection in the surface and it’s like multiple times and places happening simultaneously.”

For the artist, it is meaningful that her exhibition is going to “three relevant cities that have majority Latinx populations,” she said, particularly to Miami, which was formative to her visual sense of the world. Her parents immigrated there from Havana as teenagers.

“They arrived to a Jim Crow South,” said Fernández, noting that the city was a very different place then from what the art world now associates with Art Basel Miami. Her parents were told to go back to where they came from; she remembers being told to speak English.

“A lot of what we’re watching on the news, it’s not new,” she said.

Early in her career, she resisted discussion of personal narrative, wary her work would be reduced to ethnic clichés. Artist Nari Ward, who is also bicultural and has known Fernández since 1996, understands the fear of being pigeonholed by identity.

“As you’re coming up through the ranks, you’re trying to fight for what your vision is,” said Ward (he and Fernández are both represented by the Lehmann Maupin gallery). “As an older artist with a reservoir of confidence and resources, Teresita’s thinking about what is the legacy she wants to claim.”

Becoming an activist outside the studio was not an obvious fit for Fernández. But frustrated by what she termed the “invisibility” of Latinx artists and curators at a high level in the art world, she spent a year organizing the U.S. Latinx Arts Futures Symposium in 2016. The event, hosted and funded by the Ford Foundation, brought together 200 artists, museum directors, scholars, curators and funders to talk about the lack of Latinx representation. (While Latinx people are fastest growing ethnic group in the United States, they hold only 3% of museum leadership.)

Scott Rothkopf, chief curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art, told The New York Times in 2018 that the symposium was influential in his hiring of Marcela Guerrero as the museum’s first curator specializing in Latinx art.

“Teresita is revealing the complexity of the Latinx conversation and taking a public leadership role in holding the mirror up to the art world,” said Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, which convened a second iteration of the symposium last month.

“I think there’s a ripeness for something that I’ve been working on for a long time and that I’ve been living for a long time,” said Fernández, who employs five women of color and Latinas in her studio.

“If the show and my own narrative expands people’s understanding about being an artist from Miami, then I think it’s an amazing thing,” she added. “There’s a lot of young artists in Miami who do not see versions of themselves in the art world.”

This article originally appeared in

For Teresita Fernández, Personal Is Political

NEW YORK — The beautiful and experiential installations of Teresita Fernández allude to landscapes — historical, geological, internal, all in a heady mix. Her “Island Universe,” for example, a stunning wall-sized mosaic composed of smoky chunks of charcoal at the Ford Foundation in New York, renders the seven continents as a horizontal daisy-chain of land masses. It suggests the ancient footpath of humankind, a time long before nations and borders.

At Frieze New York near the north entrance to the art fair opening Thursday, Halsey is presenting “Prototype Column for tha Shaw (RIP the Honorable Ermias Nipsey Hussle Asghedom) I &amp; II” — two monumental columns 12 feet high and 2 feet in diameter with hieroglyphic carvings referencing the rapper’s lyrics and world in the neighborhood now known as South Los Angeles. Halsey’s project was selected from well over 100 international applications for the 2019 Frieze Artist Award, a commission for emerging artists supported by the Luma Foundation.

“Prototype is not a word she’s using lightly,” said Courtney J. Martin, curator of the project and one of the selecting jurors who was recently named director of the Yale Center for British Art. “There are people in her community who stand up for things that she sees as models for how things should work.”

The columns are also prototypes for elements of an ambitious public project Halsey intends to build in South Los Angeles as a gathering space and a way to honor her community. She is negotiating with the city of Los Angeles on a proposal that includes plans for a white mausoleum-type structure with seating and planters and covered in her contemporary form of hieroglyphics. She sees it as a living archive of the people, businesses, culture and beauty of her neighborhood, rapidly changing and being erased with gentrification.

“In my dream world, there would be 15 to 20 of these columns — 30 feet tall and 5 to 6 feet in diameter — that would coexist with the permanent structure and that people would move through like a corridor,” Halsey said in a telephone interview. She used the Frieze commission as an opportunity to experiment with a new durable industrial plaster that was incredibly difficult to carve into but that forced her to learn new techniques. “I’m really happy with the results,” she said, “and now that I have the prototypes, I can share this with more fabricators around the country.”

Halsey, who studied architecture at her local community college, first envisioned some kind of public project as an art student at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. “I would take the bus down these main boulevards from my grandmother’s home to Cal Arts and started thinking deeply about activating these vacant lots because there are so many,” she said.

After receiving her MFA from Yale in 2014, Halsey was an artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Long interested in Parliament Funkadelic musicians who appropriated Egyptian archetypes into their cosmologies, she was seeing vendors on 125th Street selling scale models of Pharaonic architecture and then visiting the Metropolitan Museum to view actual ruins from ancient Egypt covered with paintings and reliefs.

“I thought I could sample the function of the hieroglyph — the pharaohs’ record — and remix it into contemporary neighborhood poetics and news to describe this moment for people,” said Halsey, who showed her initial experiments with carving on gypsum panels and painting colorful portraits on columns in 2015 at the Studio Museum.

Last year for the Hammer Museum’s biennial “Made in L.A.,” the artist made another architectural prototype that was installed on the terrace. Visitors could enter a large-scale open-air pavilion built from carved gypsum panels that echoed both Egyptian and Modernist structures. It was a way for Halsey to think through questions of public access and practicalities of how her future South Los Angeles monument might function outside.

“The hieroglyphic imagery is both uplifting and upsetting and speaks to gun violence, police violence, gentrification, economic insecurity — all things that we’re having to address both at a local level in LA and nationally,” said Anne Ellegood, a co-curator of the biennial. “Lauren manages to strike a really compelling balance between the fact that communities like hers are being challenged by these societal pressures and yet there’s so much positive occurring in those spaces as well.” The artist was awarded the $100,000 Mohn Award in conjunction with the museum’s biennial.

Halsey will have her first exhibition at the David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles in early 2020. She has asked the dealer to contribute the proceeds from the eventual sale of her Frieze commission to a workers’ center in South Los Angeles. She plans to employ carpenters and apprentices there once she gets the green light from the city for her civic proposal “so it becomes a small alternative development project,” she said.

She also intends to throw open the doors of her Los Angeles studio for six months and invite people to carve their own stories on the panels for her architectural structures or drop off images for others to incorporate in designs.

“It will be a collaboration with me and the people within the neighborhood,” Halsey said. “We’re all authoring narratives around what it means to be alive now.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/arts/lauren-halsey-frieze-award-new-york.html" id="e48b0488-6f7c-3139-a160-94dd43aa11c7">The New York Times</a>.

Lauren Halsey Is Making Monuments to South Los Angeles

NEW YORK — When the rapper and entrepreneur Nipsey Hussle was shot to death in March outside his clothing store near Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles, the world lost a Grammy Award-nominated artist and his community lost an activist and mentor. “He was South Central’s superhero,” said artist Lauren Halsey, a 31-year-old native of South Los Angeles who knew and admired the musician, born Ermias Joseph Asghedom, two years her senior.

Now 90, excusing himself for taking a seat because “my knees aren’t reliable,” Oldenburg began poring through scrapbooks begun at age 8 of his imagined island nation called Neubern, complete with its own flag and crest, air force, movie theaters, battleships, hotels and newspaper. “Opera at its best by Oldenburg,” he read aloud from a headline on a meticulously drafted front page.

“I haven’t looked at this for quite a while,” said Oldenburg, who is best known for his monumental public sculptures of commonplace objects and food, including a giant cherry balanced on a spoon in the sculpture garden at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and a colossal rubber stamp in Cleveland. “I think I was quite good from the start,” he added.

The remarkably well-realized world of Neubern, presaging the future artist’s acute sensitivity to man-made environments and popular culture, is part of Oldenburg’s vast archive, which was recently acquired by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, along with the papers of Coosje van Bruggen, the artist’s second wife and his collaborator from 1976 until her death in 2009. More than 2,000 drawings and collages, 450 diaries and notebooks and a trove of documentary photographs and footage, the majority of which have never been exhibited or published, head to Los Angeles later this month.

Oldenburg led an intimate tour of these artifacts, which are housed throughout the five-story industrial building where he has lived and worked since 1971. Accompanied by his daughter, Maartje Oldenburg, and Glenn Phillips, curator and head of modern and contemporary collections at the Getty Research Institute, the tall, courtly Swedish-born artist moved deliberately with a cane. Aided at moments in his recollections by his daughter, he operated the controls of the freight elevator like a captain steering his ship, cautioning his visitors at each landing that “it can be a little difficult here when you step off.”

He has kept a virtually uninterrupted set of handwritten diaries since 1956, the year he moved to New York from Chicago. They capture the inspiration he found in the gritty street life, what he ate and the many artists — including Jim Dine, Red Grooms, Lucas Samaras and his first wife, Patty Mucha — with whom he collaborated on performances and exhibitions.

He also kept journals titled “Notes,” filled with art ideas and typed on a 1926 typewriter. “Essentially my art is comic — a serious, absurd comedy … irreverent … erotical … moralistic,” an entry from the early 1960s reads.

Phillips was fascinated by how these written logs amplified the visual ideas that Oldenburg was sketching on separate notebook pages, often torn from little spiral pads he carried in his pocket. “I’ve never seen an artist recording their thought process as much as Claes did,” he said. “You have all of those parallel things side by side, so a scholar can probably find the origin of every idea that Claes had and then trace it through to the finished work.”

In a “Notes” entry from the early ’70s, Oldenburg wrote: “Drawings are for me the battleground of my being.” Looking at a sketch of an upside-down question mark on a skateboard, an unapproved proposal for a public sculpture outside the Reichstag in Berlin after reunification in the 1990s, the artist said, “I had forgotten completely about this.” He chuckled as he perused other never publicly seen drawings of baked potato clouds and a design for a tunnel in the shape of a nose.

Oldenburg is editing a four-volume book of 1,000 of these notebook-page drawings to be published next year by Hatje Cantz. Her father has always spent a lot of time “arranging, filing, editing, discarding,” she said. “Maybe that’s where the creative sparks come from, through that process.”

Asked if he still keeps any kind of daily log, Oldenburg said: “I’ve been trying very hard to do it but it is difficult for me. You get older, as I have, and you really can’t do those things anymore. But I’m still trying.”

Oldenburg also struggled to weigh in on efforts to return “Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks,” his first large-scale monument, completed in 1969, to the center of the Yale University campus from its current peripheral spot at Yale’s Morse College. The sculpture was commissioned 50 years ago by a group of architecture students headed by Stuart Wrede, who is leading the charge today to move it back.

“I haven’t been there for so long,” Oldenburg said of Yale, his alma mater. Stepping in, his daughter explained, “He’s supportive of Stuart and honored by the interest, but he doesn’t quite feel it’s his place to demand moving his sculpture back to a more prominent position.”

Reached by phone, Wrede, a former director of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, recounted how he and other Yale students had helped Oldenburg construct the sculpture, a giant inflatable fabric lipstick mounted on a plywood base that resembles a set of military tank treads. As a surprise gift to Yale, the group carried it onto campus to great fanfare from the student body and planted it near the university president’s office.

“The lipstick was an open-ended protest monument, a symbol of dissent at the time,” Wrede said. It became a podium for students to speak out against the Vietnam War and in support of gay rights and the admission of women to Yale. The university came to embrace the piece after Oldenburg was the subject of MoMA’s first major Pop art show in 1969, but relocated it in 1974.

Before the lipstick was remade in durable metal, Oldenburg recalled how students would pump it up to inflate it before standing on the tank to give speeches. “The wonderful thing about it is that it will never stay up,” he said. In “Notes” from 1969, he called it a “bisexual object.” “There’s an element of humor in whatever I do,” he added, “but it also can be turned into something pretty serious.” Original film reels of the raucous 1969 campus events will go to the Getty, too.

Watching how the artist lit up throughout the house tour, one wondered about the emotional toll of all this work departing for a new home. “I’m at a stage where I can accept that sort of thing,” he said.

Oldenburg said the idea of ultimately preserving the work in his living space didn’t appeal to her or her father. “This really gives the archive a second life,” she said. “Claes’ philosophy always has been to put the work out in the world.

“Coosje shared that,” she added, referring to her mother. “I’m glad that she’s getting more attention now.”

The archive was acquired from Oldenburg for below fair market value, Phillips said, declining to give the price. Oldenburg’s 1974 sculpture “Clothespin Ten Foot” sold for more than $3.6 million at auction in 2015.

“You can look at almost every [postwar] artistic movement in the United States and Claes Oldenburg intersects with it — whether it’s performance, pop, minimalism, postminimalism, conceptual art, installation art, postmodernism,” Phillips said.

Lisa Freiman, an independent curator who wrote her dissertation on Oldenburg, described the archives as “unprecedented” in their historical value for scholars. “I think they are going to become the most important primary research about art history in the ’60s and ’70s,” she said. “Public access is going to reveal a completely different narrative about Claes Oldenburg. All his work from the 1960s was coming out of a neo-surrealism and his interest in the unconscious.”

Oldenburg said her father had been worried about what would happen to all this material. “I hope this frees him to spend the time remaining doing new things that interest him,” she said. As he has become more frail and lost his mobility, Oldenburg has been taking photographs from his windows, drawn to the construction around his building since the neighborhood was rezoned several years ago.

“I’m shooting in all four directions while the world has been going on,” Oldenburg said, excited to show a set of large-scale prints in progress that he expects to exhibit at Pace Gallery. An image of a bright yellow crane and another of a convoy of buoyant cement trucks are consistent with the artist’s fascination with the street and mechanical objects.

“This is all right outside the door at 6 a.m. when you want to sleep,” he said. “First thing I do is go to the window. If it looks good, I take a picture.”

While his daughter expressed concern about whether her father would be able to live comfortably here with new developments poised to block two exposures, Oldenburg remained focused on his photographs.

He pulled out a print that showed an advertisement featuring a beautiful striding woman covering half the facade of a building. “It looks like she’s just a mile high,” Oldenburg said, beaming with satisfaction.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/arts/design/claes-oldenburg-archives-getty.html" id="f7c39399-e2af-36c9-a936-c120b699e1b5">The New York Times</a>.

For Claes Oldenburg, a time to let go, a time to look ahead

When Claes Oldenburg, widely recognized as the father of pop art, heard that a visitor to his studio at the western edge of SoHo, in New York City, wanted to see drawings of the fictional land he invented as a child, he said, playfully, “At last!”

Now Binion, the first African-American to receive a graduate degree from the prestigious Cranbrook Academy of Art, has been fully embraced by the mainstream art world — at age 72. His dealer is a prominent Chelsea gallery. Museums and international collectors are snapping up his large canvases, minimalist grids painted in oil stick over collages of personal documents.

With his work selling for up to $450,000, he can now travel first class and easily afford his daughter’s Brown University tuition. “I’m totally ready for it,” Binion said of the acclaim.

But he was not totally ready for the coarser realities of the modern-day art market. Binion rejected one dealer who he felt patronized him — she was hustling his freshly painted works on her cellphone at the Venice Biennale and coaching him on how to speak to curators and the press.

“Nobody’s going to tell me what to say about my work,” said Binion. “For me, if it wasn’t going to be on your own terms, it’s not worth it.”

Binion belongs to a generation of African-American artists in their 70s and 80s who are enjoying a market renaissance after decades of indifference. Museums are mounting popular exhibitions of their work and their names, in some cases, are worth millions on the auction block.

And so precisely when many artists are slowing down, they are gearing up — and struggling to balance the new pressures of success.

With public appreciation have come demands to attend openings, lectures, interviews and panels at a time when travel can be onerous, or when artists prefer to be in the studio. Those whose work was never political or didactic are apprehensive about being framed as black artists, rather than as just artists.

“The kind of elation I may have had back 30 years, I’m past that point,” said Howardena Pindell, who at 75 uses a walker and can no longer crawl up a ladder to execute her paintings, often collaged with hundreds of paper dots covered in layers of acrylic, dye, sequins, glitter and powder.

Like other artists of color discovered later in life, hers is a different kind of contentment: “It’s a more a sense of feeling protected and safe in terms of the vicissitudes of the art world.”

In interviews, several of these artists spoke of the urge to create new works, which can be physically demanding yet invigorating at the same time. And while all the new money flowing in would have been nice when they were raising families, they were happy to be able to provide some security for their children and grandchildren.

Still, they can only do so much. Alexander Gray, a New York dealer who represents Melvin Edwards, Lorraine O’ Grady and Frank Bowling, said he has been guilty of overestimating the speed of his older artists. “With the enthusiasm of the marketplace,” he said, “we forget the age of these human beings and their physical capacity to travel all over the world, expected of an artist in the art world right now. I think it can be overwhelming.”

O’Grady, 85, a conceptual artist, has been inundated with requests to appear on panels and make presentations. “Anything that involves travel at this point, she is declining,” said Gray. At 85, Bowling, who was born in Guyana and maintains studios in London and New York, has also put a moratorium on travel and interviews.

“At this point, for artists of advanced age, time is precious and there’s no more precious place to be than in the studio,” Gray said.

— ‘It’s About Time’

Recent traveling exhibitions such as “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” which opened Saturday at the Broad in Los Angeles, have illuminated the pantheon of black artists working in the 1960s and 70s. “There has been a whole parallel universe that existed that people had not tapped into,” said Valerie Cassel Oliver, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.

Shattering the $2 million threshold, new auction highs were set last year for Sam Gilliam, 85, as well as Barkley Hendricks and Jack Whitten, both recently deceased. They built on the success of younger African-American artists such as Kerry James Marshall, 63, who recently broke $21 million at auction. (While the artists do not directly benefit when collectors sell their paintings at auction, the high prices make their newly created works more valuable.)

Pindell’s breakthrough came in 2014, when she signed with Garth Greenan, a Chelsea gallerist; since then a survey of her work has appeared at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and is now on view at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum.

But as a black abstract artist, Pindell found an inhospitable reception in New York after graduating from Yale in 1967. She was bucking the widespread expectation that African-American artists should create work about social issues.

“Within the African-American community in the 1970s, if you were an abstract artist you were considered the enemy pandering to the white world,” said Pindell. “But white dealers would say that African-Americans who did abstract work were inauthentic.”

Unbowed, she followed her own path. She worked in the curatorial ranks at the Museum of Modern Art, then began teaching at what is now Stony Brook University, while showing sporadically at galleries supporting underrepresented artists.

Even dealers who were starting to show women did not often include black women. At one gallery exhibition that had no black artists, she said, “I spoke vocally about that, and one white woman came to me said, ‘Would you please be cooperative and shut up about race?'”

Since signing with Greenan she has been asked to produce more work for fairs and exhibitions than she has been used to.

But on the upside, she can now afford studio assistants and a driver to take her to her teaching job.

“I’m being well taken care of,” Pindell said.

Edwards, whose abstract, welded-metal sculptures have been acquired by five institutions in the last 18 months, including the Whitney Museum and Tate Modern, turns 82 in May. He, too, said that pursuing abstraction as a black artist was a lonely road.

His geometric barbed-wire and chain structures were shown at the Whitney in 1970, but it would be another two decades before he had his first gallery exhibition. Demand for his work has risen dramatically in recent years as a result of museum shows.

“You invent your own game — and then you push it forward,” said Edwards, who taught at Rutgers for 30 years. “It’s about time the art world caught up.”

— Not Defined by Race

In some cases, the older artists have had younger African-American stars to thank for the new attention. Mark Bradford, 57, the renowned Los Angeles artist who represented the United States in 2017 at the Venice Biennale, lobbied his gallery, Hauser &amp; Wirth, to take on Whitten, one of Bradford’s inspirations. And conceptual artist Charles Gaines, 75, Bradford’s former teacher, will have his first show with the gallery in the fall.

Yet there’s a rub for older artists whose work has never overtly addressed identity or politics, as Bradford’s work does.

Michael Rosenfeld, who represents geometric painter William T. Williams, 76, and sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud, 79, said they both “purposefully withdrew from the commercial gallery world for decades,” because they did not want their work to be seen through the lens of identity.

Still, race is an undeniable factor in the market’s new embrace. Rachel Lehmann, co-owner of Lehmann Maupin, which represents Binion, said she has asked buyers what they responded to in the artist’s work.

“They were interested in the fact that it is abstract and in the fact that this is an African-American artist — part of the spectrum that has been neglected in our history,” she said.

Like Binion, Edwards has welcomed the new income, which allowed him to buy a second home, in Senegal, and the freedom to experiment there with tapestries, which he hopes to show in his fall exhibition at the Alexander Gray gallery. “I’ve got stacks of ideas and things to do,” said the sculptor.

On a personal level, he has college-age grandchildren and would “like to contribute as much as I can to that,” he said. “When the money comes, we can use it.”

He is philosophical about all the new attention.

“Some is serious, some is fickle and some is not at all positive — you just have to find your way through it,” he said.

“But I’ll say this,” he continued. “I don’t think we’ll ever be out of the western world’s art world the way we were before. That just won’t happen anymore.”

Hailed after 70, black artists find success, too, has a price

McArthur Binion had been creating art almost completely under the radar for four decades, handling his own occasional sales and raising two children in Chicago on a teaching salary.

<h1>NEW YORK — Public art, once the domain of corporate plazas and dedicated sculpture parks, has increasingly been integrated into a variety of urban landscapes. And now, it is a gateway to museum collections.</h1>

That is the view of Brooke Kamin Rapaport, deputy director and senior curator of the Madison Square Park Conservancy in New York and commissioner of the United States Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. “Think of the number of large or smaller museums that have outdoor sculpture on their campuses as another way to invigorate the public and to get them into the institution,” she said. “That’s a change in the field.”

Since joining the Conservancy in 2013, Rapaport has been a leader in bringing greater critical attention and museum standards to outdoor public art.

In 2017, she founded the Public Art Consortium, an annual national gathering of museum, sculpture park and public art colleagues to discuss the growing field and possibilities for collaboration.

For Madison Square Park, she has commissioned a dozen ambitious temporary projects by artists including Teresita Fernández, Josiah McElheny and Erwin Redl. They have pushed the conventions of public art in this green space ringed by skyscrapers, including the Flatiron Building, and traversed by 60,000 people a day.

For the first time at the Biennale, which opens May 11, the United States Pavilion is being organized by an institution whose visual arts program is devoted to public art. There, Rapaport is presenting sculpture by Martin Puryear, who blends abstraction, craft traditions and historical forms such as the Phrygian cap worn as a symbol of freedom in the French and American revolutions.

“Martin often references the individual, democracy, questions of allegiance and responsibility, liberty and history, all of which comes forward in this sculpture,” said Rapaport, who collaborated with Puryear, a 77-year-old African-American artist, on his 40-foot-tall sculpture “Big Bling” for Madison Square Park in 2016. That project has been a springboard for the Venice exhibition, where the outdoor forecourt will be a focal point with a monumental new installation.

“I think what it demonstrates is that public art is now a contender rather than an afterthought,” she said.

For a long time, that hadn’t been the case. “Public art was considered second- and third-generation modernism,” she said, referring to sculptures of geometric abstraction often in front of office buildings. “The field of public art is at a time right now when the most distinguished artists working today want to bring their work outdoors.”

Rapaport has given artists including Diana Al-Hadid, Arlene Shechet and Leonardo Drew their first opportunities to do just that. In a significant departure for Drew — known for his wall-size, grid-based assemblages stuffed with weathered objects — he will orient a new work horizontally across the central lawn of Madison Square Park and introduce new materials including multicolored sand. Opening June 3, “City in the Grass” will be a sprawling undulating carpet stretching more than 100 by 30 feet, with a panoramic cityscape built on top of the colors and patterns of a Persian rug.

“This is a beautiful challenge,” said the artist, 58, explaining that the “public invasion” of the park is testing how far he’s willing to let people physically interact with his work. “Brooke is daring, and that’s why she will ask artists to realize outdoor works when they’re not outdoor-work artists. It does take a leap of faith. She’s there before you’re there.”

For Al-Hadid, the experience of conceiving multiple sculptures for the park in 2018 for “Delirious Matter” has changed her work deeply. “It was really about how to think of the movement of people through the park — how they might experience one work to another, how it might surprise them,” said the artist, 38, who built a mountainous figure over a fountain, for instance, and framed wall fragments with planted hedgerows to create an outdoor room. She’s now pursuing new ideas for incorporating natural materials in outdoor commissions.

When the park’s engineers suggested structural changes because the work in the planning stages appeared too fragile, “Brooke trusted that I knew the materials well enough to advocate for the work,” Al-Hadid added.

Madison Square Park has become a destination on the art and culture map, according to Julián Zugazagoitia, director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. “It’s not formulaic or predictable who the next commission is — every new piece is a total surprise,” said Zugazagoitia, who has participated in Rapaport’s Public Art Consortium.

“When Brooke creates this consortium, it’s saying, How does the typology of a very urban space like Madison Square Park transfer,” he said. “What can we learn from that experience in a different context?”

A graduate of Amherst College with a master’s degree in art history from Rutgers University, Rapaport, 56, had a long career at institutions including the Brooklyn Museum and the Jewish Museum in Manhattan before coming to public art. “Sculpture has always been my specialty,” Rapaport said. In Brooklyn, she worked with artists including Leon Golub and Meg Webster on site-specific projects for the museum’s cavernous lobby, which she feels was a good warm-up for Madison Square Park.

“So many of the problems we solve in the park, how artists have to push themselves in terms of the scale and the materials, I see that in those formative years by working on the Grand Lobby series,” she said.

Rapaport has also applied museum practices to her public art program, including publishing scholarly catalogs, investing more in public programs and taking park projects on tour to other institutions. Puryear’s “Big Bling” goes on view at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams this year. Redl’s light installation “Whiteout” is at Oklahoma Contemporary in Oklahoma City through March 31.

One thing that remains distinct about public art is what’s not hidden.

“When you realize an exhibition in a museum, all of the messy installation happens behind the scenes,” Rapaport said. “In Madison Square Park, the artist, the crew, the rigor is out front and center, no secrets. The public loves to gather around and often applauds when a work is put into place. It’s absolutely cinematic.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="2d5b10c4-c082-4ec2-9681-a6a8af1a9b72" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/arts/brooke-kamin-rapaport-venice-biennale.html">The New York Times</a>.

Since joining the Conservancy in 2013, Rapaport has been a leader in bringing greater critical attention and museum standards to outdoor public art.

Making public art a contender

<h1>Vincent van Gogh’s visceral, vibrant paintings and difficult life, which led him to kill himself at age 37 in 1890, have had an enduring hold on the public.</h1>

“He is an unusual combination of someone whose art has an instant appeal to people and a human interest story that is astonishing,” said van Gogh expert Martin Bailey, author of “Starry Night: Van Gogh at the Asylum.” “You can see the enormous appetite for van Gogh growing certainly by the decade and almost by the year.”

At least nine exhibitions on the Dutch artist are in the works at museums around the world, including three opening this month in Houston, London and Amsterdam. This confluence has exacerbated the difficulty curators have always had in getting loans of prized van Goghs.

“You have to almost fight for every single one,” said Bailey, co-curator of “The EY Exhibition: Van Gogh and Britain” opening at Tate Britain on March 27. It will look at the early influence of British art and literature on van Gogh, who moved to London when he was 20 to work for a gallery before he set out to become an artist, and then the later importance of his art on 20th-century British painters, most notably Francis Bacon.

Other shows include a look at van Gogh’s reception in Germany, opening in October in Frankfurt at the Städel Museum, and in America, an exhibition will open next year at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

The most important loan negotiated for the Tate Britain show is van Gogh’s 1888 “Sunflowers” from London’s National Gallery. It is one of five still lifes the artist made of the flowers, and it is the gallery’s No. 1 attraction (as measured by throngs of people around it and postcards sold). Now it will be seen in the specific context of its influence on Britain.

“Museums are reluctant to part with those works that are often among the most popular, and people expect to see them there,” said Nienke Bakker, senior curator of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the largest repository of the artist’s works, with 200 of his approximately 850 paintings and some 500 of his 1,500 drawings.

While her institution is lending works to all the coming shows, it is in small numbers — with the exception of a trove of paintings and drawings going to “Vincent van Gogh: His Life in Art” which opened Sunday at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. With the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo — the second largest collection of van Gogh worldwide — the two Dutch institutions are lending 50 works to Houston for its full-career survey, supplemented by a dozen works from other public and private collections.

“Ours is the only show that traces van Gogh from his tentative beginnings in 1880, when he seriously decided to become an artist, to his extraordinary final works,” said David Bomford, head of European art at the Houston museum and curator of the exhibition. “The change in confidence and in style is staggering — the speed with which he becomes a competent and then a brilliant draftsman in his Dutch period.”

The show follows van Gogh to Paris, where he adapted impressionism to his own devices, and then to Provence, where his signature radiant palette materializes.

Singular to van Gogh is his prolific correspondence, some 800 remaining letters he wrote almost daily during this period to his brother Theo and fellow artists, which is a factor in the public’s fascination with him. “We see his life from the inside,” Bomford said. “We know exactly what his thoughts were, his preoccupations were, his obsessions were.”

The curator is particularly excited with the Van Gogh Museum’s loans of “The Old Church Tower at Nuenen,” the artist’s second great early masterpiece after “The Potato Eaters” (which doesn’t travel), and a key portrait of van Gogh’s lover Agostina Segatori, a proprietress of a cafe in Montmartre in Paris.

At the Van Gogh Museum, committed to showing how van Gogh is still relevant to artists today, “Hockney — Van Gogh: The Joy of Nature” opened earlier this month. It looks at van Gogh as an inspiration for David Hockney, the 81-year-old British painter, in terms of their shared devotion to nature, high-keyed palettes and experimental perspectives. It is one of the biggest shows with a contemporary artist at the museum, with more than 100 works by Hockney, many coming directly from the artist.

Another show there in June showcases the museum’s recently restored “Sunflowers.” This version was painted in January 1889, a month after the artist mutilated his ear. “Van Gogh was not someone who was satisfied very easily, but he thought that with the sunflowers he had really done something good,” Bakker said.

The museum, which will present its findings from the technical research as part of the show, announced in January the painting will no longer travel because of its fragility.

“It’s great to be involved in all these shows around the world because our main goal is to tell the story about the artist,” Bakker said of the lineup of exhibitions. These also include projects on van Gogh’s inner circle of family, friends and models at the Noordbrabants Museum in Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands; on his still lifes at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany; and on the artists he admired most at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California.

“We really try to get away from the clichés,” Bakker said. “The idea that van Gogh was creating all these fantastic works in a fit of madness is not at all true. When you read his letters, it is very clear he was working methodically to master his craft. He was trying to become an artist and had the kind of struggles that all artists have. A lot of people can identify strongly with the person and therefore also with the art.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="5884163c-8ca8-422c-afa8-948b931556c5" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/arts/van-gogh-exhibit.html">The New York Times</a>.

At least nine exhibitions on the Dutch artist are in the works at museums around the world, including three opening this month in Houston, London and Amsterdam.

Van Gogh's perennial appeal

<h1>The Rothko Chapel in Houston, founded in 1971 by art patrons John and Dominique de Menil as an ecumenical site for both reflection and activism, will be closing on Monday for the rest of the year for the first phase of a $30 million restoration and campus expansion by Architecture Research Office.</h1>

It will erect three new buildings to support the chapel’s ongoing social justice programming and is replacing the building’s ceiling apparatus with a new skylight and digital lighting system. This will cast gentle natural light by day and uniform illumination by night for the first time on Mark Rothko’s 14 monumental black canvases, faceting the octagonal interior designed as a holistic work of art.

“We’re trying to restore the sanctity of the chapel, very close to what my father had intended for the space,” said Christopher Rothko, the artist’s son who is steering the building committee and capital campaign.

Commissioned by the de Menils in 1964, Rothko painted his perceptually subtle canvases in his carriage house studio on East 69th street in New York under a broad skylight, pulling a parachute across to modulate light. He modeled the interior of the chapel largely on the dimensions of this studio and insisted on a similar skylight. Yet he hadn’t taken into account the blinding light of Houston, which he never visited before his death in 1970.

“It was just a major problem from day one,” said Stephen Cassell, a principal of Architecture Research Office. The chapel’s ceiling was almost immediately plugged up to protect the paintings — most recently with a huge black umbrellalike baffle that radically altered the space.

Working with lighting designer George Sexton, the architects are creating a skylight similar to Rothko’s original but with special glass and a system of louvers to soften the daylight. For darker hours, they are installing digital projectors that will focus light on each painting.

The chapel, which draws well over 100,000 visitors from more than 100 countries annually, is holding a three-day symposium on climate change starting Thursday in partnership with the neighboring University of St. Thomas. The event is part of the chapel’s programming on topics including interfaith and intercultural relations, human rights and mass incarceration. A new meeting house for public programs, as well as a visitors pavilion and administrative offices, will be completed in 2022.

“A lot of people don’t see the chapel as an institution” and understand its larger social justice and outreach work, Cassell said. “This really gives them the place to do it.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="8d64e798-cb3a-4ae2-8f3a-873925da403a" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/arts/design/rothko-chapel-renovation.html">The New York Times</a>.

It will erect three new buildings to support the chapel’s ongoing social justice programming and is replacing the building’s ceiling apparatus with a new skylight and digital lighting system.

Rothko Chapel to be seen in new light

<h1>The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas in Austin has been at the forefront among museums in collecting modern and contemporary Latin American art since it opened in 1963. It is now strategically building up its holdings from the Spanish and Portuguese colonial era with an acquisition of 119 paintings, sculptures, furniture and silverwork collected by Roberta and Richard Huber.</h1>

The works, from countries across modern-day Latin America including Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador and Peru and dating from the late 1600s to the early 1800s, are valued at approximately $2.5 million.

“The Hubers started putting together this collection back in the ‘70s when the world wasn’t paying attention to this area, certainly not in the United States,” said Simone Wicha, the director of the Blanton. “It fits so beautifully into us being able to contextualize Latin America, both at the museum and with our colleagues at the university, one of the leading research institutions dedicated to Latin American studies broadly.”

The Blanton first focused on pre-modern Latin America in 2016 by partnering with the Carl &amp; Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation to fund a curator in Spanish colonial art and lend works long-term from its collection in this period. This fall, “Painted Cloth: Fashion and Ritual in Colonial America,” showcasing objects from the Huber acquisition and Thoma collection, will look at the social role of textiles produced in Bolivia, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela during the 1600s and 1700s.

“We’re now able to look expansively at the continent and how the schools of art in each region were influenced not just by Spanish culture but by local culture and customs, flora and fauna,” Wicha said. “It’s ripe for a great deal of research.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="30361dd2-576a-4d7f-bf0e-a541e8981018" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/arts/design/blanton-museum-of-art-latin-america.html">The New York Times</a>.

The works, from countries across modern-day Latin America including Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador and Peru and dating from the late 1600s to the early 1800s, are valued at approximately $2.5 million.

Austin Museum expands Latin American collection

<h1>NEW YORK — “Chance can give you a gift,” said Pat Steir, offering a preview of 11 just-completed paintings in her studio in Manhattan. The petite, monastically dressed, 78-year-old artist stood before a monumental black painting, with a row of broad white strokes from which rivulets of pigment spilled down the dark ground.</h1>

Steir allowed the random shower from each brush stroke to determine the composition without further intervention. “In some way, the paintings paint themselves,” she said.

The works are titled “Silent Secret Waterfalls” and are all 7 feet high and as wide as 17 feet, part of an ongoing series that goes back 30 years and traverses the artist’s engagement with abstract expressionism and Eastern philosophy.

“Pat’s ‘Waterfall’ paintings have this performative, gestural, meditative activity,” said Thom Collins, executive director and president of the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. He commissioned the new works for the serene, naturally lit central Annenberg Court in the collection’s home, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. It is the first time a painter has been invited to make something site-specific for the Barnes since collector Albert Barnes commissioned his Matisse mural, “The Dance,” in the early 1930s.

Steir’s first black-and-white “Waterfall” painting from 1990 is hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She made it by pouring buckets of pigment, thinned with turpentine, down the canvas in many diaphanous layers.

“I was thinking a drippy brush stroke is the symbol of an abstract painting and I was going to make it paint a picture by itself,” Steir (pronounced Steer) said.

Ever since, she has set up basic parameters about the palette and shape of her canvases and then embraced the serendipitous results of throwing, drizzling and streaming paint from vertiginous heights.

“It’s chance within limitations,” said Steir, liberated from decisions about imagery she had faced early in her career. “Being more attached to the process than the conclusion, it’s an incredible freedom.”

Steir commented wryly that she’s been “forgotten and rediscovered many times” in a career stretching over five decades. Yet she has been a mainstay of the art world. She broke through with the first generation of feminist artists in the early 1970s, including Mary Heilmann, Joan Snyder and Elizabeth Murray. “That was a good start,” Steir laughed. As one of the founders of the 1970s feminist collective Heresies she was nevertheless at odds with the movement’s emphasis on making feminist imagery.

“I became an artist against all odds and nobody was going to tell me what imagery is good for me,” she said, describing her early work as “intimate conceptual art” blending words and pictographs with expressive brushwork.

She lived with the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt through the 1970s and maintains close friendships with her intergenerational peers, including Brice Marden (her classmate at Boston University), Ugo Rondinone, John Giorno, Julie Mehretu and Mickalene Thomas.

Collins characterized her trajectory as a “powerful slow burn,” bringing increasing institutional and market attention that she has long deserved.

Steir’s change in representation from Cheim &amp; Read to Dominique Lévy in 2016 (now Lévy Gorvy) was a turning point, putting her work on a high-profile stage. Last year, she joined the small group of female artists commanding seven figures at auction when “Elective Affinity Waterfall” (1992) sold for more than $2.2 million, with fees, at Phillips New York. Its high estimate was $800,000.

“I was happy that the people bidding on it didn’t demean it because it came from a female,” said the artist, who tells her life story in an intimate, ruminative documentary by Veronica Gonzalez Peña, “Pat Steir: Artist,” premiering at Lincoln Center in the Jewish Film Festival on Jan. 19.

Next month, she will have a solo show in St. Moritz at the Vito Schnabel Gallery, and she is creating projections of her “Waterfall” paintings as the sets for the centennial celebration of the choreographer Merce Cunningham on April 16, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

This project feels special to her because Cunningham’s longtime partner, composer John Cage, was a close friend (he joined Steir and her husband, Joost Elffers, on their honeymoon in 1984). Cage’s ideas about chance profoundly influenced her dramatic change in working method five years later, when she began to explore the incident and accident of pouring paint.

The significance of chance occurrences was driven home a year ago on New Year’s Day, when the artist had a bad fall. It didn’t involve the 10-foot-tall ladder in the painting studio, from which she had done a high-wire balancing act for decades, but a slip in the kitchen.

During her arduous, five-month recovery, she was largely immobile and worried about her ability to walk (she still uses a cane). Facing the biggest commissions of her life, she began to analyze the components that made her original “Waterfall” paintings successful. (She had bragged to Elffers at that time that she had the “hot hand” of a basketball player “who couldn’t miss.”)

“I figured out the ‘hot hand’ is not in the hand, it’s in the head,” she said.

She now uses an automated lift to reach the top of her paintings. And though she is moving more slowly, she still paces off her canvases and flings paint from her loaded brush so that it lands in calligraphic arcs. Tennis champion Billie Jean King, who once visited her studio, commented on the strength of Steir’s backhand.

Artist Kiki Smith said, “I’m very moved by Pat’s tenacity and clarity.” Describing herself as one of the many “wayward people” taken in on holidays at Steir’s townhouse in Greenwich Village, Smith added, “She’s been the center of a wheel in a community.”

The two women became close after Steir appeared on the cover of Artnews magazine in 1985. Smith, 14 years her junior, sent her a postcard saying, “If you can do it, I can.” She was prompted to write by Steir’s discussion of becoming something “unimaginable.”

“It was unimaginable to everyone around me that a small girl — not even a big strapping girl — could live a life as an artist and stay alive and committed,” Steir said. Her father had gone to art school but, with four children to support, couldn’t achieve his dream of being an artist. He encouraged his daughter to be a poet because he thought she would make more money.

“I kept in my head the idea that I’m going to do this, and it’s going to mean something — maybe not to everybody but to somebody,” she said.

With the Barnes paintings completed, Steir is diving into her largest site-specific commission yet, to open in October at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington. She is painting 28 large canvases with the spectrum of colors in gradation, turning the museum’s inner circular gallery into a monumental color wheel.

Asked what drives her to keep working, Steir noted that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had shown up to work at the Supreme Court with three broken ribs and that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “is as smart as ever and looks as good as ever.”

“If you feel that you have to do what you do, for whatever reason, either political, public or private reasons,” she said, “you just go on doing it.”

“Silent Secret Waterfall: The Barnes Series”

Through Nov. 17, the Barnes Foundation, 2025 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, 215-278-7000; barnesfoundation.org