The people in Alex Majoli’s strobe-lit images are treated as metaphors instead of themselves.
Howard Greenberg Gallery
Familiar Names but Unexpected Finds at the ADAA Art Show
There’s often no rhyme or reason to the selection of art in individual booths at fairs — other than, of course, a gallery’s aim to sell well.
Street View 50 Years Before Google: Joel Meyerowitz’s Car Photos
On the road, speed is a guiding principle of design: attractions, billboards, the deceptively long (ten-foot) white stripes on our highways are all structured around the principle that time is fleeting and unfocused in the car.
Self-Portraits in a Complex Mirror: The Photographs of Vivian Maier
Vivian Maier spent some forty years working as a nanny in Chicago. When she died in 2009 at the age of eighty-three, she left behind well over a hundred thousand photographic negatives, evidence of decades spent wandering the streets of her hometown, as well as others cities and locales around the world.
Flow Charts: Edward Burtynsky’s Photos of the World’s Watery Parts
It’s well known that landscape photographer Edward Burtynsky thinks big — big subjects, big photographs. His large-format prints (dimensions up to 48 x 64 inches are not uncommon) match the physical scope of the oil industry, quarries, and ship breaking, as well as their thematic implications.
How We Picture Civil Rights
Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement shoulder an unreasonable burden: we look to them as moral beacons. Bruce Davidson: Time of Change at Howard Greenberg Gallery displays several dozen rich images by Bruce Davidson, who sat with the freedom riders and joined Martin Luther King, Jr.’s march from Selma to Montgomery. It is a timely exhibition, as Trayvon Martin’s murder raises the shadow of Emmett Till, and America looks inward to find our racial hierarchy has been reformed but not dismantled.
Your Weekly Art Rx
Here at Hyperallergic we are allergic to a lot — dust, nuts, cats, insipid art criticism, bad art shows, people who suck. Enter our weekly remedy: a list of exhibitions and events that will serve as your weekly dose of art medicine. Here is this week’s prescription …
Is The Art Show a Senior Citizen’s Swinger’s Club Past its Prime?
The Art Show has been hosted by the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) for the last 23 years, reigning supreme as the longest running national art fair. The ADAA consists of 175 galleries but only seventy exhibitors enrolled this year, excluding stunners like Andrea Rosen, Betty Cunningham, PPOW and Gavin Brown. A large majority of the participants are located uptown between 50th Street and 90th Street. The generalized content (“cutting-edge, 21st century works” and “museum quality pieces from the 19th and 20th centuries”) and my fears of dated academia prepped me for the deflated viewing that was The Art Show. The ADAA’s Executive Director spoke to the “calm and intimate atmosphere” of The Art Show. Although the Park Avenue Armory’s soaring “balloon shed” construction is partially responsible, the cavalcade of elderly patrons weren’t exactly rambunctious. The air-kisses exchanged between crotchety senior citizens summoned a swinger’s club way past its prime.