Each day of the week, I am exploring museums and exhibits, what is written bellow is a personal reflection on the experience and my personal understanding of the art seen that day. After ever museum, I find a public place to journal about what I saw to be later transcribed and edited for the web.

Interested in taking a closer look? My project exists on a separate blog here

(https://gnboulukos.wixsite.com/my-site)

The Drawing Center 

The Drawing Center is located on 35 Wooster street is one of the great smaller Museums in New York. The space was created by Martha Beck, who curated drawings at the MoMa for most of her carrier. She created the space to showcase what she considered to be over looked in the art world, drawings. At the time, Beck was a visionary for what Museums could be and how they could showcase art in progression and works in progress. Beck saw that the art world would move away from marveling at realism and could come to appreciate the elegance of graphite and paper. Now the MoMa has an entire wing dedicated to midcentury modern drawings that have come to represent the modern art movement happening in Soho during the period.

 

David Hammons

The upstairs and primary gallery in the Museum showcased David Hammons body prints. Widely known for his African-American flag, his early works reflect a foundation of protest in art and an interest into cementing the black body as elegant and poignant. He blurs the lines of what printmaking has traditionally represented. His process is string and at times confusing how detailed features emerge from the page. With a closer look, veins and blemishes on the skin are visible, the focus of the portraits come in and out drawing the eye to the minute details. The figures effortlessly use negative space to capture movement trapped and pressed onto the page. Hammons technique embodies the contemporary black experience, the bodies are expressive and rich in detail, the pressing of body parts convey a person trapped in the frame. A peice that stood out the most to me in the exhibit was Power of the Spade, the print resembled traditional playing cards except the figure was a black man with an afro holding up the black power fist. A black man on a playing card was immediately striking to me because it reorients the audience to remember that playing cards are based on white feudal societies, and how those societies are still shaping our lives today. Hammons reclaims the word spade, giving the image power and strength in a time when the black community was reclaiming language especially racial epithets to be used in music and art as a source of power. The exhibit was an excellent introduction in political art as well as experimental practices, the passing of Martha Beck in 2014 did not change the ethos of the center, the space speaks to artists who reimagine mediums to create new narratives.

The New Museum

The New Museum is a shape for contemporary artists to be showcased in a setting that would traditionally be for artists from a prior period. The building towers over the bowery in the Lower East Side, its design a testament to the forward thinking curation of the museum.

 

Grief and Grievance

The museum used all available galleries to showcase an exhibit showcasing black grief not just over the senseless violence in America but also encompassing the grievances of the black experience in America. The exhibit featured drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, and installation art without stretching out the thesis of the exhibit.

The exhibit excited me because it did not keep curation in the same box as technique, rather all of the pieces spoke to being black in America and how violence is a pervasive part of American culture. Carra Mae Weems photography representing key moments in the civil rights movement asks the viewer to rethink the iconography of the sixties. So often images of the civil rights era are journalistic and void of any emotion despite context of a struggle for independence from the white ruling class. Weems gave breath and air to moments of great tragedy, the white world created narratives that leaders like Malcom X were sowers of division, Weems does more that to simply humanize these figures, she gives them space in the frame to be remembered properly as those who sacrificed their lives for a cause that continues to be essential today. Weems work alters narratives leading the viewer to have a new understanding of how black history according to the white gaze is rarely properly contextualized with the struggle of black life in America. On the neighboring wall, there are three doors reading from left to right each with a baseball bat leaned up against the door. As your eyes scan the doors, a pattern emerges, each door has more locks than the last and the bat deals out more weight than the last, the third one being aluminum. The artist raised by a single black mother, reflects on the generational trauma and violence in the piece. The technology of the doors, locks and baseball bats progress between generations but the violence is still keeping the the bar near the door. the piece asks the viewer to question what progress looks like in America, the physical objects represent the progression of innovation and the growth in capital at the expense of a bat at the door, or the continuation of oppression against the black community.