Art Gallery Shows to See Right Now

“Downtown 2021” pays homage to artists from more than two dozen galleries; Carmen Herrera’s Paris period reveals zigzag lines and textures.

FEBRUARY 3, 2021

By Holland Cotter and Roberta Smith

‘Downtown 2021’

Through Feb. 20. La MaMa Galleria, 47 Great Jones Street, Manhattan; Fridays and Saturdays, or by appointment, lamamagalleria@gmail.com.

New York City art galleries form a resilient and irrepressible ecosystem, one that has survived recessions, gentrification, at least one hurricane, and now an aggressive pandemic. Through everything, the system continues to sprout new life. The group show “Downtown 2021,” curated by the artist Sam Gordon, pays homage to this phenomenon by giving more than two dozen galleries their hardscrabble props.

The show’s title is adapted from Edo Bertoglio’s “Downtown 81,” a film about the 1980s art-and-club scene in the East Village, La MaMa Galleria’s longtime neighborhood. But as surveyed by Gordon, “downtown” is expansive terrain, encompassing not just Manhattan but also Brooklyn and Queens. More than that, the word describes an attitude, one that blends a pull toward independence with a commitment to community. The show, assembled from work by artists who have been included in current or recent exhibitions, opens with references to communal watering holes, old and new: the Stonewall Inn in the 1960s West Village, and Beverly’s, a popular artists’ bar on the Lower East Side that shuttered during the coronavirus lockdown last summer. Among the 25 galleries represented, Gordon includes a feminist landmark (A.I.R., founded in SoHo in 1972, now in Dumbo, Brooklyn), a veteran Chelsea-based enterprise (Luhring Augustine, which has branches in Bushwick and TriBeCa), and a number of new or newish spaces, most artist-run, among them Soloway, Orgy Park, Elijah Wheat Showroom, Gloria’s, Songs for Presidents, and ZAK’S.

What counts in any group show, no matter the theme, is what’s on the wall and the floor, and there’s a lot of good work here, much of it small-scale sculpture. Highlights include an openwork bronze piece by the unaccountably underrecognized Helen Evans Ramsaran(who shows at Welancora in Bedford-Stuyvesant); a gameboard-like parquetry of brass and copper panels by Zak Kitnick; a sardonic 20-year anniversary memorial to Sept. 11 by Leah Dixon; and a sweet, smart tribute by Polly Apfelbaum — a ceramic wall piece suggesting a string of prayer beads — to the gallerist Amy Lipton, who died last December and was herself very much a downtown type.

And to get a sense of how tightly knit the downtown art world is, it’s useful to know that Apfelbaum recently exhibited at ZAK’S in Brooklyn, which is also Kitnick’s studio; and that Dixon, who shows at Gloria’s in Ridgewood, Queens, was a co-founder of Beverly’s (which will reopen this spring as a performance and exhibition space). As it happens, Gordon himself runs a Manhattan gallery in partnership another artist, Jacob Robichaux, who has shown at Orgy Park (Brooklyn) and has a delicately tensile 3-D painting made from thread, pins and staples, on display here. A few of the show’s artists have exhibitions currently on view elsewhere. There’s a survey of work by Frederick Weston (1946-2020) at Ortuzar Projects in TriBeCa through Feb. 13, and the photographer D’Angelo Lovell Williams is doubling up as a curator of a group show at Higher Pictures Generation in Brooklyn.

Add to all this an online video program courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix and archive of information on all the artists compiled by Wendy’s Subway, a Bushwick-based independent publisher, and you’ve got a rich map of downtown: present, future, perpetual.

LINCOLN JOURNAL STAR STOPLIGHTS HELEN EVANS RAMSARAN

“The Sanctuary” Sheldon Installs new Helen Ramsaran Sculpture

JANUARY 26, 2014

BY L. KENT WOLGAMOTT

“The Sanctuary” stands along the walkway between the Sheldon Museum of Art and the College of Business Administration, eight winged white pieces of bronze stretching toward the sky around a circle of white rocks with a pit in the middle.

The newest addition to the Sheldon’s acclaimed sculpture garden, “The Sanctuary” comes from sculptor Helen Ramsaran. It is, to a large degree, exactly what it appears to be — a representation of trees. But they aren’t just any trees. They’re representative of trees from Africa, where Ramsaran has frequently traveled, the continent she calls her muse.

In Lincoln Thursday for the dedication of “The Sanctuary,” Ramsaran talked about the piece and her work in a public lecture and in an interview, revealing much about its origin and meaning.

“I call it a sacred grove,” Ramsaran said. “There were sacred groves in the Ivory Coast and in other parts of Africa as well. A sacred grove is a group of trees that may be on the outskirts of a village. Inside the gap of trees is an area where ceremonies take place. The general public is not allowed to go there, just the people in the group. It’s a place where one does sacred ceremonies and everything about those ceremonies is pretty secret.” Ramsaran is among those who don’t know what was passed on in the groves of trees or what the ceremonies that took place in those spaces entailed. But that lack of knowledge didn’t deter her from making the piece. “I don’t need to know the secret,“ Ramsaran said. “I just needed to know it was there. I decided to make my own secret grove.”  To do so, Ramsaran made wax models of each of her “trees,” then cast them in bronze, covering the surface with a white paint.

For smaller pieces, like “Winged Moondance,” which is on view on the Sheldon’s second floor bridge, Ramsaran does the wax work herself, skipping the clay models generally used in the bronze sculptural process.  “I do little sketches and not detailed ones,” Ramsaran said of her working process. “I don’t mold them in clay. I work directly into wax. I work by cutting the pieces (of wax) and carving into them and putting them together with a soldering iron.” “Winged Moondance” is part of “The Sanctuary Group,” a series of seven pieces that represent components of what might have occurred at a ceremony in the sacred grove.

The spindly-legged piece with a bird flying from the top is designed to suggest honoring ancestors, Ramsaran said. “With ‘The Sanctuary Group,’ I thought of them as the group,” she said. “So it is good that ‘Winged Moondance’ is here. With some of the other work, like the Pathways, they are not grouped. Every now and then I do one.”

Ramsaran has a third piece connected with Sheldon - a “Magic Finger” that is included in the catalog for “Its Surreal Thing: The Temptation of Objects,” a 2013 exhibition of three-dimensional objects that was surreal and connected with the historical surreal movement. The catalog is a clear Plexiglas box filled with large playing cards containing images of the show’s objects and the four small surreal sculptures. “I like magic,” Ramsaran said. “I read all those Harry Potter books. I like the idea that you point at something and it happens.” One thing all three of her pieces have in common is that they are easy to understand. “The Sanctuary” looks like trees — and with a little background, the title, construction and placement of the work become more apparent. “Winged Moondance” has a spiritual/ritualistic sensibility, feels African and with the background, connects with “Sanctuary." And the catalog piece is perfectly surreal. “I would like for it to be accessible,” she said of her work. “I came from a working class background. Not many people in my community understood art, could relate to art. So I don’t want my pieces to be so obtuse. I want them to work a little (to understand it). But I want it to be there.” Ramsaran, who is retired from teaching after spending four decades at New York City colleges and universities, has experienced the struggle for, first, recognition of African-American art, then for integration of it into the broader art world.

“The younger artists don’t think too much about that anymore because so much has gone on before,” Ramsaran said. “For some of the older artists, it still is difficult to get our work in context. “When I walked into your (Sheldon) collection, one of the impressive things is you placed the work of African-American artists in context with their pieces. We’ve been talking about that for the last 30 to 40 years. The Sheldon museum has got it.” That’s one of the reasons Ramsaran is thrilled to have her work at Sheldon.

“I’m just really stunned,” she said immediately after the unveiling. “I’m stunned with the presentation of both of the pieces. It’s a very beautiful collection, and I’m happy to be a part of it.” The feeling is mutual on the part of the museum, said Sheldon Director Jorge Daniel Veneciano.

“She is very much a thinking person’s artist,” Veneciano said. “It is natural that her solo shows and collections tend to be (at) college and university museums. There’s something about it that fits with university art programs. Her work is not splashy in a way that larger museums want for blockbuster exhibitions. There’s something about Helen’s work that needs thoughtfulness.”

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The art critic, Okwui Enwezor, editor of NKA: A Journal of Contemporary African Art, interprets the essence of the emerging genius of Helen Ramsaran, an African American sculptor whose successful wedding of African motifs created in classical outlines, is beginning to make a break-through.  Her recent exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem was a celebration of sorts.

May 1995

BY OKWUI ENWEZOR

Pragmatic critiques and judgments of contemporary art currently exist, it seems, under an impasse. Part of the reason lies in their obdurate adherence to a kind of western formalist cocoon.

Of all such artists, the work of Mel Edwards clearly resonates the loudest. To look at his work is to map a whole range of associative readings in relation to the immensity of African sculptural traditions. (In this instance, Igbo-Ukwu ironwork and Benin bronze casting might be a good pace to start). But Edwards is hardly unique in this sense.  Less known, but equally articulate in the spatial language which inhabit African sculptural idioms are the wispy, taut, skeletal and poetic works of Helen Evans Ramsaran, recently exhibited at The Studio Museum in Harlem from July 17 through October 2, 1994.

The work presented in this exhibition, which originated from The Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia, comes from Ramsaran’s scrupulous distillation of her experiences while living and traveling through Africa (Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Morocco, Ivory Coast, Ghana and Egypt) in the early eighties. In her sculptures spindly, attenuated forms, the body’s essence fills the exhibition space with an explosive, troubling aura. Connections to the body’s temporal habitat have been substituted with its flight from the cage. Ramsaran is an exquisite essayist of dreams, a poet of allegory and imagery quivering just on this side of the real.  The images are real alright, but in their hybrid other worldliness, poised between the mineral and vegetal, they appear unconnected to any one realm of reality. Their presence lacks the kind of punch that necessitates silence in the viewer.               

It is through this form of visual speech in three dimensions that African sculptural influences most resolutely make their entrance. For in African sculpture, the power of the work is not at all invested in the object, but rather in its aura: in its affinity within other spatial and associative meanings extraneous to the sculpture’s objecthood. Though Ramsaran’s sculptures harbor a certain pragmatism, in the sense that there is nothing novel about them, they still embody some of her empiricist doubts; one located in prehistory.

 While present feminist deconstructivist strategies work towards disrupting the male centered gaze might not be a concern these sculptures wish to communicate, they nonetheless are not oblivious to them. Installations such as The shrine of the Arrowhead Women, A Woman’s Shrine, The dance of the Arrowhead Women and Initiation of the Arrowhead Women partially repudiate the apoliticality of the art objects.   

Take for instance a title like A Woman’s Shrine which clearly evokes Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (one of the canonically inscribed platforms for feminist political agency) and we can see how large her work’s awareness are in terms of contemporary female subjectivity. Grouped on an altar-like platform strewn with crushed white gravel, the smallish sculptures are awash with a sense of ceremony.         

TURNING AN ALLEY INTO A SHOWCASE FOR SCULPTURE

New York Times

September 22, 1995

BY MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Almost since the day in 1979 when it moved into its quarters on 125th Street, the Studio Museum in Harlem has eyed the city-owned alley next door as a place to show outdoor sculpture. It was an unpromising site, to be sure, a shadowy sliver of urban wreckage between two blank five-story walls running the length of the block from 125th to 124th Street. Still, the museum saw potential in it and has spent the last dozen years or more grappling with city administrations, an altered City Charter and the challenge of raising private money in one of New York's poorest communities. Meanwhile, the costs of developing the site ballooned to $1.6 million from some $500,000.

The 5,200-square-foot concrete Sculpture Garden that has just opened is thus a triumph of determination. But it is more than that. To an extent that could not have been foreseen, it is a surprisingly pleasurable place in which to see art. Working with Fred Bland of the New York City architectural firm Beyer Blinder Belle, the museum made the very most of the difficult space, breaking it up with a raised platform at one end and a tall triangular glass bay window in the middle that functions both as an entrance and a source of light indoors. Finding sculptures that suit the space (201 feet by 26 feet), not to mention that look good together, will remain a challenge. But the inaugural installation of 12 works by 12 artists demonstrates that the museum has already come up with a satisfying plan.

The show, called "The Listening Sky," neatly reflects the museum's mandate to present African-American artists of different generations, diverse inclinations and who live around the world, not just in New York City. Elizabeth Catlett lives in Cuernavaca, Mexico; Barbara Chase Riboud in Paris; Richard Hunt in Chicago; John Outterbridge in Los Angeles; John T. Scott in New Orleans. Their works look very different. Ms. Catlett's "Webbed Woman" reflects her knowledge of the arts of ancient Mexico and the Mexican muralists. Mr. Hunt's "Steelaway" is a lyric abstraction, a kind of "Victory of Samothrace" made of shards of curved steel that have been allowed to rust, so the sculpture's orange tint shimmers in the light. Mr. Scott's "Don Quixote (Tilling Urban Windmills)" is a kinetic sculpture, painted brilliant colors that betray an affinity for de Stijl, its slender poles dipping and rising with the breeze.

Many of the sculptures refer to black history and culture, explicitly so in Tyrone Mitchell's "Chair in the Sky for Charles Mingus," but mostly obliquely: Robert Craddock's "Introjects," for instance, is a suite of handsome wood totems loosely inspired by African sculptures, while Helen Evans Ramsaran's "Sanctuary" evokes a circle of trees surrounding an altar made of coiled branches; it is an abstraction in bronze derived from West African religious ceremonies that Ms. Ramsaran has studied. Three sculptures were done expressly with the garden in mind: both Mr. Hunt's and Mr. Scott's, along with Nari Ward's "Ascension." All are tall. It's inevitable that, in a narrow space between high walls, tall sculptures, as opposed to those that sprawl, will fit most comfortably. Jorge Daniel Veneciano, the show's curator, has nonetheless managed to mix works of different dimension, which proves critical to a sense of rhythm and variety.

One of the most successful pieces in the show is Chakaia Booker's "Untitled (Male Torso That Left His Path)," an interpretation of the Belvedere torso made of bent and twisted rubber tires that perfectly mimics bulging muscles. The reclining torso faces Mr. Ward's towering work in the garden, and the two sculptures, both made of discarded materials, complement each other.

"Ascension" has a washing machine for its base topped by a spiraling stack of washing machine agitators. Tar coats the sculpture, with bits of clothing, bottles, feathers and shoes stuck into the tar. The effect is to suggest an exploding machine throwing clothes into the air, or perhaps a gushing oil well. It has a comic, baroque quality, and at the same time refers ominously to black history with its use of tar and feathers. None of the works on view belong to the museum yet. The installation remains through next summer, when a new one succeeds it, and the museum's hope is that eventually works will be donated to the garden and commissioned specifically for it so that a collection of outdoor sculptures can be amassed.

The garden is actually stage one in a grander development plan, if the money can be raised, for an auditorium and gallery for the museum's permanent collection below ground and a glass pavilion on the 125th Street side of the garden, now a brick wall. Someday the museum may consider building on the site of the garden. Meanwhile, corporations and individuals gave $500,000 toward the garden and the remaining $1.1 million came from the city, which should be glad to have got in return such a civilized and useful new space.

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TWO SHOWS BY WOMEN, ONE FULFILLING A MISSION AS A “PLATFORM”

New York Times

March 16, 1997

By VIVIEN RAYNOR

COINCIDENTALLY, all the artists reviewed this week are women, eight of them at the Hopper Art Center in Nyack and four at the Hostos Art Gallery in the Bronx. A melange of paintings, photographs and sculpture, the Hopper Center's ''Power of Suggestion'' does not compare with ''Four Women in Form,'' the all-sculpture display at Hostos. Still, to contrast the two is to see that the success of a show depends to some extent on the way it is conceived and presented.

An essential ingredient is mission and, for better or worse, the Hostos production has that in abundance. The gallery is a generous storefront space in the college's new-and-spiffy Center for the Arts and Culture and ''Four Women in Form'' has the run of it. Thanks to financing by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts Expansion Arts Program and other agencies, the show not only looks good but also does good. That is, it spearheads a move by the center to make what its director, Wallace Edgecombe, defines as a ''platform'' enabling women in all the arts to gain exposure and, hence, recognition.

Then there are the show's themes. In her brochure introduction, Betty Wilde, curator of the gallery, identifies these as ''gender-related'' issues but leaves them vague enough to allow for a wide range of interpretation. Accordingly, Ada Pilar Cruz and Kukuli Velarde are at one extreme with clay figures, and Helene Brandt is at the other with geometric abstractions made of blackened steel rods. On the borderline is Helen Evans Ramsaran, represented by bronze abstractions evoking landscape.

Three of Ms. Cruz's half-life-size women stand together at the far end of the gallery, their clothed forms earthy in color and texture. Details like folded arms or a tilted head distinguish one from another, but all seem engulfed in anomie, likewise the children and other women standing nearby. Born a New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent, Ms. Cruz has taken part in numerous exhibitions and, at the moment, is teaching at upstate colleges as well as at the Museum of Modern Art. She has also done her share of traveling, notably in Mexico.

But despite all these experiences -- or perhaps because of them -- Ms. Cruz produces art that keeps its distance from the world. These well-modeled women and children stand aloof, admitting to no particular influence, belonging to no one culture and making the efforts of Kukuli Velarde seem garrulous by comparison.

A transplanted Peruvian with a record of shows on both continents, Ms. Velarde models grotesquerie -- a rearing centaur embellished with nails, a dog possessed of human head and extremities and half-infantile, half-adult entities reminiscent of those produced by the Olmec in Mexico. Having painted the figures dark gray, the sculptor incises them with ribbons of white writing, adds white to the eyes and, in one case, a garnish of pink veins to a chest wound sutured with green ''stitches.''

Other memorable details include indisputably male angels left white and, on the heads of some babies, a device like the microphone worn by sportscasters, also white. Tracing influences and separating them from the sculptor's own inspiration is a task beyond the lay observer, but there is no doubt as to the pre-Columbian flavor of Ms. Velarde's weirdness.

Whatever the sex-related issues on her mind, Helene Brandt does not let them leak into her work, preferring to concentrate on the reality of, say, a rectangular cage gradually collapsing on itself. The sculptor, a veteran of many exhibitions in this country and abroad, contributes logic to the display as well as rhythm born in part of her experience as a dancer. No matter what their contents, each series comes and goes, rises and falls as if there were order in the world.

It takes a keen eye to spot the engraving on the surfaces of Helen Evans Ramsaran's gray bronzes and an even keener one to recognize its source in the custom of tribal scarification. An artist who draws inspiration from her African ancestry, Ms. Ramsaran teaches at John Jay College in Manhattan and has an installation-in-progress in Battery Park there. She also trails a long string of exhibitions in New York and other cities. Her vignette-like compositions, which abound in forms implying, variously, dwellings made from branches, shrubs, spears, even figures, are the most elegant pieces in the show.

THE questions seemed never to have come up in Paris during the 19th and early 20th centuries, but today seem never to stop coming up in New York and other American cities: Can minority artists make the mainstream and keep their cultural identities? Is it possible or even desirable to cultivate these identities in what amounts to a hothouse atmosphere?

Fred Wilson, director of the Bronx's Longwood Arts Project and curator of its gallery, addresses these questions - sort of - with his group show, ''Double Vision.'' But he doesn't answer them - who can?

The display started out, in a some-what different format, at Hallwalls, an alternative space in Buffalo; it remains here through May 27. Longwood, a similar place, is on the second floor of P.S. 39 at 965 Longwood Avenue. Although it gets funds from the usual city, state and Federal agencies, it is primarily a ''store window'' for the Bronx Council on the Arts, whose legion of clients runs from the borough's Museum of the Arts to storefronts such as the Bronx River Gallery.

The 10 artists in ''Double Vision'' are all in the New York City area but each has a foot in some other cultural door. Of those born American, some are black, others are of Asian descent; of the immigrants, one comes from Cuba, another from Japan. The permutations are many. Charles Yuen, for example, is half Chinese, half Japanese-Hawaiian.

Still, there is little about this in the catalogue and, because the art is very much a la mode, which is itself highly eclectic, Mr. Wilson's assertion that the artists are drawing on the non-American aspects of their backgrounds must be taken on trust. With ethnicity now as hackneyed as the St. Patrick's Day Parade (one of its earliest manifestations), the curator's reluctance to overdo it is welcome. At the same time, however, the viewer, alerted to the presence of conflict, searches for its signs - the show could as easily have been called ''Double Take'' or ''Second Look'' -but to little avail.

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DOUBLE VISION EXAMINES THE CULTURAL IDENTITY OF ARTISTS

New York Times

May 15, 1988

By VIVIEN RAYNOR

To this observer, Richard Armijo's gunslingers drawn in black over white linear shapes on a green ground seem just as ecole de David Salle before the discovery of his Mexican ancestry as after. The paired canvases of John Allen - the first all-black and patterned with raised lines suggesting map contours, the second bright red with a scattering of maplike shapes in black - are as chic as the abstractions of Peter Nagy, although more attractive. Yet, Mr. Wilson notes that Mr. Allen, who is Japanese-Jewish, is one of the artists concerned with the differences and similarities between Western and non-Western ways of seeing.

The curator seems nearer the mark when he suggests that the aforementioned Mr. Yuen essays a ''metaphor for life on earth'' in his canvases, where naturalistically painted objects such as a flower pot are combined with symbols drawn in black lines against backgrounds filled with multicolored bands. Something may be lurking in these compositions, but it will have its work cut out piercing the veneer of Post Modernism.

Helen Rasmaran's sculpture arouses associations with the work of Ned Smyth - but only for a moment. Mr. Smyth's stumpy columns are derived from Western art history, whereas Ms. Rasmaran's four verticals made of paper and smeared with muted colors seem to come from Africa. One is a serrated blade, the others, crowned by figural shapes transformed with wings, serpents and other objects, recall the walking sticks made by early African-Americans. The bed of moss in which they are rooted adds a ritualistic touch; so do the painted pebbles nesting in the moss, along with the offering of maize mixed with small medallions of clay.

Good as the woodcarvings of Tyrone Mitchell are, they convey the difficulties facing black Americans, which are as great as those confronting American Indians - greater, when the influence of African art on Modernism is taken into consideration. One is an Excalibur, except that the sword is a blade of raw wood and the rock it is stuck in is a pile of rounded forms painted black and white. The other is a smooth black and white shape pointed at one end, blunt at the other and perched horizontally on a roughly chiseled dome. Are Brancusi's genes dominant or is it the reviewer's conditioning that makes it seem that way?

With Howardena Pindell and Albert Chong, the issue of nature versus nurture all but disappears. Ms. Pindell, the best known of the exhibitors, contributes a shape like a crooked turtle shell that is covered with strips cut from colored postcards. It is a magnificent piece by any standards, including those of the Western tradition that this black American is said to avoid.

Mr. Chong sabotages the show's thesis as a Chinese Jamaican, who seemed the most Hispanic photographer in a group of Hispanic photographers that were present in last year's roundup of alternative spaces at the Lehman College Art Gallery in the Bronx. His best effort here is the coarse-grained, eerily lighted study of a female torso embellished by flowers, a dead bird, a turkey's leg and some unidentifiable objects.

The show, which also includes paintings by Emily Cheng, Eugenio Espinosa and Carrie Yamaoka, is worth seeing not only for its contents but also for its political message. Mr. Wilson hints at this when he notes casually that the non-Western backgrounds of the artists are those inhabited by the majority of the world's population. But if the third world is to rejuvenate Western art, as Africa and Melanesia did in the early 1900's, it must first cancel its subscriptions to Western art magazines.

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