At Brooklyn Museum, New York, “It’s Pablo-Matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby” is receiving Ambivalent Reviews.. and More
USA_New York
At Brooklyn Museum, New York, “It’s Pablo-Matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby” is receiving Ambivalent Reviews
As this year marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), there are more than 50 exhibitions around the world honoring the artist. One such exhibit, “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby” at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City, celebrates the artist from a different perspective.
The exhibition is curated and guided by Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby (b. 1978). Visitors to the exhibition hear Gadsby’s voice satirizing Picasso’s misogyny through the audio guide. Gadsby made a sensation in 2018 with her stand-up show ‘Nanette’ in which she criticized the mythology of male artists, including Picasso, and told her own story.
While Gadsby’s fame and provocative curation have drawn attention to the exhibition, critical reviews of the show have been ambivalent. On the one hand, it is praised as the only one of the many Picasso exhibitions this year to examine his life and art from a feminist perspective; on the other, there is harsh criticism for relying on Gadsby’s celebrity but failing to understand and thus to critique Picasso’s artistic influence.
USA_New York
Whitney Museum of American Art, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith Retrospective: A Native American’s Modern Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art presents “Memory Map,” a retrospective of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940) on view through August 13.
A native of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, Smith describes her art as “examining contemporary life in America and interpreting it through Native ideology.” Over the past 50 years, she has appropriated major movements in American art of the late 1900s, including Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Neo-Expressionism, combining them with her cultural traditions.
In doing so, she points out and satirizes the absurdity of the process of art history, questioning why certain visual languages become mainstreamed as valuable and historically powerful. Landscape painting and maps are recurring themes of hers.
USA_New York
Darrel Ellis in the Bronx Museum, New York: Photographer Who Longed for a Wholesome Family He Never Had
The Bronx Museum in New York City presents “Darrel Ellis: Regeneration” through September 10. The show is organized in collaboration with The Baltimore Museum of Art.
The exhibition introduces the photographer Darrel Ellis (1958-1992), who died in 1992 at 33, just as his work began to be recognized. Ellis worked with family photographs and negative films left by his father, an amateur photographer who had died shortly before he was born. By printing his father’s film and crushing, obscuring, or repainting family photographs, he expressed his longing for an unrealizable wholesome family.
His original combination of painting, printmaking, and photography pioneered some of the most important themes of contemporary art, including the archive, appropriation, personal narrative, and representations of black selfhood and domesticity. At the same time, researchers have understood his work as an unfinished tenor because of his untimely death from AIDS-related disease. This exhibition is a pioneering attempt to shed light on his art.
