NYRA Skyline: July 15, 2022

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S K Y L I N E | ALL ABOUT ART

Revisiting Abloh and Serra, and some new places we’re finding space

Emily Conklin

Jul 15, 2022

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Concept sketch for Landscape and Memory by Cristian Iglesias. Courtesy Madison Square Park Conservancy

My day job is located near Madison Square Park, a well-funded green space that has a superb public art portfolio. The latest exhibition mounted by the Madison Square Park Conservancy is Cristina Iglesias’s Landscape and Memory. Her earthwork evokes a forgotten NYC landscape of abundant waterways and grasses, long before us. The effect is transportive, such that a 10-to-6er like myself can find solace and clarity in the work in the span of a lunch break, no heavy theory required. A single glance encompasses so much—modes of mapping, abstraction, playful attitudes towards scale—and I think it’s something architecture can own, too.

This week’s Skyline heralds the summer gallery season—traditionally a season of group shows staged while gallerists and collectors are on holiday in luxurious places. There are plenty of emerging voices and also a few old favorites (looking at you, Zwirner). So much of what’s on view suggests an overlapping of fine art and the architect’s realm of spatial thinking and representation. Below, our contributors home in on precisely these moments, plus more.

— Emily Conklin

DISPATCHES

Virgil Abloh, Figures of Speech

The Brooklyn Museum

A display in Figures of Speech. Courtesy the author. Figures of Speech, an exhibition devoted to the work of the late VIRGIL ABLOH, opened at the Brooklyn Museum earlier this month. The show was conceived by Abloh, but the tragedy of his death has transformed the show from a retrospective to an iconic celebration. Notably, the Brooklyn iteration of the show is bookended by two works of architecture.The first is a blue foam model of Chicago that formed part of his architecture thesis at the Illinois Institute of Technology. The second work, Social Sculpture, is unique to the posthumous show. The full-scale wooden house was designed by Abloh in the legacy of “negritude architecture,” a term coined by DAVID HAMMONS to evoke a uniquely Black way of building and making.

Figures of Speech represents a diversity of work that’s unique within the design industry, and its radical inclusion of Social Sculpture not only redefines architecture, but expresses Abloh’s commitment to creating spaces for Black artists. The show solidifies Abloh’s legacy toward connecting the fast-paced worlds of fashion and music in authentic, layered ways to his expertise in architecture and design.

— Tiam Schaper

Serra David Zwirner, Chelsea

An installation at Richard Serra. Courtesy the author.

It is hard, rough, and still. A lot of young people suddenly became relatively still. The space becomes bigger by the inclusion of something this big. The roughness of the surface registers time.

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Richard

A gravity-space paradox

The whiteness of the gallery

The silence The concrete floor Up close there’s marks of making Of tarnish and tears As I walked in I was followed by teenagers chatting The conversation became cacophony in the echoes and sonorously of the empty space.

Anthony Ames: Fifty Paintings a83 Gallery, Soho

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— Ekam Singh

Anthony Ames, Egg, 1987. Acrylic on fiberboard, 10 x 10 in. Courtesy Anthony Ames

In keeping with the show’s superliminal title, Atlanta-based architect ANTHONY AMES has hung 50 paintings at a83. Though the assembled canvases span a 40-year period, they share the same recurring preoccupations—2D abstractions of residential scenes, architectural elements, everyday objects. At the opening party, I saw STEVEN HOLL and TOD WILLIAMS chatting with younger designers like STEPHANIE LIN and CHEN CHEN. This multigenerational cohort had gathered to see Ames’s handiwork up close. The paintings, he explained, “are a way to try and do architecture even when I don’t have ‘work.’” They set up brilliant contrasts, mixing modernist tropes with ephemera, so as to challenge the antiseptic perfection of architectural staging. There’s plenty of visual trickery—a pair of Corb-like eyeglasses turn out to be gymnastic rings—and humor, too. Among the many wine bottles and Purist geometries is, without any sense of incongruity, a basketball.

— Drew Seskunas

Stephanie H. Shih: Open Sundays

Harkawik Gallery, Lower East Side

Harkawik Gallery is nestled within a piece of the Lower East Side that terminally online media professionals call

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Open Sundays. Courtesy the author

Dimes Square, and it’s here that STEPHANIE H. SHIH has staged her small exhibition, Open Sundays, featuring ceramic sculptures of food and signage that speak to the neighborhood’s long history as an enclave for Jewish and Chinese communities. Her ceramics include a bottle of soy sauce, a bagel with lox, a bag of frozen dumplings—all small packages that spark joy. In the context of Dimes Square, with its wealthy influencer set stomping up and down Canal Street, these ceramics preserve at a small, domestic scale what is being lost as rents are raised and residents displaced. As joyful as Shih’s individual sculptures may be, their gallery-bound display takes on a strange funerary quality—stripped of any of the communal quality that food, or meals, can evoke, they sit in tomblike silence as visitors gawk at them and gallery attendants stationed behind the front desk silently rearrange the press releases at the desk.

— Kevin Ritter

Poetry in the Courtyard

MoMA PS1

Under the hot July sun in the courtyard at MoMA PS1 on Rashid Johnson’s Stage, five artists, activists, and poets shared their poetry about the politics of space as part of the Life Between Buildings exhibition. Life Between Buildings reviews how artists and communities have used interstitial, negative spaces in NYC as spaces for life through community gardens and art installations. The organizers of the event, Assistant Curators Jody Graf and Elena Ketelsen González noted that the courtyard was chosen intentionally to “breathe life” into what used to be a parking lot, now an open space surrounded by luxury condos. Lillian Tate, a 2021 participant in the MoMA PS1 and Lower East Side Girls club internship program, spoke of what freedom is not and painted an abolitionist’s world as green. Urayoàn Noel, author, translator and Associate Professor at NYU, performed haikus written on plastic bags about the regulation of space, using English and Spanish interchangeably. Jayden Strong, an interdisciplinary artist, invited listeners to take action, “Where is the dynamite?” Eileen Myles, a poet and activist, read several poems where developers and politicians are vampires, and cried, “Where would the trees go?”

—Poun Laura Kim

EYES ON SKYLINE

In Skyline 76, readers were interested in the nesting of the Shed.

IN THE NEWS …there’s a new NASA telescope and its images are dozens of hours long

…Mario Gooden is the new president of Architecture League

https://newyork.substack.com/p/s-k-y-l-i-n-e-77-all-about-art[1/6/23, 1:29:24 PM]

…Marcus Fairs, founder, CEO, and editor-in-chief of Dezeen, dies unexpectedly at 54

DATELINE

Our listings are constantly being updated. Check the events page regularly for up-to-date listings and submit events.

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Write us a letter! We’d love to hear your thoughts. You can s/o this week’s editor, Emily, @conk_shell on Instagram or send her an email at conklin.emilyg@gmail.com

NYRA is a team effort. Our deputy editor is Marianela D’Aprile, our editors-at-large are Carolyn Bailey, Phillip Denny, and Alex Klimoski, and our publisher is Nicolas Kemper.

To pitch us an article or ask us a question, write to us at: editor@nyra.nyc.

For their support, we would like to thank the Graham Foundation and our issue sponsors, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and Thomas Phifer.

To support our contributors and receive the Review by post, subscribe here.

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