http://apple.co/2iFrR8H

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Nicole Will was interviewed by Emerson Rosenthal for the Creators section of the recent (June) issue of Vice Magazine. The article focuses on independent curators and trends in curating. Click here to read in full. 

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Recently, I re-read A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. There is a great passage where Gertrude Stein gives advice to Hemingway on collecting "pictures" which I thought I'd share:

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"'You can either buy clothes or buy pictures,' she said. 'It's that simple. No one who is not very rich can do both. Pay no attention to your clothes and no attention at all to the mode, and buy your clothes for comfort and durability, and you will have the clothes money to buy pictures.'

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"'But even if I never bought any more clothing ever,' I said, 'I wouldn't have enough money to buy the Picassos that I want.'

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"'No. He's out of your range. You have to buy the people of your own age – of your own military service group. You'll know them. You'll meet them around the quarter. There are always good new serious painters. But it's not you buying clothes so much. It's your wife always. It's women's clothes that are expensive.'" 

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♔ FOUR ♛

Pictured above: Blinky Palermo and Imi Knoebel, Madrid, New Mexico, 1974 (Palermo and Knoebel traveled in the Southwest area of the United States by car in 1974. They visited the de Menil's Rothko Chapel, 1971 in Houston, Walter De Maria's Las Vegas Piece, 1969 and Michael Heizer's Double Negative, 1969.)

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Blinky Palermo's life could be the plot of a Hollywood film. He was born a twin in Leipzig Germany in 1943 with the name Peter Schwarze. He was adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Wilhelm Heisterkamp becoming Peter Heisterkamp and when his adopted mother died in 1958, he learned of is biological identity.

Studying graphic design in the Bauhaus style in his early adult-hood led him to the Düsseldorf Academy in 1962 where he was classmates with some of the most recognized German artists today. 

His name, Blinky Palermo, was assigned to him by a classmate referencing the con-man and fight fixer in Philadelphia. 

In 1964, he took classes with the ever-affecting Joseph Beuys where he quickly became his star pupil. Beuys supported Palermo's identity change having been quoted saying "To change your art, change yourself." 

Heiner Friedrich (co-founder of Dia Art Foundation), of Heiner Friedrich Gallery in Cologne who represented artists including Robert Ryman, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd and Fred Sandback and many more (not a woman among them), first met Palermo in 1966 during the Academy's student exhibition. He would remain an important source of support for the rest of his life

Palermo had visited the United States, with Gerhard Richter, once in 1970 before he moved to New York City for three years in 1973. The city, and the country, would have a strong effect on him and be the impetus for one of his most loved installations. 

His life ended early, possibly related to drug and alcohol use, while on vacation in the Maldives. At the age of 33, in 1977, Palermo died leaving a concise and ultimately brilliant body of work

The most important aspect of his work, to me, lies in the relationship he exemplified between the mind (inner) and location (outer), or what art historian Suzanne Hudson has called 'Psychic Geography'. Below is an excerpt from her essay in Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964 - 1977 published by Dia and Yale, 2010 on the occasion of the exhibition curated by Lynne Cooke. 

"Resigning his habit of leaving works untitled, Palermo referred to New York as a place as much as a psychic geography in the titles of numerous works from 1975 including Coney Island and Wooster Street. The following year he began the epic To the People of New York City. The work typically, and not undeservedly, described as Palermo's "magnus opus," in the words of Robert Storr...."

"....contingency on location is not the same thing as transparency to it, especially once the painting has been detached from its referent's site. Indeed, the Metal Pictures evince a move from reflexive site-specificity continuous with its architectural surrounds to a present organization of space based on excerption from elsewhere."

Both Blinky Palermo and Ellsworth Kelly offer two sides of the same coin: alternate cut - outs of reality and an extensive liminal nature. 

"There's no smoke without fire, as the saying goes; Kelly does not deny this, but he is solely interested in the smoke, and couldn't care less about the fire, as he prospects this illogical object, an index without a referent," said Yves-Alain Bois. Perhaps, we could argue that for Palermo, fire and smoke are equally present. 

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♔ THREE ♛

The Black Mountain College defined a uniquely generative moment in the history of art. A radically independent school in North Carolina open from 1933-1957,  it fostered a true spirit of experimentation and artistic community. Once a professor at the Bauhaus, Joseph Albers, with artist Anni Albers, fled Germany in 1933 and found themselves in new teaching positions at the BMC at the recommendation of Philip Johnson, then curator at MoMA.

The Albers' spoke little English but became an influential axis point at this college in the South which would invite professors Jacob Lawrence, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Xanti Schawinsky and Buckminster Fuller to teach. Students who attended include Ruth Asawa, Lorna Blaine Halper, Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Martha Parks Washington, and many others including WAA's number three pick: Dorothea Rockburne. 

Rockburne (b. 1932) arrived to Black Mountain from Montreal directly after high school in 1950. Her first retrospective was held at the MoMA when she was 81 years old. Throughout her career, her work has maintained a rigorous exploration of geometric mathematics as it relates to nature's organization, primarily the golden ratio.
 

The text below has been transcribed from a brief video on MoMA's website to provide some information in Rockburne's own words:

"Drawing is the bones of thought. I always find I am reading or seeing or doing something and the only way I can think is with my hands, drawing.

"I went to BMC in 1950 and two weeks after I was at Black Mountain I must have said something because Max came up to me and said 'I want you to take my class.' Max Dehn was a mathematician. While people came from all over the world just to study with him, he never had more than 3 students, but the students he had were really significant.

"When he asked me to take his class I was horrified because I said 'I've had no training, I can't take your class.' And he said 'You haven't been math poisoned which is right' he said 'I will teach you mathematics for artists.' And he showed me mathematics in nature. He wasn't teaching a mathematician he was teaching an artist how to think mathematically but it was so wonderful, so heady, I felt big..."

"I was studying transitive geometry and I wanted to find a transitive material. I located the carbon paper and by folding and unfolding the sheets I could transpose the equations I was working into a materialized artwork. I was very interested in the fact that the whole room should represent the art. I painted the walls with the brightest white paint you could find. As people walked into the room their footprints became part of the drawing, that was my plan...

"I lived on Chambers Street. I was working all kinds of jobs at once plus I had a child I was raising. And I didn't have the money to buy art supplies, they were expensive. So I went across the street to the hardware store and I bought crude oil, gallons of crude oil. People look on the crude oil as a big insight into material, believe me it was not, it was accident. But I also had done some tests and I knew what it would do and I knew it had incredible properties and color wise it fell right into my Beaux-Arts training because this was a natural in-the-earth material. And to me it has a lot of color..."
 

"By this time I had been looking at a lot of Italian painting and realized that they were all based on the golden mean. I was very familiar with what the golden mean looked like. Now our bodies are all golden mean... every thing is, you begin to realize. It's a magic proportion. If you do anything using it you can't go wrong, its bound to be a success. It's amazing..."
 

"I wanted to work with curves, because every thing in the universe moves on an elliptical... When one is dealing with art, or mathematics, there is always an element of magic. If everything adds up and works out well you are on the wrong trail."

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♔ TWO ♛

Agnes Martin, part one of this five part series, was a friend and neighbor of Ellsworth Kelly (1923 - 2015) at the Coenties Slip near the Seaport in Manhattan. Kelly is the second artist in WAA Game. Where to start: look at gelatin silver prints such as Broken Window, Paris from 1978. This, and other photographs included in the Matthew Marks exhibition in 2016, describe perfectly, succinctly and without words, the essential nature of Kelly's work. 

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Ellsworth Kelly created colorfully saturated and carefully scaled monochromes for over 60 years. He is given credit for one of the greatest contributions to the history of painting - the shaped canvas. It is not enough to see images of Kelly's work, but to experience them in real life, where in fact, his inspiration is mined. 

My favorite series, Curves, was made by Kelly in the 1990s, all of which are singular, large-scale, monochrome painted canvases of various shapes, each featuring one curved side. The Curves of the 1990s refined the language of earlier paintings by removing the shape from the confines of the canvas’s rectangular frame altogether. 

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His work is a part of every major public collection. The Guggenheim writes "Ellsworth Kelly extracts visual 'fragments' from the surrounding world—the sweeping curve of a Romanesque nave, a crescent moon, a barred window—and then condenses them into elemental colors and shapes. Although relentlessly abstract, his forms are anchored to the legible, to details of architecture or landscape, filtered through the artist’s vision. Early in his career, Kelly adopted a philosophy of anti-illusionism that would change the parameters of painting and revise its relationship to sculpture. He began painting monochrome panels in the early 1950s and has been experimenting with this composition (or anti-composition) ever since in single and multi-panel formats. With their anonymous, uninflected technique and absence of surface drawing, these pristine 'painting-objects' established a new relationship between painting and its architectural context. By defining the structure and shape of each canvas through color—matte, uniform, and without gestural nuance—Kelly eliminated any figure-ground illusion and brought painting into the sculptural realm of objects; the painting itself became the figure, with the wall as its ground."

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Recently visiting the new SFMoMA, after their long closure for renovations, I was impressed most directly by their Kelly and Martin rooms, located adjacent to one another. 

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After a year of organizing, I am honored and excited to announce the opening of

Do What I Want: Selections from the Arthur Russell Papers

Through May 14th, 2017
at the Brooklyn Academy of Music

Russell was a visionary figure in the downtown music scene in New York City during the 1970s and 1980s. As director of the Kitchen; regular at the Paradise Garage, the Loft, and the Gallery; band member of the Necessaries, Flying Hearts, Singing Tractors and Sailboats; part of the Love of Life and Zummo Orchestras while continuously recording (and re-recording) his diverse tracks, Russell left behind a large body of work though only released 4 EPs during his lifetime. 

My obsession with Russell started over 10 years ago. His music, divorced from nostalgia, speaks to a timeless and transcendent nature found in the greatest of artists. Formidably opposed to hierarchical classifications of music (high or low) he carved out a unique sound well ahead of its time. 

Collaborating with greats like Phillip Glass, David Byrne, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Zummo, Laurie Anderson and many more, his music crossed boundaries and blended genres.

Steve Knutson from Audika Records, responsible for many of the posthumous releases of Russell's music, created a playlist for the exhibition. Click here to listen. 

Additionally, Matt Wolf's documentary on Russell, Wild Combination, and Phill Niblock's film from a performance at the Experimental Intermedia Foundation will be screened on April 20th, followed by a panel discussion. 

On April 22nd, Russell's collaborators, Mustafa Ahmend, Ernie Brooks, Peter Gordon, Bill Ruyle, and Peter Zummo will perform a night of music with special guest performers to be announced. 

Click here for a recent article on Pitchfork. 

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♔ ONE ♛

Anyone obsessed with art plays this game: IF YOU COULD LIVE WITH ANY WORK OF ART EVER MADE, what would you choose? Just last week the artist Shawn Kuruneru and I had this conversation and we both agreed on this selection. 

The next few iterations of the WAA List will focus on five historic artists, in no particular ranking, to personally answer this question. Included in each part will be selections of the artist's own words describing their work and practice. 

Two criteria I use to consider art: a) it simply and subtly exposes a universal, often problematic and paradoxical, truth (in nature, beauty, art, materiality, humanity, perception, philosophy, etc.); and b) the excavation of this truth is elusive, transitional and/or essential to the artist it therefore remains their continued priority, allowing unlimited interpretations along a constant thread. This pursuit goes on no matter whatever validation – positive or negative – they receive.

The second point requires working with faith in the intangible, the inspirational and the unreliable; a rejection of security (or perhaps better stated the acceptance of "security" as a falsehood); a considered abandonment of things ubiquitous in our society today such as: fame, transacting, advertising, more is better, elitism, contorting to commercially influenced as well as peer and self interested criticism. All the while the artist still produces an object which, in order to be exposed in our world, to exist, must have, or eventually will be evaluated to have, a monetary value.

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While the financial conversation isn't all that interesting, it does happen frequently enough - we need to survive and want to own (oftentimes needs and wants get confused): both require funding. I have no illusion that this topic of picking favorite art to live with is linked to ownership, though the exercise of thinking about the art is decidedly more important than possessing the objects, which after all, is only logistics. The possession of art is complicated as well. It can be argued that even if it resides in an individual's collection, they are ultimately entrusted as the guardians of the work, becoming a part of the object's history, not the other way around.
 

So...here it is, number one - a type of work that would inspire every day, morning and night: an Agnes Martin 72 x 72 inch painting (a grid from the 60's), in a large light-filled (UV protected of course) corner adjacent to a bright shaped canvas by Ellsworth Kelly (contender number two). So, while I am saving up the millions of dollars (this might take a while), I will share what fascinates me - the sense and motivation behind the work holding its true value.  

Recently, I found myself winding up the ramp of the Guggenheim rotunda where Martin's paintings have been organized (mostly) chronologically. Her work exemplifies an honest sublimity and an imperfection of perception. What looks smooth, refined, precise from first glance, is full of moments of human "mistakes". Her work is bonded to formal concerns, and it is through her imposed limitations we get to be present to the painting's truths, somewhat flawed, simultaneously offering a "non-objective" experience.  She might say, leaving us with an "inexhaustible" feeling. (See an explanation on this below in her own words.)
 

Her paintings' immediacy, the feeling that they exist beyond the scope of the art establishment, rooted in a larger desire to get to a core of human perception and consciousness, has always drawn me to them.  The work goes beyond, "abstract", "geometric", "minimal" or any other unworthy classification that could be used on them. She explains her intentions rather clearly in the excerpts I transcribed from a compilation of audio recordings smartly put together on the Guggenheim website.

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Included are snippets from Martin's entries in The Video Databank by Lynne Blumenthal and Kate Horsefield recorded in New Mexico, where Martin was living at the time, which are archived at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Also, there is a portion of the lecture Martin gave during her residency at Skowhegan in Maine. 

Enjoy! And if you haven't seen the show at the Guggenheim you have until January 11th!

From The Video Data Bank:

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"A lot of people will think that social understanding is […] going to lead us to the truth but it isn't, it is understanding of yourself. To make a beginning of that, you have to look at your mind and see what you are thinking about, because the truth is you are unconscious of your own thoughts, until you catch yourself. You can't be in an unconscious state and paint because what ever is in your mind, and not the subject matter, but the feeling you have related to that subject matter, is what you are going to paint. So the beginning is not actually painting, the beginning of painting is not you put down green and then you like pink, and then you put down pink, painting is not about that anymore than music is about this sound and that sound, it’s a whole thing, you know. It something that you can't resist putting on – representing – its something that drives you to expression, it's irresistible. " 

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"People are able to make the response to music very easily and very accurately, and I think it is the highest form of art because with 8 notes they express everything that we have ever experienced. To be an artist you look, you perceive, you recognize what is going through your mind and it is not ideas. Everything you feel and everything you see and every thing … your whole life goes through your mind, I have to recognize it and go with it. And really feel it." 

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"Anger and all passions are not real. They are, what I call, the exhaustible. All the exhaustible things, like anger, how quickly it passes, even the sense of seeing beauty is a very exhaustible thing, seeing with your eye. If you see something that looks very very beautiful, but if you kept your eye on that and looked and looked and looked the beauty would disappear from it. Because the eye is exhaustible. But then the inexhaustible is there within the mind, and the beauty that you see within the mind, it really never disappears. Now, the inexhaustible they go on forever, that’s reality. They go on without change. But anything that is exhaustible, is not real. We start out with high hopes because people taught us that just around the corner is happiness and contentment and all you have to do is be good and try hard. When you find out you can be just as good as you possibly can be, I mean, and you try as hard as you possibly can try. And you still have, the same old thing, you have failures and successes, no? Some things fail and other things succeed. But then you get quite desperate, you know, and you think I am gonna work and work and I am not going to have any failures, right? But then you find out the failures are inevitable. That you cannot possibly, none of us, you can't even draw a straight line, you know that. And you can't have things, and you can't have all days in which you are sunny and good natured, and everything like that. And you can't be sweet to people, and you can't please people, either. Well that is the development. The development is of oneself."
 

From Martin's lecture at Skowhegan:

"[As artists...] We contemplate reality with a sense of beauty as though it were perfect. We are also able to contemplate non-objective beauty. I am very anxious for you to understand what I mean by non-objective experiences. Say that you went blind, its very depressing but you know, you would still have a very exciting emotional life, that is a non-objective experience. Everything is contemplated in the mind, without meditation, we make a very complicated response. Just to look at a floating branch evokes very complicated objective and non-objective responses. The artist must slow all this down mentally. It is this mental experience that makes the representation of beauty possible.

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"The part of the mind in which we experience the perfection of beauty is not the intellect. The intellect is the part of the mind that calculates, compares, associates, classifies and decides according the facts.  It is very different from the other part of the mind, where we simply wonder what to do and the answer comes to us with out any evidence. And if we sincerely want to do a difficult thing we call the answer inspiration. Alone and in silence, the mind rises up from worldly concerns to considerations of the truth about life.

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"The truth about life is not spiritual, it is the truth about this life. It is the real answer to our zest for living and our faith in life. It is also the best condition of mind for inspiration. Zest for living and faith in life are non-objective experiences, as is happiness. You may feel all of these with out a material cause. We can wake up happy for no reason and be full of zest with out thinking of anything. I want to urge you to an awareness of such feelings. And I want to urge you to go in search of yourself. You have been thoroughly conditioned since the day you were born. So it is hard to find out what you think, but it is possible. By questioning your own mind, it is possible to have absolutely original thoughts. To have absolutely original point of view. What you want to find out is what you want and what you do not want. When you give up what you do not want you take a move forward in life. 

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"Your conditioning has taught you to identify with others, their emotions and their needs. I urge you to look to yourself. In our convention, it is particularly difficult for women but still it has to be done. The purpose of life is to know your true unconditioned self. In the middle of a work of art, an artist often feels that he is failing, and he starts interfering with his inspiration. That is a mistake...THE mistake. It is best to push on through. Such works frequently turn out to be the best. To fail is a very ordinary experience for an artist. To fail and fail and still go on marks his character. Most people cannot bear to fail even once. They think of security."

Listen to the entire collection of interviews and excerpts here. You will not be sorry.

I'd love to hear the works at the top of your wishlist, send me an email! Tell me what artists inspire you. And...
 

...coming soon, in part two, how Ellsworth Kelly inspires. Interesting to note, Martin and Kelly both lived in the old sailmaking lofts at Coenties Slip (as did a number of other artists including Robert Indiana and Lenore Tawney) near the East River in New York City during the 1960's. It was there that they became friends. 

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Abdolreza Aminlari's work is delicately complicated and sophisticatedly minimal. Born in Iran in 1979, Abdi's Persian heritage informs the works on paper. Weaving gold, black and brightly colored threads geometrically into archival paper both systematically and organically. Some works remind of shapes in patterned tiling and others of vibrating nets or webs. His installations contrast the two modes.

Taking patterns as subject, he sews thread, considered for its material, color and line, into paper. Historically in art, gold has been used to depict god and the spirit, but also wealth and opulence – Abdi's gold, on the other hand, captures the element inherent in the medium – light.​

His compositions relate to the beautiful Islamic tradition using sacred geometry in the ornamentation of spiritual places. The use of gold and the non-figurative subject exemplifies the duality found in transcendent works of art:  its reality and its illusion, its subject and its objecthood, the hand of the artist and the elements of nature inescapably present.

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While I was in Beirut for a week I ended up getting a 24 hour virus, had a silly fight with my best friend (who is living there, and who I was staying with) and was generally exhausted and a bit frustrated by the time I arrived at Rafic Hariri Airport to head back to New York. I watched Anthony Bourdain's Beirut episode from his series Parts Unknown as an amusing way to prepare and in hindsight his opening words are fitting: "There's no place else even remotely like it. Everything great, and all the worlds ills, all in one glorious, messed up, magical, maddening, magnificent city. Beirut!" 

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In the book The Tiller of Waters by Lebanese author Hoda Barakat, the protagonist recounts: "My grandfather used to say that a city built by Saturn - as the ancients told it - will not flourish long." Looking at the buildings is an immediate sign of both its prosperity and struggle. New towers of glass and concrete, with hanging gardens lining large balconies, stand next to smaller decaying buildings pocked with bullet holes. The developments in Centre Ville, the initiative of Rafic Hariri before he was assassinated known as Solidere, were built in a traditional style during the period of Reconstruction after the Lebanese Civil War ended in 1990. Looking east, out of one of these newer windows, you can see the ruins of a Roman bathhouse, built after Berytus (modern Beirut), the capital of Pheonicia, was conquered by the Romans of Pompey in 64 BC. Collapsed from violent earthquakes, colonized by France, and massacred by its own sects, and still after each instance, the city reforms and thrives again unapologetically. 

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It is not a timid city. Its conspicuously hot in August. Dramatically placed on cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean marked by the distinctive Raouche Rocks. Its noisy. Taxi and cars honk as if they are keeping some consistent yet irregular rhythm. Motos regularly burn out in intersections. Occasionally there is some celebratory (and, from what I am told, sometimes not so celebratory) gun fire. The food is outstanding, some of the best I have ever eaten, try Syrian fetteh! And hummus so creamy its hard to believe I eat the crap they sell in Whole Foods. Influences intersecting from all over the region. 

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Lebanon maintains the governmental organization, said to represent the proportional power of its three main religious sects, adopted during WWII when it finally gained independence – A Maronite Christian President, a Shia Speaker of Parliament, and a Sunni Prime Minister. It is also home to Hezbollah, has a large population of Palestinian refugees and is now overflowing with Syrian refugees as IS attacks its border with Syria. 

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I am neither a politician nor a scholar on this area. I knew I was headed to a place different than any place I had ever been before. Two days before my flight, the US sent an amended warning to its citizens not to travel to Lebanon. But, people live their lives there! My friend lives there, great art lives there, people from all religions, ethnicities, and economic backgrounds take refuge there. In a way it was like New York City, if Arabic was its primary language and the call-to-prayer echoed at the most beautiful times of day, oh and the IS threat was visible 2 hours north and cell service was shoddy at best. HECTIC! 

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Five art moments stood out: The Aïshti Foundation, The Sursock Museum, The Beirut Art Center, Nabil Nahas' home and studio and Yto Barrada's exhibition at Sfeir-Semler Gallery.  

◰ The Aïshti Foundation ◰

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Tony Salame has installed his vast collection at the Aïshti by the sea, a luxury shopping center about 20 minutes north of downtown Beirut. Since it opened just last fall they have presented two shows of western art. Thanks to my inability to connect to wifi at the airport I unfortunately missed meeting Leila Bou-Nasr, the curator of the foundation. Though when I visited the next day I had the whole, Massimiliano Gioni curated, four floors of galleries, to myself. Included was a large scale joke painting by Richard Prince, a David Hammons garbage bag painting, Josh Kline's three dimensionally printed heads on Plexi boxes, Stuart Uoo's singed mannequin's, a large drawing by Kaari Upson and much much more. One detail I thought was interesting, next to the obligatory Alex Isreal paintings (the show brings together artist's contemplations on American ideologies), the wall plate had purposefully left his last name blank. Hmm? The word itself is barely tolerable it would seem.  

◰ The Beirut Art Center ◰

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The BAC is a not-for-profit exhibition space near Palais de Justice. On view was Esma'/Listen, a group show focusing on sound. Besides walking on Christian Marclay's floor covered in old vinyl records, watching Francis Alÿs' Railings, London, and the beautiful Silence Score, in which Pierre Huyghe precisely scored Cage's 4'33'' famous recording from 1952, one notable discovery was the work of Vartan Avakian. Assembling what looked like parts of a trumpet the instrument transmitted the sounds of water from the Beirut River flowing through radio frequencies.  

◰ The Sursock Museum ◰

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Nicolas Sursock was a Lebanese collector who supported artists from Lebanon. He left his mansion to the city of Beirut to be used as an art museum when he died in 1952. Opening officially in 1961 it surprisingly remained open during most of the Lebanese Civil War. Major renovations started in 2008 which transformed the original 1500 square meters to 8500 square meters, and recently re-opened last October.  

Ali Cherri's exhibition brings attention to the nature of relics and their necessity to decay. In the permanent collection, portraits of Lebanese dignitaries and nobles from the late 1800's and picturesque landscapes flank the impeccable preserved reading room and study. Also included is a large scale Etel Adnan painting from 1985 of Mt. Tamalpais, the mountain she is obsessed with in Marin County, California where she (and I) lived for many years.  

◰ Nabil Nahas ◰

Nabil was introduced to me through Nessia Pope and graciously invited me to dinner at his home in the hills, a town called AIN AAR. An old silk factory, used by squatters during the Civil War, is peacefully rehabbed with olive and lemon tress amongst other greenery planted carefully by hand. His large scale works, a representation from the last 40 years, hang throughout his home and compliment his collection of objects and paintings. His first commercial exhibition in Beirut, his hometown, had just closed at Saleh Barakat Gallery.  

◰ Yto Barrada at Sfeir Semler Gallery ◰

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One exhibition I was very sorry to miss - caused by my body's desire to break down for 24 hours - was Yto Barrada's Faux Guide at Sfeir Semler Gallery.  In the show she examines the "fetishistic thirst for foreign objects", their authenticity and creativity. Presented to articulate the act of collecting and display. 

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Nathaniel Mary Quinn and I have something in common - our moms. Not that our moms are similar in any way or our experience with our moms is alike - Quinn's passed when he was 15 years old, mine is alive - pretty definitive difference. What's similar is they provoke in us a motivation to succeed, keep going, never give up. I grew up in the au-pair rooms of mansions, my mom working as the housekeeper. When I was a bit older we moved to affordable housing. I grew up in Marin County and was surrounded by wealth, while not having money. Quinn grew up in South Side Chicago, in the Robert Taylor houses. Obviously we had different upbringings, but ultimately it was our moms that told us it was possible to go after something BIG. When Quinn told me the story of his illiterate mother believing he could be a great artist someday - something important snapped into focus. 

I met the actress Donna Augustin-Quinn at a gallery dinner at The Park in Chelsea. The dinner was hosted by my good friend Davide Balliano's dealer Nikola Cernetic of LUCE gallery in Turin. Donna is married to Quinn, who was sitting beside her at this dinner. That should connect all the dots for the moment. It was Donna who led our section of the long table into a great time. One of the least stuffy, authentically fun gallery dinners I have been to. Maybe it was just there was no posturing or i don't know - who cares it was fun and I knew only a couple people there.  At the end of dinner Donna and I exchanged numbers. This was back in March of this year. 

Another hot July day, I am walking down Utica to make a right on St. Marks. I arrive at Quinn's studio/home and he is outside talking to a neighbor. My partner in FOUR A.M. arrives and we are given a quick tour of their new house - above the mantel is wonderful LaLa. 

Nathaniel Mary Quinn does not make portraits. The subjects resemble people but not their surfaces. They are "an emotional investigation of the interior self, that which is not seen." LaLa is a guy Quinn once knew, back in the RT houses, a drug dealer of the dangerous variety. I asked if he was afraid of LaLa and he said "no, but was very aware of his capabilities." LaLa would go to school sometimes, and what was made clear by looking at this piece, contorted himself physically - and probably mentally - to fit in that environment. Reckoning his street persona with perhaps an idealized promise of a "better" educated life.

Let's back up, immediately it was clear that we were getting into Quinn's life and perspective and the work reflected this - but it almost doesn't matter. The work speaks for itself without any of the backstory. I personally love hearing the story. I love getting a sense of the vision and its connectedness to his memory. Quickly, we have reached topics of the African American diaspora, the eventual leveling of the Taylor projects, supply and demand of drugs in South Side Chicago - you'd be dumb not to go into that business in those circumstances, btw. 

LaLa has a bulky, muscular, top-heavy figure with little legs squeezed into his child's desk. There are flowers in his hair. The work is made with charcoal, oil pastels and paint using a process of masking and over-painting. An amalgamation, not collaged, of parts. He intuitively mixes signifiers of remembered personalities, twisted just enough so a bit of their soul leaks out. 

So, that thing that snapped into focus, yeah, right, back to that. Well, its simple, if not cliché. Be yourself, do good, be kind, as Quinn said "never accept mediocrity." For me, its moments meeting people making work like this - with all of their heart - with all their commitment, that makes me so fucking happy to be a part of art in some tiny way. To get into someone else's perspective for a moment, see what drives them, relate, support and carry it on. 

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Quinn is represented by Rhona Hoffman, Chicago and M + B, Los Angeles. Bio below is courtesy of M + B. 

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Nathaniel Mary Quinn (b. 1977, Chicago) received his BFA from Wabash College and MFA from New York University. Solo exhibitions include Back and Forth at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; Past/Present at Pace Gallery, London; and Hybrids at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, New York. Past group exhibitions include Unrealism, organized by Jeffrey Deitch and Larry Gagosian, Miami; AIM 23 at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Still/Moving: Photographs and Video Art from the DeWoody Collection, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach; and presentations at Frieze London and Art Basel Miami Beach. In New York Magazine's April 2016 issue, Jerry Saltz selected Quinn as one of eleven artists "poised to have breakout years." Quinn has been profiled in a number of other publications, including The Independent(London), Modern Painters, ARTnews, and The Huffington Post. His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; and Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE, among others. Nathaniel Mary Quinn lives and works in Brooklyn.

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If you get a chance to see Jason Moran perform live - you should. And if it is within the context of one of his installations - even better! Last Saturday, I was grateful to do just that at his exhibition STAGED in Luhring Augustine's Bushwick location. 

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Moran became more than a name I only sort of recognized a couple months ago. I was doing some research on Jennie C. Jones for another project I am working on when I came across his requisite talk - Jazz, Minimalism, and Abstraction - at the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston for the occasion of Jones' show. I was immediately absorbed - listening to kernels of sublime jazz between statements like "people love talking about jazz, but never listen to it" and his interpretation of Jones' relationship to the music - hooked is a better word. Ellington, Holiday, Simone, Parker, Davis - a bit of each strung together in such a way they start to build a skeleton to what I heard on Saturday. 

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Saturday at 1pm I entered the A/C of the gallery from a soupy 90 degree sidewalk in the rapidly changing neighborhood of Bushwick in Brooklyn. (Ate at the Michelin starred Roberta's after the performance) It immediately felt like exactly where I needed to be. Two large sculptures representing two stages - one from The Savoy and the other from Three Deuces - two clubs that no longer exist, but were originally located in Harlem and Midtown respectively. When I enter, both are playing recordings. 

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Moran, with eyes closed, plays the piano in the Deuces stage, pictured above. The echo from The Savoy's speaker wafting into his set. He was up there with his trio - The Bandwagon - drummer Nasheet Waits and bassist Tarus Mateen. I am sitting on the cold concrete floor with a couple dozen other people in the audience. In the first song a frenzied, concentrated, intense crescendo slides sweetly (you know when you get the goose bumps?) into a slow melodic sway. 

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The next song starts like the street on a saturday afternoon. Rythmic piano chords give way again to that "transformational moment" - the soft flutter of wings around a cave. I imagine the unforgiving frying pan of pavement outside interrupted by a distant clap of thunder and the starting tapping of rain, cool grey in a hazy yellow heat. Somehow sweet and sad. 

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As far as collecting Jason Moran, grab a limited edition record produced by the gallery on the occasion of his inclusion at the 56th Venice Biennale, or the recent magazine he released called LOOP. In addition to the two large scale installation sculptures, there are charcoal works on paper that are distinctively made by the artist playing the piano, through paper, with charcoal on his fingers. All of the works capture the physicality of an unseen musical, yet deeply palpable experience. 

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The image above and bio below are both courtesy of Luhring Augustine, NY.

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Moran was born in Houston, TX in 1975.  He was made a MacArthur Fellow in 2010 and is currently the Artistic Director for Jazz at The Kennedy Center in Washington DC; he also teaches at the New England Conservatory in Boston, MA.  Moran’s activities comprise both his work with masters of jazz such as Charles Lloyd, the late Sam Rivers, Henry Threadgill, Cassandra Wilson, as well as a number of partnerships with visual artists, including Stan Douglas, Theaster Gates, Joan Jonas, Glenn Ligon, Adam Pendleton, Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, and Kara Walker.  Commissioning institutions of Moran’s work include the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Dia Art Foundation, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Jazz at Lincoln Center, New York, and Harlem Stage, New York.  Moran has a long-standing collaborative practice with his wife, the singer Alicia Hall Moran; as named artists in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, they created BLEED, a five-day series of live performances that crossed genres and cultural barriers.  He is currently curating the Artists Studio, series of performances in the Veterans Room of the Park Avenue Armory, New York City, which will run throughout 2016.  Moran also recently launched his own recording label, Yes Records, which will release his work as well as that by Ms. Hall Moran.  In Spring 2018, Moran will have his first solo museum exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN.

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{I wrote this on the afternoon of July 25th  while listening to his performance with Charles Lloyd. A violent thunder and lightning storm out my window.}

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