When you think “New York City subway,” the first words that come to mind are probably congested, dirty, loud, among other less-than-positive descriptors. Most of us coming from New Haven associate the descent into the subway system with a sad departure from the grandeur of the Grand Central atrium. But if you take a second to look, you’ll find unexpected beauty in its tunnels.
Though we imagine New York City’s art attractions to be almost exclusively above ground, the subway stations are filled with public artworks commissioned and installed over the past 25 years. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority network continues to plan artistic installations with the goal of brightening every station in the city. The founders of the NYC subway wanted to reflect the city’s vibrant artistic culture beneath its streets, enriching the travel experience of millions of New Yorkers each day.
Subway stations are covered with carefully crafted terra cotta, bronze, glass and mixed media sculptures. Like art in more conventional aboveground museums, the works on the walls of subway stations are carefully preserved, even in the midst of construction for improving the technology and quality of the subway.
One of my favorite collections includes the “Architectural Artifacts from the Collection of the Brooklyn Museum, 2004” installed at the Eastern Parkway-Brooklyn Museum station. This subway stop — below one of the oldest and largest art museums in the country — houses the long-term installation of terra cotta artifacts and glass mosaics along its mezzanine and stairway walls. The bright blue mosaic tiles and carefully carved figures are a natural extension of the Beaux-Arts architecture of the building above. Appropriately, Beaux-Arts architecture is known for its sculptural decoration, classical details and mosaics — all of which the subway station possesses.
The artistic features of the subway system extend across the bridge to the 14th Street Eighth Avenue station. The station features prolific public sculptor Tom Otterness’ bronze sculptures on railings, beams and columns. Created in 2001, Otterness’ work is sure to garner a smile from even the grumpiest of rush hour commuters. The series, called “Life Underground,” features small men engaged in what Otterness imagines to be typical — or in some cases purely comical — underground tasks. In one sculpture, a man in a top hat slips under the railings, only to find himself looking up at a castigating police officer. In another, a giant alligator peaks out of a manhole cover to drag a frightened New Yorker down into the sewers with him. In a third, a man sits on a bench while holding an ostentatious bag of money — a shrewd commentary on commuters’ tendency to flaunt their iPhones and other pricey gadgets. Otterness equates this flashy behavior to clutching a large pouch bearing a dollar sign.
In the near future, even more stations will boast insightful and diverse art projects about New York culture. The Second Avenue subway line has scheduled to open its track in 2016 and with it pieces from leading artists like Sarah Sze, Chuck Close, Vik Muniz and Jean Shin.
Sarah Sze plans to ornament the 96th Street station with wild landscapes mimicking the commotion of everyday subway travel, replacing the skyscrapers and concrete with flora and fauna. 86th Street will boast Chuck Close’s photorealist portraits of important New Yorkers. Vik Muniz’s “Perfect Strangers,” depicting Muniz’s perspective on the subway goers themselves, will adorn the walls of the 72nd Street station. Finally, 63rd Street will play home to an installation of Jean Shin’s photographs on ceramic and glass from the Transit Museum. All of the works will embrace the diversity, culture and force of New York City.
So the next time you leave the aqua blue dome of Grand Central for the crowded subway below, don’t forget to take a moment and look up — there’s more beauty than you think.
Coffee in hand, I walked with a friend past TDHeav and took a right. A little off the beaten path for most Yalies and across from Koffee? with a K, a photography public art installation lines the windows of an empty building. Located in New Haven’s Audubon Arts District, the exhibit, “Artists at Work,” features photos by Chris Randall of local New Haven artists practicing their craft. The installation aims to show artists as integral parts of the workforce and inspire young artists to “pursue their dreams” and a career rooted in their creative passions.
The first picture is of dancer Adele Meyers. The image is the size of a poster, and her leg is gracefully kicked back. She appears confident and at ease in her motion. In an accompanying blurb in the window, she answers a series of questions. “I have been an artist as long as I have been alive. I do not differentiate who I am from what I do,” she says, responding to the question of how long she has been an artist.
The next window reveals a photo of historian and biographer Debby Applegate, a woman armed with a pen and a smile. The following images show a violinist, a spoken word poet, a graphic designer and a flamenco dancer. A singer holds a microphone to his lips. A painter stands proudly in front of his exhibition, arms behind his back. An actor practices lines while pointing at his reflection in the window. Behind each photograph, the empty rooms of the vacant building loom.
The conversation that the window installation explores — the role of the arts in our community and economy — is particularly relevant at a time in which the arts are being criticized as unimportant more than ever. An exhibit of this nature has a lot to offer in way of countering this marginalization. Indeed, the exhibit’s greatest asset is that it provides fledgling creators with the images of role models in their industry. Ultimately, these hopeful artists can envision the value of their creative talents within the marketplace, as it speaks to a variety of different, profitable paths, such as graphic design and trade book illustrating.
The execution of the space, however, is ineffective. The location — an empty storefront — makes the installation feel more like a promotion for the building than an ambitious artistic endeavor. The photos and text themselves come across more as an ad campaign than an exhibition. Each photograph is not particularly aesthetically interesting. Each seems to portray the career more than a portrait of the individual. They are not remarkable for their composition. This lack of intrinsic beauty of the pieces, coupled with the installation’s clear agenda, challenges the importance of the art itself.
The actual timing of the exhibit is also puzzling. An installation that can only be viewed while outdoors is inane in the winter. The average passerby is thinking only of reaching the next heated location, not about stopping to admire a poster in the window.
Because the spirit of the exhibit is valuable — its construction simply subpar — the series of photographs would likely fare better online. As the project’s goal is to generate conversation among viewers and extol the work of local artists, an online ad campaign would project these goals to a much larger audience. Perhaps a forum for discussion and even mentorship could emerge from a website. The exhibition as it is, however, fails to pique the interest of the casual New Haven onlooker.
Last weekend, I hung out with the Yale University Art Gallery guides in an abandoned factory and wandered through tall fields of grass in upstate New York. Art would never be the first word to come to mind when considering these two seemingly opposite spaces. Yet, both the factory and the 500-acre meadow display permanent collections that seem to have been made for them, and in some cases actually were. Dia:Beacon, located in Beacon, NY and the Storm King Art Center, in New Windsor, N.Y. are perfect escapes from the often overwhelming Yale bubble.
My favorite element of Dia:Beacon may have been the building itself. Originally a Nabisco box-printing facility, and later a factory for International Paper, it was donated to the Dia Foundation in 1999 to use as gallery space for the foundation’s monumental collection of minimalist art from 1960 to the present. This industrial space was never meant to be a gallery, yet its tall brick walls, large open rooms, and huge windows offering natural lighting, make it a perfect space for one. Ironically, and perhaps intentionally, much of the sculpture, painting and installation work in Dia:Beacon comments on industrialization and mass production. Many of the pieces are from the 1960s, a time when the factory itself was up and running. Head curator, Yasmil Raymond, and her team tackled the mammoth space and created a cohesive, but lenient narrative, that does not force visitors into one particular experience or understanding. There is no one point of entry into the collection. And, though I took a tour and gained some background knowledge, there is no writing on the walls to explain what you perceive — no mediator between viewer and art.
Visiting Dia:Beacon is a good way to see work by the biggest names of the postmodern and contemporary art scene. Each vast room is dedicated to a particular artist. Some of my favorites included Dan Flavin’s “‘monuments’ for V Tatlin,” a minimalist series that features megalithic fluorescent light fixtures that recede backwards almost infinitely into space. Andy Warhol’s “Shadows” takes over a high white-walled room with its 72 striking screen prints of the same shadow in various colors. Richard Serra’s gargantuan sheet metal installations are in balance in the equally massive, naturally lit room they occupy. Sol LeWitt, a Yale University Art Gallery favorite, is also given pride of place at Dia:Beacon, where you can find an entire maze of his famous mathematical wall drawings. But, though the factory space looms over you, it isn’t hard to approach the works on display. The Gallery Guides and I climbed between the legs of Louis Bourgeois’ giant spider, and even got past the glass to stare into the abysses of Michael Heizer’s four 20-foot-deep sheet metal craters.
Thirty minutes away, we continued our exploration in the far more open landscape of the Storm King Art Center. There, I really fell in love. When they acquired the site in 1960, Storm King’s founders, Ralph E. Ogden and H. Peter Stern, intended to use the land as a museum of the Hudson River School. However, in 1966, they acquired 13 geometric sculptures by American abstract expressionist, David Smith, and decided instead to use this rural setting as a stage for massive industrial sculptures. In this pursuit, they succeeded entirely. Storm King’s success articulates the surprising compatibility between natural and industrial. Roy Lichtenstein’s massive pop art boat, for instance, sits on an island in the middle of a pond with a comic-book female set on its prow, providing an ironic take on a 16th century figurehead. Like Dia:Beacon, Storm King also boasts other big names from abstract expressionism to contemporary art, including Yale’s own Maya Lin, who constructed a 240,000 square foot wave field on location. The wave field is about as site-specific as art can get, a series of 15-foot-high earthen mounds that roll outward before your eyes. Just as Dia:Beacon’s curators removed wall-descriptions to narrow the distance between art and viewer, Maya Lin completely breaks down boundaries between her wave field and its visitors. We ran up, down and across each wave, doing what would be considered the height of illegality at most conventional museums — touching the art. Lin’s wave field augments the natural landscape, but also blends into it. It is a quiet, yet powerful ode to the natural world. It’s recession into the horizon recalls “Women’s Table,” her simple, but direct testament to the female presence at Yale which sits outside the Sterling Memorial Library.
Dia:Beacon and Storm King are opposite spaces, yet they achieve almost the same effect. They are made for the art they display and for visitors with the keen and critical eye that I know Yale students have.
At New Haven’s Sumner McKnight Crosby Jr. Gallery, art fans are being shocked out of their complacency — or at least that’s what Hayward Gatling, the curator of “Disturbing the Comfortable,” would say. His show, which includes works of various media done by artists ranging from 17 to 65 years of age, draws inspiration from the words of graffiti artist Banksy, who said, “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”
From its content to its location, “Disturbing the Comfortable” breaks convention. The exhibit’s paintings, photos and sculptures are displayed in a space that is part-gallery, part-office. The contemporary works line both sides of a hallway sandwiched between office cubicles, extending into a large and otherwise bare conference room. All around, office workers continue to perform their daily tasks. At first, this juxtaposition is jarring—why should collages and copiers cohabitate? But perhaps this tension is intentional: a traditional office environment is interrupted by provocative modern art, just as innovation must always disturb tradition. In this way, the pseudo-gallery setting follows the exhibit’s theme. With his surprising choice of venue, Gatling already has his viewers where he wants them.
Once viewers have taken in the space, their attention can move on to the works themselves. Jahmane’s “MLBK JR,” for example, is a mixed media piece reminiscent of a political cartoon. A majestic image of Martin Luther King Jr. stands powerfully beside a Burger King logo that reads, “Martin Luther Burger King Jr.” King’s mouth is open, and a spiky red speech bubble — of the breed that should belong to a superhero exclaiming “POW!” — says “Feeding the Struggle One Meal at a Time!”
Works such as Vito Bonanno’s “Borat Stories” and Dooley-O’s “Hanging Men/Strange Fruit” also suggest uncomfortable racial undertones. In the foreground of “Borat Stories,” a simple, cartoon version of Borat frowns. The haphazardly-colored background is punctuated by interjections such as “warning!”, “I love you” and “Borat poop in a bag.” In Dooley-O’s piece, dark figures hang by their necks alongside decrepit signs that read “equal rights” and bear peace symbols. These works, like “MLBK JR,” force the viewer to confront unpleasant realities — they are a reminder that, despite how far the Dream has come, race remains an uncomfortable subject for most.
Other pieces, like Alan Neider’s “Ad and Jewelry-3,” present a not-so-subtle commentary on materialism. A young, bearded man drawn in charcoal lies on the floor, face twisted towards the viewer as he is crushed beneath a woman’s black stiletto boot. Superimposed over the boot-wearer’s legs are massive, bejeweled rings is made of silver, platinum and gold fabric.
Beauty is also aptly explored, and dismissed, in Neider’s “Portrait-5.” Like one of Lichtenstein’s blonde faces, the painting is composed of almost careless-looking splashes of paint on a background of fabric and twisted wire. The comfort the viewer finds in the subject’s pouty-lipped, blue-eyed beauty is disturbed by the unevenness of the background: Beneath the paint, haphazardly placed wires add anatomically incorrect texture to her complexion. With their use of unconventional materials and raw subject matter, Neider’s works fulfill the exhibit’s goal of challenging expectations.
Other works, however, puzzled more than they disturbed. The exhibit is advertised as a radical departure from conventional artwork, but some pieces fell short of that promise. In Kwadro Adae’s “Vertigo,” for example, six large, humanoid creatures stand in various orientations. These figures, done entirely in blue, red and purple, appear to be frozen in unidentifiable dance positions — it’s intriguing, but not provocative. Similarly, Trevor Lyon’s “Olives” was disturbing only in that its supposedly status quo-disrupting message is impossible to decipher. The black-and-white photograph depicts a close-up aerial view of olives splashing into a martini glass — a beautiful piece of work, to be sure, but perhaps not a standout of the “new art movement”, that Gatling trumpets.
Gatling’s show presents an engaging collection of works — some thematically discomforting, some made troubling through their media and some that fail to disturb altogether. These pieces, set in an unusual gallery space, span the spectrum of both success and failure in contemporary art.
The title of Red Grooms’s installation at the Yale University Art Gallery is telling: Larger than Life. As soon as you step off the elevator and into the fourth floor, a makeshift Grooms archway complete with a hasty depiction of the modern, classic New York City life — bridge, building, Knicks, foreign taxi driver, and hipster walking his dogs— crowns your head and resets the rules of reality.
As you walk in, three gigantic artworks seem to extend beyond the walls themselves, double the height of a normal ceiling on either side of your vision, immersing you in people and colors. But it is a joyful, energetic immersion, where nothing is off limits to laugh at or laud — there was a man in his sixties next to me chuckling for a solid ten minutes at one point in the exhibit. Grooms himself is currently 76 years old, and he’s been an artist-satirist for over fifty years now. That’s a lot of time to laugh.
In the three immense wall spaces, the subjects of his drawings are stripped down to their iconic essences: 52 characters in total interacting with each other beyond the canvas. They are extremely recognizable figures, that is, if you have a working knowledge of 20th century artists — or access to Wikipedia. Regardless, Grooms counts with studies and preliminary sketches of the works that generate a map of sorts for the view. Really though, as long as you know of Picasso, there is life to be seen here in Grooms’s big-scale detail.
The largest work is “Cedar Bar” (1986), in which Grooms imagines an isolated world where celebrities of the New York art world interact over spilled drinks, smoke, heels, flats, hats, stools, subtle Stamos and Rothko intrigue, and the Cedar Bar itself. It’s all about the details. Jackson Pollock is shown in his paint-splattered shoes drunkenly wrestling — knee to the groin — Willem de Kooning, a fellow abstract impressionist. To the left of the fighting pair their wives casually smoke together while Aristodimos Kaldis casually flirts with them to no avail. At the same time, it’s the bigger picture: the five huge sheets of colored pencil-and-crayon creation that lend this work an appropriately defined setting for these “larger than life” icons. No one is particularly beautiful; caricatures dominate appearances and interactions, and only the bartender and a hidden Ad Reinhardt confronts us square on. The foreground and background’s shallow spaces pulled me in even more, physically drawing me in to see people’s faces, reminding me that the bar is not a place of emotional depth.
Turning around to admire the sheer height of the final two pieces, I almost had to sit back down and get my bearings. The cartoonish meditations on the life and death of Picasso contain double the amount of frenetic intrigue in “Cedar Bar” and half the logic. “Studio at the rue des Grands-Augustins” (1990-1996) depicts Picasso working in the studio on “Guernica,” and “Picasso Goes to Heaven” (1973) has a little more post-mortem humor. Only after a few minutes of scouring the wall, physically hopping closer and then farther from the work — much to the concern and amusement of the security guard — did I notice the atomic sign in the “light bulb” of Grooms’s interpretation of “Guernica,” an allusion to nuclear warfare. Grooms also adds impressionist cigarette smoke, a tiny globe, and hints of modernism to further beam us into his bursting world.
Drama dominates all aspects of the canvas as Grooms blurs lines blur and invades his art with Picasso’s monochrome monsters. I left the exhibit feeling privileged to have witnessed dead Picasso in red, checkered boxers giving me a thumbs-up from the afterlife, and the color and life force in Red Grooms’s exultant works.
My first motive in writing this review of “Still Life: 1970s Photorealism” — to say “Go, go see this” — is accomplished in few words. The second motive — to say, “This is what I saw” — takes a couple hundred more. Today I recorded the things I saw speaking into my iPhone. This review is the direct transcription of that Voice Memo, with some edits made for clarity and brevity.
The walls are orange. And there is a man sitting in the corner with newspapers and a beer. He is hanging out after a long day of work. Or maybe this is his work. Next to him the headline of the sports magazine reads: “More Bad Luck.” It’s a copy of the New Haven Register. One wonders if an actual New Haven newspaper was part of Duane Hanson’s original sculpture installation.
“It’s Open” reads the poster above the Louisiana Superdome and immediately, from the effects of lights shining on other lights, I think, “This is real.” It really does look like a photograph until I see the Kentucky Fried Chicken scene, whose outlined letters are too sketched and nervous to be real, although that blurring sketchy quality was probably a real property of the original light that just appears fake here. This painting, Noel Mahaffey’s “Louisiana Superdome — Times Square” (1977), makes for a different greeting than the seated man but an equally strong opening impression. And it also immediately raises what seems to be one of the tacit questions of the show (besides the unanswerable question, “What is realism?”) which is: When pursuing this fidelity to the photographic style, why does the artist choose to break from it?
The opening hallway’s drawings and paintings announce some of the problems staged by photorealism. There’s something mechanical, Teutonic and draftman-like in some of the paintings collected from the Documenta 5 exhibition of 1972. These works appear more as exercises than as finished pieces and as I say this, I see that that guy sitting in the chair with his beer is still watching me.
My favorite painting in the show is probably of the tangerines, called “Tangerine Sugar” by Ben Schonzeit. You can see the luscious flesh of the tangerine almost bursting into Rorschach abstraction yet still remaining a most real, chaotic, juicy, membranous offering. It is dripping with some solidity, but it also seems as though it could float away into ephemeral dots of its own pastel at any moment.
In contrast to the lively colors of that tangerine, there are the fruits of John Clem Clarke. He paints a quince (which I’ve been told is a type of pear), a melon and a cucumber. And his weirdly dark arrangement recalls those Spanish still-life paintings by Zurbaran or kitchen life paintings from the 16th and 17th century.
The Chuck Close portrait is also amazing because it is sad. In its attempt to capture everything perfectly, there is something tragic about the fact that the attempt might always be a failure.
There’s a cool Richter at the show as well — “Portrait of Holger Friedrich” — where Richter’s characteristic blur shows the photograph as a process, as a moment in time, as a shake of the hand over a negative in the studio. It reminds me of when a painter chooses to show his brushstrokes, or paint his own hand, painting. And the exactitude of his blurring seems even harder to “get right” than simple clarity would be.
Why a show about photorealism? How can we think through Los Angeles, urbanism, New York, automobile culture, with these paintings?
In one nook, there’s a grouping of cityscape paintings of cars and diners and old homes and streets and small businesses and country Chevrolets that are coming and going and the dust is California, and Sacramento, if you keeping driving, is just around the bend. If you walk around the whole room, it’s like you’re driving up to Sacramento getting all of these sights and snapshots of all the things you see from the car for a second and then remember and then forget soon thereafter. This car-ride effect is the most successful curatorial choice in the show.
On the flipside, Duane Hanson’s “Drug Addict” is the worst-placed object in the show. It used to be placed downstairs on the first floor of the YUAG around a corner, and you used to just turn around and walk into it and that was very surprising. Here he seems denied the agency of surprise. Still, the pain and the shock and the reality of his pain are probably somehow better amplified by the white walls of this museum space than on the street, as just another object.
The last painting I want to talk about is the gigantic face of “Giummo” by Ben Schonzeit, who also painted the tangerines. Giummo is a guy who looks like an aging rock star with black curly hair and big aviator glasses for reading. You can see the black stubble on his beard, and half his face is cast into shadow — it’s a profile perdu and it’s so sad because he’s looking at us but he’s not looking at us. And his nose is red and burned from too much sun, and his skin feels oily and aged and he’s like plastic or cellophane.
You want to reach out and touch him, but when you do, you don’t get anything back. And that darkness is obviously enhanced or lost by his mass of hair and he’s looming like the blurry Richter painting of the photo of Holger Friedrich but he isn’t because isn’t he real?
When I first entered the Yale School of Architecture’s newest exhibit, “Everything Loose Will Land,” I was confronted by a triangular fortress, 20 feet wide on each leg with rectangular portals, towering up to the ceiling amidst dangling neon shapes. The structure, created by Bruce Nauman in 1980, is aptly named “Untitled (Equilateral Triangle).” I can’t help but wonder if it’s a peace offering from a delegation of geometry-happy alien invaders. Regardless, it’s landed bravely in this 1970s Los Angeles architecture exhibit, inviting us futuristic trespassers to step inside.
“Everything Loose Will Land,” originally displayed by the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House in Los Angeles, is inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s declaration, “Tip the world on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.” The exhibit explores the relationship between postmodern art and architecture as a function of changing cultural drama, a relationship somewhat as centerless as Wright’s interpretation of the city. Still, the exhibit attempts to ground itself with four themed sections clustered around the “Untitled” structure: “Procedures,” “Users,” “Environment” and “Lumens.”
Don’t attempt to tour the pieces without doing some background reading — curator and UCLA professor Sylvia Lavin provides a thorough and necessary explanation of the exhibit’s themes. “Procedures” showcases the new methods of producing architecture developed in the 1970s through the simplification of building tools, allowing for an increased unity between architecture and art. “Users” transforms the nature of architecture by actively participating in architecture, often using buildings as tools. “Environments” incorporates a study of factors such as limited space, pollution and noise. Finally, “Lumens” deals with the influx of contemporary lighting and its effect on how the surrounding environment, art and architecture were perceived.
This is less an architecture exhibit than a contemplation of the ideas that built 1970s Los Angeles. Sometimes, the relevancy of the pieces to architecture was more obvious, as in the model of an Ajax Car Rental station built by Peter de Bretteville and Keith Godard, and a 2–4–6–8 House Kit, instructions tucked neatly into a small box on how to assemble a simple home. In these pieces, the simplification of tools and procedures, and the desire of users to be more active in the production and manipulation of architecture, manifest clearly as contributors to 1970s Los Angeles design culture.
Other pieces struggled to fit so cleanly within the confines of the exhibition’s thematic limits. In the “Users” section, I found myself face to face with Robert Mangurian’s “Portable Person,” an amalgamation of a human skeleton X-ray with various wires, chips and technological gizmos. Fascinating, yes — Mangurian incorporates everything from an antenna to improve communication to life-support features. A computer chip appears to rest where the skeleton’s heart ought to be. But the relationship between the “Portable Person” and architecture is a stretch, even with the bridge of the “Users” theme. In the “Environments” section, uncomfortable images of “17 Beautiful Men Taking a Shower” leapt away from otherwise obviously architecturally relevant pieces. The influence of cultural growth on art and the Los Angeles population was clearly portrayed, but the connection between these developments and architecture sometimes left me grasping. “Everything Loose Will Land” takes a leap of faith between its thematic content and Los Angeles architecture itself.
Just before I entered “Lumens,” the final section of the exhibit, I noticed a slideshow of projected images against the back wall. The West Coast seized me, a Midwestern girl who had never seen the Pacific Ocean. I let 1970s Los Angeles wash over me in snapshots: highway congestion, skyscrapers, a man sleeping, smog, birds above the ocean, tunnels, palm trees, more traffic, natives surfing, an advertisement for a McDonalds’ Quarter Pounder. At last, I felt at ease in the exhibit. I had fallen loose from New Haven, tumbling past blueprints and posters and cardboard chairs, and landed in this strange town called Los Angeles, where perhaps, for a few moments, I could belong.
“Everything Loose Will Land” is daring and self-assured. The thematic premise is initially perplexing, but the cultural awareness in the gallery is gripping. I came away from the exhibit less with a sense of 1970s Los Angeles architecture than with a sense of 1970s Los Angeles entrepreneurship in a fiercely energetic, technological age. The exhibit never promised clarity, or cohesion — only landing. To find peace in this strange world of yesteryear is quite the destination.
Walking into the School of Art’s 32 Edgewood gallery felt like walking into a refuge from the busy world that characterizes life at Yale and New Haven. Alone in the space, I was at first overwhelmed by the utter silence and sense of serenity that filled the room. Yet, when my attention turned towards the paintings that conform Francesco Clemente’s exhibit “Clemente>Brazil>Yale,” I quickly realized that the peaceful space was the perfect medium to grant each unsettling image the freedom to tell its story. The exhibition, curated by School of Art Dean Robert Storr, holds thirty paintings that Clemente, a native Italian, created from 2006 to 2008 during several trips to Brazil. The works are hung around the room so that each larger piece is followed by two smaller paintings, part of Clemente’s “Actors of Terreiro” series.
Though the paintings are united by their source of inspiration, as someone who does not have a great understanding of Brazilian culture, I did not find that influence to be extremely evident. But it is clear that many of the works commented on religion, specifically through references to Brazil’s Roman Catholicism. “Father” depicts a pallid, small man dwarfed by a papal hat; he looks almost inanimate with his big eyes and tongue lolling out of his mouth. The painting’s focus is on the ornately decorated hat. With its aesthetic beauty, the painting goes beyond the typical interpretation of this-painting-is-accusing-the-church-of-being-vapid protestant-reformation-2000. Another work, “New Paestum,” also critiques the Church in a glaring way by portraying arms coming out of unidentifiable bodies under priestly robes.
Another motif that seemed to unify the pieces was weaving. (The Directed Studies junkie in me had to note that shout out to Jane Levin during her first lecture.) Different ropes, thread or interwoven patterns appeared through almost all of the paintings, suggesting an underlying interconnected narrative between the exhibition as a whole.
One piece, though inconspicuously named “Actors of Terreiro XV,” shows Clemente interest in sexual exploration (that’s why he chose Yale). Depicting a nondescript body part that looked both phallic and a bit like a vagina, the painting definitely draws the eye. I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out what was going on. Though my conclusion was indecisive, you definitely don’t want to miss out on a chance to figure out the mystery yourself.
The most intriguing painting, “The Hunter’s Dream,” portrays a needle and thread going through a button. This close-up, pink image is ambiguous at first, and suggests a sexual undertone. The idea of a threaded button, beyond evoking images of penetration, brings about a sense of nostalgia for domesticity, indicating that the hunter misses home for more than one reason.
As Clemente is a celebrated international painter living in New York, I definitely wondered why he would choose to locate his first substantial exhibit in the United States in New Haven. That being said, while it is here, I highly recommend taking advantage of the opportunity to enter the world his paintings create. The exhibition, which runs through June 2, is a must-see for Yalies and New Haveners alike.
A crown jewel sits unassumingly among missionaries’ journal entries, aging photographs, handwritten letters to midlevel political officials and books neither particularly old nor rare: one of the 100 volumes of the Lhasa Kangyur, a translation of the Buddha’s teachings, that comprises half of the Tibetan Buddhist canon.
The Kangyur belongs to the “Himalayan Collection at Yale,” an exhibit at the Sterling Memorial Library that showcases a sample of the University’s vast Himalayan archives, drawing from the holdings of the Sterling Memorial Library, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Divinity School, the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, the University Art Gallery, the Center for British Art and the Peabody Museum of Natural History. The display demonstrates the gap in understanding between the Western world and the Himalayas. The most telling example is the Lhasa Kanyur.
The 14th Dalai Lama had this 100-volume copy of the Kangyur printed expressly for Yale at the request of Yale’s Himalayan Collection curator Wesley Needham, who cultivated a relationship with the Dalai Lama through written correspondence in the 1940s. Needham is prominently featured in the Himalayan Collection; he made expanding and explaining the University’s Himalayan archives his life’s work.
The Kangyur arrived at Yale in February of 1950, packed in crates bound in yak skins, stitched together with rawhide. A horse caravan carried the precious texts from Lhasa to New Delhi, 1,000 miles across mountain ranges. A freight ship from Calcutta brought the volumes across the ocean to New Haven.
The pages of the Kangyur, printed in the Wylie Tibetan script and embellished with depictions of the Buddha, is often stained, either purposefully with decorative henna, or accidentally because the bright orange cloth swaddling the volume has bled artfully onto its pages. Regardless of its origin, the watercolor effect on the paper calls to mind an ancient treasure map whose edges have been seared. The Kangyur is an export of the Himalayas of the Western imagination, the remote world where temples are tucked into the sides of mountains that pierce the sky.
The Himalayan Collection shows that the East’s mythicized portrait of the West also has some grounding in truth; this picture, though, is less flattering. To share the Buddha’s teachings in America, the Dalai Lama sent Yale these hand-printed volumes carried by caravan across continents; to convert Nepalese peoples, Christian missionaries spread the word of God through brightly colored comic books telling simplified stories of Jesus’ deeds.
The two Nepali-language graphic novels on display are artifacts from the Divinity School’s Himalayan Mission Archives, the largest such collection in the world. Other artifacts in this portion of the exhibit include missionaries’ memoirs about their Himalayan campaigns with vaguely offensive titles such as “Better than the Witch Doctor.”
The Himalayan Collection makes it clear that not only literal mountains separated the peoples of the Himalayas from those of the West in the 19th century. Often Western climbers still get lost in those mountains, surprised to find themselves unprepared to ascend the Himalayan slopes.
Leaning perilously over the display at the Yale University Art Gallery, the boy wasn’t quite sure what to make of artist Mona Hatoum’s quaint crystal orbs.
“They’re grenades, honey,” his father said perplexedly, reading the description of Hatoum’s piece, titled “Nature morte aux grenades.” Upon closer inspection, what I had imaginatively taken for pomegranates protruding wartlike across a hospital gurney proved, indeed, to be grenades. The three of us clustered awkwardly on one side of the gurney, staring expectantly at the little bulbs as though waiting for them to either explode or explain themselves. Silence ensued as before.
A guard nearby, coming suddenly to life from totemic stillness, shifted towards our company. I glanced at the child’s fingers, which had probably strayed too close for comfort and were now to be chastised. Instinctively, I stepped back, recalling with unfortunate clarity being criticized for touching museum pieces I ought not to be touching. We fixed ourselves like the grenades on the gurney, willing our bodies safely away from the art. It was the guard, though, of ursine proportions and with hands the size of Frisbees, who seemed more likely to crush the collection.
But when he spoke, it was not, as I had thought, to usher us aside. “This is one of my favorite pieces,” the guard said. We looked at him, taken aback, as he proceeded to explain the work and the artist’s history. He was, clearly, no tour guide. Still, he continued as though he were, animatedly evincing a knowledge of the art more encyclopedic than I would ever have imagined from one whose task it was to stand by and secure art, not study it. First fruit had become firearm, and now security guard had become scholar. The guard’s name, he said, was Jerry Gray.
***
After 14 years of renovations, the Yale University Art Gallery reopened in December 2012 to fanfare from visitors and journalists alike. Heralded as “magnificent” by The New Yorker, the YUAG was praised for its balanced collections that feature not only marquee pieces like Van Gogh’s “Night Café,” but also smaller, unexpected works by artists both famous and forgotten.
The YUAG’s attention to the small and unexpected filters down to its security agents. Although Gray is a notable example, he isn’t the only guard who has taken more than a passing interest in the gallery’s offerings.
Visitors to the gallery have noticed the guards’ excitement. One wrote in a letter, “Typically, the security in museums big and small [is] more like the statuary they protect. The enthusiasm I felt when I left your museum was due in no small part to their enthusiasm for the museum, too.”
Gray insists he doesn’t know as much as I thought he did about the gallery. He says he’s studied a bit (“I did a little reading”), favors contemporary art (“Sol LeWitt and Pollock”) but also goes for the classical — in other words, his is an interest no more remarkable than that of your average amateur, he seemed to assert. Still, it’s hard to imagine LeWitt or Pollock preferring a viewer told by textbooks and lecturers to venerate their works over one like Gray, who has come to art of his own accord.
“People are floored that I know things about the art,” he said, with a touch of pride. “But if I’m interested in it, I’m going to learn about it.” I pointed out that not everybody takes such initiative, and he shrugged. “That’s just how I am.”
Despite his familiarity with many of the works in the gallery, Gray claims that he doesn’t have a favorite piece. Shaking his head, chuckling and shrugging his massive shoulders, he said that he loves “all the art.”
“I love working in the Trumbull gallery,” he conceded. When I asked why, he widened his eyes, surprised that I didn’t know. Gray explained that Trumbull, a Harvard graduate, agreed to display his collection in the Yale galleries only under the condition that he and his wife be buried beneath his portrait of George Washington. It’s one story among many Gray likes to share with the people passing through his watch.
Gray might be oversized, but there is no doubt that he is exactly where he belongs at the YUAG. Towering sturdily over his painted wards, he could be art himself, an ambitious artist’s exploration of the majesty in bulk and brawn. A sculptor might labor to make his face as full and self-assured as in life, to painstakingly chisel the manifold pleats and tucks in his cheeks that deepen when his lips let loose a smile.
Gray is the kind of person around whom you feel either very safe or very scared, depending on your side of the law. As important as art has become to him, apparent in his largeness is that something else has held his heart far more tightly, and for far longer: football.
***
Gray has spent the past 17 of his 45 years coaching football. Next year, he is poised to be the defensive coordinator of a new minor league pro team in Connecticut, the New Haven Venom. The day after he interviewed for the job, he was hired.
“I am very, very good at coaching,” Gray said. It wasn’t bragging, just affirmation of what he knew to be fact. His tone left no room for doubt. “I’m going to coach till the day I die.”
It’s a passion that has been fermenting since he started playing at the age of 5. Football became his “saving grace,” a place of comfort from a host of anger management problems. Gray’s father, a former football player himself, encouraged his burgeoning interest in the sport.
That he was right for athletics became immediately apparent. As a child, he once “tackled a high school guy who weighed 270 pounds.” Unable to stop myself, I asked him how much he weighed at the time, as by his own admission, Gray was “always big.”
“I wasn’t 270, I know that,” he responded grimly. “But I went at him hard. … I had no fear.”
In Gray’s adolescence, a number of coaches noticed his talent. The first, Ron Carbone, a high school coach from Hamden, recruited him when he was only 12. Big and fast, Gray made an impression on each who saw him play.
He seemed disarmingly nonchalant about the injuries he received on the field. “My mother was fine with football. It was actually my father that freaked out” about Gray’s bruises and bumps, he said. In high school, he rolled his ankle. Then, playing defensive lineman for Western Connecticut State College, he broke his neck, a fact he revealed only after I pressed him further. He broke his neck — then continued to play.
“I lay on the ground, screaming,” recalled Gray. “I knew my career was over. Then I got up, said nothing to the coach, and kept playing.”
The accident left the entire right side of his body partially paralyzed, and Gray, unwilling to acknowledge the end, became a left-handed player. “Luckily, I’m [naturally] left-handed,” he said, although his resulting condition would take its toll on him by the end of the season. Gray explained that he had gone to college solely to play football as the only freshman starter in New England’s Independent Division 3. In the permanent, jarring absence of the sport that had first saved him, then ruined him, he lost all motivation to finish his education. Gray came home and went to work at a dry cleaner’s.
***
In May 2011, after Gray crossed the stage at Albertus Magnus College to receive his diploma, the first thing he did was hold it skyward. Absent from the audience was his father, who had died of cancer four years ago.
“That moment changed everything,” he said. “It destroyed me.”
After his stint at the dry cleaner’s, Gray had been flitting between jobs, eventually entering the security business when a friend pointed out his size would be an asset in that industry. Still, he recalled a promise to his father to complete his education. Eleven months after his father’s death, Gray enrolled at Albertus Magnus. He received his associate’s degree in business management from its New Dimensions program, which allows students to simultaneously pursue their careers and attend school.
He chose to continue his studies at Arizona State University last year, but had to return home after developing soft-tissue sarcoma, losing the entire left side of his chest in surgery. Back in New Haven, he sought work in security once more, learning about an opening at the YUAG. Gray impressed with his friendliness and excitement for the job, said Joshua Ramirez, his current supervisor, and he was hired.
In the six months Gray has been at the YUAG, his excitement has only bloomed. “People tell me, ‘You should be a tour guide!’”, he said, though he has no plans to apply.
Gray doesn’t think his position at the New Haven Venom will require him leaving the gallery, “but if it does, it does,” he said. Then he paused, seeming to reconsider. “I don’t know. … I like it here. I like everything about this place.”
***
Ramirez said his staff dissuades the guards from overstepping their responsibilities as security agents. “We don’t want to infringe on our [visitors’] experience,” he added.
But visiting an art gallery is in itself an infringement — on expectations. The experience of viewing art is necessarily a displacement of assumptions about color, perspective, form, composition. Verisimilitude, even in the exact sketch of a subject’s plump form or a gnarled tree branch, is only ever a coincidence. If in art audiences sought only the quotidian, the seen and foreseen, creators might set down their tools; real life would suffice. Art succeeds most when it challenges us.
At the YUAG, the gauntlet has been thrown. There, art is a crystal pomegranate that becomes a grenade. From 9:15 a.m. to 5 p.m., art is a security guard named Jerry Gray who becomes a storyteller.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh needed to crane her neck to such a degree to see her husband, Charles, that she could have been looking up at an airplane. But their relationship was such that only his height, a towering 6-foot-3, would prevent them from seeing perpetually eye to eye.
As it happened, Anne was not to spend much of her time staring upwards, but rather forwards from her seat beside Charles in the sky. Evident in “Aviators, Authors, and Environmentalists: Exploring the Lindbergh Papers and Photographs in Manuscripts & Archives” at the Sterling Memorial Library is that, for both members of this cockpit couple, there was no higher calling than flight.
Glancing over the exhibit, which celebrates the formal opening to research of the Lindberghs’ papers, feels a tad like rummaging through a dry file cabinet. On display is a smattering of maps, missives, postcards and photographs that chart the daring duo’s legacies beyond Charles’ famed solo trans-Atlantic flight from New York to Paris on the Spirit of St. Louis in 1927 — but it is a sterile smattering that leaves no indication of the dramatic events surrounding their relationship. Where the exhibit succeeds, however, is in presenting selections that make the viewer feel as though she is unpacking the overflowing contents of a traveler’s lovelorn suitcase.
Charles was as much an explorer of the skies as of the frontiers of innovation. A graduate of the engineering school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Charles designed and patented a “perfusion pump” that maintains organs’ viability outside the body. Below that structure, reminiscent of an orchid plant, is another meticulously annotated sketch for a novel method to collect atmospheric microorganisms. Also displayed are records of Charles’ contributions to the military, which included helping modernize the country’s air capabilities and launch the space program.
The two were no strangers to fan mail. Immediately to your left upon entering are what is surely only a sampling of postcards from earnest Japanese youth, each praising the Lindberghs for completing their pioneering flight to East Asia, which concluded with volunteering at the Chinese Flood Relief Commission. “My dearest Lindy!” reads one, set in curlicued handwriting that recalls the loop-de-loops of a stunt plane. “I called to you loudly from my window. But you passed at full speed to Tokyo,” the writer concludes, miffed like any teenager today at his favorite celebrity’s unintentional slight. Other letters to the couple from statesmen, first ladies, fellow authors and artists makes clear their stature as the eminent explorers of the day.
Though it seems they spent their lives primarily in the sky, the couple remained committed to the earth from which they had taken off. Charles became a passionate advocate for environmental protection and conservation, working especially on behalf of endangered species. Personal photographs of their travels also showcase their respect for the riches of their surroundings. Gazing upon an image of a deep and fractured canyon, one almost wishes the photographer had turned the lens on herself instead to capture what could have been the canyon of her own mouth, agape with awe.
In her writings, Anne also made the natural world a focus. Charles wrote as well, going on to win the Pulitzer Prize for “The Spirit of St. Louis,” his autobiographical account of the trip. Not to be outdone, Anne authored 14 books, as well as numerous articles and poems.
Missing from the papers, however, is evidence of the intimately personal. There are no love letters, no miss-you notes, no hastily scribbled reminders to take out the trash or buy broccoli — in other words, no hallmarks of a life where your feet never leave the ground for longer than it takes to leap.
And little is said of how the two first met, or of the individuals beyond their achievements. We are told only that Anne Spencer Morrow, daughter of the American ambassador to Mexico, married Charles Augustus Lindbergh in 1929. If there is a story here, it is told in snapshots: In one photograph, the couple is shown seated and smiling with their children, chuckling as though pleasantly surprised to find themselves on solid ground. A stark image of Anne in silhouette, writing “North to the Orient” in 1935, speaks volumes of her character without a single word. Seeing her scribbling, solitary at her desk, we remember what her beguiling dimples have induced us to forget: how alone she was as a female explorer in the mid-20th century, despite her husband’s company.
If she ever felt lonely, however, it’s not evident from the exhibit. There are comparatively few photographs of Charles and Anne on their own — side by side seemed to be their natural state. What is evident, despite a pronounced lack of emotive tropes, is that their relationship was one in which Anne was probably never lonely for long. You don’t need to send love letters to each other if you’re always together — rooted on the ground, through takeoffs rickety and smooth, and soaring through the boundless air.
