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Miss Rockaway Armada

I was at Mass MoCA over the weekend and very excited to be there.  But the shows, and this is no knock on the shows, were really dire, almost hopeless, really.  Video installations of high rises and factories in China (Eastern Standard) and heartbreaking evidence of the impact of warfare and pollution on the environment (Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape).  So, it was a relief to finally stumble on Being Here is Better than Wishing We’d Stayed, an installation by the Miss Rockaway Armada collective.  It was inspiring to see something--anything--that people came together and made, especially something with such a plapable sweetness.  Visitors could add typewritten notes or drawings; while I toured through the space an older woman was sitting at a table drawing, making occasional wisecracks to no one in particular, and humming along with the tinny music that played at random intervals.

Take a gallery tour:

Wack!

I've been loving Wack!: Art and the Feminist Revolution by Cornelia Butler so much I can barely stand it.  It's perfectly organized: pictures, biography, essays.  The biographical section is a different kind of paper so you can look at the whole big, thick, thing and land in more or less the right place.  It's a great mix of artists and does it a good job of trying to represent the performance work that's so central (for me anyway) to the intersection of feminism and art.  It's not just the usual suspects -- lots of South American artists I hadn't heard of, inspiring textile stuff, cool looking film.  It made me feel all hungry.  I want to own it.  Love Catherine Lord's essay.

Bonus: exhibit website.

Glitter and Doom

Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920’s, a catalogue for a Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition, was literally staring at me from the new arrivals shelf when I walked into my library this afternoon. The portraits, by artists such as George Grosz, Max Beckmann and lesser-knowns Christian Schad and Otto Dix date from the short-lived reign of the Weimar Republic. The images are completely arresting, with elongated features, Diane Arbus-like attention to weirdness, and explosions of color.