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10 articles, 2016-02-12 06:00 1 Accessory of the Day: New York Fashion Week, Fall 2016 For fall, Creatures of the Wind designers Shane Gabier and Christopher Peters collaborated with jeweler Pamela Love. 2016-02-12 05:41:52 923Bytes wwd.com 2 Primark to Open Six Stores in U. S. in 2016 The retailer is eyeing mainly suburban locations after opening on downtown Boston. 2016-02-12 05:31:52 2KB wwd.com 3 ecdm architectes completes new city hall for bezons ecdm architectes has completed the new city hall of bezons, a commune in the suburbs of northwestern paris. 2016-02-12 04:04:38 2KB www.designboom.com 4 “Agitprop!” at the Brooklyn Museum: Waves of Dissent, Legacies of Change The Brooklyn Museum's Agitprop! (through Aug. 7) explores the many ways that artists directly address issues of public concern. Opening last December, works will be added to Agitprop! twice in its nine-month run, once in February and again in April, to reflect how multiple generations of artists have tackled the same concerns over time. 2 10KB www.artinamericamagazine.com 5 Camille Henrot Entering French-born Camille Henrot's first solo show at Metro Pictures, I recalled a vivid early memory: my first time hearing an answering machine. I stood in the kitchen in the late '80s, clutching our outdated avocado-colored rotary phone, while my mother dialed my grandparents. Instead of answering my chipper greeting, the canned voice on the line recited the leave-a-message-at-the-beep spiel. It's not them! What's happening? I shrieked, my mother confused until she grabbed the receiver and laughed. 2 4KB www.artinamericamagazine.com 6 Art in America The Chinese-American artist Martin Wong (1945-1999) celebrated both his cultural heritage and New York's gritty Lower East Side in paintings rife with firemen, convicts, pop icons, graffitied walls and ASL hand signs. 2 15KB www.artinamericamagazine.com 7 Evelyn Statsinger Scattered throughout art history are unconventional talents who don’t fit easily into standard narratives and categories, and thus don’t receive the recognition that they deserve. One such outlier is 88-year-old Chicago artist Evelyn Statsinger, who has had some taste of national attention during her long, still-active career but should be much better known. 2 4KB www.artinamericamagazine.com 8 Review: ‘Fitoor’ Enlists Dickens to Tell a Hindi Love Story Based on “Great Expectations,” the film, directed by Abhishek Kapoor, is more Bollywood than Charles Dickens. 2016-02-11 00:00:00 2KB www.nytimes.com 9 An Adam Pendleton Exhibition Will Open in New Orleans The city’s Contemporary Arts Center is devoting all three floors of its galleries to the show, “Adam Pendleton: Becoming Imperceptible.” 2016-02-11 00:00:00 6KB www.nytimes.com 10 Elizabeth Dee Gallery to Leave Chelsea for Two-Story Harlem Space An installation view of works by Julia Wachtel from her 2015 show at Elizabeth Dee's Chelsea location.COURTESY ELIZABETH DEE Chelsea's Elizabeth Dee Gallery 2016-02-12 03:31:48 1KB www.artnews.com Articles

10 articles, 2016-02-12 06:00

1 Accessory of the Day: New York Fashion Week, Fall 2016 With a show entitled “Knife,” Creatures of the Wind designers Shane Gabier and Christopher Peters had modernism on their minds — especially related to even the most ordinary items. Here, they collaborated with jeweler Pamela Love on this torque-style choker with a blade pendant. 2016-02-12 05:41:52 Roxanne Robinson

2 Primark to Open Six Stores in U. S. in 2016 It’s been roughly six months since Primark opened its first U. S. store in Boston’s Downtown Crossing, but the retailer has plans for an aggressive Northeast rollout that includes opening its first stores in Staten Island and Freehold, N. J. Although the Boston flagship is in the historic, former Filene’s building, Primark has indicated it will pursue dense suburban locations for expansion, rather than downtown spots. The company will open six stores this year, including two more in Massachusetts (Burlington and South Shore Plaza malls), in Danbury, Conn., and Willow Grove, Pa. In 2017, it will open in American Dream, the megamall under construction in East Rutherford, N. J., said Jose Luis Martinez de Larramendi, president of Primark’s U. S. Corp. The firm operates a U. S. distribution center in Pennsylvania. Martinez de Larramendi, who has run the fast-fashion giant’s businesses in Spain and Portugal, was in Boston Tuesday at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design to award two fashion scholarships. Liz LaCava, one of the winners, will intern at Primark’s Dublin headquarters this summer. The retailer has struck a yearlong partnership with the college, which included designing windows for the Downtown Crossing store opening, and a portfolio challenge that asked students to come up with fast-fashion interpretations of runway, street and celebrity trends. Throughout the semester, Primark’s team in Dublin gave regular critiques via video conference, said Sondra Grace, chair of MassArt’s fashion design department. This story first appeared in the February 12, 2016 issue of WWD. Subscribe Today. Primark has similar partnerships with fashion schools in Ireland, Spain and Germany. 2016-02-12 05:31:52 Katherine Bowers

3 ecdm architectes completes new city hall for bezons ecdm arranges city hall in paris suburb around four-storey atrium all images by benoit fougeirol ecdm architectes has completed the new city hall of bezons, a commune in the suburbs of northwestern paris. set back from the adjacent avenue, the building’s most noticeable external feature is a dramatic cantilever, which creates a sheltered public space below. this architectural statement serves as a bold introduction to visitors arriving from the nearby river seine. the building forms part of the region’s ongoing regeneration, which will eventually include a host of new businesses and residential properties. the internal program is arranged around a central atrium that extends upwards, from the ground floor to the ceiling. staircases and pathways traverse this void, connecting the offices on different levels. vegetation is found at the lowermost storey with planted trees and other greenery. from below, the pathways display their red underside, providing a vibrant splash of color against the more restrained materiality of the concrete and glass walls. circulation routes connect the various offices on different levels vegetation is found at the lowermost storey with planted trees and other greenery from below, the pathways display their red underside, providing a vibrant splash of color the building will form an important part of the region’s ongoing regeneration the new city hall was completed in late 2015 2016-02-12 04:04:38 Philip Stevens I Designboom

4 “Agitprop!” at the Brooklyn Museum: Waves of Dissent, Legacies of Change Otabenga Jones & Associates: The People's Plate Mural , 2015, acrylic on wall, 96 by 36 feet. © Otabenga Jones & Associates. Photo Lawndale Art Center. Advertisement The Brooklyn Museum's "Agitprop! " (through Aug. 7) explores the many ways that artists directly address issues of public concern. A term originated in Soviet Russia, "agitprop" is an amalgamation of the words "agitation" and "propaganda"—the desired effect of the medium's politically charged messages. Opening last December, works will be added to "Agitprop! " twice in its nine-month run, once in February and again in April, to reflect how multiple generations of artists have tackled the same concerns over time. Organized by the museum's Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, "Agitprop! " presents work by approximately 50 artists and collaborative groups in total that tackle reproductive rights, mass incarceration, war and imperialism, racial justice, economic equity, and issues of representation and visibility. Graphics and film clips from 1930s Russia and Mexico, as well as photographs, drawings and prints documenting the actions of the NAACP, WPA and women suffragettes in the United States, offer historical counterpoints to a selection of works by international artists over the past 30 years, a period roughly corresponding to third-wave feminism. Artists in each "wave" of the exhibition choose their "successors"—the artists whose works will join the show in the following iterations. The first round comprises 20 participants. Dyke Action Machine! (DAM!), Otabenga Jones and Associates, and Coco Fusco, for example, carry on the legacies of LGTBI activism, black radicalism and post-colonialism, respectively, and will pass these torches to a new set of artists in the following versions of the exhibition. In the first wave of "Agitprop," two posters by Dyke Action Machine! (DAM!) duo Carrie Moyer and Sue Schaffner are wheat-pasted directly on the walls of the museum; they were originally presented in the streets of New York and San Francisco. Aligned with the AIDS and LGBTI activism of groups like ACT UP and Queer Nation, DAM! updated advertisements with lesbian content as a form of culture jamming. In response to Calvin Klein's advertisements from 1992 that featured then vocally homophobic Mark Wahlberg (who publicly apologized for his bigotry in 2014) in the brand's underwear, DAM! recast the ad with lesbians to advocate for dyke visibility. Later in the '90s, the collective addressed issues of gay assimilation into mainstream society through marriage and military service with the campaign Lesbian Americans: Don't Sell Out (1998), featuring images of lesbians against the backdrop of the American flag, positioning them as the embodiment of the American revolutionary spirit. DAM! chose LJ Roberts as the inheritor of their legacy for the second iteration of "Agitprop!," opening Feb. 17. "We're living in a time where there's a huge premium put on ambiguity, because it's market-friendly. There's something really refreshing in how direct and explicit LJ's work is in its message," said DAM!'s Carrie Moyer. Roberts, who first saw DAM!'s work 16 years ago at age 20, will show Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves (2011). Part of a series of protest banners the artist created for street demonstrations, the work features an image culled from Brooklyn's Lesbian Herstory Archives woven into the fabric of a blanket. For the third wave, opening Apr. 6, Roberts chose the 2016 edition of Play Smart Trading Cards , a series of baseball cards featuring the work of artists paired with condoms and lube in "Prevention Packs" that encourage safer sex practices. The series is distributed by Visual AIDS , an organization that raises awareness about HIV/AIDS through art, advocates for seropositive artists and preserves the legacy of those who have passed. Redubbed "pleasure packs" by Play Smart artist Jessica Whitbread, the 2016 edition features women artist-activists as creators, models and producers. Along with the artworks, the packs include Black Dragon gloves which can be made into dental dams. Cards will feature the work of Whitbread and Kia Labeija, as well as images of artist Beverly Bland Boydston III, Reina Gossett and Sarinya Srisakul in pin-up style portraits. Roberts said, "DAM! did so much work to increase the visibility of women who weren't airbrushed media ideas. I wanted to bring it back to the streets with the Play Smart Trading Cards. Women are still so absent from dialogue of HIV and AIDS. The packet centers on women and accommodates different sexualities, genders and physiques. " DAM!'s Sue Schaffner contributes to the project as a photographer. The link between Dyke Action Machine, LJ Roberts and the artists contributing to Visual AIDS's Play Smart Trading Cards is but one wave of momentum that moves through the exhibition. The Houston-based collective Otabenga Jones and Associates were inspired by the Black Panther's Free Breakfast program, which provided school children in Oakland a meal each morning from 1969 to 1975, to produce a takeaway printed with Panther recipes. Named for Ota Benga, the Mbuti man displayed in the monkey house of the Bronx Zoo in 1904 as a so-called anthropological "missing link," the artist collaborative works across mediums. Their multipronged initiative The People's Plate , organized for Houston communities through the Lawndale Art Center in 2014, included a mural, lunch boxes for school children and public programs aimed at teaching healthy eating habits and expanding food options for black children in urban environments. Otabenga Jones's project echoes others such as Nicole Caruth's With Food in Mind , an organization producing pop-up events in New York City that address childhood obesity and decreased arts education in low-income communities of color, and artist Simone Leigh's Free People's Medical Clinic , which reinstituted the Black Panthers community healthcare initiative in the Weeksville neighborhood of Brooklyn last year. Otabenga Jones and Associates considered the pamphlet medium and its historical link to Black Radical literature when they chose Shani Peters to exhibit in the second wave of "Agitprop! " In 2011, Peters distributed flyers with empowering messages—from figures such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X—in Harlem, the Bronx and Brooklyn. Flyers from Peters's project, entitled We Promote Knowledge and Love , will be available on Feb. 17. In the third wave of the show the collective Weird Allan Kaprow will take the stage with their project Karaoking the Museum. Viewers can sing along with songs such as TLC's "Waterfalls" with new lyrics like "Don't go taking continents, I know that your gonna keep expanding and taking it all, but I think you're going too far," targeting imperialism in American landscape paintings such as the Albert Bierstadt work in the Brooklyn Museum's collection. Coco Fusco is represented in the first wave by a series of etchings made in 2012 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of her collaborative performance with Guillermo Gomez- Peña, Couple in the Cage: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992). In the original performance, Fusco and Gomez-Peña enacted the ethnographic displays of natural history museums and human zoos in their roles as the primitive inhabitants of a newly "discovered" island. The etchings, made in the style of 19th-century political cartoons, illustrate the responses the performance elicited from audiences, which speak to the pervasive logic of colonial systems still in effect. Picking up on themes of imprisonment in the work, Fusco chose Laurie Jo Reynolds, best known for Tamms Ten Year , a grassroots advocacy project that helped shut down Chicago's Tamms Correctional Center in 2013. For the show's second wave, Reynolds will exhibit five cards that tap into Adrian Piper's living legacy. Where Piper began handing out her Calling Cards (identifying herself as black and objecting to offensive remarks) in the mid-1980s to alert white Americans to their insidious displays of racism, Reynolds's Calling Cards (2009-ongoing) speak to issues of disclosure for those struggling with the stigmatization of sex offenses. Reynolds selected artist Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, a co-founder of the Puerto Rican discursive cultural production hub Beta-Local, for the exhibition's third round. Muñoz will show her film La cabeza mató a todos (The Head Killed Everybody) , 2014, in which the artist and Michelle Nonó, an expert on the medicinal plants of Puerto Rico, perform an incantation and corresponding ritual to "destroy the war machine" and restore the island of Vieques, used as a training site by the U. S. Navy from 1941 to 2003. Employing a magic spell, Muñoz finds camaraderie with other projects that experiment with agency and activate the human will for change. Together, the generational waves that flow through the Brooklyn Museum's "Agitprop! " suggest that there is no such thing as independent action, as the art world and the Western valuation of the individual artist-leader would have us believe. Instead, "Agitprop! " offers a model in which change is made through the concerted efforts of a group of people working together across places and over time. 2 by A.i.A. Editors by Stuart Comer by Jonathan Weinberg by Risa Puleo

5 Camille Henrot Camille Henrot: Bad Dad & Beyond , 2015, 3-D resin print with video and telephone components, 44 by 20 by 9 inches; at Metro Pictures. Advertisement Entering French-born Camille Henrot’s first solo show at Metro Pictures, I recalled a vivid early memory: my first time hearing an answering machine. I stood in the kitchen in the late ’80s, clutching our outdated avocado-colored rotary phone, while my mother dialed my grandparents. Instead of answering my chipper greeting, the canned voice on the line recited the leave-a- message-at-the-beep spiel. “It’s not them! What’s happening?” I shrieked, my mother confused until she grabbed the receiver and laughed. The strength of those fleeting feelings—frustration and alienation in the face of technological mediation—remains clear to this day. Henrot’s nine new telephone sculptures, created in collaboration with writer Jacob Bromberg, evoke a similar sentiment. The mostly wall-mounted corded objects, made of 3-D-printed resin or nylon polyamide and incorporating sound and video components, assume retro or absurd shapes: a teal phone with triangular orange buttons, a keypad in the shape of an ear, even an oversize receiver resembling a purple dildo. Listeners respond to a series of prompts on subjects including career goals and their bank account numbers. All the button pushing leads to dead ends. As with many of Henrot’s crowd-pleasing works, the phones’ nostalgic appearance belies a larger inquiry into questions of control and shifting social relations. Henrot’s previous works, such as her 2013 Venice Biennale Silver Lion-winning video Grosse Fatigue , have examined systems of scientific knowledge and creation, as well as legacies of colonialism. The successful artist has been criticized, however, for her treatment of “otherness.” Recently, e-flux’s digital forum “Conversations” hosted a debate about her remarks in a September Guardian interview, in which she called the choreography of rap superstar Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” video (the subject of a recent series of drawings) “shamanistic and entrancing,” adding, “She is challenging us to embrace our primal nature.” This exhibition focused mostly on the thorny subject of patriarchy via the gendered patterns of service labor. Several of the phone sculptures provide faux-self-help lines on topics such as male infidelity ( Is He Cheating on You? ), psychological evaluation ( Splendid Isolation ) and interpersonal complaints ( Enough Is Enough ). These works feature female voices alternately stern and flirty, asking increasingly personal questions. Most searing is Dawg Shaming , also voiced by a woman. Posed as a help line for pet problems, the service offers 31 menu options, outlining scenarios ranging from dogs messing on the carpet to instances of domestic abuse by male partners—metaphorical “dogs.” Men are on the phone lines, too, but in roles such as an elderly grouser (voiced by Willem Dafoe), masochistic historical figures looking for love, and an automated service provider addressing father/technology problems ( Bad Dad & Beyond ). A series of large sketchy watercolors (all 2015) occupied another room of the show. Here, Henrot used the medium of painting to illustrate bizarre fantasies (in the psychoanalytic sense) hinted at elsewhere. Killing Time , for example, depicts a cannibalistic male office worker, while Sad Dad shows a human/bird figure with an erect penis dragging a baby by the arm. A bronze figurine related to the West African Dogon creation myth and a multitiered zoetrope animating miniature resin sculptures of assorted motifs, like cascading pills and stretching Buddhas, by strobe light, completed the show. At first, the various types of work seemed disparate. But all the pieces reflect a sense of alienation produced by the commodification of spirituality and relationships in our data-mined, automated world. For the show’s youngest visitors, accustomed to swiping and texting on smartphones to meet their needs, even picking up the phones must have felt like an anachronistic gesture. The thought of being so disconnected from live voices made me long for the days of landlines. 2 by Wendy Vogel by Wendy Vogel

6 Art in America Martin Wong: Brainwashing Cult Cons Top TV Stars , 1981, acrylic on canvas, 30 by 40 inches. Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York. Advertisement Martin Wong’s intricate paintings meld keen observations of his gritty New York neighborhood with a rich poetic imagination. Martin Wong, whose visionary paintings of the 1980s capture the tragic lows and vibrant highs of life on New York’s decaying Lower East Side, received his first and, until now, only retrospective in 1998, at the New Museum, as he was dying of AIDS. After more than a decade during which his work received relatively little critical and curatorial attention, Wong’s paintings have been reappearing in prominent venues, including the 2014 Whitney Biennial, where they have tended to stand out as embodiments of a more authentic, less market-driven art world. An avid collector, Wong left behind a rich archive of papers, objects and ephemera, which complements and sheds light on his own artistic production. At New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2012, artist Danh Vo staged an homage to Wong, presenting objects from the late artist’s massive collection of curios, paintings, antiques, calligraphic scrolls and kitsch. (Wong’s mother had been preserving these varied materials in her home since her son’s death in 1999.) In 2014, the Museum of the City of New York showcased Wong’s vast collection of drawings and paintings by graffiti artists. Last spring, an exhibition at San Francisco’s CCA Wattis Institute featured letters and artifacts from Wong’s personal papers, which are held at New York University’s Fales Library. The culmination of this broad reassessment of Wong’s life and art is now on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. “Martin Wong: Human Instamatic” (the title comes from a moniker Wong adopted while doing street portraits in Eureka, Calif., in the ’70s) is a wide-ranging survey organized by Sergio Bessa, Bronx Museum curatorial director, and Yasmin Ramirez, adjunct curator at the museum and a close friend of the artist. The exhibition reveals why, even in his active years, Wong was an enigmatic figure. He is described in the Wattis catalogue as “a sort of queer Chinese-Latino fireman cowboy graffitist.” 1 A San Francisco native who moved to New York in 1978 at the age of 32, Wong became an unlikely fixture in his adopted neighborhood, identifying with bohemian Latino poets, petty criminals and drug abusers. Tall and lanky, he fantasized about beefy firemen and was known for wearing a fireman’s jacket to openings and parties. He painted numerous prison scenes charged with homoerotic desire despite having spent only a single night in prison himself. He developed a signature visual motif: rows of cartoonish gesticulating hands that spell out tabloid headlines or fragments of street poetry in American Sign Language (ASL). These manual characters appear in works Wong referred to as “paintings for the hearing impaired.” He spoke about his canvases in the casual vocabulary used by the graffiti artists he admired, but his archives reveal how intricate and deeply researched his compositions could be. There is some controversy among critics and historians as to whether Wong should be considered a self-taught artist. Though he studied ceramics at Humboldt State University in California, Wong learned to paint on his own after he moved to New York. Dan Cameron, who co-curated the artist’s 1998 retrospective, argued in that show’s catalogue that the artist’s work bears a strong kinship with the obsessive visions of such outsider figures as Joseph Yoakum, Martín Ramírez and Adolf Wölfli. In the catalogue for the Bronx exhibition, poet John Yau and art historian Benjamin Binstock counter in separate essays that Wong’s style evolved far more rapidly than that of most self-taught artists. Indeed, both writers are more inclined to compare Wong with canonical painters, ranging from Bosch to Vermeer to Johns. The Bronx exhibition makes the case that Wong’s prowess as a painter transcends semantic categories. His vision of Loisaida—a Spanish-inflected term for the Lower East Side popularized in the 1970s by Nuyorican poet Bittman Rivas—offers a contemporary version of the apocalyptic sublime. Echoing the spectacular imagery of Romantic-era figures like J. M. W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich, Wong’s paintings often present human figures as diminished or even obliterated by an overwhelming environment. His urban landscapes from the 1980s present a human-built world imbued with the fearsome, awe-inspiring majesty of the untamed wilderness. Wong’s city is an airless territory of obdurate brick walls, padlocked storefronts, chain-link fences topped with coils of razor wire and alleys piled with rubble. The red of crumbling bricks bleeds into ocher skies, blotting out any touch of blue in what seems to be a perpetual twilight. Above ragged skylines, constellations expand like gossamer webs. Meanwhile, the (mostly male) figures who appear in Wong’s works are often dwarfed by the urban canyons around them. These figures also seem completely at home in their blighted surroundings, quietly writing, embracing each other or drifting to sleep in a drug-induced haze. It is a highly romanticized version of a city that offers a zone of existential freedom even as it is beset with the multiple scourges of crack, heroin, crime, homelessness and AIDS. Texts superimposed on these sometimes bleak streetscapes are sources of humor, beauty and lyricism. Indeed, Wong’s paintings are laced with language, much of it composed by poet Miguel Piñero, Wong’s friend and sometime lover. Attorney Street (Handball Court with Autobiographical Poem by Piñero) , 1982-84, borrowed from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for the Bronx exhibition, was the first work of Wong’s to be acquired by a major museum. It offers an inventory of the textual forms that Wong employed. A hand-printed passage from a Piñero poem is inscribed in the sky above a row of brick tenements. Below, a concrete wall in an asphalt playground is covered in flamboyant graffiti. Four rows of ASL hand signs appear to float over the blacktop. The entire composition is bounded by a trompe l’oeil frame decorated with a faux plaque inscribed with the lines Piñero spoke in the critically panned 1981 cop film Fort Apache: The Bronx : “It’s the real deal, Neal. I’m going to rock your world make your planets twirl. Ain’t no wack attack.” The complex work features a catalogue of painting techniques, from linear perspective to decorative patterning. The various forms of writing and mark-making on display invite multiple modes of visual engagement, often melding reading and looking. Wong drew directly from his own life experiences to create paintings with an intimate, personal feel. One of the earliest works in the Bronx show is My Secret World 1978-81 , from 1984, a composition some critics have connected to van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles (1889). This painting offers a glimpse through two tenement windows into Wong’s first residence in New York, a small room in the Meyer’s Hotel where he was employed as night watchman. The furnishings and decorations in the room add up to a symbolic self-portrait, though the artist is not visible. Above a single bed we see partially obscured representations of Wong’s own paintings of an eight ball, a pair of dice and a set of ASL hand signs spelling out a tabloid headline about the notorious serial killer Son of Sam. Through the other window we see a bureau stacked with books, the titles of which suggest Wong’s interest in everything from hockey to physics. A text inscribed on the outside window sill announces, “it was in this room that the world’s first paintings for the hearing impaired came into being.” Wong’s art historical bent is also evident in Down for the Count (1985), which is not included in the Bronx show. The work depicts boxers and firemen in a composition that subtly recalls Goya’s The Third of May 1808 (1814). The prisoner before the firing squad in the Spanish master’s iconic work is transformed by Wong into a boxer exulting in his victory over a supine sparring partner. Crouching on either side of the victorious figure, a pair of firemen hold the fallen fighter. The poses of the firemen, Wong’s notes reveal, are based on allegorical figures of sleep and death on a 6th-century b.c. Greek vase that he saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he worked in the bookstore. Through these references to tragedy and violence, the artist imbues his ostensibly quotidian figures with heroic import while complicating the painting’s overt narrative of victory. Similarly, Wong’s depictions of prison transform the institutions of incarceration into sites of erotic fantasy. These works are greatly indebted to Piñero’s writings and experiences as a convict. In contrast to the pervasive red of the urban landscapes, the backgrounds of the prison works share a predominantly white palette. Dark-skinned men recline suggestively in some of these scenes, assuming poses that recall 19th-century odalisques. In others, prisoners engaged in sexual encounters are glimpsed between bars. In The Annunciation According to Mikey Piñero (Cupcake and Pico) , 1984, Wong references Renaissance depictions of the Annunciation, with the angel’s message from God to Mary reconfigured as an attempted seduction of one man by another. By the 1990s, Wong had changed gears, perhaps under pressure from critics and curators to explore his Asian heritage, as Yasmin Ramirez suggested to me in a conversation at the press opening. As Lydia Yee, co-curator of the New Museum retrospective, put it in the catalogue for that 1998 show, Wong began producing works that “seemed to better fit a multicultural paradigm than their Lower East Side predecessors.” 2 These paintings, which could be understood as reflections on how Asian identity is constructed in popular culture, feature glitzy panoramas of the New York and San Francisco Chinatowns. As Yee argued, these works are more indebted to the orientalist stereotypes of 1930s movies than to anything Wong personally experienced in the 1990s. Accordingly, the paintings have a very different feel from his Loisaida works. They are gaudy and playful, mingling depictions of the laughing, pot-bellied Hotei Buddha and other Asian spiritual motifs with depictions of Hollywood heroes like Bruce Lee and representations of historical figures, including a youthful version of his own aunt, who was Miss Chinatown in the 1930s. In contrast to the rectilinear geometry of his earlier works, these compositions are full of undulating lines, curling lotus forms, curved pagoda roofs and intricate chinoiserie patterns. These late works were featured prominently in Wong’s 1998 retrospective, and Cameron suggested they were key to his appeal at a moment of “increasing public interest in art that attempts to bridge cultural differences between disparate groups.” 3 However, many critics at the time found them less convincing than Wong’s earlier work. Barry Schwabsky, reviewing the show for this magazine, noted disapprovingly that Wong had “become something much more like a conventional Pop artist than he was before.” 4 By the late 1990s, the decaying splendor of Wong’s Loisaida was quickly disappearing into memory, and the art that it spawned—by figures like Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz and Jean- Michel Basquiat—was being eclipsed by Conceptualist practices that offered cool, impersonal critiques of the media and consumer culture. As Marcia Tucker, the New Museum director at the time, noted, even Wong’s preferred medium—painting—was falling out of fashion. The renewed attention Wong’s work is receiving today comes in the context of widespread popular nostalgia for the gritty authenticity New York had before the economic boom transformed marginal neighborhoods like Loisaida into playgrounds for tourists, well-heeled students and Google millionaires. Wong’s work now strikes us as a time capsule, memorializing and romanticizing a bygone era. However, the rough image of urban life Wong conveyed is also steeped in self-conscious artifice. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, middle-class youth flocked to New York to mingle with the underclass they would soon displace. Artists in Wong’s circle fetishized ruins, cultivated decadence and assumed the guise of outlaws. In a 1996 interview with Ramirez published for the first time in the current catalogue, Wong speaks about his life in the East Village and jokes about watching friends commit robberies, shoot up and talk about their prison experiences. But it is clear that Wong was more a voyeur than a participant in such rituals. A 1993 self- portrait, painted in the same style Wong used to render Asian movie icons, shows the artist sporting a cowboy hat, Fu Manchu mustache and embroidered Western shirt. Though this is one of the few works in which Wong depicted himself, what we see is more a persona than a true identity. Wong’s theatrical sensibility dates back to his days in San Francisco in the late 1970s, when he was involved with the Angels of Light performance troupe. In New York, Wong seems to have channeled this affinity for the stage into his paintings, creating setlike environments populated by figures—actors, really—who strike dramatic poses. Today, artifice, rather than social realism, is the most striking aspect of his work. As Wong noted in a 1991 talk in San Francisco, reprinted in the Wattis catalogue: “Basically in painting you have to fake things.” 5 Of course, this pervasive artifice could be used to convey larger truths. Penitentiary Fox (1988), is a memorial to Piñero, who died of cirrhosis in 1988. The poet is painted before the closed doors of Sing, the prison where he wrote and first staged his Pulitzer Prize–winning play Short Eyes (1974), while serving a sentence for armed robbery. Above prison gates lined with guards, the walls are cut away to reveal the inmates who were in the original cast. They are arranged in front of their cell block as if standing on a multitiered stage set. The entire prison is contained within a cartoonlike thought bubble: Piñero’s dream as reimagined by Wong. Canvases like this suggest that it is wrong to separate Wong’s prison and Loisada works from his Chinatown paintings. His visions of urban grit and prison life are as much works of the imagination as his Hollywood-style Chinatowns. Like any great storyteller, Wong took the materials of his life and world and wove them together into believable fictions. Because they spark our own fantasies, desires and memories, they continue to resonate today. CURRENTELY ON VIEW “Martin Wong: Human Instamatic,” at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, through Feb. 14. ELEANOR HEARTNEY is an A.i. A. contributing editor. 2 by Brian Droitcour by Stuart Comer by David Ebony by A.i.A. Editors

7 Evelyn Statsinger Evelyn Statsinger: Land and Sea , 1951, india ink, colored ink and crayon on light buff paper, 39½ by 109¾ inches; at Richard Gray. Advertisement Scattered throughout art history are unconventional talents who don’t fit easily into standard narratives and categories, and thus don’t receive the recognition that they deserve. One such outlier is 88-year-old Chicago artist Evelyn Statsinger, who has had some taste of national attention during her long, still-active career but should be much better known. “A Gathering,” a mini-retrospective at Richard Gray featuring 25 of her drawings, paintings and photograms (plus an assortment of tiny clay sculptures) spanning more than six decades, was a big step in that direction. Statsinger earned her bachelor’s degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1949 and is best known as a member of the Monster Roster. That group, which includes Leon Golub, Robert Barnes and Don Baum, emerged from the school in the late 1940s and early ’50s and later influenced the Chicago Imagists. Its members looked to Surrealism, tribal and outsider art for inspiration, all of which can be seen in Statsinger’s work. Her participation in three of the city’s first artist-run Exhibition Momentum salons beginning in the late ’40s, including one curated by Alfred Barr Jr. and Sidney Janis, gave her career an early boost. In 1952 and ’57, probably as a result of that attention, Statsinger was featured in solo exhibitions organized by the Art Institute’s prints and drawings department. Final Burial of a Very Young Dead One (1949) is typical of her early output. Composed with pen, india ink and crayon on white paper, the work offers a primitivist look at a strange, quasi- religious ritual: two three-legged, robed individuals holding kites stand alongside a kind of altar with a presumably deceased, three-eyed figure sprawled across it. Closely related to that piece is a group of seven untitled photograms produced between 1948 and 1949, likely inspired by the celebrated photograms of László Moholy-Nagy, who spent the last nine years of his life in Chicago. Created in the darkroom using paper cutouts, Statsinger’s smiling figurative images are original contributions to the development of this photographic technique and deserve more attention in their own right. Another early drawing—arguably the highlight of the show—is Land and Sea (1951), measuring approximately 3 by 9 feet. In this semiabstract, vaguely surreal composition, which combines india ink, colored ink and crayon on light buff paper, what could be figures and sea creatures are set against a background of bent, cylindrical fossils. Distinguishing this work is its dogged patterning, from the interwoven remains to grids, stripes and dotted diamonds, all with clean, meticulous draftsmanship. This unrelenting precision continues in the later, often more colorful and stylized works, where figuration largely gives way to abstracted biomorphic forms, as in Three Memories (1994), or overlapping podlike elements, as in an untitled drawing from 1956. Different from anything else on view is the wonderfully titled Dreaming of Ocher (ca. 1960s), a 40-by-26-inch oil on canvas rendered entirely in ocher and gray-green. The paint is loosely applied to the canvas, with traces of the underlying white gesso showing through. The partitioned composition, with its elusive, glyphlike forms—vaguely resembling those of Adolph Gottlieb— has a deliberately raw, undisciplined and distant look. Statsinger’s body of work appears especially fresh as it shifts from enigmatic figuration to nature-based abstraction. As Chicago and the rest of the country are increasingly taking stock of the city’s artistic heritage (the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, for example, is mounting a Monster Roster exhibition in February), this artist’s breakout moment just might be arriving at last. 2 by A.i.A. Editors by Brian Droitcour by Linda Mai Green

8 Review: ‘Fitoor’ Enlists Dickens to Tell a Hindi Love Story Based, sometimes loosely, sometimes carelessly, sometimes pointlessly, on “Great Expectations,” the Hindi movie “ Fitoor ” is at all times more Bollywood than Dickens. The Urdu word “fitoor” means “madness,” as in madly in love, so it’s no surprise that the movie, directed by Abhishek Kapoor ( “Rock On!!” ), focuses on the love story. Noor falls instantly and, yes, madly for Firdaus when both are children in Kashmir. He’s a poor boy with artistic talent. She’s a horse-riding rich girl, the adopted daughter of Begum Hazrat ( Tabu ), the Miss Havisham character who languorously smokes her hookah in a beautifully crumbling mansion, her eyes full of pain. Years later Noor (Aditya Roy Kapur) becomes a hotshot artist in Delhi, where again he meets Firdaus (Katrina Kaif). Boom. Too bad she’s about to be engaged to a Pakistani bigwig. “Fitoor” doesn’t get much political resonance out of its Kashmiri setting, though the wintry sadness of the first scenes has power. Nor does it get much resonance out of class differences between Noor and Firdaus. Handsome and self-possessed, Noor has his great career expectations met upon arrival in Delhi, where he instantly becomes the Next Big Thing on the art scene — a glittery, multicultural world of gents with man buns and women in miniskirts. He’s artist as gym god, hammering metal like a shirtless, muscle-bound Vulcan. As for Firdaus, she may have secrets but she doesn’t have much mystery. Together, she and Noor are pretty people whose pain registers as broody pouting. It’s left to Tabu to give the movie some emotional punch or any real connection to Dickens. She may not be at her finest here, as she is in “Maqbool” or “ Haider.” But with her great tragedienne’s face she can express loss with just a gaze, a melancholy reminder of how the weight of the past warps the present. 2016-02-11 00:00:00 By RACHEL SALTZ

9 An Adam Pendleton Exhibition Will Open in New Orleans The conceptual artist Adam Pendleton has not made work that specifically references Hurricane Katrina. But because his pieces often deal with African- American political and social history, they seem well suited to New Orleans. That is partly why the Contemporary Arts Center in that city’s Warehouse District is devoting all three floors of its galleries to what it says will be the largest solo museum exhibition of Mr. Pendleton’s work in the United States. The show, “Adam Pendleton: Becoming Imperceptible,” which opens on April 1, will include film, wall paintings, ceramics and silk screens. “Siting it in New Orleans carries with it so many reverberations,” said Andrea Andersson, the museum’s chief curator of visual arts, referring to the aftermath of the hurricane, “when so many people were without homes and living in unfit dwellings.” One of those works uses the language of the Black Lives Matter movement. “My work deals with the past but also the future,” Mr. Pendleton said. “That’s what a city like New Orleans, after an experience like Katrina, is perpetually grappling with: How does our future relate to our past?” With Sotheby’s recent buyouts and hiring of two former heavyweights from its chief rival, Christie’s, and with relatively new chief executives at all three of New York’s main auction houses (Phillips is the third), there is something like a game of musical chairs going on in the art business. Complicating all this movement are the noncompete agreements, common in employment contracts, which force executives to wait for as much as a year before moving from one auction house to another. This requires high-powered executives to cool their heels, even as the auction houses have to cover their jobs until they arrive. In an apparent attempt to short circuit this process, Sotheby’s in recent months has offered to release one of its former executives from a noncompete obligation if Christie’s would do the same. But Christie’s refused, according to people on both sides of the discussions who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations. The proposed agreement would have allowed Marc Porter, who resigned in December as chairman of Christie’s Americas, to start work as a chairman of Sotheby’s new fine-art division , leading global business development. Sotheby’s had offered to let Guillaume Cerutti, its former deputy chairman in Europe and chief executive in France, out of his restrictions so that he could start sooner as president of Christie’s for Europe, the Middle East, India and Russia. You can’t open the door to the Lower East Side gallery Chapter NY right now without bumping into a wall of plexiglass. Nor can you see what’s behind that barrier, because the room is almost completely dark. But this disorientation is deliberate, part of Adam Gordon’s “ Tiernan ,” his first solo exhibition in New York. As your eyes adjust, the scene beyond the plexiglass reveals a drab, gray room; an oscillating fan; pieces of wood piled on the floor; a few plastic bags. “I like work that is unexpected and that takes something from the viewer,” said the gallery’s owner, Nicole Russo, adding, “You may love it, you may hate it, you may be frustrated, but something’s occurred.” The installation takes up so much of the 200-square-foot space that Ms. Russo’s office has been relegated to the remaining sliver, little more than a corridor with a desk wedged behind a wall. (She skipped the usual opening reception: “No room.”) Ms. Russo, formerly a director at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, doesn’t mind. In fact, her inability to witness visitors interacting with this show has become part of the experience. “I can’t see, which is fascinating,” she said, “because I can hear people.” The exhibition, which runs through March 6, also includes a performance component, “Iwona,” which consists of a woman walking slowly back and forth in front of the gallery for an hour twice a week; precisely when is anyone’s guess. “You only have so much information,” Ms. Russo said. “And there’s an element of chance.” He has installed sheep in the grass outside a former Getty filling station in Chelsea (a work by the artist François-Xavier Lalanne), water towers containing neon messages in Madison Square Park (by Iván Navarro) and colorful numbers signifying life’s stages up Park Avenue (by Robert Indiana). Now the gallerist Paul Kasmin is bringing a sharply pointed steel structure by the French artist Bernar Venet to Union Square. The work, “Disorder: 9 Uneven Angles,” is composed of nine steel pieces of varying heights and slightly different angular degrees. “I like the juxtaposition of Manhattan and sculpture,” Mr. Kasmin said. “In New York, there’s a particular excitement with the architecture of the city, so it’s almost like you’re altering people’s perception.” The Venet sculpture, about 26 feet high, will be erected the first week of March with the city’s Department of Transportation and the Union Square Partnership. To coincide with the installation, Mr. Kasmin will present Mr. Venet’s first solo exhibition at his Chelsea gallery , starting on April 28. And on Feb. 29, the International Sculpture Center is awarding Mr. Venet, along with Kiki Smith, its 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award. Mr. Venet has worked with curves and straight lines before, but the acute angles of his current work are new for him. “About a year and a half ago, suddenly I tried to work on what I call complexity — making things which are related to disorder, to things you do not really master,” he said, “where there is a big part of improvisation, where unexpected phenomenon are taken into consideration.” Katie Hollander will become executive director of Creative Time, which presents projects, exhibitions and events at public sites throughout New York. Ms. Hollander, who for eight years was the deputy head, has been acting director since Anne Pasternak announced last year that she would leave to become director of the Brooklyn Museum. “The thing I’m most committed to,” Ms. Hollander said, “is thinking about new platforms to help amplify artists’ voices.” 2016-02-11 00:00:00 ROBIN POGREBIN

10 Elizabeth Dee Gallery to Leave Chelsea for Two-Story Harlem Space Last year, dealer Gavin Brown announced that he would move his gallery from its longtime West Village to Harlem. His forthcoming location, in the area’s Manhattanville neighborhood, is a little less than a mile from Dee’s spot. In the story, Dee says that she talked with about 20 dealers about the possibility of moving to, or opening a space in Harlem. “Out of those 20,” she says, “I’d estimate that 10 are actively looking now for space in Harlem, either as a move or to establish a second gallery location.” 2016-02-12 03:31:48 Robin Scher Total 10 articles. Created at 2016-02-12 06:00