Sugar, Unsweetened

There are still two weekends left to see Kara Walker’s searing installation, "A SUBTLETY: OR THE MARVELOUS SUGAR BABY, AN HOMAGE TO THE UNPAID AND OVERWORKED ARTISANS WHO HAVE REFINED OUR SWEET TASTES FROM THE CANE FIELDS TO THE KITCHENS OF THE NEW WORLD ON THE OCCASION OF THE DEMOLITION OF THE DOMINO SUGAR REFINING PLANT."

Last weekend the wait was about 40 minutes on a line that stretched for blocks, so plan accordingly. Also check the Creative Time website for exact hours. I see they've just extended Saturday and Sunday viewing to 7 pm.

The space reverberates with the haunted past of the sugar industry and the damage—human, environmental, political, and otherwise—it has inflicted in satisfying our collective sweet tooth. The Domino factory, which during the 19th century refined more than half of the sugar in the U.S. will soon be erased by development, but the history will not.

You can  read more here, here, and here,  but this mother speaks for herself. And she’s gotten the walls to talk too.

The molasses figures are melting.

Gwen Murphy's "Foot Fetish" Faces

The Governess

I recently encountered Gwen Murphy’s “Foot Fetish” sculptures in Brattleboro, Vermont at Gallery in the Woods. Definitely a cut above the usual craft-gallery fare. I wonder if she gets to deduct shoes as a business expense?

Toe Shoes

Indru and Jojo

Red Devils

Big Mouth Twins

She's Not There

Blue Elders

Run, Don't Walk: Hopper Drawings at the Whitney

In the supporting reference for “New York Movie,” 1939, we learn that usherettes were to refrain from watching the film while on duty. 

You really don’t want to miss the show of Hopper drawings at the Whitney. It closes on October 6th, so consider this fair warning: Get yourself over there this week.

Edward Hopper was a master of distillation. His powerful ability to observe, stage, and edit have resulted in some of the most iconic images in American painting. He manages to evoke not just a geographic sense of place, but a location’s emotional essence as well.

The drawings document Hopper’s perception and thought in real time. Raw reportage. It might be the flicker of what he’s seeing at a given moment while riding the elevated train, or the framing of a scene he’s studied for some time. We watch him record, digest and process the world. Through his drawings, we experience, visually, the artist’s brain at work.

This show is also an opportunity to marvel at Hoppers draftsmanship, which is something not always evident in his paintings. And to support the drawings, the Whitney provides sketchbook pages, vintage photographs, maps, floor plans, and—oh yes—21 paintings.

"Early Sunday Morning," from 1930, was reunited with the easel Hopper painted it on in his studio.

Stuck at the Met

The Gotlands Museum in Sweden

We’re all familiar with the colorful freeform encrustations that grow on the walls, pipes, and any street furniture in close proximity to museums these days. I always smile at these organic accretions of discarded admission stickers. Their lively messiness provides the perfect counterpoint to the curated seriousness of the very institutions from which they originate.

So, in some way, I was kind of looking forward to seeing what the Met would roll out to replace their iconic and much-loved colored metal tabs which were recently retired after 42 years. Because if ever there was a high-profile occasion for an elegant or interesting design solution, this was surely it. Right?

The other day was my first visit to the museum since the changeover to paper admission stickers. At the exit, there used to be elegant acrylic receptacles filled with colored metal tabs. Now there are very ordinary stanchioned-mounted boards, the kind you might find at a convention informing you which plenary session is to take place in which ballroom. They are positioned to accept the exiting museumgoer’s blue and white rectangular sticker. That’s right, the stickers are, according to a guard I queried, always blue on white.

Too bad the Met, of all places, passed on the opportunity to create what might have been an interesting, or even inspired admissions interface. Instead they seem to have opted for the Staples method (just push the “easy button” and hop on the aesthetic blandwagon).

But let’s wait a while, there’s no telling what might become of those boring little stickers …

Board at the Met

Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki

The Sinebrychoff Taidemuseo, Helsinki

I was very excited to recognize the portraits on some the stickers as the ones photographed by Finnish artist Jorma Puranen!

Results of a Flickr search

The Arts Covers of Paris Vogue

Alfred Hitchcock

December 1974-January 1975

During the 1970s, 80s and 90s Paris Vogue used to publish an issue for December/January and devote the cover to the arts--film, music, dance, painting. I'm struck by how distinctive any non-fashion cover is for Vogue.

Salvador Dali

December 1971-December 1972

Fellini

December 1972-December 1973

Joan Miro

December 1979-December 1980

Andy Warhol

December 1983-January 1984

Franco Zefferelli

December 1984-January 1985

David Hockney

December 1985-January 1986

Baryshnikov

December 1986-January 1987

Kurosawa

December 1988-January 1989

Martin Scorsese

December 1990-January 1991

Tapies

December 1991-January 1992

Note to subscribers: If you subscribe to ALL MY EYES via email, then the other day you received five posts at once. That was not intentional. In the last few months, it seems that when I paste text from Microsoft Word into Blogger, some very nasty code comes along with it and disables recognition by FeedBurner, which updates feeds and emails new posts. All subsequent posts are also disabled. Removing the code and updating the post doesn't fix the glitch. So I reposted all the offensive entries and dated them with when they were originally posted. I did not realize that they would all get sent at once. Sorry to overwhelm you all at the start of the new year.

Kusama, Spot On

"...a polka-dot has the form of the sun, which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon, which is calm. Round, soft, colorful, senseless and unknowing. Polka-dots become movement... Polka dots are a way to infinity." Yayoi Kusama

There will be no shortage of dots in New York City this summer. In particular, white dots on red, but also dot/ground combinations of white, black, red, and yellow. A retrospective of the dot-obsessed 83-year old Japanese artist, Yayoi Kusama, is on view at the Whitney, while elsewhere around town, Louis Vuitton is featuring a Kusama-inspired collection in their windows.

There’s lots to read about the artist, whose life is an ongoing performance piece, and there are plenty of videos on YouTube to check out.

Here are some iPhone pix from the Whitney party.

You will definitely want to see the the fabulously trippy installation, Fireflies on the Water.

As I was leaving the museum, I met the Ariel, the “Anti-dot.” He effortlessly carried off an elegant ensemble--shirt, tie, vest, and trousers--of dark blue toile on cream.