THE HEADLINES

ASPEN’S GRASP. Known for winter sports and other outdoor recreation, Aspen, Colorado, has become increasingly celebrated as an art destination, reports The Art Newspaper. The Aspen Art Week brings together collectors, curators and artists in a culture festival co-ordinated by Aspen Art Museum. This summer, the Aspen Art Fair (29 July-2 August) joins in with a debut at the high-profile Hotel Jerome, in the city center. About 30 exhibitors and projects—from Los Angeles (Carlye Packer, Casterline Goodman), New York (Miles McEnery, Nancy Hoffman) and abroad (El Apartamento from Havana and Madrid, Galerie Gmurzynska from Zürich, Perrotin from Paris)—are in the art fair’s lineup. Admission to the event costs $30 per day, except for those statying at the hotel who get complimentary passes. “It’s really important to us to be part of the citywide cultural conversation year round,” said Becca Hoffman, the director of the fair.

TO RETURN OR TO LOAN? Objects from London’s British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum are on loan at the Manhyia Palace Museum in the center of Kumasi, Ghana, while Los Angeles’s Fowler Museum has transferred ownership of seven items, reports The Art Newspaper. The UK loans include gold items, soul-washers’ badges, a figure of an eagle and a symbolically charged peace pipe, as well as the important ceremonial sword known as the Mponponsuo. There are also seven items from the Fowler Museum on view. Most of the returned items are colonial loot, seized by British troops during the Asante wars. A few others were legitimately acquired, not in battle. Ownership of the seven Fowler items has been formally transferred to the Asantehene, who is now free to use the regalia for ceremonial purposes. The BM and V&A objects, however, are required to be treated as artworks. The UK museums are returning material as three-year loans, with the option of a three-year extension.

THE DIGEST

Dr. Robert Boulay, who devoted his life to identifying Kanak works for the world’s most prestigious museums, including Paris’s Quai Branly, has died at the age of 80 years old. [Le Quotidien de l’Art]

Collectors Andrée and Gérard Patt have given the town of Audincourt, in the Franche-Comté region, 236 works of modern and contemporary art. The retired couple, who started amassing their treasures in the early 2000s, aquired their first paintings from a gallery in Megève. Their donation includes pieces by Salvador Dali, Pierre Alechinsky, Roberto Matta, Lucio Fontana, Arman, Hervé Di Rosa, Jean Messagier… [Le Quotidien de l’Art]

Seven artists with connections to Los Angeles, including contemporary conceptualists Glenn Kaino (b. 1872) and Charles Gaines (b. 1944), were commissioned to bridge sports and culture, by creating works for the Intuit Dome, an indoor arena under construction in Inglewood, California. [The New York Times]

An extremely rare vinyl record by the Sex Pistols has been sold by record specialists Wessex Auction Rooms for a record-breaking price. The controversial single God Save the Queen was released in the 1970s. About 25,000 records were withdrawn from sale after a backlash to lyrics describing the monarchy as a “fascist regime”. A few copies remained in circulation, including the one that sold for £24,320. [BBC]

Linda C. Harrison got the profile treatment from Tiffany Dodson in Harper’s Bazaar, the director of the Newark Museum of Art’s, one of the few African-Americans leading a major art museum. She assisted the institution in becoming more inviting to residents of the New Jersey city. [Harper’s Bazaar]

THE KICKER

LOONEY TURN OF EVENTS. Sydney artist Philjames’ oil on lithograph “Jesus Speaks to the Daughters of Jerusalem”, depicting Christ overlaid with Looney Tunes characters, was removed from the Blake Art Prize exhibition at the Casula Powerhouse Arts Center, after fierce criticism hit the artist and gallery on Friday, just two days before the eight-week exhibition ended. The biennial award recognizes contemporary artworks that explore spirituality and religion, and draws talents from all beliefs and cultural backgrounds. However complaints suddenly broke out online. Some protesters, who see the work as an insult to Christianity, have threatened the museum and its staff, including volunteers, with violence. [The Guardian]

Curated with Sonia Dhami, president of the Art & Tolerance organization and a trustee of the Sikh Foundation, the exhibition, titled “I Will Meet You Yet Again: Contemporary Sikh Art,” brings together 40 works. Ranging from sculpture to photography, from painting to photographic essays, the works center Sikhism, a socio-religious group with an origin in India’s Panjab region and a diaspora that today numbers around 25 million. 

A new exhibition of Sikh art that Puliady co-organized offers what the previous have lacked: an opportunity to exceed one’s understanding of both South Asian art history.

No two works approach Sikhism from an identical historical moment or perspective; they represent the constellation of experience that forms collective memory. To bring them together, Dhami and Puliady worked with scholars, artists, and local religious practitioners for over two years.

“We wanted personal stories, not another anthropological exhibition,” Puliady said. “This was an opportunity to make room for women, ideas on climate change, political activism. We could expand past the boundaries of conventional pairings of sacred and historical narratives.”

The show is organized into themes that have shaped modern Sikh identity, starting with the 1947 Partition, during which India was violently divided to form a second nation, Pakistan, following its liberation from British colonial rule. In the process, millions of Sikhs were displaced from their ancestral lands. 

But rather than lingering on the tragedies wrought upon the Sikh community, as is common among Western narratives about Partition, Dhami and Puliady explore topics of gender, artistic production, architecture, climate change. Themes in the show, for example, include “Sikh Heritage as Artistic Inspiration” and “Sikh History in the U.S.A.” Additionally, underpinning the exhibition are three concepts—sangarsh, (struggle), basera (home), and birha (longing)—that speak to more ineffable elements of Sikh identity.

The show celebrates Sikh women, whose achievements have been woefully understudied in institutional settings. Among the standouts are two seven-foot-tall tapestries by the Singh Twins, British artists of dual Indian and English ancestry. The tapestries depict Sophia Duleep Singh, an Indian princess and high-profile suffragette in early 20th century England, and the Hungarian Indian avant-garde painter Amrita Sher-Gil. Both women—radical thinkers in their respective ways—stand amid a dense weaving of traditional Panjab symbols and allusions to the legacies of colonization.

A solemn section of the show focuses on 1984, the year the Indian government initiated a pogrom against its Sikh population. During the genocidal campaign, sacred sites and Sikh-owned business were destroyed across the country and civil rights were curtailed, and within days, some 3,000 Sikhs were murdered in in New Delhi alone.

Artist Arpana Caur has contributed Wounds of 1984 (2020), a surreal expression of the injustice inflicted upon Sikhs after the assassination of the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards, the event which triggered the pogrom. Whether ghost or physical, the figures in the painting have been transmuted by anguish, elongated, wide-eyed, and withered. But they are also the only varied bursts of color within a black night flickering with firelight. 

Elsewhere is an excerpt from 1984 notebook (2013) by Gauri Gill, one of few first-person chronicles of the anti-Sikh pogrom. Working for Tehelka magazine in 2005 and Outlook magazine in 2009, Gill conducted interviews with survivors in Trilokpuri, Tilak Vihar, and Garhi, and took their photographs. Later, she asked artist friends with a connection to Delhi to write a small paragraph to accompany the images. The entirety of the project is available for reading online, and is very worth it.

There is a severe lyricism to the pairings. On page 8 of the online edition, there is an image in which a woman named Nirpreet Kaur does not look at the camera. The caption reads that when she was 16, she joined a protest movement, and married a militant. Later, he was murdered, and her family was arrested. Beside Kaur’s stark black and white portrait are these words by the artist Monica Narula: “The insolubility of the photographic surface gives life its stupendous force to keep in contention the very will to breathe itself.”

It’s an important idea in this show, which toils over the ruthless transference of the past into the future. Kaur sought justice repeatedly in court but, like countless others, never found it. In the whole of South Asian art history, Sikh artists were pushed to the margins. Recognition—taking a photograph, weaving a tapestry, curating such an exhibition—is an expression of resistance.

“Most institutional spaces stop at the Partition or 1984,” said Dhami. “I think the reaction from the community has been so positive because this is more a collection of stories, monumentalized or memorialized through artworks. It’s the building of a home.” 

Foundation for Contemporary Arts Awards 2021 Artist Grants
The New York–based nonprofit Foundation for Contemporary Arts has announced its 2021 grants to artists, which comprise 20 unrestricted awards of $40,000 each. The categories for the grants include dance, music and sound, performance art and theater, poetry, and visual arts. Among the visual arts grantees are Candida Alvarez, Ian Cheng, Amie Siegel, and Constantina Zavitsanos. The full list of grantees can be found here.

Colby College Museum of Art Acquires Work by Hew Locke
The Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, has acquired the 2018 mixed-media work Souvenir 1 (Queen Victoria) by artist Hew Locke. The piece comes from the artist’s “Souvenirs” series, which examines the history of ceramic Parian Ware and the myth-making involved in the creation of nations. The work was exhibited in Locke’s 2020 solo exhibition at the museum and has previously been shown at Ikon Gallery in the United Kingdom and Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City.

Miles McEnery’s new space in New York.

Thursday, January 28

Castello di Rivoli.

Wednesday, January 27

Castello di Rivoli Acquires Works by Giuseppe Penone
The Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Italy has received a donation of 219 works on paper and archival materials of Giuseppe Penone. The artist was a major force in the Arte Povera movement, and he is  best known for his sculptures incorporating natural materials like tree trunks. In a statement, the museum said that the donation from the artist “provides an unprecedented opportunity to study Penone’s artistic practice and will be conserved at the CRRI (Castello di Rivoli Research Institute).”

Artist Megan Rooney.

Monday, January 25

Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center Creates Asian American Art Initiative
The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University in California has established the Asian American Art Initiative (AAAI) as part of an effort to acquire, preserve, exhibit, and study art related to Asian American and Asian diaspora artists. The initiative’s founding co-directors are Aleesa Alexander, assistant curator of American art at the Cantor, and Marci Kwon, assistant professor in Stanford’s department of art and art history. It is anchored by the museum’s acquisition of 233 ceramic masks by Ruth Asawa and 141 pieces from the Michael Donald Brown collection of works by Asian American artists from 1880 to 1996.

Ruth Asawa with Family Masks, 1991.

Austrian Painter Arik Brauer Has Died at 92
Arik Brauer, an Austrian artist celebrated for his painting, architecture, and music, has died at age 92. In 1946, while studying at Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Brauer cofounded the influential Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, whose purveyors combined the techniques of Flemish Old Masters with surrealist imagery. A Holocaust survivor, Brauer settled later in Israel, where he undertook architectural projects such as series of murals on a shopping mall in Haifa. His design projects also include what became known as the Brauer House in Vienna.

Marian Goodman Gallery Appoints Director of Books and Multiples
Marian Goodman Gallery, which maintains spaces in New York, London, and Paris, has named Dagny Corcoran as its first-ever director of books and multiples. In this position, Corcoran will collaborate with the editorial teams in New York and Paris to expand the gallery’s presence in publishing, including the sale of historical and rare books. Previously, Corcoran worked as a gallery assistant at the Multiples Gallery in Los Angeles, before founding the Art Catalogues, an independent bookstore specializing in contemporary and out-of-print museum and gallery exhibition catalogues and books on modern art, architecture, and photography.

Matthew H. Robb.

COURTESY THE FOWLER MUSEUM AT UCLA

The Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles has announced the appointment of Matthew H. Robb as chief curator. Robb, who previously worked as curator of the arts of the Americas at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, will begin his new position on June 13.

Robb’s background in Native American, Oceanic, and African art is particularly suited to the Fowler Museum, which is noted for its collection of art and artifacts from Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas. Robb is also a specialist in the art and archeology of ancient Mesoamerica. At the de Young, Robb conducted research on pieces in the institution’s permanent collection with a particular emphasis on murals from the ancient Mexican city of Teotihuacan. He additionally created a database of more than 500 examples of stone masks from Teotihuacan that now acts as a digital catalogue raisonné of these little-studied objects, a project resulting from Robb’s time as a scholar at the Getty Research Institute in 2015. Robb also was responsible for the institution’s acquisition of the Weisel Family Collection of Native American art.

Before his time at the de Young, Robb served as associate curator of the department of the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at the St. Louis Art Museum, where he began his career as an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral curatorial fellow in 2007. There, he organized the first reinstallation of the institution’s ancient American collections in 30 years, and also headed the reinstallation of the African, Oceanic, and Native American collections. While there, Robb also worked to bring in the Donald Danforth Jr. collection of Plains Native American art.

Robb completed his undergraduate degree at Princeton in 1994, his master’s degree at the University of Texas at Austin in 1999, and his Ph.D. at Yale in 2007. At Yale, his thesis on Teotihuacan compounds earned the Frances Blanshard Fellowship Fund.

Since then, Robb has lectured and written on subjects ranging from copper plaques of the ancient Midwest to the history of collecting pre-Columbian art in the 1950s and ’60s, and has lectured on pre-Columbian art at Washington University in St. Louis and St. Louis University. Robb has also worked as a visiting curator at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and the Princeton University Art Museum in New Jersey.

In recent years, there have been several important exhibitions reexamining the legacy of AIDS activism in the 1980s, including the just-ended “Why We Fight: Remembering AIDS Activism” at the New York Public Library. And last year in New York, at La MaMa La Galleria, there was “NOT OVER: 25 Years of Visual AIDS,” curated by Kris Nuzzi and Sur Rodney (Sur); and an exhibition revisiting Rosalind Solomon’s 1988 “Portraits in the Time of AIDS” at Bruce Silverstein Gallery.

Prior to these was perhaps the most influential show, “Gran Fury: Read My Lips” at New York University’s 80WSE galleries in 2012. This retrospective was devoted to the artist’s wing of the political-activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), founded in 1987 and dedicated to change in AIDS research, policy, and treatment. This show, in turn, expanded on the 2009 “ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993” at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.

General Idea’s iconic AIDS wallpaper, 1989, takes off on Robert Indiana’s LOVE logo.

COURTESY NEUE GESELLSCHAFT FÜR BILDENDE KUNST, BERLIN.

While these exhibitions focused on the activism of the period, other shows now are examining the impact of AIDS on art today. “LOVE AIDS RIOT SEX 1: Art AIDS Activism 1987–1995,” curated by Frank Wagner, which opened at the Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK) in Berlin in November 2013, was followed there by “LOVE AIDS RIOT SEX 2: Art AIDS Activism 1995 until Today” this January. And a joint exhibition of the ANTIAIDS Foundation and the PinchukArtCentre in Kiev, Ukraine, titled, “Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way,” opened last November with works by Tony Oursler, Nan Goldin, Ai Weiwei, and Damien Hirst.

Jonathan D. Katz, cocurator of the 2010 “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., is currently working on “Art, AIDS, America,” scheduled to open at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2015. The exhibition will feature artists from the ’80s and ’90s, such as Gonzalez-Torres, Wojnarowicz, and Frank Moore, but will go right up to the present with works by Patrick Webb, Hunter Reynolds, and Donald Moffett. “I was troubled by the repeated references to AIDS as a tragic tangent to the history of American art and one that did not do anything or lead anywhere.” He adds, “AIDS was the great motor for some of the most major changes taking place in the American art world over the last 30 years, and I wanted to do an exhibition that explored that.”

“The show fundamentally argues that when AIDS was first in evidence in the American art world, there was a kind of orthodoxy governing contemporary art; it was considered anti-authorial and anti-expressive—Postmodernism ruled the roost,” Katz says. “Ideas like ‘death of the author’ were sustainable until artists started to actually die.”

Indeed, for much of the ’80s, many major institutions and critics ignored the AIDS crisis and viewed the activism of ACT UP and the public-art projects of artist collectives such as Gran Fury, General Idea, and Group Material as unnecessarily fueling the flames of the culture wars by drawing attention to the gay presence in the art world and directly attacking right-wing politicians. In fact, when art historian Douglas Crimp published an issue of October magazine devoted to AIDS and activism in 1987, he created a schism in the publication’s editorial board.

Now artists and curators are willing to concede that great art did come out of the anger, sorrow, and bafflement in the face of an epidemic, although few people would agree with Katz’s assessment that the AIDS crisis’s greatest impact was a transformation of contemporary art. “AIDS had an enormous impact on the culture, in the broadest sense of the word, not just the confines of contemporary art,” says Robert Atkins, a writer who, with Thomas W. Sokolowski, cocurated the 1991 exhibition “From Media to Metaphor: Art About AIDS.” The great achievement was public art, whether you look at the “Red Ribbon Project,” Day Without Art, or SILENCE = DEATH. “This was art by artists that impacted culture in a big way,” says Atkins.

“Out of the urgency of the moment,” he adds, “every artist dealt with AIDS in a way, and its strength was its inclusivity.” He notes that Goldin, Jenny Holzer, and Barbara Kruger, among many others, made work about AIDS. “If we look at works from the 1990s and later half of the 20th century, we have to wonder, why is this work never conceptualized as a response to the AIDS crisis? Culture is a big thing, and AIDS was at the center of everything.”

It is impossible to consider the impact of the crisis on contemporary art without examining the visual art created by Gran Fury, a collective of 11 men and women that provided some of the signature works of the period. Gran Fury’s first project was a window installation at the former site of the New Museum on Broadway in Soho. Created in 1987 at the invitation of the late curator William Olander, it was called “Let the Record Show…”

Edith Alvarez’s 2012 mixed-media work AIDS is Not Over.

VISUAL AIDS/COURTESY THE ARTIST.

A neon sign at the top of the window flashed SILENCE = DEATH. It was set beneath a pink triangle, the insignia imposed by the Nazis to designate homosexuals. Here, the gay-rights movement had repurposed it as a symbol of empowerment. Beneath the sign, there was a window filled with tombstones bearing quotations from political and religious leaders, including Ronald Reagan, Cardinal John O’Connor, and Jesse Helms, expressing fear, ignorance, and outright homophobia.

“I would say, yes, AIDS had an enormous impact, in my own individual case and in the case of a lot of other filmmakers,” says Gran Fury member Tom Kalin, director of the films Swoon (1992) and Savage Grace (2007). “People came together who would not have met but for the high-speed collision of a crisis, and that forged a community.” Kalin points out that there was a generation before his that dealt with representations of the body and gay identity, including Andy Warhol and experimental filmmaker Derek Jarman. “But I think that AIDS definitely politicized a generation,” he says. “It was a different New York City then. People didn’t have cell phones. People didn’t have Facebook. They didn’t have e-mail. People went on the streets, and the streets were full of all sorts of information and imagery.”

“For some of us who were alive during the AIDS crisis, it was extremely traumatic. We were losing friends every time we turned around, and there was a lot of anger,” says Marlene McCarty, who was attending meetings of ACT UP and was recruited to join Gran Fury because she was a graphic designer. Gran Fury often appropriated the look of advertising to make its point, as in its 1989 take-off on a United Colors of Benetton ad showing a mixed-race couple and two same-sex couples kissing, with the headline: Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do. “It wasn’t hardly even a decision,” she says. “It was an imperative because too many people were dying.”

McCarty sees the impact of AIDS as seeping into almost every current movement in contemporary art. “It is so hard to separate the art that was being made at that time from the AIDS crisis. There was a lot of opposition to institutions, and that led directly to artworks devoted to institutional critique. But there was also a lot of hope for progress in areas of identity politics, because the government and the status quo were coming to terms with different kinds of people—I mean, other than straight, white, middle-class Americans. AIDS made these issues rise to the surface.”

Ono Ludwig portrays Petra, from the series of photos “We can be Heroes, just for one Day,” 2007.

COURTESY NEUE GESELLSCHAFT FÜR BILDENDE KUNST, BERLIN.

“Perhaps there was an AIDS esthetic developed by artists groups like General Idea or Gran Fury, whose media strategies criticized the indifference of society. But basically, there is no such thing,” says Frank Wagner, who curated the first show dealing with AIDS in Europe in 1988. In his most recent exhibition at nGbK, he underscores the diversity of approaches in works ranging from Blue (2012), an LED light box capturing a spiritual performance in the Fire Island hamlet of Cherry Grove, New York, by artists Ryan Brewer and AA Bronson; to Pasos (Steps), 2011, a video by Paris-based Chilean artist Lorena Zilleruelo showing an HIV-positive woman breaking out of her isolation by taking tango lessons. “I think AIDS had two impacts,” Wagner explains. “First, it reinvented the ideas of agitprop and propagandist art—you could call it an alternative public-relations campaign,” he says. “You can also say that art inspired by the AIDS crisis dared to be sentimental. It did not patronize your emotions and affections, but it tried to touch you by your heart.”

On the other hand, AIDS found its way into many artists’ studio practices. “HIV came into my life at a point where I was still finding a voice,” says Tony Feher, whose retrospective at the Bronx Museum of the Arts closed in February. “You were confronted with the possibility of your own mortality 30 years before you’d think about a heart attack, and I, among other people, started making work that looked at our own mortality.” Feher uses inexpensive plastic castoffs, like soda bottles and fruit cartons, to build minimalist installations that are at once graceful and surprisingly emotive. He often places colored marbles in jars in ways that make them appear molecular or that suggest reliquaries. “When I found out I was HIV positive, at that time there was nothing you could do,” he says, “I thought, if I am going to be dead in ten years, I better get busy. I wound up with something with an intimate scale that speaks to monumentality that doesn’t need a couple of longshoremen to drag it in the door.”

Certainly, the artist best known for combining Post-Minimalist strategies—such as adopting readymades and stacking materials—with AIDS-related content, is Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who died in 1996. His most iconic piece is “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers), 1991, a pair of battery-operated wall clocks, set at identical times, and left to run until they inevitably fall out of sync and one stops before the other. The work can be viewed as a metaphor for any couple gradually growing apart, or it might refer to the artist and his lover, both facing the consequences of the disease.

“I don’t know if AIDS in itself was the game changer because most art has continued to ignore it,” observes independent curator and critic Joseph Wolin, who organized the show “Absence, Activism and the Body Politic” at New York’s Fischbach Gallery in 1994. “But Felix’s work was certainly a game changer and Felix’s work was all about AIDS. I think it’s the structure of his work that had an impact, rather than the specific content about loss and a disease and one’s own mortality.”

Yet, there are still many artists living with AIDS, as evidenced by the continued vitality of Visual AIDS, which was founded in 1988 by Atkins, Gary Garrels, Sokolowski, and Olander. The program raises awareness of and supports artists who live with the disease, and also preserves the legacy of those who have died of AIDS-related illnesses by means of its registry and archive. Visual AIDS initiated the now-ubiquitous “Red Ribbon Project,” which has taken on a life of its own, with celebrities donning the ribbon to show allegiance with AIDS activists. Another source of support is Day Without Art, started in 1989, proposing a one-day moratorium on exhibitions to draw attention to the impact of AIDS on the arts community. Today, more than 8,000 institutions nationwide participate.

One artist who has made work throughout the course of his treatment is Hunter Reynolds. His performances and installations began at the start of the crisis and have appeared in New York recently at PARTICIPANT INC on the Lower East Side and at P.P.O.W. gallery in Chelsea. “I’ve always loaded my personal history into my work,” he says, noting that his recent act at the nGbK was what he calls a “Mummification Transformation” performance, in which, encased in a skin of plastic wrap, he was moved around the stage by muscular, leather-clad models. The work is intended to express the artist’s current condition, after having suffered AIDS-related strokes several years ago, and shows how it contrasts with his years in Berlin when he was in his 30s and sexually active. “I use my work as a vehicle for healing myself and others,” he says. Toronto artist Jessica Whitbread, who is also the global chair of the International Community of Women Living with HIV, puts her HIV-positive status front and center in artworks that combine the craft of needlepoint with bold-faced affirmations such as “Fuck Positive Women.” Her latest work addresses the recent criminalization of AIDS in Canada, the focus of the documentary Positive Women: Exposing Injustice (2013).

Adriana Bertini’s Encarny, 2006, composed of 4,697 condoms that had “failed the quality-control test.”

ADRIANA BERTINI COLLECTION.

“I think art was fundamentally altered by the experience of AIDS; the scope of the mortality really did trigger a sense of emergency in the art world,” says Dan Cameron, interim director at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, California, who curated “Fever: The Art of David Wojnarowicz” at the New Museum in 1999. “You see that artists like Martin Wong or David Wojnarowicz are becoming even more present in the discourse about contemporary art.”

“I think the work of ACT UP overall and activism around AIDS is absolutely still relevant,” says Kalin, pointing to the overwhelming reception the Gran Fury show received at NYU in 2012. Testifying to its pertinence is the fact that the exhibition included a teach-in led by Occupy Wall Street Arts & Labor activists. “There certainly has been a renewed interest in activist work,” Kalin says.

Indeed, AIDS activism is now a global phenomenon as the disease has become a pandemic, often accompanied by virulent anti-gay laws in many parts of the world, particularly Africa. South African artist Churchill Madikida makes haunting installations capturing the fear and sorrow surrounding AIDS sufferers, and the artist duo Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra, better known as T&T, created their “PUT-IT-ON” series to raise awareness of HIV and safe-sex practices for urban Indian youth. These artists and many other international artists were featured in the exhibition “Make Art/Stop AIDS” at the Fowler Museum at UCLA in 2008.

“Today, a great number of people feel the emergency has passed, but where it is less of an emergency in the art world than it was in the 1980s, it is an emergency in many other parts of the world. Whether the art world includes them in its scope or not is one of the more interesting discussions that is going on,” says Cameron, who is currently researching an exhibition about AIDS from a worldwide perspective.

“I see AIDS as having produced the first language of global art because it involved artists from all over the planet—Brazil, Japan, Russia, Kenya, Mali, India, South Africa,” he says. “What interests me right now is to see how the global visual language of AIDS can be developed into a curatorial project.”

Barbara Pollack is a contributing editor of ARTnews.

A version of this story originally appeared in the May 2014 issue of ARTnews on page 60 under the title “Document, Protest, Memorial: AIDS in the Art World.”

You say you want a revolution? It’s an explosion of Early Modernism

The season starts with a bang at the Guggenheim, where “Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe” tells the fast-paced story of the brash Italian vanguard. Cubism is in the spotlight at the MFA Houston, the only U.S. stop for a huge Braque survey. Meanwhile, the Baltimore Museum of Art showcases the revolutionary spirit of German Expressionism, MoMA unveils Gauguin’s rare prints and transfer drawings, and Matisse is at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor.

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Click through each image for more information.

U.S. museums are going (more) global

With Braque, MoMA’s massive Sigmar Polke retrospective, and the Whitney’s upcoming Koons show, some Big Boys of Western art are in the limelight.

And so are Venice Biennale standouts Laure Prouvost, Pawel Althamer, Camille Henrot, Roberto Cuoghi, and Ragnar Kjartansson (all at the New Museum), Austrian nonagenarian self-portraitist Maria Lassnig (MoMA PS1), Jesper Just (Des Moines Art Center), along with other major international figures including Lygia Clark, who’s getting a retrospective at MoMA, Mithu Sen and Imran Qureshi (both showing at the Broad Art Museum at MSU), Nalini Malani (Asia Society), Rirkrit Tiravanija (Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth), Ernesto Neto (Aspen Art Museum), Michael Snow (Philadelphia Museum of Art), and Robin Rhode (Neuberger Museum).

Museums of all kinds are pushing into global territory. In its first commission since Matisse finished The Dance in 1933, the Barnes Foundation has invited Yinka Shonibare to create work for its galleries, engaging with the interests of founder Albert Barnes in educating diverse audiences and collecting tribal art.

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The Jewish Museum is mining its own history too. Using “Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors,” its influential 1966 show of Minimalist sculpture, as a model (both literally and curatorially), Jens Hoffmann has assembled “Other Primary Structures.” The two-part show features abstract, geometric sculptures made by (mostly male) artists in Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America at the same time that Judd, LeWitt, and the rest were making their names in New York.

Meanwhile, the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore has a show of graphic novels by contemporary Jewish artists (telling stories about Jews). The Oakland Museum of California celebrates “Giant Robot,” the punk zine devoted to Asian American pop and alternative culture. “Black in the Abstract, Part 2: Hard Edges/Soft Curves,” second in a pair of shows exploring black abstraction from the ’60s to the present, is part of  “Outside the Lines,” a six-part series on contemporary abstraction at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Does all this mean that multiculturalism has grown up?

Sur thing: Curators look deeper into Latin America

The Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, culminates its four-year Via Brasil initiative with the show “Cruzamentos: Contemporary Art in Brazil.” “Beyond the Supersquare,” at the Bronx Museum, looks at the influence of Modernism and urbanism on the work of artists from Latin America, Portugal, and Canada. Meanwhile, “Permission To Be Global/Prácticas Globales: Latin American Art,” a (bilingually titled) selection of works from the collection of Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, arrives at Boston’s MFA.

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In July, SITE Santa Fe looks beyond conventional borders as it begins an ambitious new program called “SITElines: New Perspectives on Art of the Americas.” The six-year series of linked exhibitions is devoted to art and cultural production across the Americas, from Nunavut to Tierra del Fuego.

Dynamic Duos: Artistic BFFs

With three curators, each organizing a separate installation on its own floor, the Whitney Biennial ricochets trends in many directions. But it does include more artist collectives and collaboratives than ever.

“Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt,” at the Blanton, examines how the close friends, post-Minimalists in different ways, inspired and influenced one another. The dynamics of another artistic friendship are the subject of “Degas/Cassatt” at the National Gallery of Art. “An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle,” arriving at the Grey Art Gallery, looks at intertwined sensibilities among a larger group of Northern California artists.

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Legends in their own minds: Where artist is anthropologist

The subject of Camille Henrot’s video Grosse Fatigue, the Silver Lion-winner at last year’s Biennale, is nothing less than the origins of life and myth. The piece, shot partly in the American Museum of Natural History, will appear at the Baltimore Museum of Art before it arrives in New York, where it is in the New Museum’s overview of Henrot’s work from the last several years. (The artist has another show at the New Orleans Museum of Art exploring the evolution of oral cultures in Brittany and Southern Louisiana.)

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In “Sinful Saints and Saintly Sinners at the Margins of the Americas,” at UCLA’s Fowler Museum, artist interpret divine beings in Mexico, Brazil, Guatemala, and the United States—among them New Orleans’ “Voodoo Queen” Marie Laveau and the Native American deity known as Coyote. At the Hammer, Nathaniel Mellors has an interview with an apparently real Neanderthal.

And “DIRGE: Reflections on [Life and] Death,” at MOCA Cleveland, looks at different ways artists make sense of mortality.

Society of the Spectacle: Sports as Metaphor

At LACMA, “Fútbol: The Beautiful Game” uses works by Robin Rhode, Philippe Parreno, Douglas Gordon, and more to explore how the culture of soccer connects with nationalism and mass spectacle. The rituals and crafts of baseball are the focus of “Bull City Summer,” at the North Carolina Museum of Art, where artists including Alec Soth and Hank Willis Thomas chronicle their experience at Durham Bulls Athletic Park. Even the Metropolitan Museum is getting into the game at Superbowl time with “Gridiron Greats,” a selection of vintage football cards. Meanwhile, at the Ringling, R. Luke DuBois considers the circus as collective performance art.

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Immersive installations: Art Selfie Time!

You just have to be there to experience these site-specific installations—but take an art selfie anyway.

In New York, the Asia Society has Nalini Malani’s Transgressions II (2009), a multimedia installation where folkloric traditional shadow play meets new technology. At LACMA, Helen Pashgian, a pioneer of the light and space movement, is creating an environment around 12 molded-acrylic columns. At MASS MoCA, Teresita Fernández will use reflective gold-colored materials in an immersive installation, while Darren Waterston recreates Whistler’s Peacock Room as a sumptuous ruin. At the Eli and Edythe Broad Museum at MSU, Imran Qureshi will create a mountainous landscape out of crumbled papers printed with images of his earlier work. In the New Museum’s Lobby Gallery, Laure Prouvost presents For Forgetting (2013), a new, immersive multichannel video installation that explores slippages in memory. Swoon is building a large installation in the fifth-floor rotunda of the Brooklyn Museum. At LA MOCA’s Pacific Design Center, Jacob Hashimoto will create a new version of his Gas Giant, a kaleidoscopic installation of kite boxes and paper.

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We All Want to Change the World

“Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties,” a major show at the Brookyn Museum, examines the wide range of strategies artists used in the fight for racial justice. The Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the High Museum of Art are all showing Civil Rights photographs as well.

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The New Orleans Museum of Art traces the career of Mel Chin, a pioneer in social practice whose projects include removing contaminants from soil. At the Queens Museum, “Do you want the cosmetic version or do you want the real deal? Los Angeles Poverty Department (1986-2013),” is the first museum survey of the Los Angeles-based performance group made up principally of homeless or formerly homeless people.

Artist as Muse, Visionary, and Ghost

“Unbound: Contemporary Art After Frida Kahlo,” at the MCA Chicago, tracks the artist’s transgressive spirit in the work of figures including Sanford Biggers, Louise Bourgeois, Wangechi Mutu, Shirin Neshat, Hélio Oiticica, Catherine Opie, and Yang Fudong.

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James Lee Byars, whose “1/2 an Autobiography” (now at the Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City) travels to MoMA PS1, is the subject of a different kind of tribute, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit. “James Lee Byars: I Cancel All My Works At Death” is a show of plays, actions, and performances that are not actually on view. That’s because it’s curated by the shape-shifting crew known as Triple Candie.

Inspired by the balance of improvisation and control in William J. O’Brien’s resplendent, surrealist ceramics, drawings, and more, curator Naomi Beckwith has organized the first survey of his work, at the MCA Chicago, in the form of a poem.

The Writing on the Wall

Mel Bochner mines Roget’s Thesaurus for his “Strong Language,” opening at the Jewish Museum. “Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art” arrives at the Broad in Michigan. Print journalism lives on as art material in the work of Fred Tomaselli, whose “New York Times” series is in his show at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. See also Robert Gober in the Hammer’s “Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology,” billed as the first major show to explore strategies of appropriation and institutional critique in the work of American artists.

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The artist is curator

Along with Michelle Grabner, the Whitney Biennial co-curator whose own artwork is on view at MoCA Cleveland, a number of artists are organizing shows this season. In “Ruffneck Constructivists,” at Philadelphia’s ICA, curator Kara Walker unites artists who share a defiant, confrontational attitude toward cultural injustice. Nicole Eisenman, whose mid-career survey opens at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, curates a concurrent show there with artist A.L. Steiner. The exhibition, “Readykeulous by Ridykeulous: This is What Liberation Feels Like™,” features emotionally charged works by more than 40 artists and activists.  Jessica Jackson Hutchins (and later Trevor Paglen) is curating a theme-based show from the permanent collection of the Broad in Michigan. At the Menil, Haim Steinbach will help organize an installation of his own work, works from the collection, and objects from stores and beyond that evoke Duchamp’s readymades.

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…And so are you

While “Art of Its Own Making,” at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis, examines the role of the audience in perceiving artworks that change over time, other museums are putting the viewer in the curators’ chair.

Voting is currently underway for “Boston Loves Impressionism,” the MFA Boston’s first crowdsourced exhibition. The Chrysler Museum, which reopens in its expanded and renovated building in Norfolk, Virginia, in May, has also opened voting for a crowdsourcing of objects from its collection. Here’s your chance, the museum advises, “to save one of your favorites from languishing in a vault.”

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Check back at artnews.com for more previews of upcoming shows.

Mochica, North Coast, possibly La Mina, Forehead Ornament with Feline Head and Octopus Tentacles Ending in Catfish Heads, 100 – 800 A.D., gold, chrysocolla, and shells.

MUSEO DE LA NACIÓN, LIMA, PHOTO ©DANIEL GIANNONI.

Crafted in gold, chrysocolla and shells, this sea god was made for a Mochica ruler some time between 100 and 800 A.D. Scholars believe it was buried at a site called La Mina in the Jequetepeque Valley, on Peru’s northern coast.

But they don’t know for sure. In 1988 La Mina was looted, and by the time archeologists learned the ornament existed, it had been smuggled to Spain. After being recovered by Scotland Yard in London, it was repatriated to Peru in 2006.

Grimacing from the catalogue’s cover, the golden god sends a fierce message about Peru’s ongoing commitment to reclaim its archeological heritage.

But it’s also there to make a larger statement about a national cultural identity.

Pre-Columbian Peruvian art has been a staple of North American museum shows, like recent efforts at the Yale Peabody on Machu Picchu, at the Fowler on the Moche, and at the Met on feather art. “The Wari: Lords of the Ancient Andes,” organized by the Cleveland Museum, is now at Fort Lauderdale’s Museum of Art and is headed this summer to the Kimbell.

The show includes some new acquisitions by Cleveland, including a stunning bag illustrating a human face and adorned with human hair that it bought at Sotheby’s last year for $146,500. (Some experts have questioned its vague provenance, but the museum says evidence of its pre-1970 history complies with UNESCO guidelines.)

Wari, Peru, Bag with Human Face, 600–1000, alpaca or llama hide, human hair, pigment, cotton, coca leaf contents.

THE CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART, LEONARD C. HANNA JR. FUND 2011.35. IMAGE © THE CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART.

Lately–reversing centuries of discrimination–the art made after the Spanish conquest has been edging out pre-Columbian on exhibition schedules. The Philadelphia Museum just opened “Journeys to New Worlds: Spanish and Portuguese Colonial Art from the Roberta and Richard Huber Collection.” The Brooklyn Museum is planning a show exploring ways that New World colonial society used art objects to help create a notion of home. And this May, the Denver Museum will include a selection of Spanish Colonial paintings depicting Native textiles in its museum-wide “Spun” extravaganza. “Fashion Fusion” features some bizarre combinations of cross-cultural pollination, like this Inca princess painted as an alter ego of the Old Testament heroine Judith.

Inca Noblewoman (Gran Nusta Mama Occollo), Cuzco, Peru, early 1800s, oil on canvas mounted on board.

DENVER ART MUSEUM, GIFT OF DR. BELINDA STRAIGHT.

“Peru: Kingdoms of the Sun and the Moon” unites all these and more.

The Montreal exhibition defines Peruvian identity by tracking symbols and myths that emerged hundreds of years before the Spaniards arrived—how they were manifested in pre-Columbian civilizations; how they persisted, submerged, in the post-Conquest era; and how they were reclaimed and reasserted in modern times.

Organized by Victor Pimentel, curator of pre-Columbian art at the Montreal Museum, along with a high-wattage team of advisers, “Kingdoms” includes more than 350 objects that traverse some 3,000 years of history. The pre-Columbian works range from a Cupinisnique ceramic stirrup-spout bottle depicting human and feline heads dating from 1200-200 B.C. to spectacular creations, in precious metals, camelid wool, clay, feathers, and other materials, by artists representing the Chimú, Huari, Lambayeque, Mochica, Tiahuanaco, Nazca, Paracas, and Inca cultures, among others.

Nazca-Huari, south coast, Poncho with Felines 500–900 A.D., camelid wool.

THE MONTREAL MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS 1948.AD.44. PHOTO MMFA

None of these cultures used a written language. Instead, as the catalogue explains, visual languages, of symbol, color, and form—from the fantastical beings and geometric motifs on textiles to the “spatial syntax” of a vessel’s handle and spout—were the conduits for information about power, ritual, religion, and identity.

Anonymous, Cuzco School, Virgen Niña Hilando (Young Virgin Spinning), second third of the 18th century, oil on canvas and gold leaf.

MUSEO PEDRO DE OSMA, LIMA, PHOTO ©JOAQUÍN RUBIO.

In the Colonial era, the unprecedented mixture of people, materials, and styles from America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, led to the emergence of new art forms and iconography. The catalogue explores the endurance of native cosmology in the new context. For example, the image of the Young Virgin Spinning, a reference to Mary’s activities in the temple, was brought by Spanish painters to Peru. To Andean eyes, it also alluded to the “virgins of the Sun,” the Inca women confined to the temple who were charged with weaving fine garments for use in ceremonies.

Anonymous, possibly Lima, Depósito eucarístico con forma de pelícano (Eucharistic urn in the shape of a pelican), circa 1750 – 1760, partially gilded silver, and gemstones.

MONASTERIO NUESTRA SEÑORA DEL PRADO, LIMA, PHOTO ©DANIEL GIANNONI.

The Pelican feeding its young with its own blood, a symbol for the Eucharist since the Middle Ages, was a favorite of masters of the Andean Baroque. In this urn (a highlight of the Met’s “Colonial Andes”) the birds have movable tongues and glass eyes. A key opens the hinged door on the back to allow the placement of the host for use on Holy Thursday.

Francisco Laso, Habitante de las cordilleras del Perú (Inhabitant of the Peruvian Highlands), 1855, oil on canvas.

PINACOTECA MUNICIPAL “IGNACIO MERINO” DE LA MUNICIPALIDAD METROPOLITANA DE LIMA, PHOTO ©DANIEL GIANNONI.

Fernando Laso’s Inhabitant of the Peruvian Highlands, painted for the 1855 World’s Fair in Paris three decades after Peru proclaimed its independence, represents in a sense the return of the repressed.

The painting shows a man holding a Mochica pot depicting a prisoner with his hands tied behind his back, and a rope knotted around his neck. Displayed alongside a portrait of the conquistador Pizarro, it was a clear reference to the oppression of Indians, past and present.

As image of the new nation that began to be disseminated in books, photos, and postcards, the image of the Indian was slow to emerge. When it did, it was to satisfy interest overseas.

Martín Chambi, Tristeza andina, La Raya (Andean Sadness, La Raya), 1933, gelatin silver print.

COURTESY OF ARCHIVO FOTOGRAFICO MARTIN CHAMBI, CUZCO.

Gradually, as the exhibition chronicles, the idea of the “Indian” as untouched by time or modernity became central to the idea of Peruvian culture. Photography played a large role in disseminating this new/old Indian (the odd non-Peruvian here is Irving Penn, represented by the elegant portraits he shot in a Cuzco studio, some of which ran in Vogue). Most influential was Martín Chambi, the Puno-born photographer who alternated his Cuzco studio practice with travels to photograph indigenous communities in the surrounding region.

The newest works in “Kingdoms” are popular-art objects like carved gourds from the Junín region, a mask from the Dance of the Huaconada, and elaborate carved retablos. Like the majestic bowler-hatted women of the altiplano depicted in so many paintings here, their genealogy is mixed–some deeply obvious, some deeply encoded. The conclusion is that the “authentic” Peruvian is of course a hybrid creation.

Leonor Vinatea Cantuarias, Pastoras (Shepherdesses), 1944, oil on canvas.

MUSEO DE LA NACIÓN, LIMA, PHOTO ©JOAQUÍN RUBIO.

The most recent paintings, though, are indigenista works of José Sabogal, Leonor Vinatea Cantuarias, and others, dating from the mid-20th century. It might have been interesting to see how visual artists from more recent times took from their native traditions, mixed them with international art currents, and ran with them.

But that will have to be the subject of another show.

“Peru: Kingdoms of the Sun and the Moon,” on view in Montreal through June 16 and a part of the museum’s Summer Educational Program through September 15, will travel to the Seattle Art Museum from October 17 through January 5.

At museums, meanwhile, bats and black cats have come out of storage, along with a parade of skeletons from around the world. While all galleries remain closed on the East Coast, their counterparts in the rest of the country are still in the seasonal mood. Some have organized tours around themes like the macabre and the carnivalesque; others just happen to be showing art that fits right in. Increasingly, the focus is not just on Halloween, but the more solemn (yet deliriously festive) celebrations honoring the dead in Latin and Caribbean cultures.

Here are some highlights compiled by our interns, Maximilíano Durón, Miao Jiang, Mila Pinigin, and Claire Voon.

Altar Egos
Day of the Dead celebrations are getting bigger and bigger. At the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City, Mexican artist Betsabeé Romero is collaborating with Jenny Mendez from Mattie Rhodes Center to lead a team of local artists in creating a traditional altar. The piece honors two recently deceased cultural figures: author Carlos Fuentes and singer Chavela Vargas.

COURTESY MARK MCDONALD AND NELSON-ATKINS MUSEUM OF ART, KANSAS CITY.

It’s the Great Munch Pumpkin
MoMA got into the spirit by commissioning a pumpkin to promote its showing of The Scream (a show that happens to feature a few vampires). It’s on the counter in the entrance to the museum offices.

Maniac Pumpkin Carvers, The Scream, 2012, carved pumpkin.

IMAGE REPRODUCTION COURTESY OF THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK. PHOTO BY MAXIMILÍANO DURÓN.

Winged Victory
Marcel Dzama goes batty in “Fairy Tales, Monsters and the Genetic Imagination,” a traveling exhibition now at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Marcel Dzama, Welcome to the land of the bat, 2008.

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND DAVID ZWIRNER GALLERY, NEW YORK.

Bead It:
Barron Lacroix, a Gede spirit rendered in beads by Roudy Azor is in the Fowler Museum’s “In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st‐Century Haitian Art.” The piece is part of a kids’ program celebrating Fèt Gede, Haiti’s festival of the ancestors, November 4.

Roudy Azor, Barron Lacroix, 2010, polyester, beads, thread.

FOWLER MUSEUM AT UCLA X2010.17.1/MUSEUM PURCHASE, THE JEROME L. JOSS ENDOWMENT FUND.

Dancing in the Streets
Henrik Martin Mayer, who was born in New Hampshire and once ran the Wadsworth Atheneum, found inspiration for his 1938 painting Halloween Carnival in the Halloween celebrations once held on Monument Circle in downtown Indianapolis. It’s in “All Hallow’s Eve,” one of the “Tag Tours” at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Henrik Martin Mayer, Halloween Carnival, 1938, oil on Masonite.

GIFT OF MRS. HENRIK MARTIN MAYER, 77.62.

Bone to Pick
A woodblock print from “Collection Tour: Kuniyoshi: Graphic Heroes, Magic Monsters” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Kuniyoshi was a big influence on today’s manga and anime artists.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi, In the Ruined Palace at Sôma, Masakado’s Daughter Takiyasha Uses 
Sorcery to Gather Allies (Sôma no furudairi ni Masakado himegimi 
Takiyasha yôjutsu o motte mikata o atsumuru), ca. 1844 (Kôka 1), woodblock print (nishiki-e); ink and color on paper.

WILLIAM STURGIS BIGELOW COLLECTION. PHOTOGRAPH ©MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON.

Head Trip
A bizarre Gauguin sculpture is featured in an audio tour for “Demons, Angels, and Monsters: The Supernatural in Art” at The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Scholars believe the figure may be a self-portrait. The head, known from photographs the artist pasted into his manuscript Noa Noa, was rediscovered in the 1990s.

Paul Gauguin, Head with Horns, 1895-’97, wood with traces of polychromy.

THE J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM, LOS ANGELES. ACCESSION NO. 2002.18.

Dream Interpretation
Yinka Shonibare riffs on a famous Goya print in “Fairy Tales, Monsters and the Genetic Imagination” at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Yinka Shonibare, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (America), 2008.

COLLECTION OF JAMES P. GRAY, II.

What’s Halloween Without a Black Cat?
A beloved Steinlen poster from “Collection Tour: Halloween” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, Collection of the Chat Noir, 1898, lithographic poster, printed in black and red.

ERNEST WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW FUND AND PARTIAL GIFT OF JAMES A. LAP. PHOTOGRAPH © MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON.

Go Sister
A painting by Chicana artist Patssi Valdez paying homage to scholar and author Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is in “Día de los muertos 2012,” a celebration featuring Ofrendas, installations, and artworks created by Mexican artists from both sides of the border, at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago.

Patssi Valdez, October/Octubre, 1995, acrylic on canvas.

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MEXICAN ART PERMANENT COLLECTION, 1997.32, PURCHASE MADE POSSIBLE BY ABE TOMÁS HUGHES AND DIANA GIRARDI KARNAS IN MEMORY OF RAY CHAVEZ, PHOTO: KATHLEEN CULBERT-AGUILAR.

Some Enchanted Evening
Henri Rousseau in the “Halloween Themes in Art” tour at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Henri-Julien-Félix Rousseau, Carnival Evening, 1886, oil on canvas.

THE LOUIS E. STERN COLLECTION, 1963. IMAGE COURTESY OF THE PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART.

Unknown Artist, Cast of Gradiva, early 1900s, plaster. Freud hung it in his study, in clear view of the patients on his couch.

© THE FREUD MUSEUM LONDON.

Archeologically, the cast isn’t too important. But it went on to make a big stamp on modernism—and maybe even on Freud’s early patients, who viewed it from his couch.

Freud, who owned many authentic antiquities, acquired this reproduction because it depicts a fictional character—the sculpted woman who obsessed an archeologist in a 1903 novella by Wilhelm Jensen. That book became the subject of Freud’s psychoanalytic essay Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva (1907), which in turn obsessed a long line of Surrealists and their kin—from Dalí (who nicknamed his wife after her), to Breton (who named a gallery after her) to Duchamp (whose erotic objects honored her) to Masson, Barthes, Derrida, and Robbe-Grillet.

Giorgio Sommer, Cast of a Dog Killed by the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius, Pompeii, about 1874, albumen silver print. Sommer’s photos documenting a new method to create plasters out of the voids where bodies had disintegrated were a worldwide sensation.

© THE J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM, LOS ANGELES.

Allan McCollum, The Dog from Pompeii, 1991, polymer-modified hydrocal, composed of casts of casts of casts.

© LAMAY PHOTO/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND FREDRICH PETZEL GALLERY.

The meaning of Rauschenberg’s dog is disputed; Seydl suggests it embodies the threat of nuclear war. Inevitably, the show argues, the art imagining this spectacular lost-and-found city reflects anxieties about our own. “Despite all that has changed in the past two millennia, this is the event that could happen again and with much the same consequences,” write Getty director Timothy Potts and David Franklin, director of the Cleveland Museum (where the show travels before arriving at Quebec’s Musée national de beaux-arts) in their co-authored catalogue introduction.

Mr., “Metamorphosis: Give Me Your Wings”, 2012, at Lehmann Maupin’s Chelsea space, restages the aftermath of Japan’s earthquake and tsunami.

PHOTO: MIAO JIANG/© THE ARTIST AND KAIKAI KIKI CO., LTD.

Then there’s Concordia, Concordia, Thomas Hirshhorn’s massive piece at Gladstone on 21st Street, inspired by the sinking of an Italian cruise ship earlier this year. The scene is definitely a disaster. The installation—which the viewer cannot enter—is a huge jumble of furniture, gear, kitschy decorations, and humble materials that stand in for the high-tech innards of the ship, threatening to collapse further at any moment.

Thomas Hirschhorn, Concordia, Concordia, 2012, recreates the sunken cruise ship at Barbara Gladstone’s gallery on 21st Street.

PHOTO: ANNA KOWALSKA/© THOMAS HIRSCHHORN/COURTESY GLADSTONE GALLERY, NEW YORK AND BRUSSELS.

Javier Arce, Serie Estrujados (Guernica X-L), 2012, felt-tip pen on tyvek & trash bag, unfurled. The piece is now crumpled on the floor at Newman Popiashvili.

NEWMAN POPIASHVILI GALLERY.

The role of art as document, catharsis, elegy, and inspiration in times of disaster is nowhere more clear than in a show that opened a few days after “Pompeii” in another part of L.A.: “In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st-Century Haitian Art,” at UCLA’s Fowler Museum. Exuberant and heart-rending, raw and brash, mournful and scary, the exhibition (which travels to Quebec’s Musée de la civilization), features works dating back to the mid-20th century, but mostly from this one, when a series of catastrophes—most tragically, but not most recently, the 2010 earthquake—shattered the nation.

Evelyn Alcide, Séisme (Earthquake), 2010, beads, thread, polyester.

© FOWLER MUSEUM AT UCLA/MUSEUM PURCHASE, THE JEROME L. JOSS ENDOWMENT FUND.

The show’s theme, though, is how these accumulated catastrophes have affected images of Haiti’s gods, particularly the Gedes, trickster deities of the vodou pantheon. The curatorial team, lead by Donald J. Cosentino, traces how imagery of the Gede—god of death, of resurrection, of sexuality—has become more intimidating, aloof, disconnected from the populace whose unrepressed desires he traditionally represented.

Didier Civil, Gede Triptych (1 of 3), 2006, acrylic on canvas.

© FOWLER MUSEUM AT UCLA/GIFT OF MARILYN HOULBERG.

Cosentino describes these works as “Post-apocalyptic arts,” a term that aptly reflects the visceral, hellish reality they convey. But the phrase, he concedes, only works up to a point. In Haiti, the apocalypse is still going on.