Entering the contemporary art space located just a few minutes’ walk from my home in the Hudson Valley last fall, I had no idea what to expect. Gallerist Jack Shainman had just opened an exhibition by the Botswana-born artist Meleko Mokgosi. Entitled “Democratic Intuition,” Mokgosi’s opus fills all three floors of the stunning 30,000-square-foot building called The School. The artist’s massive paintings feature jarring mash-ups of people, places, objects, and animals that draw from the lives of the people of southern Africa. To write that the exhibition fills the space barely captures how the paintings burst off of the walls, confronting viewers with image overload and leaving the visitor with the challenge of coping with the unexpected discomfort the images conjure.

Mokgosi’s paintings are gorgeous, with saturated colors that sting the eyes. At least one of the pictorial pieces is paired with a canvas covered with dense, hand-written verbiage that maps the artist’s philosophical explorations. In that piece and others, Mokgosi makes visible his desire to reveal in painstaking detail his underlying thought process. But unlike the work of many other contemporary artists, Mokgosi’s powerful imagery requires no verbal explanation. In truth, Mokgosi gives the game away in a modestly scaled, straight-on self-portrait that the gallery’s curators had the wisdom to hang in a light-filled back-hall space that allows the achingly honest and unsparing self-image to stand on its own.

It is there, in the quiet of that space, that Mokgosi’s intention is laid bare. The artist’s eyes, staring straight ahead, burn into the viewers’ eyes with unblinking confrontation. Mokgosi’s expression seems to hide a complex mixture of tightly held messages. A polite invitation is not one of them. Instead, his expression signals a demand to those of us who take for granted our place in a predominantly white, privileged, first-world society to step outside our self-imposed indifference to the lives of minorities, people of color, the poor, and the disadvantaged. Mokgosi implores us to open our eyes. “We are here,” he demands. “Look at us. See us.”

Mokgosi’s paintings were still churning around in my brain when I happened upon reporting and devastating video footage from ProPublica about the tragic death of Carlos Gregoria Hernandez Vasquez. Carlos, a sixteen-year-old Guatemalan taken into custody by ICE, died of flu-related complications in the bathroom of a quarantine cell at a border station in Weslaco, Texas, in the early hours of May 20, 2019. The crime — and the shame — is that Carlos didn’t die because he was ill with a 103-degree fever. He died because he was denied proper care. He died because the guards at the facility acted as if his life was of so little value that they ignored instructions to check on his condition every few hours. He died because the border-patrol station lacked the proper facilities, personnel, and adequate funds to care for sick, quarantined children. He died because the Trump administration made the cynical and cruel decision to punish children like Carlos whose parents’ only crime was to make the heart-rending decision to send their loved ones alone on a dangerous journey to the U.S. border in a desperate bid to find a safer life.

Carlos is one of twenty-three immigrants – including two children under the age of ten — who have died in custody since the Trump administration came into office. In the end, the sad truth is that Carlos Gregoria Hernandez Vasquez and the others died because we just didn’t bother to see them.

Meleko Mokgosi’s “Democratic Intuition.” Saturdays, 11am to 6pm, until Spring 2020 at The School I Jack Shainman Gallery, 25 Broad Street, Kinderhook, New York.

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Donald Trump’s embrace of neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups has alienated yet another of his showpiece “advisory” councils. All 17 members of the President’s Council on the  Arts & Humanities [PCAH] resigned on August 18, 2017, leaving a harshly worded break-up note. Their letter of resignation is the latest in an accumulating file of written protests by knowledge experts,  industry luminaries and military leaders, whose moral compasses are guiding them away from a president whose policies and actions they feel they can no longer implicitly endorse.

Below is the full text of their letter. It’s worth noting that the Honorary Chairperson of this group is none other than Melania Trump, who must be mightily embarrassed by this move [and by having been suckered into putting her name on the letterhead]. Also, sharp observers have noticed that the first letters of each paragraph combine to spell the hidden message, “RESIST.”

Dear Mr. President:

Reproach and censure in the strongest possible terms are necessary following your support of the hate groups and terrorists who killed and injured fellow Americans in Charlottesville. The false equivalencies you push cannot stand. The Administration’s refusal to quickly and unequivocally condemn the cancer of hatred only further emboldens those who wish America ill. We cannot sit idly by, the way that your West Wing advisors have, without speaking out against your words and actions. We are members of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH). The Committee was created in 1982under President Reagan to advise the White House on cultural issues. We were hopeful that continuing to serve in the PCAH would allow us to focus on the important work the committee does with your federal partners and the private sector to address, initiate, and support key policies and programs in the arts and humanities for all Americans. Effective immediately, please accept our resignation from the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.

Elevating any group that threatens and discriminates on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity, disability, orientation, background, or identity is un-American. We have fought slavery, segregation, and internment. We must learn from our rich and often painful history. The unified fabric of America is made by patriotic individuals from backgrounds as vast as the nation is strong. In our service to the American people, we have experienced this first-hand as we traveled and built the Turnaround Arts education program, now in many urban and rural schools across the country from Florida to Wisconsin.

Speaking truth to power is never easy, Mr. President. But it is our role as commissioners on the PCAH to do so. Art is about inclusion. The Humanities include a vibrant free press. You have attacked both. You released a budget which eliminates arts and culture agencies. You have threatened nuclear war while gutting diplomacy funding. The Administration pulled out of the Paris agreement, filed an amicus brief undermining the Civil Rights Act, and attacked our brave trans service members. You have subverted equal protections, and are committed to banning Muslims and refugee women & children from our great country. This does not unify the nation we all love. We know the importance of open and free dialogue through our work in the cultural diplomacy realm, most recently with the first-ever US Government arts and culture delegation to Cuba, a country without the same First Amendment protections we enjoy here. Your words and actions push us all further away from the freedoms we are guaranteed.

Ignoring your hateful rhetoric would have made us complicit in your words and actions. We took a patriotic oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic

Supremacy, discrimination, and vitriol are not American values. Your values are not American values. We must be better than this. We are better than this. If this is not clear to you, then we call on you to resign your office, too.

Thank you.

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I’ve often been told that writers write in order to figure things out.That is definitely the case with this piece, in which I feel compelled to explore the current controversy surrounding the “Direct Drive” exhibit at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis.

“Direct Drive,” an exhibit of work by Kelley Walker, features magazine photographs of black men and women that have been digitally manipulated and then smeared with chocolate and toothpaste. While other works by the artist are also on display, these images have triggered outrage and a public boycott of the museum. Many of the protestors are members of St. Louis’s black community; they have demanded that the works be removed and the museum issue a public apology for hanging them.

Let me be clear: I am not an artist and I have no expertise in the art world.  I have served as a docent at a sculpture park and somewhere along the way I took an art history class.  I like art and I enjoy museums. In the current controversy, I am less troubled by the images than I am about the arguments.

After visiting the exhibit, I came home with a copy of the gallery guide and tried to think critically about the controversy. Part of the problem between those who inhabit the rarefied atmosphere of the art world and us lesser mortals is, I believe, a problem of language. Artists and those who write about their work often use “art speak”—-a version of the English language that seldom clarifies, and often muddies, the water.  Therefore, when the gallery guide says that “Walker creates gestural abstractions and alludes to consumption, objectification, and impermanence,” many of us remain confused.  This was apparently an issue when the artist and a curator participated in a talk at the museum. The artist, who is white, was described as “hostile” when visitors inquired about his use of images of black civil rights leaders and black women on magazine covers.

Is it important for artists to be able to explain their work? I don’t know.

Some of the protestors complain that Walker’s images are “offensive” and “disrespectful.” While I acknowledge these feelings, I also wonder: are works of art supposed to be non-controversial? Is the purpose of a painting to show respect? If so, to whom—-the model on the canvas? the viewer? What about respect for the artist’s vision?  Shouldn’t he be allowed to express it? British painter Lucian Freud once said that “the task of the artist is to make the human being uncomfortable.” If that is the goal, then Walker has succeeded admirably.

Another complaint about this exhibit is that it is being shown in St. Louis, a city that has experienced racial unrest in the wake of Michael Brown’s death. Does place matter where art is shown? If the answer to that is “yes,” then a lot of cities (Baltimore, Chicago, Charlotte) will be eliminated from Walker’s prospective venues. It might be argued that art lovers in these cities would be even more receptive to discussing and critiquing his work.

I don’t know how to respond to this work, any more than I knew what to think about Chris Ofili’s “Black Madonna,” a painting of the Virgin Mary decorated with dried elephant dung that was produced in 1999 (and later sold for $4.6 million). I don’t know if works of art have to have “meaning” or if it’s enough for them to stand on their own, without explanation. I don’t know if the powers that be in the art world are exhibiting “lily white ignorance” of issues that might inflame their communities. I do know that violent and painful images abound in the art world, and some people may be offended by almost anything.

In an attempt to avoid offense, the Contemporary Art Museum found a solution that will probably satisfy nobody. It is erecting barriers to shield viewers from the offending works; the barriers will feature signs that explain the objections to the work and museum-goers can decide for themselves what they want to see.

While this controversy has been difficult for the artist, painful for the protestors, challenging for museum officials, and somewhat baffling for the rest of us, it is probably ultimately good for the city of St. Louis. It has made some of us think and question our assumptions about art. It has probably increased attendance at the Museum. It’s given some of us something new and different to protest. And it’s quite possible that the situation will end up saying more about St. Louis and its citizens than it ever does about Kelly Walker his work.

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While riding my bicycle a few months ago past The School: Jack Shainman Gallery—a stunning, year-old kunsthalle just around the corner from my home in the Hudson Valley—I was surprised by the appearance on the gallery’s front lawn of a magnificent, red-hued sculpture by the artist Mark di Suvero.

The sculpture, entitled Chonk On, is constructed of Cor-ten steel, one of the award-winning sculptor’s favored materials. Like most of di Suvero’s mature work, the sculpture’s power lies in the sleight-of-hand the artist conjures when he lends an appearance of delicacy and weightlessness to this heavy-duty material.

My response to seeing the sculpture that first day could best be described as unreserved delight. The piece’s complex interlocking of steel beams reminded me of a kinetically charged troupe of dancers whose muscular limbs and arched bodies lean into one another, teetering on the edge of toppling over but held in precarious balance through the cooperative strain of mutual support. The exhilaration of that first viewing, however, was quickly followed by the suspicion that the unexpected and startling appearance of this twenty-foot-high, mega-ton exclamation point in the otherwise staid, predictable narrative of the tiny historic village where I reside probably would cause ripples of discomfort and more than a smattering of controversy.

The installation of an industrial-strength sculpture like Chonk On in an urban square or out in the fields of a sculpture park is no longer surprising. In fact, such installations have become an urban-planning and art world cliché. Chonk On packs an altogether different visual punch when planted in the middle of a collection of lush residential lawns, clapboard siding and weathered brick, colonial fanlights, Palladian windows, and Greek-revival trim. The stark contrast between the aesthetics of the old and the shock of the new initiates a visual conversation that is deeply provocative and radical to its core.

Over the next few weeks, I was pleased to discover that my concerns about negative pushback to the sculpture would prove to be unwarranted. Initial speculation about the sculptor’s intent was rife with charges of thinly veiled erotic content and phallic allusion. Over time even those rumors faded. Later, when it became known that an outspoken coterie had decided to object officially to the sculpture’s installation, the majority of the community rallied to express support for the sculpture and the gallery’s decision to install it. In a packed public meeting, one neighbor after another spoke eloquently of their gratitude for the opportunity to be able to view such accomplished and acclaimed art in their own community. One resident went so far as to describe the community’s response as “a love fest.”

I began to wonder. Was it possible that this small community—highly conservative in outlook and deeply invested in its traditional historic lineage—had understood the installation of di Suvero’s quintessentially contemporary sculpture not as an interloper into an historic context but as an energizing counterpoint? Could it be, I thought, that the presence of the sculpture had inspired in more residents than just myself a fundamental questioning of how we perceive our shared environment and how we define its place in the contemporary world?

These questions and the social dialogue they engender is the essence of what engaged art hopes to achieve. Contemporary artists who share di Suvero’s drive to exhibit on public turf and brave the controversy, like Richard Serra, the minimalist sculptor and bête noire of the infamous Tilted Arc, or Jeff Koons, or Christo, or Maya Lin, or Andy Goldsworthy, or Anish Kapoor (who dared to install within the manicured gardens of the Palais de Versailles a sculpture called Dirty Corner—now dubbed the “queen’s vagina”) understand that the most effective setting for inspiring oft-times unsettling social dialogue is within the public sphere.

After all, unlike the controlled environs of the museum or gallery, public space is accessible to all, raucously multifunctional, and largely unpredictable. Unlike art contained within white walls, public art doesn’t beckon from behind closed doors where mainly art lovers or the intellectually curious make a conscious choice to enter and engage in the dialogue. Public art is not polite nor demure. It thrusts itself bluntly into an otherwise open, familiar space and forces the unsuspecting viewer to become the unsuspecting constructor of meaning. For many, this unsolicited and often unwanted confrontation—particularly within an historic context—is deeply uncomfortable. And why shouldn’t it be, since most of us seek out the comfort and balance of the familiar and would rather not have anything (especially art, thank you very much) disrupt our carefully constructed zone of comfort.

I suspect that every gallerist, museum curator, and public official or government bureaucrat who approves the installation of art on public turf is well aware of the discomfort and controversy such works might inspire. But challenging the status quo is exactly the point.

Di Suvero himself lays out the argument for embracing the challenge when he admits that he wants to inspire the viewers of his work to “think differently about their lives, about their cooperative relationship with the art, with their world, with their neighbors.”

The School: Jack Shainman Gallery is located in the Village of Kinderhook, two and one-half hours north of New York City.

Information about the current exhibitions, “Winter in America,” A Multimedia Group Exhibition Including Works by Artists Representing 15 Countries, and “Room with View,” The Sculpture and Drawings of Mark di Suvero, can be found at www.jackshainman.com/school.

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Today I joined hundreds of tourists, camp groups, families and local residents who were visiting The Bean in Chicago’s Millennium Park.  [British artist Anish Kapoor’s  highly polished, stainless steel creation is officially titled “Cloud Gate,” but after its unveiling in 2006, its shape quickly inspired the more popular, descriptive nickname.]

We walked around it and under it, touched it, and photographed ourselves, our friends, and the skyline reflected in its fun-house-mirror, stainless-steel skin.  I watched as children crawled on the ground  at the scultpure’s base, seeing themselves appear to be climbing up the inside of the sculpture. I stood underneath The Bean and looked up to see myself and others reshaped and repositioned, depending on where we were standing in relation to the varying curvatures of the Bean’s surface.

It’s an amazing work of art. The Bean’s western surface offers a compressed, fish-eye distortion of Chicago’s dramatic skyline.  On the east,  north and south sides, you can snap a self-portrait of a smaller or larger version of who you think you are, in the optically re-proportioned  plaza surrounding you. And underneath it, you might see yourself multiplied, or upside down.

The visual experience is striking. The design itself is reality altering, because despite its 110-ton weight, it appears almost to float over the plaza, like the drop of liquid mercury that inspired Kapoor.

But there’s an intangible effect, too. If one of art’s purposes is to allow us see to our world in new ways, The Bean achieves its goal artfully and subtly—not by clobbering you over the head with a message, but by drawing you in through its beauty and ingeniousness.

I loved watching people –kids and adults—playing with their reflections, waving to locate themselves on the distorting surface, and discovering the visual trickery of the sculpture’s curves.  I don’t know if Kapoor  intended this to happen, but it seems to me that we all were, mostly inadvertently, doing something very simple, but  psychologically powerful and politically important:  discovering and acknowledging that there’s more than one way to see ourselves, others and the world around us.

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Art and I have a tumultuous relationship. While I like visiting museums and I have an appreciation for things hung on walls, my mind usually categorizes it in one of two ways.
1. Oooh, pretty.
2. I don’t get it.

That isn’t to say I don’t enjoy art. I’m just not one of those people who can stand around and have deep conversations about what a piece signifies or what the artist was trying to convey. Sometimes a pretty landscape is just a pretty landscape. So imagine my shock when I found something artsy that not only do I like, but I understand.

It’s an installation called the I-75 Project. The artist, Norm Magnussun has been working on lining 1,775 miles of Interstate-75 with mock historical markers that have a progressive political message. (The artist calls it a message of social conscience. I’d like to think that’s what being progressive is all about.) The goal is to put one marker at each of the 50 rest stops off of I-75. This is a quite an interesting goal considering that I-75 starts in Michigan and then travels through five red states. (Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida)

In my mind this is a great example of social activism. The art is accessible, clever, and it’s more thought provoking than the usual name calling that happens at most protests. At the very least it should be an interesting conversation starter for all of the families taking a summer road trip on I-75.

[cincopa AYMABrq85BO-]

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The Monarch-Chesterfield levee, in suburban St. Louis, is about to get beautified by a creative, fun community project that could be a good starting point for a wider discussion.

On June 4, 2011, a group of 50 students in 8^th through 12^th grades will lead an expected 600 to 1,000 area residents in painting a student-designed mural on a 500-foot, concrete stretch of the Chesterfield-Monarch floodwall. The community art project, called Make Your Mark, is sponsored by Chesterfield Arts, a community non-profit. The group describes the project this way:

…a free, community-based project that is providing a unique leadership opportunity for students from across the region…This Student Leadership Team has been working since July [2010] on Phase I of the project, which includes creating the design for the mural. With the help of professional artist Stuart Morse of Morse Fine Art Studios, the team has been getting creative with concepts that will transform the levee and the future Great Rivers Greenway recreation trail.

A constructive activity for teens. Enhancing area recreation. That seems like a good project for teens and community residents, right? So, what’s the problem?

History: Water flows, and so does money

The levee is designed to protect St. Louis County’s Chesterfield Valley from a 500-year flood. In 1993, when the existing Monarch levee failed, Chesterfield Valley [previously known, more descriptively, as “Missouri Bottoms” and “Gumbo”] was inundated with more than eight feet of Missouri River overflow. Local residents recall the dramatic images of a main east-west highway [now I-64/40] completely cut off by flood water, and an area landmark—the Smoke House Restaurant—up to its top liquor shelves in muddy water. Before it was over, many of the 300 businesses then in the Gumbo area were flooded.

Because of the flood, FEMA required the existing levee to be recertified. The history of the levee is closely tied in with commercial development. In the early 1980s, Spirit of St. Louis Airport opened in the area, prompting St. Louis County to upgrade what was then a much lower, agricultural levee to a structure made to resist a100-year flood.  In 1994, after the flood, the city of Chesterfield went a step further, creating business-friendly tax-increment financing [TIF] to attract commercial development to the valley. In 1997, that incentive brought THF—a Wal-Mart developer—into the valley. THFcreated Chesterfield Commons, which has evolved into the longest [2 miles] big-box shopping strip in the country. THF’s presence sparked even more development, and the Monarch-Chesterfield Levee District gained the funds to finance the improved, 500-year levee. An estimated $2.2 billion worth of new commercial and residential development currently stands on land that was under water in 1993.

The levee district itself has spent more than $20 million on the levee’s system of pumps, spillways, berms and gates.  And today, the now-more-appealingly named Chesterfield Valley, once a huge, natural flood plain, is a huge retail mecca protected by a levee system, jointly funded by the levee district and the federal government to the tune of about $70 million.

Decorate or detonate?

Meanwhile, downriver in Tennessee and Mississippi, similarly costly levees along the Mississippi River have been blown up, and spillways have been opened in an effort to alleviate flooding and protect commercial interests. The result of these desperate measures has been a mixed bag of good and bad news: One the plus side, saving Cairo, Illinois, and protecting New Orleans from another waterborne disaster; on the minus side, creating a Mississippi tsunami for farmland, thus destroying an entire growing season for farmers.

The sharp contrast between decorating one levee and blowing up another should give us pause and make us think about: the reasons [for good and bad] that levees exist; their environmental and economic impact; the role of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; the private, financial interests that influence their placement and construction; and the relative merits of the overall public good versus the private sector’s needs.

A good time to think about these issues might be while slapping some paint on that wall on June 4. The organizers of the paint-by-numbers project respectfully request, though, that you act like a nice, domesticated little river and stay between the lines.

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