NEW YORK CITY: WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART

For years I have been hearing about "The Whitney," a Manhattan museum built in 1931 by American socialite, patron, and collector Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney to house 20th century American art (and now 21st century American art as well).  

It is known both for its permanent collection and for a curated international art show held every two years called the Whitney Biennial. According to Wikipedia, the Biennial "is generally regarded as one of the leading shows in the art world, often setting or leading trends in contemporary art. It helped bring artists like Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, and Jeff Koons to prominence."

Lucky for us, we just happened to be visiting during the 2017 Whitney Biennial. I was so excited!

The original Whitney museum was located on Madison Avenue on NYC's Upper East Side. In 2015 it moved into this building in Lower Manhattan designed by Renzo Piano, the Italian architect and engineer who also designed the Pompidou Center in Paris:

The upper floors of the building present some unique views of the surrounding environs. NYC from above seems somehow more approachable than NYC from ground level:

If I zoom in on this photo looking south down the Hudson River . . .

. . . Hey! There's that famous Lady with the Torch!

One of the artworks in the Biennial pays homage to Lady Liberty. This piece, called Liberty, is performance art and may be a live person (usually a man) or a mannequin. It references street performers and particularly those in costume who sell photo ops to tourists:

But before I delve into the Biennial exhibitions, I want to deal with the permanent collection. The Whitney has more than 22,000 drawings, paintings, prints, sculptures, installation art, videos, and photographs created by over 3,000 20th and 21st century artists from the United States. About 600 of those works were part of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's personal holdings. Of course, like any museum, not all of the art is on display at one time.

The permanent collection is on the top floors, so we took the elevator, itself a piece of art:

One of my favorite pieces in the museum is Jasper John's Three Flags (1958). Johns said the flag is an iconic image generally "seen and not looked at, not examined." He created a series of American flag paintings during the 1950s.

Artists try out their ideas in many ways. Here is Flag Study (1959) by Jasper Johns, executed on a letter from choreographer Merce Cunningham to Johns's fellow painter (and partner) Bob Rauschenberg:

The Whitney owns several paintings by Edward Hopper, including Early Sunday Morning (1930):

. . . Railroad Sunset (1929):

. . . and New York Interior (1921). This final painting is a strangely personal but detached picture of a woman sewing. Hopper once noted that French Impressionist Edgar Degas was the painter whose work he most admired, and this figure seems influenced by Degas' iconic ballerina paintings.

Standing Lincoln (1931) by Daniel Chester French is the model for his nine-foot-tall sculpture that is now on the state capitol grounds in Lincoln, Nebraska. It shows Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address. The popularity of this piece led to French's commission of the seated Lincoln statue in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Red, White and Blue (1961) by Ellsworth Kelly is a different take on the iconic trio of colors:

Do you recognize this building? It's Mount Vernon (1932) by Herman Trunk, Jr. Since we had just visited Mount Vernon a few days previous, I especially enjoyed this painting:

A quick glance places this painting squarely in Depression Era art. It is Employment Agency (1937) by Isaac Soyer:

I enjoyed these paintings of women by a woman, Elizabeth Catlett. They are (left): In Sojourner Truth I fought for the rights of women as well as Negroes (1947); (top right) In Harriet Tubman I helped hundreds to freedom (1948); (bottom right) In Phyllis Wheatley I proved intellectual equality in the midst of slavery (1946). All three paintings are from the series I am the Negro Woman.

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I have seen sculptor Louise Bourgeois's giant spider sculptures in Tokyo and Des Moines, Iowa (two more contrasting locations are hard to imagine), so it was fun to see a much different kind of work by her in New York City. This is Quarantania (1941), one of her earliest carved and painted sculptures.

I like the museum placard that accompanies this artwork. It reminds me that, as in literary analysis, meaning is often imposed on a piece rather than inherent in it:

In The Artist and His Mother (c. 1936), Arshile Gorky loosely reproduces a photo taken of him and his mother in their native Armenia when he was only eight years old. (He has an old face, doesn't he?) Three years later, Gorky, his mother, and his sister survived a death march under the invading Turks. His mother starved to death a few years later during the Armenian genocide, and the following year Gorky and his sister emigrated to the United States. If you see these faces as bearing haunting expressions, now you know why:

A very different childhood memory was painted by John Steuart Curry, Baptism in Kansas (1928), which shows a scene he witnessed in 1915 in the idealized American heartland:

In striking contrast to the above painting is Thomas Hart Benton's Poker Night (from a Streetcar Named Desire) (1946):

I love anything by Roy Lichtenstein, but I think Bathroom (1961) is my new favorite:

I've been gradually moving forward in time, and I end the photos of the permanent collection with Clam Digger (1972) by Willem de Kooning, who is better known for his abstract expressionist paintings than for his sculptures, but I love this lumpy fellow, especially with the angular New York skyline as his backdrop:

And so, on to the WHITNEY BIENNIAL:

The first Biennial exhibit we saw was Root sequence. Mother tongue by Asad Raza. This installation of 26 trees occupies an entire room. 

The art includes the humans that take care of the trees, and their equipment is strewn around the room:

As are the caretakers themselves:

Henry Taylor usually paints racially charged topics, and I'm not sure how his wonderful painting A Happy Day for Us, which shows a black couple with angel wings and flowers, fits into that genre:

However, his painting The Times, They Ain't a Changing Fast Enough! draws on a horrific video of police fatally shooting a black man in Minnesota in 2016:

A third painting by Henry Taylor is entitled Ancestors of Genghis Khan and a Black Man on a Horse:

Drawings and paintings by Celeste Dupuy Spencer depict a wide variety of Americans:

Two artists, Kerstin Bratsch and Debo Eilers, collaborate under the name Kaya to create these bizarre works, part painting and part sculpture:

I love Elevator by Dana Schutz, which hangs across from the Whitney's actual elevator and depicts a tangled mass of human and insect bodies. The doors of the elevator on either side are just closing--or are they opening? There is no way to be sure.

The most controversial piece in the show is also by Dana Schutz. Open Casket shows the disfigured image of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American brutally beaten and lynched in Mississippi in 1955 because he offended a white woman in a store. Till's mother decided to have an open casket at the public funeral so that the world could see what had been done to her son's face, forcing people to confront the truth of what was happening in the Jim Crow South. The two men who kidnapped, assaulted, and murdered Till were ultimately acquitted by an all-white jury. The lynching and trial remain a touchstone for civil rights activists. However, critics of this painting focus on the fact that the artist is a white woman, which is especially offensive since a white woman lying about her interaction with Till led to his murder.

After viewing that painting, it was nice to come upon this wool rug. I would have liked to take Ulrike Muller's gato chico (small cat) home with me:

John Riepenhoff is both artist and gallerist, and his work here reflects those roles.  This first work, The John Riepenhoff Experience, is a tiny gallery in a box that visitors put their heads inside to see:

The second work, Handler, is a series of artworks (by other artists) held up by legs modeled after Riepenhoff's own. I think this is one of my favorites in the show:

At night we walk in circles by Harold Mendez is both appealing for the intricate symmetry of the web and a little creepy if you think about walking into it at night:

Two works by Jon Kessler were quite intriguing. In the first, Evolution, two snorklers are taking a selfie while seemingly oblivious, or maybe just indifferent, to both the nature that surrounds them and the imminent destruction of that environment:

In Exodus, figures the artist purchased on eBay are on an endless circular journey while being filmed by an iPhone. For me, the work asks viewers if we really see refugees and emigrants for what and who they really are, or do we trivialize both situation and person? Or perhaps we should ask ourselves if the endless stream of refugees will ever stop, and does their exodus really change anything.

It's nice (and unfortunately somewhat unusual) to see a contemporary painting that makes me feel happy, and Cascade by Shara Hughes did just that:

Artist Samara Golden placed mirrors on the ceilings and floors of the western windows of the 5th floor to create a seemingly endless shaft.

I can't explain how it's done, but several tiny environments are part of the work, giving the illusion of a series of conflicting spaces:

The iconic image for the 2017 Whitney Biennial might be Childermass by Ajay Kurian, which stretches in the open stairwell from ground level to the top of the building. The description notes, "The installation is inhabited by a variety of surreal or nightmarish characters, including children who are part animal or part machine, moon men, and other creatures."

I got a kick out of In Search of the Perfect Double in which Kaari Upson left a sectional sofa in the backyard of her Los Angeles studio for a year and a half, casting the sections in urethane over and over. She repositioned them in odd ways and painted them, but they are still ugly couches, aren't they? Remind me not to hire her to redecorate my family room.

In the Wake by Cauleen Smith is a collection of banners of the type used in processions.

I like the Whitney's description of the banners:

And, finally, the elephant in the room, or in this case the giant pink box, is Claim by William Pope L. 

Each of those dots is actually a slice of bologna, 2,755 in all (they are inside as well), and in the center of each piece is a photo of a random New Yorker. Honestly, I did not realize this was bologna and photos when we were there or I would have taken a better close-up shot than this:

The juices from the rotting curing meat drip into the green tray at the bottom of the structure. We were visiting on May 18th, and the show ran from March 17th to June 11th, so I think we missed a lot of what has been described as a "sickly sweet smell" emanating from these unique picture frames.

"Art?!" you might ask, but yes indeed, it's art. In fact, the Whitney Museum folks thought it was so great that they named Pope L. (and what kind of name is that?) the winner of this year's Bucksbaum Award, a $100,000 grant that is given to only one participant in each Biennial and comes with the promise of a future exhibition at the Whitney.

Actually, the pink box with black dots and a green "rind" reminds me of a huge square watermelon. I think it's amazing. Bob says it's all just a bunch of baloney.