PopWars

Peggi and I took a break at the Whitney and had a beer at the outdoor café on the eighth floor. I put my camera on the table and took a timed photo of the two of us. We don’t do many selfies, so it got more attention than most of my posts. And because I said, “We survived the Whitney Biennial,” I was asked about it several times at our Margaret Explosion gig.

I shouldn’t have been so snarky. I loved the decorative work by Kamrooz Aram. And there was a video in one of those dark rooms about an orchestra that really captivated us. And that beer tasted so good.

We went to three garage sales yesterday. Pete and Emily are moving to Italy, so they have an “Everything Must Go” sale going on. We stopped there first and considered buying a $200 turquoise guitar. We told them we’d think about it while we walked around. When we returned we saw a guy putting it in his car. We came home with a black Cuisinart cast-iron enamel Dutch oven, some glasses, and a crowbar. At the other two sales we mostly laughed and came home with two tiny square plates with the letter “P” on them.

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The Guston show at Hauser & Wirth, mounted in conjunction with the release of Life With P, a compilation of poet Musa McKim’s journals and poetry, remains top of mind.

We picked a pawpaw two years ago and let it sit on the counter for a few days. When the fruit felt relatively soft, we ate it and kept the seeds. Peggi nicked each one with a knife and put them in a baggie filled with topsoil for the winter, a process called stratification. She planted them in small pots in the spring, and twelve eventually emerged as tiny trees. We put those in a cool, dark place for the second winter and then on the windowsill in the spring. We just started bringing them out each day to experience a bit of the outdoors, and when it’s warmer we’ll leave them out. This fall we’ll put them in the ground, and they will be on their own.

Something went wrong with our Padrón peppers. Only eleven of the seeds we sowed have sprouted. We need at least twenty plants to ensure peppers each night. We ordered new seeds from Hudson Seeds and planted them in small pots yesterday. Our neighbor suggested we put them in a warm place—the theory being that peppers grow in warm climates. We planted our root vegetables: two rows of carrots and two rows of beets.

Duane took a train in to meet us at the Guston show and he told us that he could see us talking this one home with us. We did our best to bring the whole show home.

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It must have have beat least twenty years since we were last in The Frick. It was before I started keeping track of things here because I found nothing in the search. The Frick rounded up other versions of two of their sensational El Greco’s and hosted a mini blockbuster with the variations. We made a special trip to see that.

El Greco’s Purification of the Temple and his Saint Jerome still steal the spotlight in the newly refurbished Fifth Avenue mansion. Other Spanish masters – Goya with his workers, The Forge, Velazquez’s his hapless King Philip IV and Murillo’s self portrait – are well represented. Vermeer’s lighting is a knockout. Bellini’s Saint Francis receiving the stigmata is a wonder. Hans Holbein the Younger appears to have actually preserved the real the Thomas Moore in his canvas.

Two versions of the Pieta, the Virgin cradling the dead Christ after the Crucifixion, both by unknown artists from the 15th century, were hung together in an upstairs room. They knocked me out. One obviously copied the other and both probably copied someone else. I love the idea of a rich diner hiring an artist to put him at the scene.

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One whole floor of the Whitney’s 2026 Biennial features Precious Okoyomon’s installation of suspended figures, stuffed bunny suits with 1930s/40s blackface doll heads, taxidermy feathers, wings, and teeth. It’s titled “Everything wants to kill you and you should be afraid.” We were not.

Aki Onda presents Ugnayan (1974), music for twenty radios composed by José Maceda. Maceda wrote a fifty-one-page score, created separate reel-to-reel recordings of singers and musicians playing gongs and Filipino bamboo instruments, and worked with radio stations across Manila to play the tracks simultaneously. Blanketing the city in sound waves, Maceda’s composition returned music from the concert hall to everyday life. The piece is adapted here for boom boxes, each playing there own part.

We walked through the gift store on the way out and found an eight dollar Warhol banana sticker that looked like it would fit on my bare Velvet Underground & Nico album.

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The passage near where this Bill Viola piece is mounted reads:
“The Greek word for martyr originally meant ‘witness.’ In today’s world, the mass media turns us all into witnesses to the suffering of others. The martyrs’ past lives of action can help illuminate our modern lives of inaction. They also exemplify the human capacity to bear pain, hardship, and even death in order to remain faithful to their values, beliefs, and principles. This piece represents ideas of action, fortitude, perseverance, endurance, and sacrifice.”

The special shows at the Memorial Art Gallery are usually the draw, but the collection itself is often better than the shows—especially under the direction of the last two directors. The place has come to life with exciting new acquisitions, adventurous pairings, and the rotation of works on paper from the collection—works like the Claes Oldenburg prints that can only handle a limited amount of light. It is the perfect place to feed your head.

Picasso made about 200 linocut prints during the last fifteen years of his life, and there is a fascinating show of the working and final stages of three in the Lockhart Gallery now. “Picasso and the Progressive Print” shows the artist having fun with his Spanish heritage and mythology.

“The Abandoned” by Georges Rouault is one of my favorite pieces in the collection. It’s oil paint over an intaglio print on paper mounted to Masonite, and the theme is part of his Miserere series. My father had four Rouault pieces hanging over the couch in our living room when I was growing up—plates he had cut out of a Rouault book. The way they were painted, the religious subject matter—I found them so mysterious.

Since the inception of the Media Arts Watch Gallery at the MAG, they have had one sensational installation after another. Rashid Johnson, one of Hauser & Wirth’s artists, has a video installation called “The Hikers” there now. And just outside that gallery is this beautiful Jean Arp bronze.

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The last time we saw Shawn Dunwoody in person he was spinning records at the Bop Shop. Of course we see his work everywhere in the city. Shawn is a dynamo, and we got a chance to hear him talk about his projects at the Memorial Art Gallery yesterday. The auditorium was full. Shawn has a lot of fans.

Creating murals on buildings, walls, and roads is so much more involved than just painting. Shawn brings life to some of the most run-down parts of our city. He can secure large quantities of paint from Sherwin-Williams, and convince companies or the City of Rochester to allow him to transform the cityscape. His projects involve and lift up the communities there. There is real power in his art.

When Shawn’s talk finished we took in the MAG’s new show, “Determined to Be: The Sculpture of John Rhoden.” According to the notes, “music was a fixture in John Rhoden’s creative and personal life—his studio space was outfitted with a concert grand Steinway piano that Richanda, his wife, would play as he worked.” The MAG’s Spotify setlist of the music that inspired Rhoden includes plenty of Thelonious Monk.

The MAG partnered with Garth Fagan Dance to explore the rhythmic qualities of Rhoden’s work and commissioned choreographer PJ Pennewell to create a series of short, original movements inspired by five sculptures in the exhibition. These performances are screened on the dark walls of the galleries and are as captivating as the sculpture.

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