Resistance Art to See in New York City

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Late last year, after Donald Trump was elected President, Badlands Unlimited—the publishing house founded by the artist Paul Chan, which defies all labels except subversive and kickass—printed a poster with six incantatory stanzas of black-and-white text. It begins:

No to racists

No to fascists

No to taxes funding racists and fascists

In the wake of last Saturday’s act of domestic terrorism in Charlottesville, Virginia—and Trump’s shameful refusal to condemn the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who incited the violence—Badlands’ “New No’s” assumes a fresh, chilling resonance. A special edition of the poster, signed by Chan, is on sale at the Whitney (proceeds benefit Planned Parenthood and the A.C.L.U.) to accompany the exhibition “An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1940-2017,” which opens this Friday, August 18th. Following are The New Yorker’s recent reviews from our Goings On About Town section of current shows in New York that find artists, fashion designers, activists, and documentarians working with the conviction that resistance is its own form of beauty.—Andrea K. Scott


We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85

The several dozen artists whose work is featured in this superlative survey did not conform to one style, but they did share urgent concerns, often addressing issues of bias and exclusion in their art—and in their art-world organizing. The Just Above Midtown Gallery (JAM), a crucial New York institution of the black avant-garde, was instrumental to the careers of a number of them, including Lorraine O’Grady, whose sardonic pageant gown made of countless white gloves—the artist wore it in guerrilla performances at gallery openings—is a wonder. There is much powerful photography on view, from Ming Smith’s spontaneous portraits of Harlemites in the seventies to Lorna Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems’s poignant pairings of image and text, from the eighties. But the ephemera—the fascinating documentation and spirited newsletters—provide the exhibition’s glue, presenting women not as anomalous achievers but as part of a formidable movement. (Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn. 718-638-5000. Through Sept. 17.)


The Body Politic: Video from the Met Collection

Four hard-hitting video works—by David Hammons, Arthur Jafa, Steve McQueen, and Mika Rottenberg—play in four separate rooms. The artists’ formal approaches diverge, but they share a profound awareness of bodies and of the camera’s power to disrupt stereotypes about race, class, and gender. Rottenberg’s “NoNoseKnows” deploys the artist’s trademark politically razor-sharp absurdism, intercutting footage of Chinese women laboring to harvest pearls with surreal scenes shot in New York. McQueen’s “Five Easy Pieces” is a seductive meditation on voyeurism, with its slow-motion footage of unsuspecting subjects, from a tightrope walker to a man urinating. Hammons’s only video work, “Phat Free,” is a powerfully simple vignette in which a disorientingly noisy darkness lifts to reveal a man kicking a metal bucket down the street, evoking the danger of walking while black in America. Racist violence is more than a spectre in Jafa’s timely marvel of rhythmic editing, “Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death,” in which archival civil-rights-era images, sports and entertainment clips, and dash-cam and cell-phone footage shift seamlessly—and heartbreakingly—between moments of triumph and terror. (The Met Breuer, 945 Madison Ave. 212-731-1675. Through Sept. 3.)


Counter-Couture: Handmade Fashion in an American Counterculture

In all its sumptuous, ragtag, iconoclastic, and utopian forms, hippie clothing reflected the seismic cultural shifts of Vietnam War-era America, eschewing the mass-produced in favor of the personalized and the handmade. This captivating exhibition, installed in moodily lit galleries against purple-and-gold wallpaper, goes beyond the expected caftans and macramé to detail the nuances and extremes of countercultural aesthetics. A section devoted to stage costumes includes a medieval-inspired muumuu, its pastel-ombré velvet adorned with a starburst appliqué; Mama Cass Elliot, of the Mamas & the Papas, wore it in 1967. Nearby, looping film footage includes performance documentation of the Cockettes, an anarchic theatre group whose psychedelic, thrift-store drag sensibility helped shape a nascent queer aesthetic. From the Army-surplus garments appropriated and painstakingly embroidered by flower children to the dashikis and African fabrics embraced by the black-pride movement to the ascetic styles of communes and cults, the exhibition emphasizes how vernacular fashion signalled antiestablishment values and group identity. That said, high fashion isn’t neglected. One highlight is the visionary designer Kaisik Wong’s glittering, futuristic “wearable art,” which resembles armor and cocoons from another planet—or the next Aquarian age. (Museum of Arts and Design, 2 Columbus Circle. 212-299-7740. Through Aug. 20.)


AIDS at Home: Art and Everyday Activism

From Nan Goldin’s intimate 1994 portraits of patients in hospice care to ephemera from grassroots organizations, this thoughtful exhibition elucidates the ways in which the AIDS plague transformed community activism. Strangers became caregivers, friends became family, and domestic spaces became sites of support and resistance. The Buddy Program, initiated by Gay Men’s Health Crisis, in 1982, to assist AIDS patients at home, is poignantly commemorated with documentation that includes a handwritten sign-up sheet and a photograph of God’s Love We Deliver volunteers ladling soup into takeout containers. The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power—better known as ACT UP—is represented by Bill Bytsura’s charming portraits of its diverse membership. The show also includes a broadsheet, from 1989, condemning the current U.S. President for receiving a lavish tax abatement for Trump Tower while the sick were dying on city streets. In one photograph, a prescient drag Dorothy is seen holding a protest sign that reads “Surrender Donald.” (Museum of the City of New York, Fifth Ave. at 103rd St. 212-534-1672. Through Oct. 22.)


Nari Ward

In his new show, titled “Till, Lit,” the Jamaican-born, Harlem-based artist presents formally striking and politically charged sculptures made from surprising materials. The “till” of the title evokes both field labor and the reserves of a cash register. Compartments from the latter figure in a number of works here, as do delicate paper rectangles that are made from the excised edges of dollar bills. These shapes overlap in abstract compositions, such as the austere “Royal Alpha” and the shimmering “Providence Spirits (Silver),” which also incorporates cowrie shells (once valued as money). The legacy of slavery and its barbaric transactions suffuses the works on view. The powerful installation “Lit” uses buzzing floodlights and a concrete-submerged ladder to conflate antebellum slave patrolling with present-day police surveillance. The mixed-media work “Hanging Study” proposes a form of redress—it spells out the word “reparations.” (Lehmann Maupin, 536 W. 22nd St. 212-255-2923. Through Aug. 25. )


“Body, Self, Society: Chinese Performance Photography of the 1990s”

In the repressive period following China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, assertions of individuality were dissident by definition, and most of the black-and-white photographs in this compact seven-artist exhibition leverage that fact with a fraught but straightforward focus on the artists’ own bodies. Zhang Huan prods and pinches his face, Ma Liuming walks naked on the Great Wall, and Ai Weiwei interacts violently with his nation’s history, in the triptych “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn.” Most interesting are the artists who deëmphasize their own position in favor of the complex futility of the larger situation, as Song Dong does in “Printing on Water (Performance in the Lhasa River, Tibet),” a grid of thirty-six pictures, documenting an hour that the artist spent repeatedly trying to stamp the word “water” into the river using a large wooden seal. (Walther Collection, 526 W. 26th St. 212-352-0683. Through Aug. 17.)

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