New in New York
I love musicals, especially of the Broadway variety. And there are a lot of new productions on Broadway now, including revivals, about 13 in all. But none of them are grabbing me, though I have heard good things about The Outsiders and Water for Elephants, and great things about Merrily We Roll Along (which I recently tried to get a ticket to but couldn’t, at least not for a reasonable sum).
What to do then? Go to museums where, for a fraction of the price of a Broadway show, you can spend hours enjoying fabulous art.
At the Metropolitan Museum, The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism (thru July 28) offers a fascinating overview of how Black artists portrayed everyday modern urban life from the 1920s to the mid-1940s during which time millions of African Americans moved away from the segregated rural South as part of the Great Migration.
Using paintings, sculpture, photography, and film (don’t miss the great clips of Josephine Baker and Cab Calloway), the exhibit is broken into about a dozen thematic components including “Nightlife” and “Family and Society”; one corner of the “Portraiture” section highlights such gay Black artists as Richmond Barthé and Beauford Delaney.
Noted painters such as William H. Johnson, Archibald Motley, Elizabeth Catlett, Horace Pippin, and photographers Carl Van Vechten and James Van Der Zee are featured along with names new to me. All combine to bring back to life and give a vibrant chronicle of an increasingly distant time and place. Sadly, Johnson’s “Moon over Harlem” (c. 1943–44) with its unflinching depiction of police violence is no less relevant today than it was 80 years ago.
“Moon over Harlem” (c. 1943–44) by William H. Johnson (1901-1970)
Also at the Met, you can see The Costume Institute’s wildly popular Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion (thru Sept. 2); join the virtual queue when you get to the museum and explore other exhibits while you wait for your entrance time.
There’s a lot going on in Sleeping Beauties. The exhibition features approximately 220 garments and accessories spanning four centuries, all visually connected through themes of nature, which also serves as a metaphor for the transience of fashion.
In the more tightly conceptualized first half of the show, you wend your way through displays of outfits inspired by flowers and gardens followed by, more specifically, poppies, tulips, roses (red and black), etc. This culminates in a large room with a garden’s worth of hats and headpieces surrounded by upper and lower rows of yellow ensembles, “a notoriously divisive color in fashion” we’re told, but which connects them to sunshine which flowers, of course, need.
From there, it’s on to insects (beetles and butterflies feature prominently in various designs), then birds (including a room filled with hats from the last quarter of the 19th century, when millinery ornamented with the bodies of taxidermied birds enjoyed a vogue, resulting in hundreds of thousands of birds being killed annually), marine life (nautiluses, fish, shells, etc.), and even snakes, all represented by worthy garments.
“Venus” and “The Siren” and “The Mermaid” sections, however, are a bit much, gilding the lily as it were, and, though the final mermaid bridal ensemble is a stunner, less might have been more.
Similarly, while I enjoyed the sensory lagniappe (video animations, soundscapes that give an idea of how certain dresses sounded as the wearer moved, tactile experiences to get a sense of how various materials feel (tho one guard mistakenly told me not to touch one thing)), the chemically recreated scents of clothing didn’t add much and were more of a distraction.
But wait, there’s more!
Punctuating the galleries are a series of “sleeping beauties”, garments that can no longer be dressed on mannequins due to their extreme fragility, and so are laid out in vitrines. The various explanations for why the outfits have deteriorated are very interesting; this could’ve been an exhibit all on its own.
Of the clothing, you’ll have your own favorites, but highlights for me included Yves Saint Laurent’s Van Gogh-inspired “Irises” jacket (1988); Sarah Burton’s dress (2011) veneered with turkey feathers painted to emulate monarch butterfly wings; Alexander McQueen’s dress (2001) embroidered with razor clamshells; a trio of gold evening mermaid gowns by Joseph Altuzarra (2022–23), Michael Kors (2021–22) and Marc Jacobs (2020); and Jun Takahashi’s amazing “terrarium” dress (2024) of reinforced 3D-printed clear resin containing pink silk roses, green velvet leaves, and yellow silk butterflies overlaid with white tulle.
“Irises” jacket (1988) by Yves Saint Laurent (1936-2008)
Further downtown, Fotografiska New York presents Vivian Maier: Unseen Work (thru Sept. 29), the first major retrospective in the United States of street photographer Vivian Maier (1926-2009), covering her oeuvre from the early 1950s to the mid-1980s.
Born in New York, Maier spent her early years in the Bronx. Throughout her time in NYC and continuing after she moved to Chicago, Maier photographed the world around her, all while working as a nanny.
In 2007, one of her storage lockers in Chicago was auctioned off due to delinquent payments. It contained a massive hoard of over 100,000 negatives from throughout her lifetime. Only after her passing, however, did her images wind up on the internet where they went viral and attracted critical acclaim.
Spread over two floors at Fotografiska, Vivian Maier: Unseen Work is divided into bite-sized thematic groupings. About 90% of the works are black & white prints; her color ones and Super 8 films are mostly negligible, though, in one room, a short film from 1971 of people coming and going in downtown Chicago, presumably during morning rush hour, has a hypnotic quality to it.
Those black & white images, however, convey a simple, sublime grandeur. Their titles generally offer little more than when and where they were taken, if that. In their unostentatious way, they can seem like the visual equivalent of haiku poems.
Foreshadowing Diane Arbus’ works, Maier’s images present people with singular physiognomies and in intriguing situations. There’s one of an Armenian woman fighting with a policeman on East 86th Street in Manhattan; what were they arguing about? Ditto for a couple in a heated encounter aside a Chicago building as another twosome passes by.
A Black man sits on a Central Park bench with a baby who reaches up to a white balloon which obscures the gent’s face. A couple puffs on cigarettes, their wisps of smoke echoed on the whitewashed windows of the building the man and woman lean against. A group of sailors in their dress whites stand with their luggage in a train station, beams of light falling down on them like in a Renaissance painting.
“June 25, 1961” by Vivian Maier (1926-2009)
It’s easy to get lost in Maier’s world of a bygone time. You won’t want the exhibit to end. At least, I didn’t.
Unlike the Whitney Biennial for which it is hard to comprehend just how ugly, trite, self-indulgent and, ultimately, boring virtually everything in it is. Well, everything.
While I was on the Whitney’s elevator, I overheard its operator ask a young couple regarding their toddler what he had thought of the museum. They replied that “he preferred the classic stuff” (meaning the permanent collection).
Wise kid. I couldn’t agree more having visited “the classic stuff” after enduring the Biennial and seeing, among other masterworks, Edward Hopper’s “Soir Bleu” (1914), a fantastically imaginary Paris café scene which I don’t recall having seen before. Hope that child becomes an art critic some day.
“Soir Bleu” (1914) by Edward Hopper (1882-1967)
A fantastically imaginary scene taking place in real life could be found at Red Eye’s LOLLIPOP party hosted by Amanda Lepore and featuring Peppermint of RuPaul’s Drag Race. With a giant horse people could ride on, among other things, it looked like West 41st Street had been transformed into the Moulin Rouge.
WORSHIP-HER and Daniel Nardicio at Red Eye’s LOLLIPOP party
Also at Red Eye was a recent edition of Bette, Bathhouse and Beyond, which will be returning to NOLA for Southern Decadence for its 7th year (tix at https://www.redeyetickets.com/bette-bathhouse-beyond-southern-decadence/). With Drew Brody as “Barry Manilow” at the piano, Amber Martin performed 3 sets of Bette Midler-inspired songs, “live from the Continental Baths,” and sounded absolutely fabulous.
As for theater, do try to see Appropriate (Belasco Theatre), Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ searing dysfunctional family dramedy starring Sarah Paulson, and Mary Jane (Samuel J. Friedman Theatre), Amy Herzog’s warmly humane drama starring Rachel McAdams, before they each close on June 30.
And I was thrilled to see NOLA’s own Tyler Nowell Felix in off-Broadway’s Dungeons & Dragons: The Twenty-Sided Tavern (Stage 42) in his professional debut. If you’re a D&D aficionado, you’ll have a rollicking good time. If not (like me), parts of it will mystify you, but you’ll still have a rollicking good time!
Madelyn Murphy, Tyler Nowell Felix, and Diego F. Salinas in Dungeons & Dragons: The Twenty-Sided Tavern
