Farewell, Victory Hall/Drawing Rooms on Grand Street

The sign outside Drawing Rooms' former site

Note: Originally I had planned to post this in June, but life intervened, so better late than never, no?

One aspect of Jersey City that particularly has interested since moving here over two decades ago is the small but vibrant arts communities that has managed to thrive in the shadow of New York City's far larger global art-industrial-complex world just across the Hudson. Jersey City's downtown, part of which was once dubbed the Powerhouse Arts District, once was full of warehouses and lofts where artists could and did live and work quite affordably, particularly compared to Manhattan and even Brooklyn. Many of the older buildings have been razed for new towers, which began rising in the lead up to the 2007-9 financial crisis, and once again began rising in 2011-12, or they were repurposed for rich condo buyers, as the downtown has steadily gentrified, scattering artists to nearby districts and cities, like Newark. A few organizations and a good number of artists have managed to hang on.

One, Victory Hall Inc., began hosting a series of programs in 2011 under the rubric of Drawing Rooms, a contemporary arts center in what was a former convent next to the campus of St. Peter's Preparatory High School, near the Paulus Hook neighborhood of Jersey City. Drawing Rooms hosted a range of shows of "two and three-dimensional works"--drawings, paintings, mix-media works, sculptures of various kinds--as well as performances by emerging and mid-career artists based in the metro area Its focus on local artists, especially those from Jersey City, Hudson County and northern New Jersey, has been heartening. Some have gone on to shows a bigger galleries in New York and elsewhere, but Drawing Rooms never lost the intimacy of its exhibition spaces, the informality and friendliness of the staff, or the affordability of works on display, for those interested in buying it. All of these set it apart even from most smaller galleries in the City.

What I learned once I started dropping by Drawings Rooms's shows, which run regularly throughout the year, was that its parent organization, Victory Hall, comprises more than Drawing Rooms, however; its other programs include Rainbow Thursdays Artists, art classes for local developmentally disabled adults; Artist Workspaces, hosted in Drawing Rooms and other sites in Jersey City; Victory Hall Press, which published original catalogues of work by Victory Hall-affiliated artists; Victory Arts Public Projects, which have included partnering efforts with other local organizations; and The Art Project, shows and gallery tours organized for four new condo developments, in conjunction with Shuster Development, in downtown Jersey City: Art House, The Oakman, Hamilton House and Gallery at 109 Columbus. (I have to say that while I understand how politics and economics have changed the equation for not-for-profit arts organizations, pushing all but the wealthiest to the brink, it still pains me a bit to witness the very institutions squeezed out or suffocated by gentrification partnering with gentrifiers in order to stay alive and keep a foothold in the very spaces and places they alone once brought to life. Neoliberal capitalism is something else, and this pattern has repeated itself over and over, I know.)

As of June 15, however, Drawing Rooms will no longer occupy its ex-convent home; it had previously announced that it would be moving to the Topps Building/Mana Campus in the Journal Square neighborhood of Jersey City. (The Mana Campus is part of Mana Contemporary, the contemporary arts powerhouse in Chicago and Miami. In preparation for its move, Drawing Rooms held a two-day final celebration and fundraiser, titled "Somewhere Over the Rainbow & Prospero's Grand St. Masque," which included an art sale, so I headed over during the second day's Brunch session to spend a little time with the artworks and artists, including James Pustorino, the Executive Director, and Anne Trauben, Exhibitions Director/Curator, who work I featured on here back in 2013, when I read poems based on them as part of a Halloween event. For the Masque, Drawing Rooms had taken its aesthetic design from Edgar Allan Poe's famous 1842 story "The Masque of the Red Death," and decorated the rooms in the colors delineated in the tale, with two additional ones, yellow for an eighth room, and red for the hallway, signifying not death and morbidity, but a rainbow's promise and ephemerality.

It was encouraging to see how many people were there that Sunday, and to later learn that a number of the artworks did sell. Below are some photos from the event; you can find the names and titles on the Masque link above. if you are in Jersey City and want to see some of the artists whose work has been featured at Drawing Rooms, Drawing Rooms' new exhibits, "Now Ya See It, Now Ya Don't" and will open this upcoming weekend at the new gallery in the Topps Building, and there will also be an Artists' Studio Tour, including Art Project exhibits at the Art Project sites listed above.

The sandwich board out front

Some of the artwork (I can't remember which color
designated this room)

Artworks by (l-r) an unknown artist,
Cathy Diamond, Gregory Stone, and Brian Hallas

Patrons and supporters of Victory Hall
& Drawing Rooms

More artwork, at left by Robyn Feld
and Andrew B. Cohen, two at
right by god@daddy borja

Conversations amid the art 

 Works in the Yellow Room (I think), by Barbara Lubliner
(fourth from left), an unknown artist,
and  Joan Mellon (at far right), 

Works by Anne Trauben (left) and Joan Mellon (right) 

Conversations in one of the galleries 

The Black Room

Some of the art in it 

Viewing the art up close

The now former home of Drawing Rooms

Halloween Happening Party @ Victory Hall (Jersey City)

One of the pleasures of being back home is having opportunities to explore and participate in local activities and events. One of the local--very local, as in Jersey City--spaces I have begun to drop by regularly is Victory Hall DRAWING ROOMS, a contemporary art gallery for drawing, painting and print located in downtown Jersey City. Occupying a former convent, DRAWING ROOMS has ten rooms of artist exhibition spaces (the nuns' former monastic cells), as well as a small bookstore that publishes art books, and a tea shop.

They also hold exhibitions throughout the year, and in conjunction with their current exhibit, Raw Drawing, featuring an expansive take on the idea of drawing by area artists, they hosted a Halloween Happening Party, on Halloween night. James Pustorino, the Executive Director, and Anne Trauben, the Assistant Director, both artists in their own right, invited me to participate by coming to view the artwork and reading some poems, old and new, perhaps in collaboration with some of the artifacts on display.

Before I write about my participation, let me note that other participants during the evening included Senegalese artist Ibou N'doye, whose work was on display and who also paired with fellow artist Geraldine Gaines in African Djembe drumming; saxophonist Zach Herchen, the new artistic director of Jersey City’s chamber music group, Con Vivo (a not-for-profit organization that produces free concerts in the diverse neighborhoods of Jersey City), who played a few works, including a stunning piece for solo woodwind by French spectralist composer Gérard Grisey; and artist Margaret Weber, who hosted a Mask Making session; and Maggie Ens, who guided people through Halloween face-painting.

I was drawn to the work of a number of the artists, including Gaines and N'doye, but I especially liked Anne Trauben's wire sculpture-drawings and 2 dimensional drawings, which I immediately felt were in conversation with Chris Stackhouse's "Perpendicular Series" drawings (some of which appeared in Seismosis), and with other works of visual abstraction, so I drafted two short (haiku-like) poems in conversation with them, read a few from Seismosis that I also thought were appropriate, and then ended with one of my favorite personal art poems, "How to Draw a Bunny," invoking two artists, passed and still with us, I deeply admire. One highlight was the presence of a reporter/photographer, Alyssa Ki, from our local paper/website, The Jersey Journal/NJ.com, who wrote up and took some great photos of the event. Attendees were urged to be creative in their costumes, so I came as a visual abstraction--or conceptual performance of--a pumpkin (cf. below). All in all it was a fun evening, and look forward to more projects at and I hope with DRAWING ROOMS.

Me reading, Anne Trauben
and Zach Herchen at right
 (© Alyssa Ki/The Jersey Journal)

Anne Trauben's "Wire 2: Untitled Wire"
(wire sculpture)

Wire 1: Puff 

 after Anne Trauben's sculptural drawings

entering the cloud
of wire, silently drawing
the breath of space


Drawing 2: 19 x 24, Untitled

 after Anne Trauben's sculptural drawings

figure negation:
white on black, back as foreground,
time's shadow, outline


"Wire 1: Puff" and "Drawing 2: 19 x 4, Untitled",

Copyright © John Keene, 2013. All rights reserved.

Anne Trauben's "Drawing 2: 19 x 24" Untitled
(ink on acrylic gesso) 

Me, before the reading
(Alyssa Ki/The Jersey Journal)

Some of the revelers, with Geraldine Gaines
and Ibou N'doye at center

Geraldine Gaines playing
the African Djembe drum

Zach Herchen playing the
piece by Gérard Grisey

Drawings by Greg Brickey

Artists making and trying on masks

Ibou N'doye

Revelers taking in the drawings

In the hallway (someone
is channeling René Magritte,
I think)

Mixed-media works by Jill Scipione

A drawing by Elizabeth Onorato

Drawings by Nguyen E. Smith

Pattern Recognition: Reading/Panel @ MoCADA in BKYN Tonight!

If you are in or around Brooklyn this evening, drop by MoCADA to catch PATTERN RECOGNITION, an amazing exhibit of contemporary abstract art, and then stay for the reading and conversation I'll be participating in!

POETRY READING & DISCUSSION:

EXPERIMENTATION AND THE BLACK AESTHETIC

Friday, September 13

6:30-8:30PM | MoCADA

Evie Shockley, author of the new black and Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry, will join celebrated innovative poets LaTasha N. Diggs, John Keene, and Dawn Lundy Martin for a reading and discussion on craft, language, politics and the search for a “black aesthetic” in contemporary art. 

Seating is limited, please arrive early. Wine will be served and author books will be available in the MoCADA Shop. $3 contribution.

Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s @ Cheim & Read

It has been a good year for art exhibits on abstraction so far. Last summer, the Guggenheim Museum mounted a show entitled "Art of Another Kind: International Abstraction and the Guggenheim, 1949-1960," and this summer returns with another show drawing from its rich holdings in abstract art with "New Harmony: Abstraction between the Wars, 1919-1939," which I went to see last week. The Museum of Modern Art held its "Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925" from December 2012 to April of this year, which the art journal October examined extensively this past winter in its "Abstraction: A Special Issue" edition (No. 143). Sunday is the final day to see "Brothers and Sisters," a sprightly exhibit focusing on the conversation Beauford Delany's (1901-1979) abstract works open up with those of other 20th and 21st century black artists, ranging from Jack Whitten and Alma Thomas to Glenn Ligon and Julie Mehretu. And certainly there are many more exhibits across the city.

One I dropped by last night was "Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s," curated by New York-based artist and scholar Raphael Rubinstein, at Cheim & Read gallery. Rubinstein's focus is on New York artists born between the chronological window of 1939 and 1949 who were painting in the 1980s, the decade now mostly associated with movements such Neo-Expres-bsionism, Appropriation Art, Neo-Geo, identity-based art, and so on. As Rubinstein notes in his rationale for the exhibit, these artists, in their 30s and 40s during this moment, were not so much concerned with a "'return to painting'" as with "finding a bridge between the radical, deconstructive abstraction of the late 1960s and 1970s...with a larger painting history and more subjective approaches." 

From including elements excluded in the prior decade, such as a return to a conventional rectangular support, to allusions to figuration and landscape painting, to allusions drawn from art history and the wider culture, these works mark an important shift in New York abstract painting practice, yet it remains that case that these artists and their work still have not received extensive critical treatment or been regularly shown together, thus Rubinstein's show, which is not just expertly mounted, but instructive and generative in the conversations it opens up between and among the works. From the inclusion of biomorphic imagery to contestations with the frame to the presence of autobiography to attempts to counter the strong influence Color Field painting, these works suggest and point to shared challenges, struggles and achievements that suggest a new stage in abstraction that subsequent generations of painters in New York and elsewhere have built on.  

Moreover, the works themselves harmonize with each other, not in mirroring or echoing fashion, but in their often consonant visual grammars and approaches. One question a viewer might ask is given how extensive abstract painting in 1980s New York was, why such a small show, and Rubinstein's response is that he wanted to zero in on a "specific generation" that contributed to it. As he says, his titling of the exhibition was inspired by painter Carrie Moyer, "who, writing about Stephen Mueller in 2011, identified his as 'the generation that reinvented American abstract painting.'" That may be too tendentious a gesture, but Rubinstein's show does succeed in showing that Moyer's statement does have real basis in fact, which is to say, in the persuasive, beautiful, provocative works themselves.  Some photos from the Cheim & Read exhibit, and a few from the "New Harmony" exhibit at the Guggenheim.

At Cheim & Read:

Raphael Rubinstein (l) chatting with artist Gary Stephan (r)

Joan Snyder, Beanfield with Music, 1984

Stanley Whitney, Sixteen Songs, 1984

Elizabeth Murray, Sentimental Education, 1982

Thomas Nozkowski, Untitled (6-30), 1988

Terry Winters, Point, 1985

Carroll Dunham, Horizontal Bands, 1982

And at the Guggenheim:

Frantisek Kupka, Form of Blue, 1925

Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, All, 1984

Francis Picabia, The Child Carburetor, 1919-1939

In the galleries, Guggenheim Museum

Hirst: Out, Out Damned Spot

Hirst's "Urea-13C"
Gagosian Gallery
(Librado Romero/New York Times)

Two autumns ago as part of a colloquium sponsored by the California Institute of the Arts I gave a talk on poetry, money and society at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in which I cited Damien Hirst's infamous diamond-encrusted skull, "For The Love of God," as emblematic of the logic of capitalist aesthetics.  He (and a few others, including the Black-Eyed Peas, for example) was, to my mind, taking a particular articulation of Western aesthetics and aestheticism, informed by post-industrial capitalism, the commodification process and neoliberalism, to its end, at the very moment that capitalism itself was globally imploding. In fact, his artistic trajectory and triumphs were both the symbols and embodiments of that implosion.  Not that I was exactly denouncing him, since I both find his work hollow and often mindless while also thinking his overall approach to art and particular pieces fascinating, but in any case I wasn't the first to critique Hirst, and anyways, who gives a damn what I think?  He's rich, b****! as Dave Chappelle, channeling Rick James, would say, and people far richer than Hirst, like his former collector Maurice Saatchi and his dealer Larry Gagosian, as well as countless connoisseurs who could afford to offer emperors' ransoms to purchase his "art," are the ones who have the last say in his regard. And they are still testifying on his behalf. That said, Hirst's detractors include the likes of the great Anglo-American artist David Hockney, who recently critiqued Hirst's use of assistants to create his art. When I read Hockney's criticism, I thought, well he must know that there's a long tradition of assistants in the Western and other traditions, and the authenticity fetish of the individual artist's craftmanship went out the window with Marcel Duchamp, but still...Hirst does get under people's skins. (In case you are in London, Hockney's remarkable recent paintings are on display until April 9, 2012, at the Royal Academy.)

Hockney's "Winter Timber" (2009)
at the Royal Academy
(Guardian Online)

He also has more life in him than 1,000 cats, it seems. After the critical debacle of his 2009 "return to painting" a few years ago at the Wallace Collection, he is back with a spectacle of a show, or shows, that would make even his most famous peers flush with envy. I say show or shows because one can think of the Gagosian Gallery's multiple-site exhibit of Hirst's work as one collective show or several running in parallel, but all appear to be showing variations not just on the same theme, but the same work itself: his banal "spot" paintings.  I see these paintings and I think, this is an art student's quick insight (or post-LeWittian or Buren-esque hangover), wallpaper for a child's bed or romper room, charming-the-first-time-through gift wrap, the not-very-interesting results of a simple computer algorithm, glorified and blown up into a mini-industry, which is to say, I regard them both with condemnation and simultaneously admiration for Hirst's cleverness, audaciousness and chutzpah. One gallery full of these paintings really ought to have been enough; then you could acknowledge their decorative and simplistic aspects while noting that even if a small child, with no grasp of abstract or conceptual art, had thought of this, it would still be worth viewing. Variations on a theme! Play with scale! Abstraction rebirth after the return of figurative painting! Conceptualism's delights! And, certainly, color! But ELEVEN galleries, featuring 331 paintings across the globe? Really? Really? The response is something C and I often say: "And why not?"

Roberta Smith, writing of the New York shows in her New York Times review, "Hirst, Globally Dotting His 'I'," did not hesitate to say that some of these paintings were "bad." How could she not and still possess any integrity? Full quote: "Well, very bad at times, and yet, at others, not bad at all, in fact rather good." Rather good: for some of Hirst's specific pieces, and the spectacle itself, exert a fascination, and sometimes achieve what could be described as beauty. (Were the 11 galleries in the vicinity of each other, one might even talk of their approximating a kind of anti-sublime.)  But, as she says, too many galleries full of this stuff goes too far.  It got me thinking that it might have been far more interesting and conceptually profound had Hirst, instead of filling the Gagosian galleries with this guff, decided to wrap one of the buildings housing one of the galleries, or perhaps another New York landmark--the Washington Square Arch, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the Woolworth Building, Pennsylvania Station and Madison Square Garden, etc., with a patented, stretchable version of his "spot"-painting. Or even if he'd just paid people to wear Hirst-spot clothing for a week, and stand in various places, à la Vanessa Beecroft, looking chic and entitled. A true outrage, on the level of what the 1999 Sensation Show at the Brooklyn Museum--which I saw, with a gang of friends who were motivated to check it out mainly because of the uproar--would have been for him to design tents, cold-weather outfits, even survival implements, for Occupy protesters, and underwrite Hirst-spot plates, cutlery, sheets and warm bedspreads for the numerous soup kitchens and shelters around the US and UK providing nightly meals and lodgings for the many homeless people desperately struggling to make it through to the next day. Just imagine the brouhaha...and praise....

"Moxalactam," "L-Isoleucinal,"
"Cefatrizine Propylene" and “1-Hexadecene"
Gagosian Gallery
(Librado Romero/New York Times)

But alas, we instead have the prospect of acres of spots and dots, large and small, painted, impastoed, screened, crowding white canvases, crowning white walls. And Hirst, blathering on about what it is he does, or doesn't, including growing old, chats about it all with Anthony Haden-Guest, the journalist and socialite. Whatever he does or doesn't, one thing is certain: pounds and dollars keep lining his pockets. And if there is anything that gins up the interest of (many) Americans, and Britons, that's it. As I have said before, genius sometimes lies just on this side of charlatanry....

Hockney's New Project + Sketchbook Pro (II)

One of my avatar-heroes in iDrawing/iArt, David Hockney (1937-) continues to push the boundaries of his artistic practice, as Martin Gayford discusses in his article "The Mind's Eye," in the current (September/October 2011) issue of MIT's Technology Review.  He recounts how Hockney has been using a special rig, holding 9  high-definition cameras, to view and photograph nature scenes, simulating and expanding the experience of (the) human eye(s) and cameras.  With a small crew he travels and photographs moving and still settings, in some cases the same ones but during differing seasons.

Together these produce works and a visual experience akin, Hockney argues, to and yet distinct from that of human vision, which usually entails two lens and complex, ever-changing light, depth, spatial, and color perception, but the resultant pieces also differ from the experience of a single lens digital, 35-mm or movie camera. They are also akin to but distinct from Hockney's photomosaics and collage photographs (images that really reoriented my way of thinking about photography for a while) of the 1980s. Hockney has been presenting the resulting pieces as 18-screen videos (moving pictures in the literal sense), though it's not clear when they'll be on exhibit. 

A still from the 18-screen video May 12th 2011 Rudston to Kilham Road 5 PM. Credit: ©David Hockney

Hockney has also continued digital drawing, having moved from a tablet and stylus to his iPhone, on which he has produced his now celebrated daily drawings of flowers, outdoor scenes, and abstractions, and then onto his iPad, on which he has enlarged the iPhone images and undertaken really remarkable outdoor drawings that mirror some of his most recent paintings and photographs. The article reproduces one of his pieces using that hardware, and Brushes, which is another popular iPhone and iPad drawing software. 

This October, Gayford's new book, A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney, will be available, as will some of those iPhone and iPad drawings, as part of the exhibit "David Hockney's Fresh Flowers: Drawings on the iPhone AND iPad," at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, October 8, 2011 through January 1, 2012.

Hockney's work and daring have always inspired me, and I intend to keep exploring what sorts of very simple--such as the abstractions below--and very complex possibilities exist with both of these two technologies (and any new ones Apple develops that I can get my hands, even second and third ones, on).  Yesterday I wrote about playing with Sketchbook Pro for the iPad and some of the differences with the iPhone's version of Sketchbook (Mobile), which I've increasingly familiarized myself with. I posted a few abstractions and illustrations I'd done on the iPhone, so today here are a few recent life portraits I undertook on the iPad, along with some iPhone abstract drawings.

LIFE PORTRAITS (drawn right on the spot, not from photos)

 
Self-portrait, at Joe's Coffee, Manhattan, iPad drawing
(last year I drew a self-portrait, one of my first in about 20 years, upon turning 45, so here's one for this summer. I did look in the mirror in front of me a few times, unlike last year, when I drew myself from memory)
   
Path conductor, underneath the Hudson, iPad drawing

 
Man at café, Manhattan, iPad drawing

ABSTRACTIONS
   
Jerusalem (I), iPhone drawing
   
Jerusalem (II), iPhone drawing
   
Transatlantic, iPhone drawing
   
Las Vegas, iPhone drawing
   
Las Vegas (II), iPhone drawing
   
Ellsworth, iPhone drawing