NYC’s New Museum Triennial and Pan African Artists Today
In the world of art museums, the biennial and triennial exhibitions generate a lot of buzz. These art survey shows bring together a variety of contemporary art styles and methods, and showcase the works of artists from around the world. They can seem like a creative dream come true or a bewildering hodgepodge. In New York City, one of the world’s top destinations for seeing artworks, the Whitney Museum Biennial is the major player. But the Whitney is not the only entry in this field. The Bronx Museum of Art and the Heckscher Museum of Art in Long Island are also contenders, as is the New Museum in Lower Manhattan.
The 2021 New Museum Triennial has been named “Soft Water Hard Stone,” (part of a Brazilian proverb) and features artworks of forty artists and collectives. Twenty-three countries are represented. The majority of the artists included here were born in the 1980s, with six in the 1970s and six in the 1990s. Thus, we are looking at the creative output of artists who are for the most part in their 30s, not quite mid-career. They are not household names but do have some proven track records.
Of this cohort there are seven who are African or part of the African diaspora, including the United States, Jamaica, the UK and France. They are…
Artists in Exhibition
Brandon Ndife
Ndife has four sculptures in this exhibition, and each is composed of materials such as cast insulation foam, metal hardware, oil and enamel paints, glue, Birchwood, and rubber. Each is an unsettling piece, hard to pin down and define, and not easy on the eye. To an extent, these structures resemble household items (a table, a cupboard) that have strange growths overtaking them.
The piece Pistachio (2021) resembles a cluttered cupboard with an unwieldy fungus emerging from the top of it. Does it show a once-neat and organized kitchen fixture, overrun by a plague? Is it a commentary on nature run amok?
The nightmarish qualities to these pieces are far from pretty; do they comment on our desires to have orderly lives that are marred by tumors? These might be items we find in an abandoned home.
Krista Clark
Clark’s two pieces are curious assemblages of materials. Both include concrete, as well as other materials. Annotations on Shelter 3 has an orange pop-up tent and a work light; is it the improvised shelter of a refugee or homeless person? It has a temporary quality, particularly because it is propped up against a wall, as if being pushed aside.
Annotations on Shelter 5 includes fiberglass, plastic and bungee cords, and could be viewed as an abstract but neatly arrayed collection of pieces, or perhaps items to be taken and used for a construction site.
How do these pieces comment upon Shelter? Is shelter something made from bits and pieces of industrial castoffs? Have they been abandoned by people as they move on– or discarded when they are kicked out? These are not cozy, but impersonal items.
Sandra Mujinga
Mujinga’s work here is a video on three panels called Pervasive Light. A Black man, cloaked, moves mysteriously across the panels, and is hard to see at times. His image seems to go in and out of focus and emanates with sparks. He has an elusive quality, or perhaps we are watching him through a broken or distant screen. How does a person come “into focus”? When do his personality and humanity become clear?
Accompanied by the sound of a loud bass line, there is a voyeuristic quality to this video. Are we studying the subject of the video?
Kahlil Robert Irving
Irving’s display of ten-part installation of ceramic sculptures is named Routes & Roots [(Saint Louis<<New York (return flight)] MEMORY MASSES. Certainly, for ROUTES-mag, this is an intriguing title.
The individual pieces have decals of actual consumer items, photographs, and various items. Are these excavated artifacts, unearthed from a demolished building? Are they unusual pieces of rescued and recycled items? They have a jumbled quality yet they reflect familiar objects.
Nickola Pottinger
Pottinger’s three textured pieces of paper pulp and coloring, hang on a wall, side by side. While they appear to be abstracts, there is a playful quality to these lively items and they could fit in at a home, or a school or a restaurant. There is an endearing element to each. Do they tell a tale, together or individually?
My favorite of the three could be seen as a creature from outer space or a highly magnified creature you peer at under a microscope, with stubby tentacles on each of the four sides, and two beings in the center. Is one a small animal and the other an amoeba?
Gaelle Choisne
One of the more overwhelming pieces in the triennial is this multipart collection, Temple of love-Love to love. The many parts of this are displayed throughout a narrow gallery room, and as a whole, you’re not sure if you’re walking through an obstacle course or a bizarrely designed railroad flat apartment. Individual pieces are quite interesting, and a few tug at your emotions.
This collection is an exhibition unto itself, and it seems to tell a story with various tangents. One of the most intriguing pieces is the unusual thing that resembles a refrigerator. The doors are not uniform, wires hold up the back, the food inside looks old, pictures are attached to the doors. This could elicit many stories and feelings.
Ima-Abasi Okon
The three neatly made and arrayed pieces in this display would easily be overlooked. They seem like typical wall fixtures but there are sounds emanating from them. With the lengthy name Put Something in the Air: The E-s-s-e-n-t-i-a-l Mahalia Jackson Blowing Up DJ Pollie Pop’s Chopped and Screwed Rendition of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries– Military-Entertainment Complex Dub [Jericho Speak Life!]*(free of legacy)* the typical museum goer will be befuddled.
Includes A Gamut of Media and Forms Too
The rest of the Triennial includes a variety of artworks that run the gamut of media and forms.
I have to admit that I did not connect with many of these artworks. However, I was drawn in by Mujinga’s haunting video. Pottinger’s trio were among my favorite works in the whole exhibition, and I admired how they worked together as well as individually. Choisne’s room full of pieces were by turns mournful and harsh, but definitely interesting.
“Soft Water Hard Stone.” There is definitely a great deal of hard stone, at least on the surface, within the New Museum Triennial. Hard, brittle, dense with meaning. The soft was harder to find. Among forty artists and collectives, there is a wide range of styles, issues explored, and temperaments exposed here. The seven artists featured here are not afraid to delve into the stranger aspects of the art world, in order to create and express themselves.
The Exhibition runs through January 23, 2022.