May 28, 2022 • View in browser

This week, a shady art dealer is sentenced to seven years behind bars, an imprisoned Cuban artist speaks out ahead of his trial, a missing Picasso reemerges in the house of a dictator's wife, a couple tries to walk away from a gallery with an original Basquiat, and an "alien doorway" on Mars.

There's a lot more, including a good collection of art and film reviews and a special essay by M. T. Anderson on Vasily Kandinsky's spiritual connection with music.

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Vasily Kandinsky, “Impression III (Concert)” (1911), oil on canvas, 30 1/2 × 39 2/5 inches, painted in the weeks after the artist’s historic encounter with Arnold Schoenberg’s music (via Wikimedia Commons)

On Kandinsky’s Spiritual Relationship With Music
Author M. T. Anderson walks us through a sonic gallery of Vasily Kandinsky’s musical influences, which guided the painter’s pursuit of art that reveals a mystical, inner truth.

Kandinsky believed that music could reveal the route to a new art, an art that shed the material appearances of things in favor of a mysterious inner reality. 

NEWS THIS WEEK

Cuban artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara. The text reads, “I don’t want to die, I just want to go home.” (photo by Leandro Feal, design by Marco Castillo)

• Persecuted artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara issues a public statement from a maximum-security prison in Cuba ahead of trial.

• In a “brazen” attempt at art theft, an unknown couple tries to walk out of Taglialatella Galleries in New York City with an original Basquiat.

• Art dealer Inigo Philbrick receives a seven-year prison sentence for an $86 million “Ponzi-like” fraud scheme.

• A missing Picasso painting resurfaces in the home of Imelda Marcos, the ex-first lady of the Philippines.

• NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity captures a presumably naturally occurring rock formation shaped like an “alien doorway.” 

TRANSFORMING INFLUENCES

Willie Cole, “Strummer” (2022), Yamaha 3/4 size acoustic guitar parts, 28 x 16 1/2 x 15 inches (courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York, photo by Joy Whalen)

Willie Cole Recycles Musical Instruments Into Outstanding Sculptures
Billy Anania on Willie Cole: No Stings at Alexander and Bonin.

The exhibition is Cole’s latest foray into assemblage at the Soho mainstay. For this show, the artist partnered with Yamaha, whose upcycling program donates blemished instruments that did not pass final inspection. New acoustic guitars are split open, divided into pieces, and rearranged into bodily forms.

Anabel Juárez’s Castles of Wonderment 
Jenny Hata Blumenfield on Anabel Juárez: Recordar Es Vivir at the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum.

How Lee Alexander McQueen Spun History Into Fantasy
Anne Wallentine on Lee Alexander McQueen: Mind Mythos Muse at LACMA.

ART ACROSS THE US

Stanley Lewis, “View of the Garden with Orange Fence II” (2020), acrylic on paper, 38 1/2 x 33 1/2 inches (courtesy the artist and Betty Cuningham Gallery)

Stanley Lewis in a Wayward World
John Yau on Stanley Lewis: Paintings and Works on Paper at Betty Cuningham Gallery. 

What sets Lewis’s views apart is that he is essentially an abstract painter working with line and narrow bands in a pasty medium. The end result is an uneven topographical surface. There are areas where crisscrosses of different browns, flecks of green and orange become a tangle of mud and vegetation in late autumn. 

Who Discovered Eva Hesse?
Sarah Rose Sharp on Forms Larger and Bolder: Eva Hesse Drawings at Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College.

Behind the Scenes With Three New Mexico Curators
Jordan Eddy introduces us to Manuela Well-Off-Man, Marisa Sage, and Mary Statzer, university museum leaders who are bridging cultural chasms through elaborate, generative work with their students.

FILM ROUNDUPS & REVIEWS

From The Lost Letter (1972), dir. Borys Ivchenko (image courtesy Dovzhenko Centre)

10 Films to Get to Know Ukraine
Oleksandra Kalinichenko rounds up ten films that showcase Ukrainian culture and its long-held ethos of resistance.

They Tried to Make a Sexy Movie About the Eiffel Tower Engineer
Jake Cole on how Eiffel inadvertently paints its protagonist not as a great man worthy of scrutiny or praise, but as the Elon Musk of his day.

All Men Are Evil, According to This Film
Dan Schindel reviews writer-director Alex Garland’s latest feature, Men.

Ruben Östlund Satirizes the Lives of the Mega-Rich in Triangle of Sadness
Sophie Monks Kaufman takes a closer look at the Swedish director’s latest feature on a luxury cruise to hell.

MORE FROM HYPERALLERGIC

Tyrus Wong, “Chinese Jesus” (detail), (photo by Mark Gibson, courtesy the Walt Disney Family Museum)

A Bicultural Jesus Celebrates Asian American Identity
Karen Fang spotlights Tyrus Wong and expands on how his “Chinese Jesus” painting embodies Asian American identity.

Throughout his career, critical reception of his works often stressed his ethnic heritage, ignoring the bicultural influences of someone who had been in the US since childhood, and who had studied both traditional Chinese calligraphy and European and American art history and media. 

In recent years, however, growing awareness of Asian American history as well as contemporary cultural developments have fostered a very different climate for Asian and Asian American art.

A Parent’s Guide to Navigating Biennials
Rea McNamara: “Seeing the Toronto Biennial of Art through my daughter’s eyes helped me push past some of its challenges by experiencing it on a primordial level.”

Required Reading
This week: Should Washington have a national memorial for gun violence? Have cats used us to take over the world? What is Cluttercore? And more.

TREMAINE FELLOWSHIP ARCHIVE

Clockwise from the top left: Hyperallergic’s 2021/22 Emily Hall Tremaine Journalism Fellows Tahnee Ahtone, La Tanya S. Autry, Dan Cameron, Frederica Simmons, and Jeremy Dennis

From December 2021 through February 2022, with the support of the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, Hyperallergic selected five curators for monthlong fellowships to help demystify the work they do and reveal what goes into their curatorial practice. Each Fellow received a $5,000 grant to create an email exhibition for Hyperallergic subscribers, write articles related to their research, and present and discuss their exhibition during an online event.

Important Kiowa Murals Tell the Story of a People
Kiowa Tribal Museum Director Tahnee Ahtone explores how curation for a Native American community connects to the realities of Native sovereignty.

Notes on Beholding, Black World Making
Cultural organizer and curator La Tanya S. Autry delves into how Black people defy ongoing precarity while loving one another through modes rooted in Black liberation and anti-colonial pedagogies.

I Will Be A Witness: Bessie Harvey and Alternative Legacies in American Feminist Art
Frederica Simmons discussed “conscious curation” while researching the life and work of Bessie Harvey, a self-taught artist from the Black American South.

Surrounding Chiloé
Dan Cameron used his grant to return to Chiloé, an island off the coast of Chile that he has visited for nearly a decade to test out unexplored possibilities for locating, nurturing, and presenting art.

Shinnecock — Backward | Forward
Artist and curator Jeremy Dennis discussed the art-historical legacy of the Shinnecock Indian Nation, of which he is an enrolled member.

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