don't miss it: in the city

© kjm

In NYC for a few days as Marilu does studio visits and takes in the latest Whitney Biennial. Some highlights:

At MOMA, geek that I am, my first stop was a show called 50 Years of Helvetica. It was very small, though, just a corner of one of the design galleries. In Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today, there were all kinds of good things. John Baldessari's photograph called Common Memory Colors, a beautiful Jennifer Bartlett, David Batchelor's Found Monochromes of London, and Jim Lambie's vinyl tape floor (iPhone self portrait, above.) I've always loved On Kawara's date paintings, but never had the chance to see the corresponding color chart journal, so that was a treat. The link above for the show is a nice online exhibit, where you can see everything I've just mentioned.

The Archive Fever show at ICP had beautiful photographs from Afghanistan by Fazal Sheikh. I'm not sure what I think of Sherrie Levine's straight appropriation of Walker Evans photos, but I'll need to read more about her in the catalog.

In Chelsea, Bruce Yonemoto's pictures at Alexander Gray - portraits of Asian American men dressed in Civil War uniforms; Marcel Dzama at David Zwirner - drawings, along with journal pages of sketches, sculptural dioramas, and even a scratchy film.

Lastly, Thomas Holten's show, The Lams of Ludlow Street at Sasha Wolf. The most memorable photo in the show (the third in the online gallery link) could tell the whole story on its own.

Whew. OK, today, it's on to the Whitney...