For centuries, artists have wrestled with how to incorporate spirituality into their work. This question is no less relevant for artists living in today’s postcolonial, postmodern era. Co-organized by The Menil Collection and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, the exhibition “NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith” brings together an intergenerational group of artists who address ritual in the artistic process and the wider implications of spirituality in contemporary art.
Visual artists have long engaged in a dialogue with the ritual traditions of shamans and griots, or oral historians. The term “HooDoo,” which originated in nineteenth-century America, refers to folk traditions derived from the Haitian religion of Vodun, itself preceded by the religion and culture of the Yoruba people of present-day Nigeria.
Challenging conceptions of “insider” and “outsider” art, the artists in the exhibition frequently create work using everyday objects that resonate both within the confines of a gallery or museum and among members of their own local audiences, who may or may not visit art institutions. Situating their work in a vernacular aesthetic often allows the meaning of the work to fluctuate according to its context. In the art of William Cordova (b. 1972) and Dario Robleto (b. 1972), history is remixed with allusions to music and with a distanced view of the past, both artists discussing the genocide of native peoples (in Peru and the United States, respectively) in the name of manifest destiny.
While the emphasis of the exhibition is on sculpture and the three-dimensional experience of walking around art, there are photographic works addressing themes such as slavery and colonization, work that engages with the ideas espoused in Michael Harris’s words: “There are migrations and there are Middle Passages. The differences are phenomenal and phenomenological.”
The exhibition is generously supported by The Brown Foundation, Inc., William J. Hill, Beth and Rick Schnieders, Michael Zilkha, The Cullen Foundation, Houston Endowment, and the City of Houston.
Marepe
Halo (Auréolas), 2004
Cruz De La Paz Sagrada [Cross of the Sacred Peace], 1980
The Menil Collection
© Michael Tracy
Max Neuhaus belongs to a generation of artists whose work changed the parameters and transformed the experience of art in the 1960s. A pioneer in the use of sound in contemporary art, he coined the term “sound installation” to describe his practice based on the creation of unique sounds for specific locations. As opposed to the temporal experience of hearing a piece of music, his work presents sound as a continuous material used to engage our perception of the physical space around us. Through the invisible medium of sound, Neuhaus alters the way we apprehend the world. He has said, “We sense the size and nature of the space around us with our ears as well as our eyes. Our culture is so visual, though, that we tend to forget about the aural side of things. ”
In addition to his work with sound, Neuhaus has long been engaged in drawing, producing visual counterparts to the sound pieces both as proposals for ideas to be executed later and as responses to existing sound works. Neuhaus calls this latter type “circumscription drawings”; they consist of two panels, an image and a corresponding text, hung side by side. The exhibition will bring together a selection of these drawings executed between 1992 and 2007, responses to sound works from as early as 1968, many of which have never been displayed in the U.S.
The exhibition will coincide with the inauguration of the new sound work, Sound Figure commissioned from Neuhaus for a location just outside the building’s north entrance.
The exhibition is generously supported by Amy and Michael Cosgrove, Sissy and Denny Kempner (in honor of Louisa Stude Sarofim), Michael Zilkha, and the City of Houston.
Drawing:
Three to One, 1992
Colored pencil on paper
35-1/4 x 29-1/8 inches
© Max Neuhaus
Exhibition: Documenta 9
Collection: Documenta
Location: AOK Building, Kassel, Germany
Dimensions: 7 x 16 x 3 meters; 7 x 16 x 3 meters;
7 x 16 x 3 meters
Extant: 1992--present
Paired in a single museum exhibition, Saul Steinberg (1914-1999) and Hedda Sterne (b. 1910) may at first look like an odd couple. The two Romanian-born artists met in New York City in 1943 after the Nazi occupation forced them to flee Europe. They became U.S. citizens and married in 1944. Despite occupying the same domestic space, as well as exhibiting at the same gallery, the artists had little aesthetic ground in common: most art historians and critics would be hard pressed to trace stylistic influences between the two. Yet Sterne and Steinberg did share an important artistic perspective: each questioned the ability of an artist’s personal aesthetic style to communicate a stable identity.
In the New York art world of the 1940s and 1950s, divorcing style from artistic identity constituted a radical divergence from the philosophy of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Barnet Newman. While Sterne and Steinberg maintained close friendships with many of the so-called Abstract Expressionists, their work’s play with subjectivity registers important differences with that movement. By placing a small number of works by Sterne and Steinberg in dialogue with one another, this exhibition amplifies the artists’ joint (and unique) position as critics within their artistic milieu.
Appropriately, the artists’ portraits of one another reveal, on a more intimate scale, their experimentation with a myriad of styles, a fluidity that emphasizes the illusive and dynamic presence of the other.
The exhibition is generously supported by The Brown Foundation, Inc., and the City of Houston.
Hedda Sterne and Saul Steinberg, c. 1944-45
Gelatin silver print
Collection of Hedda Sterne
© Estate of George Platt Lynes
A drawing by Steinberg is visible in the background of the photo.
