A detail from tablecloth from the table central to the apartment.
Embroidery #1
#2
#3
#4
#5 from two little children's tops maybe Guatemalan which hand on the walls
Embroidery from 'sash' around one of the displays.
Sash#2
Sash #3
In our apartment there are many examples of embroidery from Latino cultures some of which are above.
At the Museum of American Native the stitched work and textiles in the collection is just amazing.
On Wednesday we decided to go to the Whitney but as two floors were closed we exited and stumbled upon a private gallery, the Keszler Gallery on Madison. We saw a great Banksy, lots of stuff on Marilyn Monroe and a German painter Christian Awe. The upper East Side area is very ritzy and conservatively expensive. The boutique for 'small adults' displayed an immaculate miniature morning suit for the very young gentleman and an evening dress with mink bolero for the very young lady. Who on earth buys these monstrosities for 9 year olds?
We took a bus across town and down to the area around W23rd Street once again, this time to definitely find some contemporary galleries in Chelsea. We were just under the High Line garden. We started on 24th Street at the Metro Picture Gallery. This was hugely disappointing due in part to the incredibly snotty young preppies on the desk. An extensive, very earnest video/sound/photography exhibition full of carousels took up the downstairs area and closely displayed life sized coloured photos of naked people painted as characters called 'Art Freaks' was upstairs.
Across the road we had a better time looking at paintings by Paul Henry Ramirez called 'Playconics' which were bright and well designed. A very polite and friendly young English woman who was a trainee at the gallery showed us around. She had finished her degree in Art History at Leeds University, written to half a dozen New York galleries one night after a few wines and received one response and then another. She has 27 days left in NY before she has to go home. You really don't know how you'll go until you give it a shot!
After that we went to a few more galleries and at the second Pace gallery on 25th there was a wonderful show of about 12 works by Agnes Martin. A highlight of that experience was reading a letter written by her in pencil on show in a cabinet in the foyer. It can be read on the internet, put in 'Letter by Agnes Martin to Pace Gallery'. Three of the works were very dark grey and almost black, she said she received no comments about those at all when they were exhibited with Pace 'downtown' about which she was very skeptical. The other works done a bit later around 1990 were lighter in tone and had lines of grey lead pencil lines to make wonderful divisions. Her work is very contemplative, still and 'non-aggressive' as she put it. In her letter she says her work is 'non-aggressive for non-agressive collectors'. It was such a treat to see her work. She was born in 1912 and died in 2004.
We saw a mixed bag in another gallery with a huge photographic composite piece in which the artist cast himself as every character in Gericault's famous and controversial huge painting from 1819 The Raft of the Medusa. It was pretty amazing.
Another really good installation was a series of videos of the artist stamping over and over and over sheafs of pages from various sources including journals, computer paper and stacks of plain paper - the perpetual clerk in perpetual motion. Alongside it was a telegram blown up to at least 1x1.2m in scale, dated 1919, sent from a Russian comrade to Spartacist Rosa Luxemburg in Weimar. But it arrived a day too late as Luxemburg was arrested by the Weimar police, beheaded and dumped into the canal. The telegram was an exhortation to go for it. Well she had but was annihilated with her comrade Karl Liebknecht in the process. The new Weimar Republic crushed the Revolution quick smart. It was a terrific way of remembering a piece of history.
On the way back to the crosstown bus we found the Jim Klempner Gallery. This was great - friendly and informative staff and work from the estates of Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns plus living artists. The Rauschenbergs on sale included the handmade paper works done in India which I'd seen in a show at the National Gallery of Australia. Also there were several pieces made from cartons and the ceramic pieces which looked like a carton.
I'm glad we finished on a high note. Of course when we finally found a brochure about all the galleries in the area I understand that there are bloody hundreds of them. Many have gone broke we heard and have moved back across town to the Bowery area.
The bus across town on 23rd Street was crowded. It was great to get on the 6 Subway up to East 116th and then across from Lexington to 1st Ave and home.
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