It’s the last day for Martin Puryear at MOMA. If you’re in NYC take a little extra time for lunch and head to 53rd Street for a look at this seminal artist’s wood hewn sculptures, work that invites the viewer to simply bask in its sheer beauty of craftsmanship, or ponder its myriad subtextual gradations.
Of late, black artists have been getting the red carpet treatment in our museums. At the Whitney, Kara Walker’s witty investigations of racial codes drive My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love in disturbing and disorienting ways. Incendiary truths spring from gorgeous works ranging from cutouts and collages to film installations that take full, cold measure of the subject of race in America. This is hair-raising (or hair-curling) food for thought—on view through February 3.
For those who missed the Whitney’s partial mounting of Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, a unique opportunity unfolds on 126th at a hot new gallery space called Triple Candie. Lawrence’s 60 paintings, an epic depiction of the black sojourn from the American South to the North during the first half of the last century, haven’t been seen in their entirely since 1941. In Undoing the Ongoing Bastardization of The Migration of the Negro by Jacob Lawrence (the exhibit’s title) the gallery remedies this injustice by mounting offset lithographic reproductions printed to scale. The unbridled rapture on the faces of viewers last Saturday confirmed my own excitement, leaving no doubts we’d been served a beautiful, satisfying compromise. But hurry—Triple Candie can be vague about the duration of its shows.