“African Art Now: Masterpieces from the Jean Pigozzi Collection” This show is filled with fresh, smart and gorgeous work. But like every individual collection, it represents one person’s taste and point of view. Jean Pigozzi began collecting contemporary African art 15 years ago; his private collection, the Contemporary African Art Collection, usually resides in Geneva. “African Art Now” includes the marvelously hyperreal and intoxicatingly colored paintings of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Chri Samba, one of the world’s best-known and most in-demand African artists; Beninese artist Romuald Hazoum’s masks and installations made out of found plastic gas canisters; Philip Kwame Apagya’s photos of Ghanaians standing in front of backdrops; and the fanatically detailed futuristic machines of Abu Bakarr Mansaray, from war-torn Sierra Leone. It’s an amazing show in many ways, but not everyone is thrilled by it. Otabenga Jones & Associates protested in front of the MFAH on the exhibition’s opening night. Collective members Robert Pruitt and Jamal Cyrus held signs that said, “You cannot contain our blackness in your white box, give me concepts or give me death” and, pointedly to Dubya, et al., “Africa is not a country.” Speaking for the collective, Pruitt says they feel the exhibition “reinforces certain ideas about African art” because of Pigozzi’s focus on “what we would call naive or folk art here.” It is a focus that tries to avoid work by artists with academic art training — and apparently women, with only two in the show. Pruitt makes an important point. Why is the museum allowing one Swiss guy’s taste to become the definition of African art? Should this show be titled “African Art Now?” or “A Random Assortment of 33 Artists from 15 Countries in a Very Large Misunderstood Continent”? Through May 8 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 5601 Main, 713-639-7300.
“Deep Wells and Reflecting Pools” David McGee combed through the Menil’s vast holdings, seeking to create a dialogue between selected works. He chose ancient to modern art and objects related to people of African descent — everything from a fifth-century BC Greek vessel to a certificate from a slave auction to a lithograph of Angela Davis. His choices and arrangement of the works become a pointed study in contrasts. Some works “ennoble” their subjects — which can be patronizing and paternalistic — and others basely objectify and exploit them. McGee sought to “take the art out” of the exhibition, focusing instead on cultural and historical import rather than aesthetics. But as a painter, he’s still susceptible to painting’s charms. A Negro Overpowering a Buffalo-A Fact Which Occurred in America, 1809 confronts visitors as they enter the Menil Collection. English artist George Dawe painted it in 1810, and it’s beautifully and masterfully executed. But Dawe gives us the face of the buffalo, not the face of the man. The animal is more of an individual than he is. Faceless, Dawe’s “Negro” has no name. There’s also a bust of famed 20th-century Renaissance man Paul Robeson, which McGee placed opposite a carved wooden head of Nat Turner, with bulging glass eyes and rope marks around his neck. Nearby, a formal, stuffy 18th-century portrait hangs on the same wall as a receipt from a slave auction for a man, woman and sorrel horse ($700, $333 and $40, respectively). McGee uses these and other cultural and artistic artifacts to create a complex, disturbing and provocative exploration of race. Through April 17. 1515 Sul Ross, 713-525-9400.
“Double Consciousness” Organized by Valerie Cassel Oliver, this show takes on the difficult task of curating a historical overview exhibition around race and a particular approach to art. Many of the works on view, like Adrian Piper’s, are conceptual and deal with black issues, while others, like the hard-core conceptual, mathematically based drawings of Charles Gaines, do not. Obviously, African-American artists make a broad range of work that may or may not deal directly with black issues. In the end, the exhibition’s works share two things: the race of their maker and a conceptual approach to art-making. Piper’s 1988 video Cornered is one of the show’s standout works, presenting a brilliant, razor-sharp analysis of racial attitudes and preconceptions in America. She cleanly dissects everyone from the overtly prejudiced to the self-congratulatory liberal. Videos of William Pope.L’s performances are also on view. For Eating the Wall Street Journal (2000), he sat on a toilet atop a high platform wearing a jock strap, reading The Wall Street Journal and swigging down pieces of it with a gallon of milk. It’s the kind of work that shocks and revolts people, but that’s part of the point. Houston artists have some impressive works in the show. Bert Long’s vibrantly colored ice sculptures are spectacular and enshrined in their own enormous glass-walled freezer. Karen Oliver’s 2003 work Bench (seating for one), in which a tiny little metal shelf/seat projects from a massive brick wall, is a study in loneliness and isolation. David McGee’s watercolors tellingly combine portraits of hip-hop figures with the names of Dadaist artists. And Robert Pruitt spoofs white corporate pretension and exploitation by displaying a series of clocks set to time zones labeled Watts, Detroit, Haiti, Nyandarua… “Double Consciousness” has brought together some strong and provocative pieces. Through April 17 at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 5216 Montrose, 713-284-8250.
“Ellsworth Kelly: Tablet” Most artists have little scraps of drawings and doodles lying around their studios, and they usually get tossed. But Ellsworth Kelly grouped them, mounted them and framed them to create Tablet (1948-1973), which is being exhibited alongside some of Kelly’s paintings and sculptures in “Ellsworth Kelly: Tablet,” on view at the Menil Collection. Tablet is not just a practical solution for preserving and presenting an artist’s studio ephemera; it is a fascinating record of one man’s artistic thought process and the way he views the world, presented through the little detritus of life. The project started in 1973 when Kelly, having just moved into a new studio, started unpacking all the bits and pieces he’d boxed up at the old place. Sifting through all those little doodles, he saw images that had later found their way into his abstract paintings, his shaped, monochromatic canvases and his sculptures. In the Menil show, chief curator Matthew Drutt’s sparing selection of Kelly’s paintings and sculptures provides a context for the sketches and ephemera. Tablet 89 focuses on arcing and angled lines. Kelly has cut a color picture from a magazine; it depicts a dark V-neck sweater with white bands around the neck, arms and hem. The artist excised the bands, drawing them as disembodied forms on a sheet of lined notebook paper. Green Angle (1970), a 20-foot-long, shaped canvas on the wall in the same gallery, could be the V-neck drawing inverted. It’s intriguing that this painting, with its huge scale and dynamic presence, may have had its origins in a dorky 1960s pullover. Through May 8. 1515 Sul Ross, 713-525-9400.
“Interactive Random Chromatic Experience” Carlos Cruz-Diez, the grand master of optically kinetic art, is presenting his paintings/constructions, the results of decades of optical experiments. He utilizes the optical flicker that happens when slender parallel lines of color radiate against each other, separating sections of lines with slender strips of tinted Plexiglas or thin painted strips of aluminum that stick out from the surface at a right angle. As the viewer moves, the painting shifts, causing the color to further flicker and creating a staccato effect on the eyes. Physichromie No. 2378 (1998) is almost 18 feet long, and as you walk past it, geometric forms appear and disappear. The painting moves from yellows and pinks to greens and blues. Another work, Physichromie No. 2364 (1996), appears yellow and black when seen from the left, and orange and black from the right. These paintings reach out and grab your retinas, whether you want them to or not. There’s no way they can be experienced passively. And they can’t recede into the background. You just want to wrap yourself in the works, surrounding yourself with optical sensation. Cruz-Diez is also making art digitally, a medium many artists who are decades younger find daunting. He’s designed a program that “invites visitors to delve into his chromatic research and vibrational discoveries.” You can select from a library of forms, colors and effects to create your own work. A time limit had to be added to the program at a previous exhibition — people became so engrossed in constructing images that they refused to share the computer. Through April 30 at Sicardi Gallery, 2246 Richmond, 713-529-1313.
“Jacob Hashimoto: Superabundant Atmosphere” Jacob Hashimoto has filled Rice Gallery with thousands of kites for his phenomenal installation there. They aren’t the kind you flew as a kid — they’re little elliptical ones made of pale silk stretched across a bamboo frame with crosspieces. Hashimoto strung the gallery ceiling with taut parallel lines of wire and hung the kites from them by slender black threads. With 9,000 kites — that means tying 18,000 knots — the artist and the Rice Gallery installation team must all have carpal tunnel syndrome. But the effect is fantastic. The kites are hung at varying heights, starting low in the back of the gallery and undulating up to the ceiling, moving back and forth with the air. The result is elegant and ethereal, like walking into a cumulus cloud. You just want to haul a mattress in and go to sleep under it. Through April 17. 6100 Main, 713-348-6069.
“Thomas Deyle” On panels of frosted Plexiglas, Thomas Deyle rolls 600 impossibly thin layers of the same color. The acrylic is highly diluted so the pigment slowly accumulates. At the end of the hundreds of coats, the center has a mass of dense, rich color that dissolves into edges that seem to have only fine flecks of pigment. The effect is one of free-floating color set against the pristine white of the gallery walls. The Plexiglas supports disappear, and the viewer is left with these mists of cadmium orange, pale yellow, lush aqua… Scarabaeus No. 5 (2002) is the largest of the series. A mass of deep cobalt floats on a six-foot square of Plexiglas. It feels otherworldly, like a digital special effect inserted into the real world. There’s no definite edge to it, but your eye seems to continuously search for one, creating an optical buzz that charges the color. The work isn’t about monochromatic color on a surface, it’s about the color itself and its inherent richness and sensuality. Deyle has embarked upon a labor-intensive quest for pure color. Through April 24 at Gallery Sonja Roesch, 2309 Caroline, 713-659-5425.
This article appears in Apr 14-20, 2005.