iThe Studio Museum in HarlemHarlem
Geometries
A group exhibition exploring geometry as an organizational principle, translating sources from city maps to West African textiles into a shared visual vocabulary spanning figuration and abstraction.
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Two X's hang in this show, for different reasons. James Little's is four triangular canvases meeting inside a wooden frame, painted in reds for Malcolm X, who was called Detroit Red. Steffani Jemison's is tape on her own studio window at the Studio Museum, put up before Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and photographed.
Everything comes from the museum's collection: thirty artists, from Alma Thomas and Norman Lewis to Julie Mehretu, working with lines, shapes and the gaps between them. In Jack Whitten's Psychic Intersection you see raked wavy lines, a perfect circle and a black square near the centre that the label compares to a black hole. Shinique Smith tied a bale of clothes with twine and subtitled it (with Cookie Pants): the wash-and-fold bag, promoted to sculpture.
No critic has reviewed it yet. Admission is pay-what-you-can ($16 suggested for adults, $9 for seniors and students), free on Sundays and for anyone 16 and under, and Fridays run to 9pm.
Look for
James Little, Homage El-Shabazz (#10)
Four triangular canvases in one wooden frame form an X where they meet, in reds chosen for Malcolm X's sandy hair and his nickname, Detroit Red.
Steffani Jemison, Untitled (X)
A photograph of her Studio Museum residency window, taped in an X before Hurricane Sandy, printed on acetate so light and shadow play across the surface.
Torkwase Dyson, Of Line and Memory, Drawing Test 02
Look for the square and the triangle: Henry "Box" Brown's escape crate and the crawl space where Harriet Jacobs hid for seven years, turned into shapes.
Daniel LaRue Johnson, Nations
One black mass and one white, each capped with bright patches of colour, stand against cerulean blue and never quite meet.
Howard McCalebb, Frank Stella as Don Quixote in Defense of the Kaiser
The geometric painter Frank Stella recast as Don Quixote in rounded shapes and colour fields, with a joke equation in the lower left corner.
Good for
- Cheap Culture
- Evening Visits
- Rainy Days
Skip if
You want pictures of people or places: this is mostly lines, shapes and fields of colour.
With kids
Admission is free for children 16 and under, and free for everyone on Sundays.
Also at The Studio Museum in Harlem
On now nearby
Image credits
5
- GeometriesCourtesy of The Studio Museum in Harlem
- Splendido, As Seen by Chris RhodesCourtesy of Aperture
- Pierre Huyghe: UUmweltCourtesy of Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
- Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the SensesRhododendrites / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- The Studio Museum in Harlem19h00s, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0