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Tris McCall

Art Review: “The Empowering: A Social Justice Exhibition”

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How much has America changed since the contested integration of the Little Rock schools in 1957? Not as much as we’d like. We’re still struggling with the same injustices and inequalities, carrying the burden of that same ugly history, still scrubbing at stains that won’t wash out. Photographs of the Little Rock Nine, and the angry reactions of their persecutors, remain sadly relevant to our national predicament. Jersey City painter Peter Delman has been grappling with the American story on his canvases for years, and his own frightening reinterpretation of the most famous Little Rock image, rendered by the artist in slate blue and bonfire red oils, now hangs in the Art150 Gallery at 150 Bay Street. It’s one of roughly one hundred pieces in “The Empowering: A Social Justice Exhibition” – an explicitly political show that asks visitors to take a hard look at America as it is, and question where we might be heading.

In better times, this attractive new gallery would be a mandatory stop for anybody interested in the current state of visual art in Jersey City. “The Empowering” includes many pieces from artists who’ve recently been shown around town. If it isn’t entirely accurate to call the participants in “Empowering” art stars, many of them are, at the very least, local arts notables: Andrea McKenna, whose burlap and driftwood tapestries haunted the Eonta Space a year ago, contributes one of her luminous portraits, the irrepressible Orlando Cuevas, superhero enthusiast, tucks a beleaguered Captain America into a gallery corner, and Theda Sandiford, whose incisive, discomfiting work seems to be everywhere lately, invites us to contemplate the experience of reclining on a sofa spiked with hundreds of razor-cut zip ties. Mollie Thonneson’s balanced, provocative arrangements of fabric scraps and beads are here, as are Robert Kosinski’s shattered images of human faces, as are two street shots from Dorie Dahlberg, whose pictures of our powder-keg nation have unsettling overtones of wartime photo journalism.

In other words, “The Empowering” deserves to be busy with visitors: it’s a state-of-the-scene show, a regional round-up, and a conversation about a country that we’ve been forced to think about more than we’d probably like to. Alas, for reasons we all know too well, the show and the gallery are open by appointment only, via EventBrite, on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. There’s definitely something ironic about the inaccessibility of a show that demands more access, particularly for people who’ve been marginalized. But that’s certainly not the fault of the artists, or the curator Danielle Scott, whose aesthetic focus and sense of outrage are immediately palpable. This (virtual) Jersey City Friday, Scott will be showing “The Empowering” via Zoom, at 8 p.m., walking through the exhibition and talking about it with an interviewer. Video shows of art exhibitions are notoriously unrepresentative, but I’ll wager this is well worth a click.

Scott’s vision is pained. It’s also rather specific. “The Empowering” is loaded with portraits — some of historical figures, some of contemporary politicians who’ve been haunting our screens with regularity lately, and some of the recently slain, who’ve had the misfortune of being on the business end of police bullets. Miguel Cardenas’s well-titled “The Problem We All Live With,” makes room on a collage of stars and stripes for a defiant George Floyd, peering back through the bars in mute challenge, circled in white as if in a sniper’s sight. Ben Jones’s large wallpaper is busy with images of Trayvon Martin, some inverted, some scribbled-over, some straightforward and unmolested; he’s paired this with an audio collage of gunshots and snippets of Marvin Gaye’s protest-soul.

Other portraits play like de-escalations. Julie Marie Seibert’s meticulously hand-stitched images of Kamala Harris, Ilhan Omar, and Deb Haaland, captured in homey circles, soften the corners of public figures who are often presented to us in high-contrast pixels and harsh backlight. Agnieszka Wszolokwska gives us a faceless, but instantly recognizable, Ruth Bader Ginsburg in acrylics, soft-shouldered, thin-necked, and fragile, in front of a chalkboard choked with text.  Many of the most effective images are the simplest and saddest, which is appropriate for a political show: Brad Terhune’s eight acrylic shadow-heads, untitled and anonymous, leaning against a gallery wall, Samon Onque’s battered boxer, facing down the barbed wire of the prison-industrial complex, Josephine Barreiro’s crouched, depleted, two-toed human, head buried in crossed arms, posing in front of an upside-down, black and white American flag. “Divided We Stand,” this piece is called; notably, the figure isn’t standing at all.

In a context so heavy with sociopolitical significance, even paintings that appear at first glance to be abstract expressionist works, like Mashell Black’s energetic canvases, begin to look like struggling figures. Are those broad, dark brushstrokes on a yolk-yellow field, or are they human beings, stretched and pulled by the metamorphic pressures of the last few years?  I think they’re people, but then again I, like many other overstimulated Americans, have started to see political significance everywhere I look: that’s a consequence of the news cycle, and the rapid expansion of a surveillance state that makes me feel constantly on camera, watched by authorities, every keystroke recorded. My favorite work in this forceful show isn’t a portrait at all — it’s an open wooden dresser, each drawer lit from within, each sock-bed filled with hundreds of pins topped with colored, cut-out fingerprints. Playfully, Valerie Huhn’s sculpture literalizes the notion of a Bureau of Investigation. More pointedly, it’s a metaphor for the invasion of our most private spaces by police logic, the law enforcement apparatus, and our own quiet paranoia.

Art150 Gallery is operated by the town’s most famous arts organization, and one that has often been forced by circumstances to act as an advocacy group for creative people. It should surprise no one that Pro Arts’s maiden exhibition at Art150 is a political one. Although Pro Arts has been around for more than a quarter-century, they’ve never had a dedicated, public base of operations before. It’s appropriate that Pro Arts would find a home at 150 Bay Street, because no building in the Warehouse District has complied with the mandates of the Powerhouse Arts District ordinance any better. (Arguably, 150 Bay is the only building in the District to have complied with the spirit of the ordinance at all.) My guess is that this gallery will eventually serve as the anchor for the District that Pro Arts clearly intends it to be, and that it’ll be as well-trafficked as any arts space in Hudson County. Not yet, alas. But soon.

Featured painting by Peter Delman

 

 

 

Tris McCall

Jersey City Arts Awards Lack Clear Standards

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The pandemic closed the doors to White Eagle Hall, home of the Jersey City Arts Council’s 2019 annual awards ceremony (and so much more). So, on Monday night, the JCAC was forced to take its festivities to the Internet. The occasion: the 2020 Jersey City Arts Awards ceremony, an annual bestowal of prizes that began in 2018.

But while the scale of the event was smaller, the stakes felt higher. Jersey City has just voted to create a million-dollar fund to serve the arts. The Jersey City Arts Council, as we were reminded several times during the stream, was the foremost organization pushing for the passage of the referendum. I supported the initiative and wrote and spoke out in favor of it.  After watching this presentation, I’m left with a creeping feeling that we made a mistake.

The problem wasn’t the recipients, many of whom are worthy of recognition and a wider audience for their art. The trouble with the awards was the Council itself. Although representatives of JCAC took up a startling percentage of the screen time allotted, not one of them articulated any rationale for the judgments they made. Much can be said about the work of Visual Arts prize winner Theda Sandiford: the fine line between comfort and destabilization that her sculptures walk, her repurposing of materials, her use of pastiche, her affection for yarn, her place within Hudson County’s long post-industrial tradition. Instead, we were assured by the JCAC presenter that she was “really awesome” (ugh) and “ever-changing and really dynamic.”

Representatives of the organization testified, in vague management-speak, to the social utility of art — fostering wellness and equality, inclusion, sustainability, and many other laudable things. What they did not talk about: good paintings, good music, good writing, and what exactly made the work honored artistically superior to the work that was not.

The presenters would not tell. Even more worryingly, they would not show. The move to videoconferencing should have given the JCAC an opportunity to present the artworks they’d deemed exemplary. Yet very little of the stream was devoted to exhibition. Young Artist award winner Tyler Ballon has developed an impressive style: He specializes in painted portraits of great intensity and in images of children who look like they’ve seen way too much. The camera captured a partial view of his canvasses, rendering them impossible for the viewer to fully appreciate.

Hip-hop fans are surely familiar with the legendary photography of Legacy Art award winner Ernie Paniccioli, the confrontational and accusatory tenor of his shots, and the role they played in the formation of the public image of rap music. It would have been a simple thing to show a few of those pictures. JCAC barely spoke to the artist’s significance, which is considerable, and had nothing to say about his characteristic style, which is not difficult to describe.

Why did these presenters seem so intimidated by the art they chose to praise? Why did they refrain from any sort of critical engagement with their own honorees? I am left with the feeling that the Jersey City Arts Council is simply not a confident organization. Not only are they uncertain about their aesthetic valuations, they prefer not to use the language of aesthetics at all. Normally, this would not be too troubling: Many people find it hard to talk about art, even those who are moved to support it. Yet there is good reason to believe that the JCAC board members are the very people in town who will have the most influence over the disbursement of the trust fund. Both the mayor and the director of cultural affairs appeared on camera during the ceremony and took pains to link JCAC’s efforts to the passage of the initiative. The JCAC has the attention of City Hall. Their judgment felt inscrutable.

At times, it was unaccountable. Consider, for instance, the selection of the city’s latest poet laureate, Susan Justiniano, who writes as “RescuePoetix.” Her poem was the low point of a show that was often a mess. The piece that Justiniano chose to read contained no audacious use of language, no unusual rhythms or images, nothing surprising, compelling, or unexpected. Instead, it was laden with inspirational platitudes and empty, new-agey phrases like “the serenity of mind and spirit” and “the gears of hatred and war.” It is no exaggeration to say that there are scores of Jersey City punk bands and rappers who are writing at a much higher level than this — writers using the English language in marvelous ways, steering clear of shopworn phrases, penning words that sing. (The complete absence of punk, folk-rock, electronic music, and hip-hop at a show dedicated to Jersey City arts suggests strongly that the JCAC awards givers are sharply out of phase with art in Jersey City as it is currently made and appreciated.)

No explanation was given for the selection of RescuePoetix; instead, we were simply assured that she’d been in the arts community for a long time, which, while commendable is not slightly salient to the question of her merit as a poet.  As elsewhere, the presenters seemed determined to confuse good citizenship with good art. Seats on boards of arts organizations were treated as unmitigated positives, rather than the political and institutional compromises they sometimes are.

Many of the best artists in Jersey City are reclusive people. They don’t engage in public controversies because they’re busy refining their crafts. Yet their work is present all over town: in galleries, on albums, in basement studios and sometimes on city walls. The JCAC might have singled out the outstanding art exhibitions that have been mounted in Jersey City over the past twelve months or commended some of the excellent curation that has been done on behalf of that artwork. They might have honored an exemplary rap verse or an unforgettable rock chorus and explained exactly what distinguished that writing from other writing like it.

That would have required an application of a coherent artistic standard. If the Arts Trust Fund initiative is going to work as it was intended, we’re going to need to develop one in a hurry. The “new funding stream ahead,” as it was called during the presentation, is no small trickle; we’re about to dedicate quite a bit of public money to the arts. Our gatekeepers and leaders have a responsibility to show us that they’re arbiters with good taste and clear aesthetic criteria. Jersey City passed that ordinance and submitted to a new tax because we’d like an artistic voice of our own. We know there’s quality work here, and we’d like the world to hear our story. But that’s never going to happen until we stop being afraid of words, until we find our voices and speak clearly about what we value, and why.

For more on coverage of the Jersey City Arts Trust Fund, click here.

Featured image by Theda Sandiford