Last Call - Yorgo Alexopoulos: Transmigrations, through April 5

If you are like me this week, you have no time to stroll through Chelsea for unexpected wonders.  You have to cook and clean and great ready for the holidays - or maybe not.  Maybe you are going to be a guest.  Congratulations - you are in luck.  Now hurry, please, to Cristin Tierney's gallery for the last day of "Yorgo Alexopoulos: Transmigrations," a wondrous video installation packed with images from photos, drawings, paintings and video on 24 flat-screen monitors.  Inspired by Jennifer Bartlett's Rhapsody, a 987-enamel plate installation from 1976 (perhaps one of her best known works), Alexopoulos brings a new dynamic to the grid aesthetic.  Here his quick succession of images plunge us into worlds that touch on nature, fantasy and the beyond - a sort of digital meets spiritual.  We float, we fly, we soar through innumerable realms of visual splendor.

Last Call: Mark Podwal's Haggadah Paintings at Forum Gallery

Mark Podwal: Sharing the Journey, Forum Gallery, February 14 through March 7.

Alan S. Yoffie, Sharing the Journey: The Haggadah for the Contemporary Family,

CCAR Press (a division of the Central Conference of American Rabbis), 2012.

With the Lenten season upon us and the Feast of Esther (Purim) almost here (March 7 and 8), can Paschal celebrations for 2012 be little more than one month away?  Yes.  The first night of Passover falls on Good Friday, April 6 (one week later for Orthodox Christians).  Within these four short weeks, vigorous preparations for festival meals take place. Jews completely clean their homes, ridding every crack and crevice of hametz (daily cakes and bread).  Then books (haggadot) that guide the Passover service at the table come out of storage, receive a good dusting and finally end up distributed at each place setting before the guests arrive. 

The haggadah helps the participants fulfill the necessary rituals before and after the Passover meal, which in its entirety is called the seder (the order).  Based on the Greek symposium, either a leader or each member of the dinner party reads from the haggadah while everyone else follows the text.  Some families prefer a set of one edition of the haggadah that everyone follows and some families prefer collecting different haggadot, which tend to liven up the conversation around the table or cause mass confusion.

Patricia Cronin's Memorial to a Marriage in DC exhibition "Bodies and Soul"

                              

Patricia Cronin, Memorial to a Marriage, 2002 in bronze and marble.

Patricia Cronin: Bodies and Soul, Conner Gallery, Washington, DC , Febuary 4 - March 10

In July, this blog celebrated the marriage of New York artists Patricia Cronin and Deborah Kass, whose long-time commitment inspired Cronin's sculpture Memorial to a Marriage, 2002, permanantly installed in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.  The marble mortuary sculpture was accomplish in death that which seemed - in 2002 -  impossible in life.

Now the exhibition of the bronze version of this sculpture, on view at Conner Gallery in Washington, DC, celebrates the transition of this artwork from depicting a dream to immortalizing reality. 

Last Call: The Snowy Day and the Art of Ezra Jack Keats, through January 29

Ezra Jack Keats, "Crunch, crunch, crunch, his feet sank into the snow." Final illustration for The Snowy Day, 1962. Collage and paint on board. Ezra Jack Keats Papers, de Grummond Children's Literature Collection, McCain Library and Archives, The University of Southern Mississippi. Copyright Ezra Jack Keats Foundation.
The Snowy Day and the Art of Ezra Jack Keats, The Jewish Museum, through Sunday, January 29, 2012.

Now that New York has just survived its first snowy day of 2012, it's time to visit or revisit another "snowy day" in the form of Ezra Jack Keats' original art for his enchanting book A Snowy Day (1962).  Born Ezra Jack Katz (1916-1983) to poor Eastern European Jewish immigrants living in Brooklyn, he experienced first hand the pain of antisemitism and being an outsider.  This aspect of his life accounts for his choice of African-American protagonists, featured for the first time in modern American children's literature. 

Best known among all his characters is Peter, the adorable little boy who ventures outside into the snow to make a snowman, snowangels and snowballs.  When he decides to bring one snowball home in his pocket, he discovers - much to his chagrin - that his precious creation has disappeared.  But luckily, more snow falls the next day and he goes out this time with his friend to enjoy another snowy day.

Luminous Modernism in Scandinavia House

Luminous Modernism: Scandinavia Art Comes to America, 1912

Scandinavia House, 58 Park Avenue at 38th Street, October 25, 2011 - February 2012

Harold Sohlberg, Flower Meadow in the North, 1905

Oil on canvas, 37.8 x 43.7 inches; 96 x 111 cm

The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo

As we celebrate the new year and the rebirth of light after the Winter Solstice, Scandinavia House on Park Avenue gives us one more reason to break out the akavit to commemorate an important occasion: Luminous Modernism.  This exceptional exhibition presents 48 works by 20 artists who participated in a similar exhibition 100 years ago, sponsored by The American-Scandinavian Foundation.  Back then, these young European artists offered a taste of the avant-garde hardly known in the United States - preceding the infamous Armory Show of 1913 (wherein Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending Staircase, No. 2 blew the critics' minds).  Eight of the paintings in the 2011-12 exhibition were included in the 1912 exhibition.