Humaira Abi, "Searching for Home" installation view, 2016. Photo: Emilie Smith, courtesy of the Bellevue Arts Museum

Humaira Abid
Bellevue Arts Museum, Bellevue, Washington
by Matthew Kangas

Continuing through March 25, 2018

When I viewed "The World is NOT perfect" (2014-17), one of Humaira Abid's installations in her exhibit "Searching for Home," I was reminded of the sight of piled-up, left-behind shoes and suitcases I had seen a few years ago inside the Auschwitz Museum. Stacked up into a corner, Abid's pile is also of shoes and suitcases, along with dolls, sandals, baby pacifiers and bricks. However, everything is carved out of wood, mostly pine and tulip, with some mahogany. The revelation that such detritus is actually the product of loving hand-carving goes a long way to redeeming our recognition of the scene's origins: bombed-out… READ MORE

Editors' Roundtable
by DeWitt Cheng

I used to read novels with some regularity, but in recent years have found biography and history more compelling. Nevertheless, the novelist Julian Barnes' 2015 collection of essays, "Keeping an Eye Open: Essays of Art," turned out to be surprisingly enthralling. Barnes combines a fluent, almost conversational style with thoughtful commentary that won him the Man Booker Prize. Barnes never studied art formally, but clearly did his homework — no Great-Writer vaporizing! — while preparing his "one go" reviews of painters from Géricault to Hodgkin: reading Anita Brookner on Delacroix and Baudelaire; Alex Tanchev on Cézanne; and Redon on Redon, among, undoubtedly, many others. Barnes' judgments are sound, based on his sympathy with other creative artists, and expressed in a "companionable and untheoretical" (as he declared in an interview with The New Yorker) manner that is colorful, readable, and sometimes memorably pungent. I cannot resist providing a few tasty excerpts.

On the incessant self-promotion of the Realist Gustave Courbet:

"Shout loud and walk straight" was apparently a Courbet family maxim, and throughout his life — in person, in paint and in letters — he shouted loud and listened delightedly to the echo. In 1853, he called himself "the proudest and most arrogant man in France." … By 1867, [he declared] "I have astounded the whole world … I triumph not only over the moderns but over the old masters as well." … He also wanted to accept and refuse … [official recognition]. He needed the public offer of a declaration so that he could be publicly offended by it. … [The artist Honoré] Daumier, … had been offered the Legion d'Honneur earlier that year, [had] refused it discreetly. When Courbet upbraided him, Daumier, ever the quiet republican [anti-monarchist], replied, "I have done what I thought I ought to do. I did, but that is no business of the public." Courbet shrugged his shoulders and commented, "We'll never make anything of Daumier. He's a dreamer."

On the anomalous, Michelangel-esque musculature of the dying shipwreck victims in Géricault's massively researched 1819 painting "The Raft of the Medusa":

… but why does everyone — even the corpses — look so muscled, so … healthy? Where are the wounds, the scars, the haggardness, the disease? These are men who have drunk their own urine, gnawed the leather from their hats, consumed their own comrades. … [F]or all its subject matter, "Scene of the Shipwreck" [the original title] is full of muscle and dynamism. The figures on the raft are like the waves: beneath them, yet also through them, surges the energy of the ocean. … It is because the figures are sturdy enough to transmit such power that the canvas looses in us deeper, submarinous emotions, can shift us through currents of hope and despair, elation, panic and resignation. … We don't just imagine the ferocious miseries … They become us. …. How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something [the rescue ship Argus, in the distance, which failed to see the raft at first] that may never come to our rescue.

And finally, on a more cheerful note, here's Barnes on the philistinism of the chic:

In Amsterdam I was halted in front of the late and leering "The Cyclops" [by the visionary Odilon Redon], uncertain what to make of it, when a party of Frenchwomen came past exuding that breezy yet proprietorial manner which somehow only the French are confident enough to affect in art galleries. The first woman donated to the painting a glance and crisply announced, as if art were merely life, "Ah, quelle horreur!" This … caused her to companions to pause briefly and tame the portrait of the one-eyed giant. "C'est une dorade [mahi-mahi]," suggested one, "Non, c'est un turbot [flatfish]," replied the other; and having thus despatched Redon to the fishmonger's stall, they passed on to the flowers. "Ça, c'est beau."

[The Editor's Roundtable is a column of commentary by our own editors and guest columnists from around the region. Their opinions do not necessarily reflect that of Visual Art Source or its affiliates.]

Odilon Redon, "The Cyclops," ca. 1914, oil on canvas, 25 1/4 x 20".
See DeWitt Cheng's column, left

Patti Oleon, "Danielli," 2017, oil on linen over hardwood panel, 55 1/2 x 42"

Patti Oleon
Edward Cella Art + Architecture, Culver City, California
by Michael Shaw

Continuing through February 24, 2018

Patti Oleon's five paintings, slated for a show dubbed "Sideways" (after the title of one work), prompt the question: What's the ceiling on painted architectural interiors? That can be taken literally, in the sense of challenging the relevance of such modes. Is it an overplayed trope, and/or ultimately placating to the market? It's also as a pun-like take on one of Oleon's recurring motifs, in which ceilings double as floors; in the case of "Danielli" — perhaps the strongest among these… READ MORE

Eddie Owens Martin, "Untitled," n.d., gouache on paper, 11 3/4 x 16". Image courtesy of LaGrange Art Museum

Eddie Owens Martin
Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, Chicago, Illinois
by Robin Dluzen

Continuing through March 11, 2018

Eddie Owens Martin began the construction of his compound, Pasaquan, in Buena Vista, Georgia around 1955. In 2016, 30 years after the artist's death, the Kohler Foundation, the Pasaquan Preservation Society and Columbus State University restored the site to its original glory. Painted in kaleidoscopic color, elaborately molded concrete walls connect a series of equally vivid buildings, adorned with Martin's own… READ MORE

Christopher Knowles
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, Texas
by Donna Tennant

Continuing through March 25, 2018

Christopher Knowles' work is part naive, part outsider art. This major retrospective includes paintings, sculptures, recorded readings, music, poems and even drawings created with a typewriter. The most impressive work, however, is the recreated set of one of the artist's performance pieces, "The Sundance Kid is Beautiful." Newspapers blanket the walls, floor and ceiling of a large section of the gallery. A few folding chairs covered in newsprint are randomly placed in the space… READ MORE

Left: Christopher Knowles, "In a Word" installation view, 2017, Contemporary Art Museum Houston

John Randall Nelson
Gebert Contemporary, Scottsdale, Arizona
by Deborah Ross

Continuing through February 10, 2018

John Randall Nelson has an idiosyncratic way of inserting folk art-style animals, objects and people into his paintings and sculptures, while borrowing from the playfulness of the Pattern and Decoration movement. His trademarks — rabbits, figures doing headstands, snippets of text, glyphs, rows of polka dots and the like — are recognizable in numerous public art pieces around Phoenix, and he has exhibited both locally and nationally. Whimsical and primitive might be the go-to… READ MORE

Left: John Randall Nelson, "She Made a Break for It," 2018, mixed media on panel, 36 x 36". Courtesy of Gebert Contemporary

Senga Nengudi
USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California
by Scarlet Cheng

Continuing through April 14, 2018

Senga Nengudi came of age as an artist in Los Angeles and New York in the 1970s, a pivotal era when young artists felt free — even obliged — to experiment with materials and methods. Artists also joined in the urgent political discussions of race (Nengudi is African American) and gender then percolating in the air. Early on she began using nylon stockings in her work (pantyhose being closely identified with women) and, as she once said in a talk at the Museum of Contemporary Art… READ MORE

Left: Senga Nengudi, "Untitled (R.S.V.P.)," 2013, stretched nylon and sand, dimensions vary