On view: Lee Quiñones
At the Museum of the City of New York.
This week, Exhibits in New York founder and editor Sarah looks at how recent city events influenced her experience at Above Ground: Art from the Martin Wong Graffiti Collection. If you’re using the app, you can follow her @sarah.
On view: Above Ground
There are a few weeks in this city where I make a point of picking up the current issue of New York Magazine, or maybe The New Yorker, because I assume it will one day end up in a museum. I have semi-decent accuracy with this; five years ago, I grabbed The New Yorker’s lockdown issue, which now sits both on my bookshelf and in an exhibit on the first floor of the Museum of the City of New York.
The magazine is placed in a vitrine dedicated to the 2020s; nearby, other periods are narrativized. The 1970s are unsurprisingly marked as a city “on the brink,” when a combination of Vietnam-era inflation and white middle-class flight to the suburbs drove the city to near-bankruptcy, destroying its ability to maintain public goods like free college and subsidized housing. The resulting New York still lurks in the public imagination: dangerous, dilapidated, and depopulating (think Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver). It was also home to the many art giants we now venerate in museums, like Robert Rauchenberg, Barbara Kruger, and Martin Wong, a Chinese-American painter from San Francisco who, while living in the Lower East Side, started collecting the sketchbooks, canvases, and ephemera of his graffiti artist friends. When he died in 1999 of AIDS-related illness—another common tragedy of a long-ago New York—he donated his collection to the museum.
Mounted on unfussy white walls that let the spray paint shine, the work in Above Ground: Art from the Martin Wong Graffiti Collection comes from the likes of Futura, Lee Quiñones, and A-One—artists whose initial works, painted on trains and public spaces, were denigrated as emblems of a fallen city. The collection here notably skews away from graffiti’s earliest periods, which makes sense, as it took time for artists—also called writers—to transition to the more traditional canvas. The genre’s eventual entrance into the gallery world is foreshadowed by displays of advertisements from the first galleries that embraced the form: spaces like Fashion Moda in the South Bronx and Razor Gallery in SoHo.
Eventually, graffiti would become an art market fad that would (of course) burn out in a few years, although many who got their start then still command high prices—I’m thinking specifically of Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The prices of these artists’ now-celebrated works (one Basquiat went for $100M+ in 2017) are an echo of what would resolve the city’s aforementioned fiscal crisis. To fix the city budget, the public sector shrank, capital spending (including home building) retracted, and, with tax cuts implemented at the federal level in the early 1980s, rates on the wealthiest New Yorkers effectively decreased; you can see this partially reflected in the much higher prices on art. As J. J. Charlesworth has argued, the art market’s mouth-watering prices are a sign of too much capital with nowhere more productive to go. Many of those not quite rich enough to play in the art market tolerated this new arrangement because they owned real estate, and would enjoy ever-increasing rents from unlanded labor, newcomers, and the young. This consensus has been durable enough to be the only New York I’ve ever known.
Then, this past weekend, sensing another magazine cover worthy of a museum, I picked up the newest issue of New York Magazine.
The cover features an unflinching Mamdani, whose win is being celebrated (or mourned, depending on your persuasion) as the possibility of a new paradigm, one that aligns with our earlier era of big government and quality public services (free buses are nothing compared to the free college Shirley Chisholm received in the 1940s; she, by the way, has her own show upstairs). Whether or not the Democratic nominee can actually implement his desired programming (should he win in the general election in the fall) is beyond the scope of this newsletter, but that the city was chattering about change ultimately underscored my experience at Above Ground. What might have originally been a heart-warming love letter to 1970s New York became an opportunity to contemplate the last time the city was in flux. Here’s hoping, if we’re really doing this again, we get something better. Above Ground is on view through October 5th.
also on view/pitches we’d like to see:
Chloë Bass, Twice Seen, at Alexander Gray Associates. Through July 26.
On Education, at Amant. Through August 17.
K Allado-McDowell, The Known Lost, at the Swiss Institute. Through September 7.
Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, at the Met, Through October 26.