Peter Watkins 1935 - 2025

Jack DeJohnette 1942 - 2025

solo begins at 5:30..

What's up

All eyes on Gaza and Sudan, but as the Commander-in-Chief of the Department of War has targeted art..so... what's up?  Several recommended shows ending today for your Saturday stroll in New York town..

The walk begins at 19th Street and 11th Avenue, where "Surreal America" is up til Nov. 8th at Rosenfeld Gallery, which greets you with works on paper by Federico Castellón and then several works by James Guy that tend less towards his socialist realist style in favor of the subconscious imagery of the original Surrealists.  In addition to John Graham and Gordon Onslow Ford, the show features the early work of abstract expressionists influenced by Surrealism.  Turning onto and crossing 20th Street, Ricco Maresca features 1940s works by Morris Hirschfield at no. 529, 3rd floor, til Nov. 15th.  

At no. 513 is the last day of Hayv Kahraman's works from this year inspired by January's Altadena fire that made her home studio uninhabitable.  Growing up a painter from childhood in an artistic milieu of Baghdad as well as a uniquely flexible acrobat, her artistic persona has in part followed those two practices, the variety of postures migrating around the compositional frame seemingly with the “true freedom” Artaud promised in the body without organs. The tortured, interrogating black pupils looking back at the viewer of the corporeal spectacle in earlier works eventually gave way to an eye completely devoid of color, “I have heard stories of refugees who burn off their fingerprints to avoid being tracked across borders. I was thinking about iris scans and facial recognition when I left the eyes blank, but I also wanted to allow them to look inward, refusing to meet the viewer’s gaze.”  The eyes have made their way to the hands, referencing the nazir ornament believed in Iraq to ward off the curse of the unintentional evil eye.  “My purpose as an artist is that of a mediator.  I have succeeded if I can somehow make you feel seen” which places the viewer on the stage of 2018’s The Audience.  The eye on the hand can also suggest the visionary quality of the artistic process, with the purpose of producing a sighting of the viewer.  Like Duchamp, she is adverse to fixed meanings of her works, and ambiguity tends to make the beholder of artworks see themselves.  Works by Giorgione like The Tempest and The Three Philosophers have for centuries inspired prominent Renaissance scholars to reveal their personal biases and wish fulfillment, while the artist’s intention remains an eternal mystery.

 

Invocation on gray flax, 2025, 35"x35", oil, acrylic, and flax on linen

Burning Womb 2, 2025, 32"x21", oil and acrylic on fax

Burning Womb illustrates “a parable told by her great-aunt in Iraqi Kurdistan that begins with a flea falling into a fire. After a series of beings — crow, palm tree, water buffalo, river — destroy themselves out of grief for the insect, the tale ends with a mythical Ur-mother who is so distraught at the carnage that she sits on a hot oven to destroy her womb, signaling the end of humanity.. ‘a story about extinction, and the idea that the extinction of one thing can be a trigger event for all kinds of extinctions.’” The large canvas Anqa' features the figure sitting on an active volcano, but the title referring to the Arab version of the Phoenix holds the promise of rising out of the destruction eternally, while rejecting fate. “Mentioned in Qazwinis cosmological book Aja’ilo al-Makhluqat, and in Ibn Arabi’s mystical poetic writing, the Anqa lives atop the inaccessible Mount Qaf (distant mountains on the edge of the world). This bird is associated with all that was marvellous, occult, and strange. It is said that she collects palm fronds to build herself a nest to then set herself on fire. In order to be reborn again.”

Anqa', 2025, 78"x78", oil and acrylic on linen

Several works in the show contain flax fibers, “a material that is produced with the aide of a bacteria in the soil.” “Immunology produces a relationship to ‘difference’ in which eradicating the Other (no matter the consequences) is acceptable.. ..the connections between the language of disease.. ..and immigration policies.. An example is Say Aah, a painting that depicts a figure swallowing or regurgitating a mortar, an object that followed me through my childhood in Iraq, during the war.”

Say Aah, 2021, 64"x42", oil on linen (not in current show)

At 521 W. 26th is a retrospective of the Cuban painter Rafael Soriano, who became an American Surrealist for a time, til Nov. 22. 

Omar Ba at 293 10th Ave at 27th Street, ending today: The disappearance of Ba’s utilization of animal imagery for military satire while spending time in the United States recalls for me both the disappearance of caricatures of military personnel when George Grosz had to leave Germany for the US in the thirties as well as Gothic sculpture’s movement away from bestiary symbolism, to my tastes unfortunate in both cases.  Ba’s work of five to eight years ago appears to the viewer like opening a supernatural epic of African history to the illustration on page 300.  Though Ba’s father had been Chief of Staff at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the government of Léopold Sédar Senghor, the Negritude poet who became independent Senegal’s first president, Ba was born in a Serer village between Dakar and the River Gambia, a region known for its ancient animist religion and for featuring animals in oral folktales.

When Grosz settled in the US, his initial inclination was to paint Long Island landscapes and fruit vendors that were suddenly of no interest to art historians.  Grosz described himself in America as an immigrant rather than an émigré, and Ba’s work, especially in the 2022 Templon show that produced his English language monograph, took on the subject of immigration during a residency in New York, moving on from the West African Générals with animal heads which haunted the Same Dream retrospective that I saw in Toronto and Montreal.  This also happened to coincide with the 2022 military coups in Burkina Faso followed by the Western propaganda that derided its uniformed leaders.  The affirmative portraits of the current Templon show have, in their last week of exhibition, become concurrent with New Yorkers’ protests against ICE’s arrests of Senegalese vendors that hang around at the corner of Canal and Church, evoking a Dakar street market along the stroll between Wooster Street and Walker Street.

My perception of the meaning of Lascaux, similar to Bataille’s view, is formed by Jean Rouch’s 1966 documentary La Chasse au lion à l'arc, which depicts the iconography and rituals of ancient initiation culture of lion hunters, before modernity and urbanization affected the role of the animal kingdom in the subconscious.  

 

As the human mind becomes less preoccupied with the animal kingdom, bestiary symbolism is selectively reintroduced to the subconscious by artists that are so inclined. If mention of the River Gambia invites a craving for a Guinean buffet, there’s B&B’s (165 West 26th) on the way to the Cindy Ji Hye Kim/ Sydney Cain show at 121 West 27th, ending today. Kim’s utilization of grayscale human skeleton imagery of X-rays in acrylic, graphite and charcoal and influenced by early photographic methods goes well with the Man Ray show at the Met. Cain also uses acrylic and graphite for grayscale in her first New York show, with some animal figures in African social settings thrown in. 

Sydney Cain, Sights, 2025, acrylic, pigment and soft pastel on wood, 18"x24"

Man Ray at the Met presents his rayographs on interior walls with a density that spreads out the crowds that can form in those galleries, arranged by Stephanie d’Alessandro who co-curated Surrealism Without Borders, taking several opportunities to hang paintings by the photograph it was based on “I maintained the approach of a painter to such a degree that I have been accused of trying to make a photograph look like a painting… Many years ago I had conceived of the idea of making a painting look like a photograph!” A few blocks North, three days remain of the Ben Shahn show, organized by the Reina Sofia, at the Jewish Museum, where Anish Kapoor opens a presentation of his early work while clarifying that he’s “deeply against what’s going on,” as we can only guess at what Shahn would say. Though not politically vocal, Man Ray was the rare soul that could side with Paul Éluard when André Breton attacked him over politics while staying in Breton’s good graces thereafter. Over at the Neue Galerie, museum founder Ronald Lauder recently had a cordial meeting with former Al-Qaeda leader Al-Jolani but any requests to destroy the Egon Scheiles have yet to be heeded. 

+ Ruth Asawa at MoMA and Magritte/ Les Lalanne at 744 Madison which I haven't seen yet. The two Ambera Wellman shows, ending today and connected by a few Soho blocks are well worth visiting, with the 145 Elizabeth Street show resembling the sinopie of the future bathroom stall of the larger 134 Wooster Street show.

Ambera Wellmann, People Loved and Unloved, 2025, Oil on linen, 84 x 144 in

 

 

 

time

mental

 

send

me

 

time 

 

 

Mariam Abu Dagga 1994 - 2025

A long, trying day at the White House for President Macron, enlivened by imagining Napoleon fortifying the Kremlin and Oedipus bragging to the Sphynx about his four legs.. 

Finally free of diplomatic duties, he enjoys a quiet dinner at the embassy..

Eddie Palmieri 1936 - 2025

Anas Al-Sharif 1996 - 2025

Raymond Saunders 1934 - 2025

 

Beauty in Darkness, 1993-1999, Collage and mixed media on board, 96 1/2 x 180 inches (245.1 x 457.2 cm)

 

t

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unite

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old 

is

real 

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unit

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GAZ

A HAS NO F

 

L

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Fanny Howe 1940 - 2025

 

In the next world I discovered

a hovel where a naked I writes with a nail

There you're as small as zero, a hole in the wall

the mouse goes in

with a whorl of cheese

for the littlest glass-cutter to eat

To paint one's rose means a life in that place

and on the thorny path outside

one cathedral is equal to the sky

 

              from Goodbye Post Office Square 

 

 

Ismail Abu Hatab 1992 - 2025

 

 

Gaza, 2024

 

Birthday boy

Ardeshir Mohassess, The king is always above the people, 1977

Mohassess, The men bent in prayer to God and the government airplanes arrived, 1977

Mohassess, The convict’s execution coincided with the king’s birthday ceremonies, 1978

Mansoureh Alikhani 1966 - 2025

 

Edmund White 1940-2025

 

[Verlaine] moved more and more in an artistic milieu. Every week he attended a salon frequented by the composers Berlioz and Wagner and the painters Édouard Manet and Henri Fantin-Latour and all the Parnassan band, who grew accustomed to Verlaine's habits; when he started drinking absinthe, they made sure to hide the knives. They knew that in a matter of moments he could go from the meekest mildness to the most murderous and ungovernable of rages. One night when he was blind with drink and wanted money from his mother so that he could continue his rout into the dawn hours, he became so angry with her for holding out on him that he attacked with his cane the jars containing Madame Verlaine's miscarriages, smashing the glass and dismembering the tiny rubbery fetuses and scattering them across the floor - and remarking soddenly that they, like him, had been macerating in alcohol long enough. The next morning, Verlaine crawled to his mother's side, begging her forgiveness in a prolonged, tearful scene of penitence. As she would do each time for the rest of her days, she forgave him.

                                                               

                                                                         (Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, 2008) 

 

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o 1938 - 2025

"It is all due to a parable that came to me as I waited in a lobby of a New York hotel, trying to figure out the meaning of the wonders I had seen in a flight I had made around Africa and all the lands where dwell black folk, in the form of a bird.

"[The Wizard of the Crow] told the story of his travels in time and space in search of the sources of black power and a rather long parable of how humans surrendered control of their own lives to a blind deity with a double barreled name of M&M, or money and market, and how Africa's independence mutated to dependence.

 "Why did Africa let Europe cart away millions of Africa's souls from the continent to the four corners of the world?  How could Europe lord it over a continent ten times its size?  Why does needy Africa continue to let its wealth meet the needs of those outside its borders and then follow behind with hands outstretched for a loan of the very wealth it let go?  How did we arrive at this, that the best leader is the one who knows how to beg for a share of what he has already given away at the price of a broken tool?  Where is the future of Africa?  I cried.

"I saw this: Around the seventeenth century, Europe impregnated some in Africa with its evil.  These pregnancies gave birth to the slave driver of the slave plantation, who mutated into the colonial driver of the colonial plantation, who years later mutated into the neocolonial pilots of the postcolonial plantation.  Is he now mutating into a modern driver and pilot of a global plantation?  But Africa impregnated its own breed, which made our people sing.  Even if you kill our heroes, we women are pregnant with hope of a new lot.  Therefore, don't cry despair at those who sold the heritage; smile also with pride at the achievement of those that struggle to rescue our heritage.

"So I said to myself: Just as today is born of the womb of yesterday, today is pregnant with tomorrow." 

                                                                                     (from Wizard of the Crow, 2006)

Sebastião Salgado 1944 - 2025

At daybreak, Waurá Indians travel by canoe to collect the “waiting net,” Xingu Indigenous Territory, state of Mato Grosso, Brazil, 2005, gelatin silver print, 20 x 24 inches/50.8 x 61 cm, courtesy Sundaram Tagore Gallery

 

Alice Notley 1945 - 2025

“In this moment” “before” “anyone, ever” “died” “before we were born?”
“in this moment forever before” “before we went to a war”
“Before we died” “In this moment, now” “In this moment before, it is
not before” “In this very moment” “where is it” “where we
haven’t died” “or died inside” “In this moment we haven’t” “in this
moment, no one” “in this moment, no one has ever, died” (“But I have
been born”) “in this moment” “where, where is it” “in moment” “who’s here”
 

                                                          from White Phosphorus, 1988

Elham Al Badi 1993-2025

 

"Operation Rough Rider"

  

"Nineteen months into the conflict, the Gaza Strip is still confronted with a critical risk of Famine. Over 60 days have passed since all humanitarian aid and commercial supplies were blocked from entering the territory. Goods indispensable for people’s survival are either depleted or expected to run out in the coming weeks. The entire population is facing high levels of acute food insecurity, with half a million people (one in five) facing starvation. 

"From 11 May to the end of September 2025, the whole territory is classified in Emergency (IPC Phase 4), with the entire population expected to face Crisis or worse acute food insecurity (IPC Phase 3 or above). This includes 470,000 people (22 percent of the population) in Catastrophe (IPC Phase 5), over a million people (54 percent) in Emergency (IPC Phase 4) and the remaining half million (24 percent) in Crisis (IPC Phase 3). This marks a significant deterioration compared to the previous IPC analysis (released in October 2024) and the already dire conditions detected between 1 April - 10 May 2025. During this time, 1.95 million people (93 percent) were classified in Crisis or worse (IPC Phase 3 or above), including 244,000 people (12 percent) in IPC Phase 5 (Catastrophe) and 925,000 (44 percent) in IPC Phase 4 (Emergency). 

"With the announced expansion of military operations throughout the Gaza Strip, the persistent inability of humanitarian agencies to access populations in dire need, an anticipated escalation in hostilities, and the continued mass displacement of people, the risk of Famine in the Gaza Strip is not just possible- It is increasingly likely."

(Integrated Food Security Phase Classification)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Update: 

This is not business as usual.
My new UN report, From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide, is out today.
It shows how corporations have fueled and legitimised the destruction of Palestine.
Genocide, it would seem, is profitable. This cannot continue, accountability must… pic.twitter.com/Ei3atw0TQ1

— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) July 1, 2025

 

 

4 'O lofty virtue,' I began, 'who lead me 

5 as you will around these impious circles, 

6 speak to me and satisfy my wishes. 

7 Pasolini's film about Luigi, 

8 can it be seen? For all the lids are raised 

9 and there is no one standing guard.' 

 10 And he to me: 'All will be shut and sealed..' 

 

At 4:36 when the apostles approach, the figure, I believe, on the left is Giorgio Agamben in his early twenties as St. Philip. Scorsese's Last Temptation lifts this scene almost shot for shot

Luis Felipe Noé 1933-2025

Cerrado por brujería (Closed for Witchcraft), 1963, Oil and collage on canvas, 78 3/5 × 98 3/10 in

 

Joris Weighs In on the New York Times

I was taught growing up that it's polite to wait until someone's New York Times obituary is out before you publicly recall what they wrote about the 'paper of record.' A Syria-related chat from April 2017:

I.K. (in response to a Uri Avnery column): "The Syrians didn’t suddenly submit to a dictatorship in the 80s. ??? The Assads took over in 1970. Like Egypt, which it was previously unified with, fair elections have resulted and would result in leaders wanting to do something concrete for the Palestinians so the US won’t allow them, evidenced by several coups. The Assads moderated Syria’s position towards Israel and the US compared to their predecessors, but Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and the US want them out, largely to reduce the influence of Russia and Iran.

"I agree with Uri tho that there’s zero evidence of Assad’s fingerprints on the chemical attack and that he’s way too smart to alienate the West a few days after Trump said he wouldn’t intervene in the war. Someone didn’t like the news that Trump wouldn’t intervene and did something, but it’s unlikely Assad was that person. Reportedly the Trump administration warned Assad and Putin about the attacks, which would mean they’re playing to US politics, less dangerously in this respect than the Hillary crowd would have.

“What does that say about the American people, and about humanity in general?” I agree that they watch too much TV and still take the NY Times seriously, but increasingly less so."

+ "Intended to mention that all UN statements (one, by former Swiss AG Carla De Ponte) about the various 2013 chemical attacks implicated the rebels, and the UN has made no statement suggesting any evidence of Assad’s culpability." 

P.J.: "Thanks, Ian, useful comments as usual! & good to remind one that the NYT, which, given the circus, one nearly went back to take seriously again, is profoundly enmeshed with the enemies. Note that its opinion pages just acquired the services of one Bret Stephens, well-known climate change denier!"

 

Pierre Joris 1946-2025

When a person has died the men bring their little drums

Mothers of Monga yo yo pray for Monga

War has crushed him how did war crush him?

Cry my gullet, mother of Monga yo yo pray for Monga

War has crushed him O how did war crush him?

When they have finished crying they dance and sing all day long.

 

                        (P.J. translation of Tristan Tzara's translation of Mourning Song of the Ba- Totela, Batatela (Zaire)) 

 

 

 

it looks like this outside tonight only the sky is white (snow and 99% waxing gibbous)

 

René Magritte, L'Empire des lumières, 1954, Oil on canvas and gouache on paper

 

Update: The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow, Gave a lustre of midday to objects below, When what to my wondering eyes did appear, But a miniature sleigh and eight tiny rein-deer, With a little old driver so lively and quick, I knew in a moment he must be Coach Nick. Rapidly the Eagles his starters they came, And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name: "Now, Cooper! now, Quinyon! now Zach Baun and Jalen! On, Saquon! on, Johnson! on, AJ and Jalen! To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall! Now beat the Rams! Beat the Chiefs! Beat them all!"

 

 at the two minute mark:

 

..or in the remake...

 

 

Moreover, Śāriputra, this buddha-land continuously produces heavenly music, and the ground is kelly green. In the six periods of the day and night, the heavens rain down māndārava flowers. In this land throughout the early morning, due to the precepts, all sentient beings have an abundant multitude of exquisite flowers.

(Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtra)

Susan Alcorn 1953-2025

"... each musician interpreting Alcorn's suggestion of a lone village woman raising the alarm before an encroaching military incursion ..."

Fire, 2025

Painter and Altadena resident Hayv Kahraman has set up a GoFundMe for her relocation. “Fortunately, Hayv and her family made it out and their home remains standing BUT it will be UNINHABITABLE for the next year as it goes through the necessary steps to get decontaminated, which means they are homeless and uncertain at this time. 

“Nearly everything they had in the house will have to be removed because of smoke damage and they will be moving into a temporary apartment in the coming weeks, hopefully.” 

Kahraman grew up in Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq war and the Persian Gulf War: "I would look out my bedroom window and see a rain of air-raid bombs. They looked like fireworks. (The air-raid sirens) are so loud and when they happen, you know that you might actually die any minute. It shakes you to the core." Her family attempted to leave for Iran when she was eleven and was struck in traffic for eleven days before finding the border closed, hiring a smuggler the following year to get to Sweden and then Florence where she copied Fra Angelico and Giotto. “People talk about (the Altadena fire) looking like a war zone and they are right. I can tell you that it does. The loss is so vast and encompassing. The rubble. The air. The color of the sky. I felt transported to that time. I had begun building a life here. A home where I was slowly shedding my survivor mode that I’ve carried in my body since the Iraq war.” 

“I am concerned with the multitude not the self," she said in a 2016 interview. "This is not only my story. It can be the story of more than 5 million people within the Iraqi diaspora or any diaspora.” Kahraman was a signatory to the October 19, 2023 ArtForum letter supporting “Palestinian liberation.. an end to the killing and harming of all civilians, an immediate ceasefire, the passage of humanitarian aid into Gaza, and the end of the complicity of our governing bodies in grave human rights violations and war crimes.. that the institutional silence around the ongoing humanitarian crisis that 2.3 million Palestinians are facing in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip be broken immediately” which led to the firing of its Editor-in-Chief David Velasco. 

Recent works are up at Seattle's Frye Museum til February 2nd.

House in Kathemiya, 2013, oil on modular panel, 124 in. x 105 in.

Kachakchi, 2015, oil on linen, 200 x 274 cm

The Audience, 2018, Oil on linen, 97 x 73"

Neurobust no 6, 2022, Oil on linen, 60.96 x 60.96 cm

 

Love Me Love Me Not (detail), 2023; Oil and acrylic on linen, 80 x 100 in.

Syria before al-Qaeda
1994 Giorgio Armani, ancient city of Palmyra pic.twitter.com/nNiAKtQso9

— OstensibleOyster (@Ostensiblay) January 21, 2025

 

 (filmed in Palmyra, Syria)

 

Martha Rosler, Invasion, 2008

 

Christina Quarles, In 24 Days Tha Sun’ll Set at 7pm, 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 77" x 96"

 

As the aforementioned paintings are hanging in there, so Christina Quarles' Altadena studio has survived both this and a fire last April, but her residence and personal items have been completely destroyed.

Two of Frank Lloyd Wright's Mayan Revival houses are in the evacuation zones

 

 The 1923 Samuel Freeman house is in the mandatory evacuation zone from the Runyon Canyon fire

 

The Millard House, also 1923, in the Level 2 evacuation warning zone from the Eaton fire

Art just outside of the Level 2 evacuation warning for the Eaton fire (Norton Simon Museum)

(LA Times update)

     Chamuda, 9th century, Rajasthan, marble

Raphael, Madonna and Child with Book, c. 1502-03, oil on canvas

Jean-Antoine Watteau, Reclining Nude, c. 1713-17, oil on canvas

Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, The Abduction of Psyche by Zephyrus to the Palace of Eros, 1808-1820, oil on canvas

Édouard Manet, The Ragpicker, c. 1865-1870, oil on canvas

Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of a Peasant (Patience Escalier), August 1888, oil on canvas

Georges Braque, Artist and Model, 1939, oil on canvas

Barbara Hepworth, Assembly of Sea Forms, 1972, marble

Sam Francis, Basel Mural, 1956-58, oil on canvas