A Poem for Deep Thinkers July 27, 2025
Posted by judylobo in Zoo.Tags: Art exhibit, Guggenhiem Museum, NYC, painting, photography, poetry, Rashid Johnson, sculpture
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Truth be told, I am not a fan of the Guggenheim Museum. I find the building design a distraction to viewing the art. That said, I do occasionally visit if there is a show I am interested in seeing like the Jenny Holzer exhibit last year. Add to that short list the present exhibit called ‘Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers’ which is there thru January 2026. On view are almost 90 works—from black-soap paintings and spray-painted text works to large-scale sculptures, film, and video. They fill the museum’s rotunda, including Sanguine, a monumental site-specific work on the building’s top ramp with an embedded piano for musical performances. Additionally, a dynamic program of events, developed in collaboration with community partners across New York City, activate a sculptural stage on the rotunda floor. If you plan your visit you can easily experience one of these special performances. For nearly 30 years, artist Rashid Johnson has cultivated a diverse body of work that draws upon an array of disciplines such as history, philosophy, literature, and music. This major solo exhibition highlights Johnson’s role as a scholar of art history, a mediator of Black popular culture, and as a creative force in contemporary art. We thoroughly enjoyed this amazingly multi-talented artist.
Edges of Ailey January 19, 2025
Posted by judylobo in Zoo.Tags: Alma Thomas, Alvin Ailey, art, Art exhibit, Basquiat, Dance, Faith Ringgold, Jacob Lawrence, Kara Walker, Kevin Beasley, photography, Rashid Johnson, Romare Bearden, Whitney Museum
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We had wanted to see this exhibition since it opened back in September but life sometimes interferes with art. We finally went last Sunday and we were wowed. Edges of Ailey is the first large-scale museum exhibition to celebrate the life, dances, influences, and enduring legacy of visionary artist and choreographer Alvin Ailey. It consists of an immersive exhibition in the Museum’s 18,000 square-foot fifth-floor galleries—featuring works by more than eighty artists and revelatory archival material—and performances in the Museum’s third-floor theater, including AILEY in residence for one week each month during the exhibition. Included are performance footage, recorded interviews, notebooks, letters, poems, short stories, choreographic notes, drawings, and performance programs and posters gathered from Ailey’s archives and others forge a vital through-line in the gallery. The artworks are arranged by themes that shaped Ailey’s life and dances. Sections span an expanded Black southern imaginary that enfolds histories of the American South with those of the Caribbean, Brazil, and West Africa; the enduring practices of Black spirituality; the profound conditions and effects of Black migration; the resilience for and necessity of an intersectional Black liberation; the prominence of Black women in Ailey’s life; and the robust histories and experiments of Black music; along with the myriad representations of Blackness in dance and meditations on dance after Ailey. Artists exhibited among Ailey include Basquiat, Romare Bearden (a personal favorite of mine,) Faith Ringgold, Alma Thomas, Jacob Lawrence, Rashid Johnson, Kevin Beasley, Kara Walker and many more. This wonderful exhibit is on through February 9th.
While at the Zoo 