Four Art+Music Exhibits | Bklyn Sounds 9/25/24—10/1/2024

Gallery shows where art meets music now + This Week's Concerts: Baalti / Pussy Riot Siberia / Ūmboma / His Name Is Alive / Wadada Leo Smith & Raven Chacon / Toribio & Jason Lindner / Bathe / and more

Clockwise from upper left: Prince (photo by Robert Whitman), Baalti, a Pussy Riot activation, Omar Ahmad and Alicia Coleman of Ūmboma

Regular readers know how much I love writing about the crossover between art and music: when ideas that started in one medium move into another, or when intentions of one space begin to influence what starts taking place in another. I believe this is how culture works, how the zeitgeist forms. September in New York seems to have kicked off with a bunch of art shows in which music, or musical artists, or musical histories are key to the work produced. I have visited four excellent exhibits in this vein over the past few weeks, and thought it was worth writing about. (In the time I conceptualized this, a couple of others have opened or are opening, one of them is in this week’s listings.)

At their best, galleries and art institutions are an important part of New York’s musical ecosystem, so go support them. Being free, I think of New York’s galleries as completely underutilized cultural resource, where artists get to grow and experiment. Below are four great music- or Dada Strain-related shows. Go support if you can.

Robert Whitman, “Smiling Music Wall, Minneapolis 1977” (photo: Roman Dean, courtesy of Ki Smith)

Robert Whitman’s show Prince Pre Fame collects images that the photographer took in 1977 of a then-19-year-old Prince Rogers Nelson. Prince had just signed his first management deal, with Minneapolis music agents Owen Husney and Gary Levinson, and was in the process of recording demos that would result in his deal with Warner Bros Records. Selects from the photos Whitman made accompanied the press kit that Prince’s managers sent out to prospective labels. Only 15 press kits were made, otherwise those selects, and all the other images from Whitman’s three separate shoots—in a studio, on the streets of Minneapolis, and at Owen Husney’s home—remained unseen. Over the last decade, a few of these shots have come to light, particularly the one of Prince beaming a broad toothy smile while standing in front of a mural depicting the sheet-music from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. But mostly, the beautiful black-and-white prints that hang at Ki Smith are making their first entrance into the world. Together, they are a rare, early visual document of one of the great musical artists of my lifetime; one who was already carrying himself with great weight and reserve, but remained open to the world in a way he would not later. I saw Pre Fame on opening night, a few days before Sasha Weiss’ incredible piece on Ezra Edelman’s Prince documentary, and already these images feel different in the shadow of that information. (In related news: RIP Cat Glover.) (Wed-Sun, noon-6p @ Ki Smith Gallery, Lower East Side, thru 10/13)

Gee Vaucher, installation view, 2024 (courtesy of White Columns)

CRⒶSS OVER, Gee Vaucher: Crass & Beyond is a small career retrospective of the British artist Vaucher. It centers the work that the 79 year-old painter, photographer, collagist and graphic designer created alongside the anarcho-crust-punk band Crass, but also presents the activism-driven pieces that Vaucher has made since the group’s initial 1984 demise, as Crass’ broadly anti-establishment music, and Gee’s visual representation of the Crass worldview, has become legend. The show opens with photos, gig flyers, posters, a self-published broadsheet (called “International Anthem” - whuuuuut?), before mutating into a set of anarcho-pacifist and feminist collages that are a European echo of the work Winston Smith did with the Dead Kennedys. (The Thatcher/Reagan years remain triggering AF.) Yet sooner rather than later, Vaucher’s POV escapes punk provinciality, and goes out into the protest movements, and into the global apocalypse of the late 20th/early 21st century. American wars (on terror and otherwise) and Palestine. Capitalism running riot next to stifling heteronormative patriotic familial expectations. Nature as producer of product, and religion as the accounting of dead. Some of Vaucher and partner (Crass drummer, poet, artist) Penny Rimbaud’s absurdism has its echoes in the more political elements of what is called street-art nowadays. But really this is a show about the aging and evolution of the punk “No!” How it’s evolved from dingy clubs, to the street, and now to the art-gallery. I hope every young person with any interest in art-school, sees this show. It feels empowering as hell. (Tues-Sat, 11a-6p @ White Columns, West Village, thru 10/26)

Ted Joans 1998, collage, ink, pencil on paper (courtesy of Zürcher Gallery)

The late Ted Joans was a Surrealist; even the father of surrealist philosophy, Andre Bretton, said so. As a visual artist, Joans was a doodler, painter, collagist and assemblage-ist; as a thinker, Joans was obsessed with jazz. He devoted verses to it in his abundant humanist poetry, performed it as a wordsmith and occasional trumpeter (you can hear him on some of Archie Shepp’s late-60s/early-70s recordings). And, as Zürcher’s show Jazz Is My Religion shows, used the music’s ideals and characters to fuel his work. (The name of the exhibit is the first half of Joans’ motto, which ended “...and surrealism is my point of view.”) Joans was especially obsessed with the musical genius of Charlie Parker, as men at the time certainly were. Bird is literally everywhere on the gallery’s walls. He is in colorful oil and ink on a canvas board (with a Basquiat-like crown). He’s a white chalk profile on black graph paper and a black marker profile on a wood plank surrounded by verses. He’s numerous crayon shadings on cardboard, a name on the plastic toy saxophone, a couple of beautiful cubist collages, a pencil outline with colorful crayon squiggles (one of a series of such pencil-and-crayon pieces, entitled ‘Remembering and Remembrances”). The outline of Parker’s alto and the “Bird Lives!” quotes are omnipresent, decorating grocery-store paper bags that serve as the exhibits primary canvases. Justin Desmangles’ catalog essay says that, for Joans, Bird’s music was “an ecstatic embrace of freedom’s possibility.” There are other great historical contextual pieces here that hint at “jazz as freedom,” especially a photo of Joans, Shepp and James Baldwin from Paris in 1975. But it’s the degree to which Bird illuminated Joans’ Religion that makes the deepest impression. (Tues-Sat, noon-6p + Sun 2p-6p @ Zürcher Gallery, Greenwich Village, thru 10/29)

Elizabeth Catlett, “Black Unity” 1969, cedar (photo: Edward C. Robison III, courtesy of Brooklyn Museum)

The long overdue retrospective of the late legendary sculptor Elizabeth Catlett, titled A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies, is less music-centric than the other shows here. There are a couple of beautiful music-related woodcuts, as well as notes on commissioned sculptures of Mahalia Jackson and Louis Armstrong. Yet what Catlett’s magnificent exhibit exemplifies isn’t music as content, but how a vision of community can drive a radical creative life. (The exhibit’s title is another artist quote, one Catlett used as a self-descriptive.) Elizabeth Catlett was a Black woman artist who moved to Mexico for both work and love; there she continued developing her extraordinary practice, and did so with an openly Black feminist perspective. The Brooklyn Museum’s show places the beauty of her sculpted shapes (figurative but also abstract) next to the clarity of her politics (communist Mexican agit-prop, Black Power symbolism and Free Angela Davis stencils), and makes clear how radicalized form and community intentions need not be separate. I first learned about Catlett’s work from reading interviews with her eldest son, Francisco Catlett Mora, Jr., a drummer who played in Sun Ra’s Arkestra *and* later mentored Detroit techno producer Carl Craig. The cross-generational throughline, how radical art embraces community values, feels like a family affair. (Wed-Sun 11a-6p + First Saturdays 11a-11p @ Brooklyn Museum, Eastern Parkway, thru 1/19/25)

This Week’s Shows:

Forever-art-adjacent, electronic pop vocalist/producer Cameron Glasser is releasing an expanded version of her 2023 album, Crux, and playing what feels like a one-off to celebrate the occasion. The opening act is Gamelan Dharma Swara is an NYC-based Balinese orchestra marking its 35th anniversary this year, and one of the best local practitioners of gamelan around. (Wed 9/25, 7p @ Public Records, Gowanus - $25)

Palestinian-American artist Muyassar Kurdi’s practice has always naturally unfolded in many directions at once: she’s a sonic experimentalist and improviser, a visual artist, a film-maker. Yet her Palestinian identity has always provided guidance. And does so now, more than ever… Kurdi has curated an evening of creative music entitled I Must Die, which features the wonderful trombone-and-electronics player Zekkereya El-magharbel, saxophonist Alex Zhang Hungtai, and Muyassar in a duo with the mighty violinist, gabby fluke-mogul. (Wed 9/25, 7:30p @ Center for Performance Research, Williamsburg - $0-$25)

Adam Shore and Brandon Stosuy’s Tinnitus Music Series makes a welcome, overdue return  with a pretty huge bill: Pussy Riot Siberia is Nadya Tolokonnikova’s latest iteration of the globally famous, anti-Putin agit-punk art project. Haela Hunt-Hendrix’s Liturgy plays a rare acoustic set. The experimental-classical-ambient keyboardist Kelly Moran plays a rare all-synths set; and JD Samson will DJ before, between and after. (Wed 9/25, 8p @ 3 Dollar Bill, Williamsburg - $20)

This wonderful bill of Afro-funk and progressive rhythms is helmed by London’s Ibibio Sound Machine, Nigerian-British vocalist Eno Williams’ octet that deftly blends Black Atlantic dance traditions, and celebrates a decade of sound. Opening is Brooklyn’s mighty Lollise, whose new electronic Afro-pop album, I hit the water, you should definitely check out. If that’s not enough, members of the Afro-Latin-electronics concern, Underground System, are the evening’s DJs. Highest Recommendation! (Wed 9/25, 8p @ Brooklyn Bowl, Williamsburg - $30)

A.B.E.L.A., my favorite electronic drum-circle collective making a ritualistic shamanic techno in Bklyn, arrives at the intimate back-room of a Gowanus brewery. The gig marks the temporary departure of producer Carlos Marte, so Carlos will “lead the meditation.” Opening is the theatrical experimental duo, Tó Ara. (Wed 9/25, 8p @ Threes Brewing, Gowanus - $TK)