111 – Frohawk Two Feathers and recommendations
Frohawk Two Feathers discussing his work at the Hudson River Museum
Three Museum show recommendations:
Frohawk Two Feather’s show Kill Your Best Ideas, The Battle for New York and Its Lifeline, the Hudson River at the Hudson River Museum is ambitious and deserves critical attention. The artist has been building fictional stories and myths based on Colonial times in America. The show, comprised of drawings and paintings and a massive two-headed, two-story Trojan Horse is excellent. The museums shabby space and Hudson River School art make it all the more poignant and embedded in reality. He bridges the insider/outsider gap beautifully. I would highly recommend the trek to Yonkers for Kill Your Best Ideas. (Open until May 17th)
The Aldrich Museum’s current group of exhibitions is excellent and worth the trip. Cary Smith and David Scanavino provide brilliant and boisterous color. Smith’s paintings feel easy, but the kind of easy that can only come from doing something well for a very long time. David Scanavino’s floor-sized installation Imperial Texture is a riot of colorful linoleum which climbs the walls just enough to point out it’s relationship to the floor size (1:1 scale). Jackie Winsor’s show With and Within was a delight as well. Her boxes and inset wall pieces were a revelation for me. They are a perfect compliment to the historic pieces installed around the museum from Larry Aldrich’s collection (long ago deaccessioned) including Eva Hesse, Agnes Martin, Richard Artschwager, Ellsworth Kelly and Richard Serra. This will also be open until the spring thaw (April 5th).
The Forever, Now at MoMA is not great or bad. It is a mixed bag and I know several reviewers have felt that money and influence (of dealers and collector/patrons) have caused this show to come to being. As a survey of contemporary painting, it fails. There is too much of the same. As a group show of good painters, it mostly succeeds. The Forever, Now seems to have suffered the type of critical backlash usually reserved for a Biennial. (Open until April 5th)
– Jeff Bergman February 2015
ATLAS 
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