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Miami Herald
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Miami Herald
Mystical painter highlights MOCA North Miami's spring season
There's plenty going on in the mind of Philip Smith, and it shows in his art. The Miami-born painter's canvases are full of esoteric symbols and mystical imagery gleaned from years of studying ancient cultures, world religions, and the work of historical magicians. Spirals, DNA strands, minerals, magic circles, foliage, human hands – all coexist in a ghostly mélange of images and ideograms. 'These images are meant to basically provoke your imagination,' says Smith, who is currently the subject of a career-spanning retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, which opened Wednesday, April 30 and is on view through Sunday, Oct. 5. 'The idea of looking at my paintings is a bit akin to sitting in a planetarium, where you're looking up at the stars and they project all these patterns. And you're told to see those patterns, that this is the Milky Way, but then your mind wanders and you start to see other things. And that's the idea with my work, really. It's a portal for the imagination.' Smith's encounters with the supernatural began during his childhood in Miami. His father Lew Smith, who had been an interior decorator for famous and powerful people such as Walt Disney and Cuban president Carlos Prio Socarras, one day discovered he could speak to the dead and heal the sick. He became a faith healer, and the difficulties this placed on then-teenage Philip, who eventually wrote about the experience in his memoir 'Walking Through Walls,' put him on his own spiritual quest. He tried drugs. He joined, and later left, the Church of Scientology. And finally, he moved to New York to become an artist, and from there he developed the image-dense visual language in his paintings. 'As a kid, I wanted to be an archeologist, so I was looking at, obviously, Sumerian and Egyptian and Indian temples,' he says. 'I wanted to sort of create a pictographic language, also a slightly cinematic language. Because I think we respond to that experientially and also cerebrally more than words,' he says. Smith explains that words have to be learned, whereas images are immediate. 'When you speak to mediums or psychics, they get their information visually. It's imprinted. They see things as they're talking to you. And so all those components go into making up this visual language,' he says. Smith's work managed to get noticed by the critic Douglas Crimp, who put him in a soon-to-be-influential show at Artists Space in downtown Manhattan called 'Pictures.' It included several artists, including Robert Longo and Sherrie Levine, who would later be part of the so-called 'the Pictures Generation,' a group of artists who were deeply influenced by the culture of mass media that was present at the time. Smith describes the art scene of that time as vastly different from today's more professionalized art ecosystem, full of passionate people that did what they did not for money, but because they felt a calling. 'I didn't understand what kids learn with their MFA today, how to network, how to write emails, how to get curators into your studio. I thought my job was just to make art, and the art world was very small and very personal. You kind of met everybody.' He says he was friendly with the likes of Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. '(Warhol) would call me every Saturday at the studio and chat. I interviewed Jasper Johns for Interview (magazine), and I would walk over to Bob Rauschenberg's house at four o'clock in the morning and sit there and drink with him. It was a very different world. And it was more a world where you kind of made it up as you went along. None of us knew what we were doing, but we all knew we were doing something different.' Still, he always wanted to come back to Miami, the place he considers his true home. After nearly three decades in New York, in 2019, he returned to South Florida and has staged several shows since then, mostly with the Little River-based gallery PRIMARY. The MoCA show, his first solo museum exhibition in Miami for several decades and one that incorporates work from 'Pictures' to now, is something of a culmination for him. 'I've always wanted to do a major show in Miami, because it's the city that I really love,' he says. 'I had to leave Miami as a young artist, because there was no opportunity. There were no real museums, no galleries, no collectors. There was nothing here. So that's why I went to New York.' Smith mentions the progression of Miami's art museums. 'Whether it's the Rubell Museum, or Marty Margulies, or Art Basel – it's an extraordinary transformation that I don't know, that people appreciate, how it went from the desert to Tribeca in a generation or two.' For the artist, the retrospective at MoCA is important on many levels. 'It's a very meaningful show to me, because I feel it's giving back to Miami as a Miami person, and I'm not coming in as a New Yorker saying 'see how great I am.' I'm coming in and saying, 'I want to share with you what my life's been about.'' Smith's status as a Miami-born artist who spent much of his career in New York complements that of MoCA's other spring show, a New York-born artist who spent much of her life in South Florida. Vickie Pierre worked for Miami art institutions, including at the former Miami Art Museum (now PAMM) and as registrar at MoCA NoMi. But alongside that career, she also made art herself, and now her work is on view in the show 'The Maiden is the Warrior.' The exhibition zeros in on the artist's 'Poupées in the Bush' series, featuring amorphous black blobs with clearly defined feminine features, somewhere between figures and abstract forms. Some have fingers, horns, and other protrusions appended to their bodies. Others wear rings or are surrounded by floral assemblages. Reflecting the duality of womanhood as in the title of the show, the Poupées are meant to have a bit of softness as well as ferocity, according to curator Adeze Wilford. 'The thrust of our show is really about the duality of their forms. Like they can equally be these, very soft, reclining figures, kind of droopy and globular but also very, almost Rubenesque in how they're conceived of. But then there are some that have these very fierce bearings,' says Wilford. Though the two shows are quite distinct, Wilford, who is curating her final show for MoCA after moving to the Memphis Art Museum in January, hopes viewers will be able to envelop themselves in each. 'The way that I conceive of solo presentations is really that the artists are inviting you into their world, into how their brain is working, and so they're very different people, and we can see how things are unfolding for them both.' WHAT: 'Philip Smith: Magnetic Fields' and 'Vickie Pierre: The Maiden is the Warrior' WHERE: Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, 770 NE 125th St., North Miami WHEN: Noon to 7 p.m. Wednesday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday through Sunday. Through Sunday, Oct. 5. COST: $10 for general admission; $5 for seniors, students with ID, ages 12 to 17, and disabled visitors; free for museum members, children under 12 years old, North Miami residents and city employees, veterans, and caregivers of disabled visitors. INFORMATION: 305-893-6211 and is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music, and more. Don't miss a story at
New York Times
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The New York Nonprofit Where Generations of Artists Got Their Start
CURRENTLY PROJECTED ON the walls at Artists Space, a nonprofit arts organization in TriBeCa, are two films by Carolyn Lazard that the 37-year-old artist shot inside a training center at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens. Lazard, who is disabled, says they approach their work as a 'chronic patient,' often addressing in their videos and installations the slowness and boredom they've experienced during frequent medical visits. In one of the films, 'Vital' (2025), the performers Martine Syms and Cyrus Dunham play a mother-to-be and a doctor during a fictional visit. Syms goes through the motions of a typical checkup — she arrives at the front desk, then anxiously scrolls through her phone in the waiting room — before being examined by Cyrus, a last-minute fill-in for her usual obstetrician. With a blank look, he shuts down question after question about doulas and epidurals, leaving the viewer to wonder whether what we've watched is truly a scene of care at all. While you might not expect to hear the thumping of a fetal ultrasound in an art gallery in downtown New York, at Artists Space, which has been a blank slate for emerging and experimental practices for over 50 years, it seems natural. Since its founding in 1972, the organization has supplied hundreds of writers, curators and artists with an alternative platform that stands apart from traditional exhibition avenues like museums and commercial galleries. Cindy Sherman worked there as an assistant; Laurie Anderson staged early performances at the gallery. The nonprofit has also been a hub for avant-garde music and political organizing. 'I hope that the space feels like [its] name — like a container that's ever refilling,' says Jay Sanders, the organization's executive director and chief curator. Since 2019, Artists Space has occupied the ground floor and basement of a former carpet factory, its sixth home. The structure underwent a multimillion-dollar renovation that kept the building's grand neo-Classical facade intact but cut a new main entrance in an alley along its side. In the past several years, the neighborhood around it has grown into a prominent arts district, with dealers like David Zwirner and Hauser & Wirth opening outposts nearby. However, when Artists Space first arrived downtown, the area was far less developed. Artists had only just begun moving to SoHo in the '60s, taking over the cavernous loft spaces left empty there by textile manufacturers. Galleries followed in the late '60s and early '70s. The dealer Paula Cooper, who championed conceptual and minimalist artists, opened her space in 1968. Leo Castelli, a gallerist who gave Roy Lichtenstein and Frank Stella their first solo exhibitions, and who had previously only operated on the Upper East Side, planted roots in the neighborhood in 1971. It was in this transitional landscape that the critic Irving Sandler and the arts administrator Trudie Grace teamed to conceive of the Committee for the Visual Arts, Inc., as part of a pilot initiative from the New York State Council on the Arts. Their mandate was simple: They would feature only artists who had no gallery representation and had never previously shown in the city. The early exhibitions, on the third floor of a SoHo loft building, functioned like a game of art-world tag, in which Sandler invited each of three well-known artists to nominate another artist. In October 1973, for Artists Space's second show, the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt chose the sculptor Jonathan Borofsky, who presented his serial 'Counting' project (1969-present), for which the artist wrote consecutive numbers on pieces of paper and stacked them with the goal of tallying from one to infinity. These appeared alongside pieces by the painters McArthur Binion and Mary Obering, who were nominated by Ronald Bladen and Carl Andre. The artist Robert Longo was living in Buffalo with Sherman, his girlfriend at the time, when he first learned about Artists Space. The couple ran an independent art space of their own, called Hallwalls, below the loft that they shared with a few friends and, in 1976, the then-director of Artists Space, Helene Winer, who'd later become Longo and Sherman's dealer at the gallery Metro Pictures, invited Hallwalls to participate in an exchange show. Six artists associated with Hallwalls presented their work at Artists Space, while five artists chosen by Hallwalls in collaboration with Winer — the performance artist Jack Goldstein and the painter David Salle, among others — were showcased at Hallwalls. Longo recalls that, while he was organizing the exhibition, he would hitchhike from Buffalo to New York and sleep inside the gallery. 'Artists Space was like our clubhouse,' he says. In the late '70s, two distinct but overlapping American art movements were founded and briefly flourished at Artists Space: the Pictures Generation and No Wave. The Pictures Generation, a crop of young artists (Longo and Sherman among them) who took a critical eye to the culture of mass media by immersing themselves in the imagery of television and magazines, was inaugurated by a 1977 show, 'Pictures,' curated by Douglas Crimp. The following year, Longo and the Hallwalls artist Michael Zwack organized a five-day festival of No Wave music, a particularly anarchic subgenre of punk that prioritized rhythm and noise over melody. The movement was short-lived but marked a brief moment when the worlds of visual art, film and music came together. The festival was advertised with fliers posted around the city listing participating bands, including Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Gynecologists and DNA. The event had no name and the price of admission was $3. In attendance was Brian Eno, who had come to New York to work on a Talking Heads album; he would later produce 'No New York,' a compilation album featuring bands that performed. The second-to-last night of the festival was cut short when James Chance, the saxophone-playing frontman of the Contortions, leaped into the crowd to start a fistfight with the Village Voice music critic Robert Christgau. BECAUSE ARTISTS SPACE operates as a nonprofit, its curatorial team is able to 'be pure in our vision,' Sanders says, and to take risks. That freedom has allowed the organization to stage several landmark shows over the years: In 1987, for example, the artist Jimmie Durham and the critic Jean Fisher organized 'We the People,' one of the first major showcases of postmodern Indigenous American art to take place in a non-Indigenous art space. However, the organization's nonprofit status also means that its programming has been under the microscope since its inception. One notorious conflict occurred in 1979, when Artists Space presented an exhibition of abstract black-and-white charcoal drawings by a white artist, Donald Newman, that included a racial slur in its title. In response, a coalition led by Linda Goode Bryant, who ran the gallery Just Above Midtown, which highlighted artists of color, sent a letter to Artists Space staff that described the decision as 'an incredible slap in the face'; among the signers were the artists Howardena Pindell and Faith Ringgold and the critic Lucy Lippard. The New York State Council on the Arts, which provided 60 percent of the organization's funding at the time, received letters arguing that its constituents' money had been misused to support offensive artwork. Another conflict came to a head in 1989, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, around the opening of the exhibition 'Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, a group show curated by the photographer Nan Goldin at Artists Space's West Broadway gallery, to which the nonprofit had moved in 1984. An essay in the exhibition catalog by the artist David Wojnarowicz titled 'Postcards From America: X-Rays From Hell' drew the ire of politicians and the National Endowment for the Arts, which took particular issue with a section of the text that described the Catholic Church as a 'house of walking swastikas' and criticized Cardinal John O'Connor, then the archbishop of New York, who had campaigned against the distribution of safer-sex information. Artists Space found itself at the center of a national media spiral, prompting the N.E.A. to temporarily rescind the $10,000 it had awarded the organization to produce the show and catalog. The grant accounted for a third of the exhibition's funding. Today, the future of public funding for the arts in the United States is uncertain. Earlier this year, the N.E.A. imposed a condition that grant applicants must attest they would not 'promote gender ideology' in response to an executive order signed by President Donald Trump on Inauguration Day; in March, the N.E.A. suspended the requirement after the A.C.L.U. filed a lawsuit arguing that the measure infringes on free speech. The president also signed an executive order in March aimed at eliminating the Institute of Museum and Library Services, an important channel for federal arts funding, and in April, the Trump administration announced it would cut $65 million from the budget of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Today, Artists Space receives the majority of its funding from private donors, yet a small but essential part of its budget — less than 10 percent — comes from public dollars. Alternative spaces like Artists Space are often an accessible point of first contact for new ideas and emerging practices. Lazard's show, for example, marks a significant evolution in the artist's oeuvre. They studied experimental filmmaking at Bard College, so making 'Vital' was Lazard's first experience working with actors on a film set, as well as their first time working in the format of narrative storytelling. New York has changed a lot since 1972. Many other prominent alternative and noncommercial spaces have come and gone over the years, including Exit Art, Art in General and the long-running Metro Pictures, which closed in 2021. Artists Space, and its mission, is one of the few cornerstones of contemporary art in the city that remains intact. The organization's goal, in Sanders's words, is the same as it always was: 'to give an artist the ability to make a dream project, really, on their own terms.'
