A Mind-Blowing Studio Visit, Classical Music, & Contemporary Photography
What’s challenging for an art advisor (or “consultant” if you will - there’s no real distinction in my mind between those two terms in this business) is sorting through the vast amount of material available to present to prospective clients, be it through in-person tours (like I did twice in NYC last week); conversations about what’s trending in galleries; or concrete proposals to acquire and display art in a collection.
Most people would go crazy attempting to see as much art as I do, much less make sense — theoretically or market-wise — of any of it. This is why it’s important to have an art advisor. Being prepared before you potentially drop thousands of dollars on art (which you should consider as an opportunity for investment, right?) saves you time, effort, while giving you the opportunity to gain valuable intelligence on what kind of art deserves more of your attention and scrutiny than others.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve enjoyed seeing half a dozen very good art exhibitions and events in Miami, including:
Argentine artist Ana Won’s first U.S. exhibition at KDR 305 (perhaps the hottest new gallery in Miami right now, for founder Katia David Rosenthal helped make 33-year-old Cuban painter Alejandro Pineiro Bello one of the local stars of Miami Art Week with a show that sold out in two days);
Early photographs of miniature figures and dolls, conceptually groundbreaking for the late 1970s and early 1980s and rarely seen outside of museum shows, by Pictures Generation artist Laurie Simmons at Andrew Reed Gallery;
An excellent survey of prominent Latin American contemporary artists shared by a private collector at the Coral Gables Museum;
A launch event at the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami for a new book on how to collect art by prominent art-world personality (and professor at the Yale School of Management) Magnus Resch.
I have also been enjoying quite a bit of classical music lately, both at home on my new Angel’s Horn H019 record player (great value for money), as well as in person. Two outstanding concerts I attended featured some of my favorite work by J.S. Bach: the South Florida Symphony Orchestra had a brilliant performance of Keyboard Concerto #4 on piano, and Miami Beach’s New World Symphony arranged Brandenburg Concertos #3 and #6 on harpsicord and Baroque-period instruments (the string instruments relying on period stretched and dried animal intestines instead of post-Industrial Revolution metal strings.)
Ana Won, (b. 1989, Argentina) The Immortality of Affections, (2023) chalk, pastel and oil on canvas, at KDR 305 Gallery in Allapattah, Miami
Laurie Simmons (b. 1949, USA), Red Library 1 (1983), Cibachrome print, at Andrew Reed Gallery, Allapattah, Miami
Beatriz Milhazes (b. 1960, Brazil), Bamboo in Yellow and Brown, (2015/16), silkscreen, in the exhibition Paving Roads for Latin American Art at the Coral Gables Museum, Coral Gables, FL
Miami Beach’s outstanding New World Symphony performing Beethoven’s sublime Symphony #9 in D Minor “Choral” (with the famous “Ode to Joy”) at the Adrienne Arsht Center in Miami, January 13, 2024.
The NWS also gave a full performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the first I’ve ever experienced live, though through dozens of recordings played hundreds of times over my headphones I’ve been diving deep into the Ninth (as well as into my own consciousness) consistently since I first started gravitating to classical music while I was living in Amsterdam in 2015 and 2016. These musical encounters bring me the utmost, superlative joy, and I look forward to more great music in South Florida — and around the country — to come this year.
Then there was my trip to New York City last week, which furnished a vast amount of material and impressions for me to share — in the interest of saving bandwidth and time, I will share just two articles today.
Studio visit with an artist destined for great fame: Noel W Anderson
Noel W Anderson (b. 1981, USA) holding one of his works-in-progress (picked and reworked Jacquard tapestry stretched on frame) at his studio in Bronx, NY
A few months ago I wrote about Noel W Anderson, whom I’ve been following since 2018, and who had a piece of his come up for auction at Christie’s NYC in November. I said I thought his career trajectory looked very likely to take off in the near future, given the uniqueness of his thread-based, picked and reworked tapestries that fascinated visitors at a recent museum show in Lower Manhattan and have already gained critical acclaim in Europe.
A week ago I visited Noel at his studio in the South Bronx. Because I had been following it for a while, I was by no means unfamiliar with his practice, but the way he explained his approach to me conceptually impressed me so much that I am convinced he is one of the cleverest, yet underrated and likely underappreciated artists working in thread-based media today.
Certainly among the pantheon of great contemporary African American artists, without whose contributions you cannot begin to understand the richness of American art over the last 50 years, he has yet to gain full recognition for the complexity of the work that he has innovated.
I already knew that Noel could boast of one of the most rigorous artistic trainings imaginable for a contemporary artist today (he is an associate professor at NYU and has two Master of Fine Arts degrees, one from Yale School of Art), but I had probably forgotten just how brilliant of an art historian and theoretician he is.
Even moreso than gazing upon the hauntingly beautiful (yet strangely grotesque) tapestries he was completing, I was enthralled by hearing him share about how he arrived at his unique method of transferring digitally manipulated images of basketball players onto Jacquard tapestry before substantially reworking (and practically mutilating) them for a wholly transformative, transcendent effect.
The astonishing part about all of this is how he has been able to insert his own labor — that of a highly-trained black artist who had long doubted the veracity of images — into his art’s conceptual processes.
This, I am convinced, is the hallmark of a truly great artist. Please allow me to explain the idea behind his work the best way that I can in this newsletter (happy to explain more over the phone / Zoom to anyone interested in going deeper).
Noel W Anderson, But where? (2022-2023), picked and distressed cotton tapestry, 156 x 105 inches, seen on display at the show Black Exhaustion, Shirley Fitterman Art Center, New York City, November 2023.
Like yours truly, Noel grew up watching television in the 1980s. Many of us will recall that in those days you sometimes had to adjust the analog set’s antennae in order to steady a wavy image. That’s when Noel started wondering what kinds of images — if any he could perceive of in reproduction — were actually real.
Fast forward more than 20 years when Noel was at Yale (the best art school in the country, hands-down) and struggling to find a purpose for his sculptural and printmaking practices. A fellow African-American artist and mentor encouraged him to visit New York’s Metropolitan Museum on sparsely-visited Friday nights for inspiration. One Friday Noel ended up lingering upon a bench in the medieval statuary hall, the one with the tapestries… and the rest was history.
Well, not exactly. Noel had to delve into books and technical processes for a decade in order to figure out how to fully insert himself into the question of “is the image I am seeing real?”
He started by delving into the history of tapestry, a distinctly European tradition that, unlike painting, required a collective effort, for no one single artist can viably produce a tapestry on his own. A collective effort was required, an entire value-chain of labor from those who sheared wool (and later to those who grew cotton) all the way on up to the most skilled artisans, and those who ran royal courts and castles knew this, privileging tapestry above painting in Renaissance times. What’s more, if an enemy army were to approach, tapestries were easier to evacute to safety, serving a practical function as blankets or even as tents (an architectural function that paintings can’t match!)
Furthermore, they served as annals of history (i.e. the Bayeux Tapestry) and archives of information. So tapestry just made more sense to Europeans of the past, and is still prized more so in Europe than it is in the United States today.
By the late 18th century, Joseph Marie Jacquard had developed his eponymous technique, a system of punch cards presaging our more recent era’s shift from analog to digital, something that most of us have witnessed in one form or another over our lifetimes, e.g. black and white TV giving way to color and flat screen TV’s of the early 2000 slowly growing obsolete in comparison to the latest virtual reality goggles.
Noel reminded me that Jacquard’s loom was a major inspiration for Charles Babbage, the grandfather of modern computing by way of WWII codebreaking machines and IBM mainframe computers of the 1960s, which relied on advancements in punch card technology that in fact had started with these semi-automated weaving techniques.
Picked cotton threads create the effect of motion on the blurred image of a basketball player.
Distorted, almost ape-like headshot of Michael Jordan displaying picked cotton threads.
One of the all-time greats of the sport, Kareem Abdul-Jabaar.
LeBron James with colorful threads picked out of his face and beard.
When Noel realized that the lines and dots on an analog TV set were historically linked with tapestry, a whole new practice of artistic expression opened up for him.
Today, he boldly inserts himself — Black artist, born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky — into the mechanization of labor by digitally altering photographs (in this case of basketball players, although he renders other images as well, including documentary photographs with complex historical narratives), transferring them to threads by way of a Jacquard studio (he engages two, one in Europe and one in the American South), and then physically picking the cotton threads out by hand.
He then adorns them with laser-cut letters lifted from basketball hide and bits of porcelain, dying the threads, and mutilating the surfaces of these images until they are transformed into objects of beauty and awe.
I could go on and on about how sophisticated an approach to making art this is; how much meaning is created when artists are willing to go to such lengths to approach and innovate their craft, thereby situating themselves in a broader art historical content.
Furthermore, I am nearly certain that Noel’s stock as an artist is likely to rise in the coming years as he gains more critical acclaim abroad as well as in the U.S. Although the largest of his tapestries are almost certainly destined for museums, he has a number of small portraits (like those above) starting at 12” x 16” for sale directly from his studio. Please contact me for more details.
New photography offers exercise in comparative connoisseurship
This week I was interviewed for an internet publication that features the stories of creatives and how they overcame obstacles to arrive at their calling. (I’ll be sure to share a link once gets published.)
In response to one of the questions I answered, I said that one of the most important things I had to learn in order to be an art advisor was to simply trust my own instincts: namely, that what kind of art I like and gets me really excited is generally good — or at least, better than the average of whatever kind of art fits in that category.
Normally, I don’t walk into every single gallery in Chelsea, the NYC gallery hub mostly concentrated between W 19th and W 27th Streets between 10th and 11th Avenues — there are literally hundreds of them. In fact, I am usually fine to pass by most of them, even if a glance in the window might intrigue me, for there’s just far too much see on any given day. An art advisor must remain disciplined or simply run out of time, energy, or attention for more rewarding viewing experiences.
However, last Friday, I happened to walk by a new gallery with only five minutes to spare before my next appointment. After a moment’s hesitation, I spontaneously breezed in and quickly realized that I was looking at an artist whom I didn’t know (which happens a lot) and who had created a body of of hybrid-media photography by an that compared very favorably to that of another artist who had crossed my radar more than once over the past year.
Wawi Navarroza, Remember Who You Are (Strange Fruit/The Other Asian, Self-Portrait with Pineapple) (2019), archival pigment print on Hahnemühle, cold-mounted on acid-free aluminum, with artistʼs frame: wrapped fabric on wood, colored frame. Silverlens Gallery, Chelsea, NYC.
Wawi Navarroza, Poleng, 3 Ways (soft sculpture) (2016), archival pigment print, cold-mounted on acid-free aluminum, encased with artistʼs frame: wrapped fabric on double wood frame.
Wawi Navarroza is a Filipina artist who shows with Manila-based Silverlens Gallery, which recently opened a space on W 24th Street. Often the subject of her own shots (a la Cindy Sherman), she constructs elaborate, symbol-laden scenes that literally explode out of the image onto fabric-wrapped frames. These speak to notions of, among many other things, exoticism and sentimentality among the Asian diaspora. One could call the portraits “pan-Asian,” incorporating elements of the art historical narrative from various times and countries.
The photographs struck me as similar in some ways (especially given the combination of fabric and photography) to work by a more well-known, U.S.-based Bosnian-Yemeni artist named Alia Ali. Both create editions of works and sell at similar price ranges, yet in my opinion Navarroza’s work is stronger and more competitively priced. Because the latter is still relatively unknown, while Ali’s work has been getting exposure at U.S. art fairs for some time now, I would bet on Navarroza’s work as the better buy.
Fabric-donned models photographed in Rajastani-woven fabric-wrapped frames, shot and designed by Alia Ali.
These editions of photography by Alia Ali are in numerous private collections as well as on display at a number of Citizen M hotel properties; however, they are priced too highly and are too common for me to recommend to most clients as a good purchase.
To be sure that my opinion was validated, I asked a Miami-based colleague (and expert photography curator) to drop by the gallery a few days ago, and she (long a fan of Alia Ali’s work) enthusiastically agreed with me.
There are important pros and cons to consider when seriously collecting photography, but as I grew up framing my artistic journey through a photographic lens, I believe I am in a good position to consult with clients on the kinds of photographs and photographic objects that will resonate most deeply with them. Not to mention that I am continuing to find placement opportunities for several of the most important photographers in Florida, who I think are destined for broader recognition as well (including Ana Samoylova, whom I mentioned several newsletters ago, as well as the historically important chronicler of the Jewish community of Miami Beach, Andy Sweet.)
