“Parking on Pavement” provocative.
Exhibit features work that examines the status quo
“Parking on Pavement,” the current show up at Jack Shainman Gallery’s The School, in Kinderhook, offers a generous selection of work from 24 artists. The title may sound familiar to anyone who has received a traffic ticket in upstate New York—it’s meant to be absurd. Loosely organized around the idea of “questioning the illogical and irrational nature of seemingly fixed systems,” according to the press release, the show features artists whose work challenges the status quo, in a multitude of ways.
The School, more in size and scope like a small museum than a gallery, occupies a former school and though most of it has been beautifully renovated, there are spaces throughout whose names refer to their previous incarnations.
In the Principal’s Office, centrally located on the second floor, is Anila Quayyum Agha’s “All the Flowers are for Me (Turquoise),” a 2017 piece that is stunning in its elegant simplicity. A laser-cut steel cube, painted blue, hangs in the middle of the room, with a single halogen lamp dangling in the center of the cube, casting shadows of the intricate floral patterns on to the surrounding walls, floor, and ceiling. Another version of this piece, “Intersections,” was the first artwork to win both the popular vote and the juried one (a tie with artist Sonya Clark in 2014) in the annual Artprize competition held in Grand Rapids, Mich. In her statement for that competition, she wrote about her Pakistani childhood, and the sense of both “wonder and exclusion” she experienced as a girl there. These elements are reflected in the experience of standing in the room with this piece.
In the South East Gallery, a former classroom just across the hall from the Principal’s Office, is a room full of captivating drawings by Derrick Alexis Coard, an artist who, I discovered later, suffered from schizophrenia and whose life was tragically cut short in 2017. In 2015, he was the recipient of a Wynn Newhouse Award for “artists of excellence who happen to have disabilities.” In pastels or graphite on paper, Coard celebrated black
men and saw these portraits as a way to see them in a more positive light. Indeed, the portraits are beautiful, imbued with a sense of poignancy and immediacy.
Back downstairs, the Perimeter Gallery, a hallway that loops around the center of the first floor, is filled with large photos by Carrie Mae Weems. In this series of black and white photos, Weems inserts an anonymous black woman, back to the camera, into the center of the frame with the camera trained on sites around Rome, or in front of art museums like the Louvre in Paris. The figure bears witness in places where black women have historically so often been excluded.
Echoing throughout the gallery, while viewing these photos, is the haunting soundtrack for Hank Willis Thomas’ 2011 video “Overtime.” The dirge-like music, created by Ditto, recalls old spirituals and chain gang songs. In the video, basketball players jump and take shots under a noose, suggesting, among other things, the exploitation of black athletes by white team owners.
Downstairs in the main gallery, which used to be the cafeteria and gym, Kerry James Marshall’s cast resin, larger-thanlife, coins, adding up to 99 cents, sit on the f loor, a comment on the economics of the art world. Andrea Bowers’ huge installation, “The New Woman’s Survival Guide,” is nearby—a collection of protest signs, drawings, letters and other copies of ephemera about the history of the contemporary women’s movement and what work there still is left to do.
There are many more great artists in the show than I have space for here, including Shainman regulars such as Nick Cave and El Anatsui. Jack Shainman’s instincts are always spot-on. The work included here is not all from his gallery’s program of artists but, as always, it’s both engaging and enlightening and worth a visit before it closes.
Amy Griffin is a frequent contributor to the Times Union.