The exhibition “New York Trilogy” is on view at the American Folk Art Museum’s Lincoln Square branch location to October 18, 2010. Highlighting New York artistry, the exhibition brings together works from the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries drawn from the museum’s permanent collections. The three-part presentation includes paintings by two Twentieth Century self-taught artists, Vestie Davis and Malcah Zeldis, and a lively sampling of Nineteenth Century artwork that reflects the energy and complexity of New York State.
Davis’s (1903‱978) New York is a bright and shiny place with impressive and diverse landmark buildings, bridges, parks and beaches. It is a hub of civic, business and recreational activity chronicled in the artist’s meticulously detailed pictures from the 1950s through the 1970s. Selected by Lee Kogan, curator of special exhibitions, the exhibition features approximately 36 paintings and drawings from the museum’s permanent collection that represent the artist’s favorite subjects.
Davis’s neatly drawn images begin with black and white photographs he took of his subjects. “Like snapshots, his vignettes appear frozen in time, set as in tableaux,” noted Kogan. Davis focuses on New York’s historic, civic and mercantile interests in works such as “Fraunces Tavern,” “Wall Street,” “City Hall,” “New York Public Library” and “Brooklyn Bridge.”
Recreational sites are beautifully rendered in Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, the ice skating rink at Rockefeller Center and the fantasy architectural Luna Park at Coney Island. A preservationist, Davis predicted that some of his favorite sites would not survive the rapidly changing needs of the city. He faithfully rendered scenes of Steeplechase at Coney Island and the Ninth Avenue Elevated subway with this in mind.
Born in the Bronx in 1931 and a long-time resident of Brooklyn and Manhattan, Zeldis is a New York artist who engagingly taps into and captures the pulse of the urban landscape. Her pictures are highly organized, often geometric; her scenes of everyday life and biblical and historical subjects are often laced with autobiographical elements. Zeldis paints in oil on canvas, Masonite and cardboard, and in gouache on paper. Audacious in her color palette, Zeldis’s hues vibrate with rhythmic intensity and her undulating lines enhance movement.
The exhibition includes 12 paintings selected by Kogan from the museum’s permanent collection. In painted depictions of New York City and Detroit, where she grew up †”Coney Island or Brighton Beach,” “Statue of Liberty,” “In Shul” among them †are diverse narratives that reflect her imagination, search for identity, concern for human rights and moral values. Zeldis also paints genre scenes, biblical and religious works, historical and current events, revered heroes and heroines (including Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Triptych and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) and fairy tales.
In “A New York Sampler: Selections from the Collection,” sparkling artworks from the museum’s collection speak to the vitality and variety of Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century art from the Empire State. Throughout its history, New York has thrived on forces balanced between old ways and progressive ideas. This creative tension has energized the state, and it is this vigorous spirit that is captured so beautifully in this folk art sampler.
Senior curator Stacy C. Hollander has selected a generous sampling, from the “Flag Gate,” the first artwork to enter the museum’s collection in 1962, to a recent gift of a robust carousel lion carved in the Brooklyn workshop of Marcus Charles Illions for the famous Coney Island carousels. Quilts and coverlets attest to the state’s preeminence as a center of textile trade and production and the sophistication of the individual makers as seen in the Mary Smith Log Cabin quilt and the vibrant Steinberger quilt made from silk and satin remnants by a man in the tailoring trade.
Not surprisingly, the Hudson River figures prominently as a visual theme in works, such as the Hudson River quilt. Depicting landmarks along the river, it was the first quilt to highlight conservation and preservation issues associated with the course of the river.
A rare, early stoneware punch bowl with cobalt blue decoration produced by the Crolius pottery on Chatham Square derives its elegant form and decoration from imported Continental pottery.
Urban show figures in wood lightheartedly satirize popular characters and trends. The handsome mustachioed baseball figure nattily outfitted in cap and shoes, carved in the famous shop of Samuel Robb in downtown Manhattan, epitomizes the notion of New York City as a baseball town, and the growing popularity of the national pastime.
The American Folk Art Museum branch location is at 2 Lincoln Square. For information, www.folkartmuseum.org or 212-595-9533.
