'What’s more real, after all, art or the feeling of it? History or the telling of it? Medium or message? We know the conventional market wisdom. It’s important to have the alternative." That's how the superb art critic Holland Cotter ends his story in the N.Y. Times (12/28/07) about two exhibition of Jacob Lawrence's "Migration of the Negro" series in New York this month. In brief, Lawrence painted the series (60 small works in tempera on hardboard panels) in Harlem in 1941 when he was 24, and he painted them all at the same time. Though clearly a single narrative work, they are rarely shown together, which Cotter says (elegantly) is a mistake. He talks about the partial show now at the Whitney and relates it to a second exhibition, “Undoing the Ongoing Bastardization of ‘The Migration of the Negro’ by Jacob Lawrence,” at Triple Candie in Harlem.

"Triple Candie," says Cotter, "is one of few nonprofit spaces in the city, or at least in Manhattan, to offer a serious alternative to the market-addled art mainstream. It has done so in a series of exhibitions that have had, by traditional standards, no art at all, and that might even be considered a threat to the very idea of art as the market defines it. A few years ago the gallery mounted career retrospectives of the artists David Hammons and Cady Noland. The first show consisted entirely of photocopies of photographs of Mr. Hammons’s work, the second of gallery-made approximations of Ms. Noland’s sculptures. Last year there was a survey of a fictional artist, Lester Hayes, with all the work cooked up (and later destroyed) by Triple Candie’s directors, Shelly Bancroft and Peter Nesbett."

Nesbett, Cotter goes on, is also the founder and director of the Jacob Lawrence Catalogue Raisonné Project and worked closely with Lawrence before his death in 2000. The entire Lawrence series is currently in the gallery but in the form of photographic prints, hung sequentially on a kind of square, free-standing fence. Cotter loved the Whitney's partial show (especially in the context of another show up right now by Kara Walker), but says of the Triple Candie show: "It presents the complete 'Migration of the Negro' series, or a version of it; and it shows it in the Harlem neighborhood where Lawrence created it, a neighborhood that became predominantly African-American as a direct result of that migration. I was just as moved to see the series in reproduction there as I was to see it complete in its original form at the Whitney six years ago, if for different reasons."

If you haven't seen Lawrence's work, check it out. And read this story. Nobody writes about curating and exhibiting better than Holland Cotter. He often makes me start looking up airplane tickets to New York.

"Visions of a People in Motion"

   

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