Amarna Period Egypt at the Brooklyn Museum
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Early Hand Tools and Farm Implements
Columbia County Historical Society, Kinderhook, New York
This exhibit of early hand tools and farm tools at the Columbia County Historical Society in Kinderhook argues for the expressive beauty of these objects. They are obviously handmade and made singly — the asymmetries are fascinating and add life to the pieces.
They share an additional point in common – they are objects to amplify the force of a farmer’s abilities, extending his or her reach, power, ability to grasp or cut. As such, they feel uncanny, almost as if imbued with their own force. I wonder what happens in the museum at night when it is empty and the lights are out.
Jane Rosen: New Studies
Sears-Peyton Gallery, New York, January 30 to March 8 2025
At Sears-Peyton Gallery (Jan 30–Mar 8, 2025), New Studies distilled Jane Rosen’s lifelong attention to animal presence into spare, lucid objects and drawings. The show paired hand-blown, pigmented-glass “birds” poised on limestone or travertine plinths with sheets of Korean watercolor and gouache. Works that read like field notes pared to essentials. The figures sit in dialogue with their stone bases; on the walls, feathered marks and negative space do the same work at paper scale. The installation made her method plain: subtract until the living line remains.
Born in New York City in 1950, Jane Rosen worked across sculpture and drawing, often marrying blown glass to found or carved stone to consider animal intelligence and our ties to the natural world. After early decades in the New York scene, she relocated to the California coast, teaching widely (including SVA, Stanford, and UC Berkeley) while developing the avian forms that became her signature. Rosen died on April 18, 2025, in Northern California.
Robert Indiana: The American Dream
Pace, New York, May 9 to August 15, 2025
Pace Gallery’s Robert Indiana: The American Dream pulls the artist’s signage, numerology, and road-worn Americana together into a single argument: Indiana didn’t just brand LOVE; he built a whole visual grammar for the country that taught him its alphabet on billboards and gasoline pumps. The show gathers early hard-edge paintings, later meditations on highways and coinage, and the sculptural ONE Through ZERO (The Ten Numbers).
If Indiana’s paintings read like dispatches from postwar America, the Cor-Ten numbers slow the message to a rust-blooming hum. Each numeral stands alone and can be re-sequenced to generate fresh alignments of time, memory, and fate. He often described the sequence as a life cycle: 1 as birth, 0 as death, with the intervening digits walking us through youth, prime, and autumn.
Indiana, a self-described “American painter of signs,” doesn’t illustrate the Dream so much as surface its infrastructure: the numerals we assign to ages and exits; the slogans that sell us gasoline and belonging; the hard edges of policy that decide who merges and who waits. Pace’s framing stresses that double register. Personal history braided with public language, make the show as much about how a country talks to itself as about one artist’s lexicon.
Pace includes canonical examples but the show’s real satisfaction is how the numbers re-center Indiana’s project. He builds a ledger for American aspiration, where desire reads as typography and consequence arrives as arithmetic. It is a quiet reminder that how we arrange our symbols is how we arrange our lives
Anish Kapoor
Lisson Gallery, New York, New York, November 2 – December 16, 2023
Okay let’s get to the paintings first, because… they are so, so BAD. Poorly drawn, acid combinations of colors that frankly would probably not be exhibited without considering the artist’s established reputation as a sculptor. Many painters and sculptors that cross over into the other’s discipline fail to make powerful works in the alternative medium and that’s okay, they can be interesting failures. And every once in a while, an artist can pull it off (Sara Sze comes to mind since she was recently exhibited in this very room).
On a brighter note the sculptures are intriguing as objects. This is the first exhibit of Anish Kapoor’s trademark gimmick, the Vanta Black pigment that approximates absolute black. The spatial effect of light dying into a form is quite interesting. One work is a rough pile of the stuff heaped on the floor, and the mounds of form and contour can only be seen as silhouette. As you walk around the piece you see that it must have misshapen lumps here and there but they can only see them as a perimeter outline – the light does not reflect back to allow you to perceive any other spatial depth looking into the form itself.
The effect works almost as well in the other pieces, which are simpler form and have different formal interests in absorbing the ambient light. They are interesting, but seemingly one liners and these pieces might not be anywhere near the heights of great art. I can’t imagine, for instance, the idea of their having an influence on another generation of artists. They feel like a dead end.
Such is the power of these miserable paintings that they affect my evaluation of the more familiar sculptures presented here – maybe this is unfair but it’s hard to swim hanging on to an anchor. I try to only review exhibits that I like, and so why include this one? As I said the Vanta Black creates an interesting object, and it’s worth considering. There is perhaps a difference between an interesting object and a worthy work of art, and if it weren’t for the paintings I would consider that.
Anish Kapoor was born in 1954 in Mumbai, India, and works in London and Venice. He currently is exhibiting the show “Untrue Unreal” in the Palazzo Strozzi, in Florence.