3 very good shows

There are 3 very good shows on now in Greenwich Village that I saw yesterday.

The Jess-Robert Duncan large show at the Gray Art Gallery titled “An Opening Of The Field: Jess, Robert Duncan and Their Circle is a wonderfully installed show documenting the long relationship of the poet and artist who partnered up for over 40 years, collaborating, collecting and writing poems and making art. They also gathered around them a large group of artists and writers in San Francisco of the 1950’s  and the show also highlights the work of these artists. There are some terrific works included by the likes of Edward Corbett, Jack Spicer, Ernesto Edwards, Helen Adam, Wallace Berman, James Broughton and many others most of whom I didn’t know. The shows  bursts with paintings, collages, drawings and cases of books, documentation and ephemera. There are also examples of work by Dean Stockwell, (yes that Dean Stockwell) and an early heavily impastoed  painting piece by Ronnie Bladen that will surprise those who think of him only as a minimalist sculptor.  Each artist has a small informative biographical label with a photo of them next to their work which is a nice touch, and once more this gallery has mounted a terrific show highlighting works by artists who by and large lived their lives and made their art without much thought to fame or admiration.

Devotion: Excavating Bob Mizer
This show is a now on at 80WSE a few steps from the Gray Gallery, and is the first big show of Mizer’s who is mainly know in gay circles for his pioneering erotic photos and publications that he published in the late 40’s and 50’s and for which he paid a very high price including a year in prison. The show only features 45 framed photos of his wide ranging output from his beefcake work to photos of  non sexual content such as portraits and mundane images like a large photo of a Siamese cat. The show is also a work in progress as there are thousands of boxed negatives and slides that are housed in a floor to ceiling shelving unit along with some of the costumes that his models wore that are being processed and archived by N.Y.U. students at work tables where computers and printers sit awaiting the process of digital copying and archiving. The walls in these galleries have printouts of these photos clipped to them in a changing and rotating mini show within the larger exhibition.

And finally I took in Philip Pearlstein-Just The Facts 50 Years of Looking and Drawing and Painting now on at the New York Studio School on 8th street. The show features 44 of his beautiful figure drawings in pencil and other mediums along with two paintings. I’ve always liked his work, and this was a great opportunity to see what is billed as the largest show of his drawings ever mounted. Hung against blue painted walls in this very old fashioned gallery with wooden floors that creak when walked on, a perfect place to view this work.