This week in Newly Reviewed, Holland Cotter covers Sheyla Baykal’s downtown stars, a group show from a radical feminist art collective and Young Joon Kwak’s quieter side.
Sheyla Baykal
Through May 10. Soft Network, 636 Broadway; 917-803-3620, softnetwork.art.
In the New York City art world in the 1960s, ’70s and even early ’80s, the descriptive terms “downtown” and “underground” were pretty much synonymous. The photographer Sheyla Baykal (1944-1997) was a vital inhabitant of that terrain, and one of its underrecognized visual historians.
Now, largely thanks to the attention of another veteran avant-garde citizen — the performance artist Penny Arcade, who has preserved Baykal’s material legacy — we have a thrilling view into those decades in an exhibition at Soft Network, a gallery devoted to preserving artists’ estates.
Born in the United States and raised in Turkey, Baykal was herself a sought-after photographic subject as a Ford agency fashion model in the 1960s. But she also carried a camera of her own and had it trained on the New York’s art scene. Through a family connection she had entree into the Abstract Expressionist circles of an earlier day; Willem and Elaine de Kooning, well along in years, were among her subjects.
Her focus, though, was a new, venturesome, primarily gay world of performance-intensive art, and her photos give us an archival treasury of images. She documented the extravagant theatrics of West Coast hippie drag collectives like the Cockettes and the Angels of Light, and the New York performer and filmmaker Jack Smith.
Baykal eventually came to favor portraiture as a genre. And some of the most radical talents associated with Manhattan’s pre-gentrified East Village scene sat for her: Bette Bourne of Bloolips fame; the performance-art dream team of Ethyl Eichelberger and Agosto Machado; the genius installation artist Paul Thek; and the photographer laureate of the underground, Peter Hujar (his ineffable 1976 book, “Portraits in Life and Death,” has recently been republished by Liveright).
AIDS and age have taken most of these beings from us, but they all appear in the Soft Network exhibition of Baykal photographs, videos and ephemera organized by the art historian Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez with Penny Arcade. And at a time when, by presidential order, all things L.G.B.T.Q. are being officially whited out from the record, Baykal and her subjects glow like the art-firmamental stars they were, and are.
Nancy Brooks Brody, Joy Episalla, Zoe Leonard and Carrie Yamaoka
Through May 11. Participant, Inc., 116 Elizabeth Street; 646-492-4076, participantinc.org.
This small, grave, beautiful show brings together work by four of the founding members of Fierce Pussy, a radical lesbian feminist art collective. It also stands as a memorial to one of its members, the much-missed Nancy Brooks Brody, who died in 2023.
The collective emerged in 1991 as an offshoot of the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). It focused attention particularly on the effects of the AIDS epidemic on women, and did so through the production of street-level, no-budget forms of protest art like wheat-pasted posters and guerrilla-style actions.
The Participant exhibition, organized by Jo-ey Tang, begins with a reminder of this history at the gallery entrance, with a stack of takeaway posters emblazoned with the phrase “I got all my sisters with me” (a quote from the 1979 Sister Sledge song “We Are Family”). But the show itself is about the individual work of the four founding artists, much of which seems to be addressing the vulnerability of art itself, and particularly of art by queer women, in a hostile culture.
Zoe Leonard’s photograph of a gnarled city tree pushing through fencing reads as a cleareyed, poetic study in struggle. So does a floor piece by Joy Episalla composed of fabric remnants of a ruined couch or bed, but with all the textile fragments neatly folded so as to look precious, not abject, or maybe both. Similarly, Episalla’s large sculpture made of creased and crumpled photographic paper comes across both as fodder for a compactor and as a bold statement of anti-monumentalism.
And a few modest-size works by Brody suggest why she is so missed. One, a black-and-white painting of wavy lines, carries the gritty title of “Glory Hole” but looks like an ethereal Agnes Martin grid shimmying and dancing. A sculpture consisting of two small triangular strips of black metal embedded high up in a gallery wall almost escapes detection but, once noticed, grips, the eye and mind: Is it meant to suggest a wound? An ornament? A surveillance device? It’s a lesson in how, in the right hands, “not much” can fire questions in every direction and be absolutely, powerfully there.
Young Joon Kwak
Through July 27. Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, 26 Wooster Street; 212-431-2609, leslielohman.org.
Born in Queens in 1984 and now based in Los Angeles, the artist Young Joon Kwak, who is Korean American and transgender, covers a lot of ground media-wise. A sculptor and video artist, they co-founded an electronic-dance-noise band called Xina Xurner in 2011; they were, and are, the rousing lead singer. A year later, in Los Angeles, Kwak turned their studio into a communal space called the Mutant Salon, where queer, trans and femme-based projects could be developed.
Much of this work was visually and aurally raucous. But the Leslie-Lohman show — organized by Stamatina Gregory, the museum’s head curator — is the opposite: spare, quiet. A large, seemingly abstract recent ceramic sculpture called “Femmes (Nic, Toria, Tala)” is a cast of the embracing bodies of three nonbinary friends. Another work, “Veil (Lulu),” is made from a pair of glitter-coated ceramic arms and hands open in a gesture of benedictory welcome. A third, “Divine Ruin (Stamatina and Young),” is in the form of what appears to be two overlapped faces encrusted with glistening rhinestones. All are images of joining, unity, community.
So, in the spirit of timeliness, let me recommend three additional New York exhibitions that keep the spark of Resisterhood burning. The group show “Ficciones Patógenas,” also at Leslie-Lohman, addresses the torturous history of Indigenous gender diversity under European colonialism in the Americas. For “Deviations” at James Fuentes, the artist Oscar yi Hou has assembled, pretty much on the fly, a survey of his downtown-ish artist-friends, most of them trans or gay. And P.P.O.W. has the first New York solo show in 15 years of the Cuban-born painter Manuel Pardo (1952-2012). He was a fixture of the East Village art world of the 1980s, who, with his early nude self-portraits and later images of his imperiously glam mother, deserves a hero’s welcome back to town.
See the April gallery shows here.
