Big Bird looks at the New York skyline from the roof of the Met
Photo: Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
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Alex Da Corte: While the sun lasts
Until October 31 at the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden at the Metropolitan Museum, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan
Sesame Street has temporarily moved to Fifth Avenue. Contemporary artist Alex Da Corte has installed a giant sculpture of Big Bird, the beloved Muppet star of the children’s television show, for his Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. But this version may seem a little different to the adult audience watching the PBS show. Perched on a crescent moon, a la Donna Summer on her album cover Four seasons of love, Big Bird will specifically be a shade of blue instead of its usual canary yellow. The choice of color is a nod to the Brazilian version of the character, named Garibaldo, who Da Corte watched in his youth in Venezuela (another avian cousin, Pine, Dutch, is also blue). It also recalls a memorable scene from the 1985 movie. Follow that bird, in which a large runaway bird is captured by a circus, caged, dyed, and forced to act as the ripper Bluebird of happiness. Da Corte’s tribute, however, will be free to admire the New York skyline, a ladder that suggests possible escape routes.
Yayoi Kusama, Dancing Pumpkin (2020) at the New York Botanical Garden
Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts and David Zwirner. Photo: Robert Benson Photography.
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Yayoi Kusama: Cosmic Nature
Until October 31 at the New York Botanical Garden, 2990 Southern Boulevard, The Bronx
The long-awaited New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) exhibition dedicated to Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama envelops the indoor and outdoor spaces of the 250-acre garden with Kusama’s extravagant sculptures and installations. The program features new iterations of past work such as Daffodil garden, a work that includes a group of reflective spheres that was first installed at Fort Tilden in 2018 and one of the famous Infinity rooms, visible only from the outside due to restrictions related to the coronavirus pandemic (NYBG expects to open works in the summer). The exhibition dramatically transforms some cornerstones of Kusama’s renowned portfolio, such as the monolithic Pumpkin dancing (2020) in which the artist reinvented his classic pumpkin sculptures into an octopus-like biomorphic figure. Kusama shared a message about the show last month: “Dancing in our universe are noble souls whose magnificent forms are saturated with mystery. I invite you to explore the ever-expanding ode to the beauty of love that is my art. “
Andrew Kuo, four ZZZs (10/15/20) (2021)
Broadway
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Andrew Kuo: water lilies
Until May 15 on Broadway, 373 Broadway, Manhattan
Andrew Kuo is best known for his complex and emotionally intricate infographic charts, some of which are featured here. Poetry arises in the first place from the fundamental conception of quantifying the unquantifiable, since the letters measure various degrees of intangible phenomena such as sadness, friendship and identity. Each one has a key; a bluish-gray color in Sad! N.º 2 (20/3/21) (2021) indicates the amount of “Know that I will die someday but don’t believe it until you see it,” for example, while a yellow in the same painting denotes “Admitting that the things that have fallen to me will eventually start with me.” These paintings represent the totem of our ever unfulfilled desire to reason with an irrational world. Then there’s the fact that beyond the poignant framework of infographics, they are doubly successful as strong and fought abstract art. Some abstractions on display that do not have clues – along with the exhibition title, Nenúfares – complicate the body of the work by highlighting its subtle and imperceptible winks and winks to the canon of art history.
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