Brooklyn Boro

A shout-out to Brooklyn artists with works in the Whitney Biennial

April 4, 2017 By Lore Croghan Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Buzz-worthy: This work, which is called “Painting,” is by Torey Thornton, one of several Brooklyn artists included in the Whitney Biennial. Eagle photos by Lore Croghan
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Three cheers for Brooklyn artists.

They’re out in force at the Whitney Biennial, a recently opened exhibition at the glam museum on the High Line in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District.

The giant blade of an industrial saw. Magnificent fake stained-glass windows. Mysteriously draped furniture. Monumental paintings.

These are some of the works by Brooklyn artists on display through June 11 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.

The museum moved from the Upper East Side to a newly constructed building at 99 Gansevoort St. in spring 2015. The new venue is a popular tourist attraction as well as a magnet for art aficionados.

On the weekends, long lines of museum-goers wait outside the building for their turn to view the exhibition, which is a survey of new or recent work by emerging and established American artists.

This is the seventy-eighth Biennial that the Whitney has staged — the event was launched in 1932. But it’s the first one to be held in the Meatpacking District museum building.

The mammoth saw blade, to which the artist has attached painted rocks, is a work called “Painting.” It was done by Brooklyn artist Torey Thornton, who was born in 1990 in Macon, Georgia.

The fake stained-glass windows, designed by Raúl de Nieves, cover an entire wall of windows at the Whitney.

Instead of being glass, they’re made of paper, wood, glue, acetate, tape and beads.

The site-specific work is called “beginning & the end neither & the otherwise betwixt & between the end is the beginning & the end.”

De Nieves was born in 1983 in Morelia, Mexico and has lived in Brooklyn since 2006.

Brooklyn artist Jessi Reaves, who was born in 1986 in Portland, Oregon, has turned sleek furniture into sculptures by wrapping a gauzy slipcover over an Eames Herman Miller sofa and adding zippered vinyl covers to shelves.

Dana Schutz, born in 1976 in Livonia, Michigan, has a painting on display called “Elevator” that’s as big as the Whitney’s freight elevator, which it hangs near.

Schutz, whose studio is in Gowanus, is the artist whose painting at the Biennial called “Open Casket” has stirred controversy about cultural appropriation and censorship.

That painting is based on a 1950s photo of Emmett Till in his casket. The black teenager was murdered by white racists after being falsely accused of flirting with a white woman.

“I knew the risks going into this,” Schutz said in a recently published story by Calvin Tomkins in The New Yorker. “What I didn’t realize was how bad it would look when seen out of context.

“Is it better to try to make something that’s impossible, because it’s important to you, and to fail, or never to engage with it at all?” she said to Tomkins. “I just couldn’t do it any other way.”

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