Elaine Reichek’s Needlepoint Revolution
Even if younger postmodern artists who use the same materials as Elaine Reichek—cloth, thread—to make work that involves stitching and the like don’t know it, the eighty-two-year-old artist is the mother of their invention. Or, at least, she certainly influenced it. I remember seeing her embroidery in the Whitney Museum’s 2012 Biennial; I got carried away by how fresh the language was in “Ariadne’s Thread” (2008-12), her series that visualizes the Greek myth about the Cretan princess helping her lover, Theseus, escape the Minotaur’s lair by following a thread she’d given him. One of the pieces, “Ariadne’s Lament” (2009), was composed of tiny, embroidered figures—a vase, a crying eye, a warrior—that were spaced apart, like those rebus puzzles that show an eye, then a heart, then a ewe (say it out loud).
Reichek’s use of language in her art, always so witty, is undeniably feminist, and works from her “Sampler” series, which she’s been making since the nineteen-nineties, are unabashedly so. By taking the sentiment of the traditional embroidered sampler and throwing it out in favor of quotes that address art-making and women becoming themselves, she seduces with the delicacy of her needlepoint and the primacy of the message. Born in New York in 1943, Reichek attended Brooklyn College, where she studied with the minimalist painter Ad Reinhardt. She moved past traditional picture-making in the nineteen-seventies, and “Back Stitch” (at Hoffman Donahue, in collaboration with Marinaro, through April 4), while not a full-scale retrospective, which she should have—hear that, Brooklyn Museum?—takes its title from a sewing method in which the maker goes back over a stitched line to fill in any open spaces. Reichek has helped close those gaps where art history has left women out, and, using the most “ladylike” of occupations—sewing, embroidering, all that which requires a special patience—wipes our faces with handkerchiefs drenched in the thought sweat and the freedom of the not at all pious woman warrior.—Hilton Als
About Town
The composer Shabaka Hutchings and the drummer Tom Skinner co-founded the jazz-fusion band Sons of Kemet in 2011, and conjured avant-garde music of the Black diaspora across four albums before disbanding in 2022. Since parting, Shabaka has performed mononymously as a solo flautist and Skinner joined members of Radiohead to form the offshoot band the Smile. The musicians reunite for a show alongside Irreversible Entanglements, a free-jazz collective led by the poet-musician-educator Moor Mother (Camae Ayewa). The acts join forces to celebrate the release of two new albums, Shabaka’s “Of the Earth” and Irreversible Entanglements’ anticipated “Future Present Past,” both of which use similarly experimental sensibilities to reach thrillingly distinct ends.—Sheldon Pearce (Knockdown Center; March 26.)
Ro Reddick’s likably off-kilter “Cold War Choir Practice” is an absurdist family sitcom set in a Syracuse roller-skating rink, a Reagan-era political farce, a zany quasi-musical featuring the singer Suzzy Roche, an avant-garde riff on “Spy vs. Spy,” and a stealth satire of a young Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni, all at once—a floor wax and a dessert topping, in the argot of the era. This madcap blend gets a bit lost on the cavernous stage, but a strong cast keeps the plates spinning, especially Alana Raquel Bowers, as the earnest ten-year-old Meek, and Grace McLean, a comic wunderkind as slinky as a Jules Feiffer illustration. Best of all is Crystal Finn as the googly-eyed Virgie, a walking panic attack in shoulder pads, scoring laughs just by gulping water.—Emily Nussbaum (MCC; through April 5.)
One of the choreographer Mark Morris’s great gifts is the way he pares movement down to its essence, and then uses repetition and variation to create lasting images. In one of two programs at BAM, Mark Morris Dance Group performs his “Via Dolorosa,” from 2024, a work of stunning purity, set to a score for solo harp by Nico Muhly, that reflects on the Stations of the Cross. Death, suffering, and consolation are treated with quiet simplicity. The other program includes “MOON,” a compendium of tongue-in-cheek dances that explore our relationship to outer space. The score ping-pongs from piano by Ligeti to the nineteen-thirties ballad “Roll Along, Prairie Moon” to voices from the record that was sent aboard the Voyager spacecraft, in 1977: “Greetings from the inhabitants of this world.”—Marina Harss (Brooklyn Academy of Music; March 26-29.)
From Paleolithic-era mammoth bones and hollow logs covered with alligator skin circa 5500 B.C. to the foot-pedalled kits popularized in the nineteen-tens and the electronic sets of today, drums have come a long way. Now, with the help of the multi-instrumentalist Jamire Williams, they may be pushed even further. Williams—drum master, performance artist—is bringing his rhythmic prowess to the Park Avenue Armory, with a solo performance that investigates what it means to create through percussion. Using not only acoustic drums but tape machines, samplers, found objects, and surfaces lined with odd materials, Williams becomes a mosaicist of sound. Who knows, maybe he’ll whip out a mammoth bone.—Jane Bua (Park Avenue Armory; March 25-26.)
Marc Jacobs and Sofia Coppola are longtime friends, and it shows in “Marc by Sofia,” the relaxed and detailed documentary that she devotes to his career and, above all, to his sense of style. The anchoring action is the making of his Spring 2024 collection, but the heart of the movie is in archival clips that reach back to the birth of a sensibility. Jacobs speaks candidly of a troubled childhood and lovingly about Fifth Avenue shopping trips with his grandmother, which inspired a feeling for fashion history and handicrafts. Coppola observes the connection of big ideas to fine details, the power of intensive collaborations, and the ultimate creative helplessness once the show starts.—Richard Brody (Opening March 20 in New York and in wide release March 27.)
John Akomfrah’s eight-channel film “Listening All Night To The Rain (Canto IV)” implicates its viewers in an impossible yearning to look every which way simultaneously. The piece wraps four walls at Lisson gallery, where Akomfrah montages archival and new footage. The work, moving in dizzying fits and starts across the surface of time, reveals connections between historical memory and now, and between political order and cultural superstructure. Images of marchers protesting the Nigerian civil war and of leaders of anti-colonial struggles blend with early documentation of European women’s-liberation movements. The newly shot footage—much of which depicts eerie land- and seascapes—is drenched in a surrealism that touches the body of the archive with an oneiric hand.—Zoë Hopkins (Lisson; through April 25.)
Pick Three
Paige Williams on uplifting songs.
Lately, with all the world in chaos, I’ve been looping uplifting spiritual music. I keep coming back to a playlist that helps my feelings, as my mother used to say, meaning it cheers me up:
1. “Don’t Let the Devil Ride” is a 2018 album by Paul Thorn, the son of a Pentecostal preacher from my home town, Tupelo, Mississippi. In the eighties, Thorn boxed professionally, as a middleweight, ultimately fighting Roberto Durán, a five-time world champ, before turning to a career as a guitarist and singer. “Don’t,” Thorn’s ninth album, reinterprets songs by Black gospel groups and artists—Joseph Pace II, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Oris Mays. The first track, “Come on Let’s Go,” is a bouncy balm “if you’ve got trouble,” “if you are worried tonight,” “if you feel hungry,” “if you’ve been lied to,” “if you need healin’.” (Who doesn’t?)
2. “Jesus Dropped the Charges,” an iconic redemption song written by the Reverend Bishop Richard (Mr. Clean) White for the O’Neal Twins, was released in 1981. It was soon featured in “Say Amen, Somebody,” a documentary on the history and importance of gospel music that débuted before a sold-out audience at the New York Film Festival.
3. Leonard Cohen’s “I’m Your Man,” the sexiest song in existence, is spiritual in a different way. For grace, there’s, of course, “Hallelujah,” and “Anthem,” whose epic line is “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” But “Come Healing”—particularly a live version that Cohen performed in Dublin in 2013, not long before he died—feels especially timely. “O gather up the brokenness / Bring it to me now.”
P.S. Good stuff on the internet:
An earlier version of this article misstated the New York release date of “Marc by Sofia.”