#truthlopez

Lina Bo Bardi: Together, Graham Foundation, through July 25, 2015.

The architect Lina Bo Bardi, born Achillina Bo in Rome in 1914, made Brazil home in 1946. She went there with her husband Pietro Maria Bardi initially to create the Museu de Arte de São Paulo. In 1969, she designed the concrete and glass museum, that lives on as a landmark of Brazilian modern architecture.

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This exhibition, curated by Noemì Blager, celebrates Bo Bardi as humanist and architect, and is responsible for my biggest case of house lust to date. In 1951, Bardi designed Casa de Vidro (Glass House) in a district in São Paulo called Morumbi. It’s a modernist masterpiece, an elevated pavilion of glass and concrete that floats atop hill lush with vegetation.

The installation design by the London-based design firm Assemble Studio is the other reason to come. Thick felt curtains reshape the rooms on the second floor into intimate curvy spaces with  exhibition cases made of metal and concrete—two of Bo Bardi’s favorite materials. Film installations by Tapio Snellman document the activity and the space of the SESC Pompéia, a gym and cultural center designed by Bo Bardi in 1982. 

It’s the ground floor that I return to, where there are photographs in light boxes by Iana Marinescu of the Glass House. Visitors are encouraged to sit in Bo Bardi’s bowl chairs originally designed in 1951. Arper, the Italian furniture design company reissued the chair a few years ago and is donating money raised from the sale of the limited edition of chairs to support the Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi. The organization and archive is housed in Casa de Vidrio, where Bo Bardi lived until her death in 1992. Until I can travel there, I will content myself with Zeuler Lima’s comprehensive book published last year by Yale University Press.

Mieke Bal, Of What One Cannot Speak

Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image

Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (Norton paperback edition)

Emmanuel Levinas, Humanismo Del Otro Hombre

EL, Totalidad E Infinito

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx

Michael Kelly, A Hunger for Aesthetics

EL, Humanism of the Other

Paul Celan, Obras Completas

JD, Espectros de Marx

JD, Adios a Emmanuel Lévinas

Guerin & Hallas, The Image and the Witness

EL, Totality and Infinity

Juan Gelman, Otromundo

Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters

Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory

JD, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas

Juan Gelman, Unthinkable Tenderness: Selected Poems

Museum of Contemporary Art / Chicago / Doris Salcedo (ends May 24, 2015)

What is dumbfounding about the museum's $64 million announcement is that there is no support for Doris Salcedo to undertake a public project in Chicago, yet the focus of this spending spree is community engagement. Scrap the new logo and restaurant plans. Food as art/food as culture is not a new concept and spending all that money (really, you couldn't work with local designers for any of this?) to move the restaurant to the ground floor so that it will be hot for a minute isn't worth the resources. You know what is? ART.

The Colombian artist Doris Salcedo creates works that are, by turns, meditations and indictments of violence and political terror. Her public works are represented in this exhibition by a video produced by the MCA. In it, she discusses the concept of a memorial informed by gang violence. An image on the screen shows an illustration of a site with the Chicago skyline. I think that the spot suggested is in the open lands south of Roosevelt and east of Ashland.  It would be a perfect site. At the press conference I ask if there are plans to make this project happen in Chicago and am told that they wanted to, but they can't. The artist seems uncomfortable and I don't push. I wish I had. Why isn't it possible?  This is a beautiful little show (well, Plagaria Muda in the entrance is too squashed and deserves the soaring ceilings of the first floor to breathe). Sadly, it could have been epic. Must it remain a lost opportunity?

FIELD MUSEUM / Vodou: Sacred Powers of Haiti

(ends April 26, 2015)

You know what you are going to learn at this exhibition? Probably what you already know instinctively—that our understanding of Vodou is nil and/or based on really bad movies featuring zombies and pin cushion dolls.

You know what you should learn, but won’t because theinterpretive materials are scant? Most of Haiti’s cultural heritage is endangered.

You might dig deeper because you want to know more about theincredible mirrors, or about the bizango—secret society—of which all thecontents of a recently dismantled meeting house are on view but, unlike all theother objects in the two exhibition halls, these are enclosed behind a curving wall with tons of small windows where viewers could take a peek. Why so protected? Is it about spirits?  

This exhibition was organized with the help of several institutions including the Foundation for the Preservation, Enhancement and Production of Haitian Cultural Works. The initial run in European museums was designed to call attention to the fact that ritual objects were being sold and taken from the country. Marianne Lehmann, a Swiss who has lived in Haiti for most of her life, purchased her first vodou object in 1986 from someone who was going door to door trying to raise money for a sick priest. This exhibition was built from the more than 3,000 objects she has collected since.

When the earthquake struck in 2010, killing more than 250,000 people, and destroying homes and much of the nation’s infrastructure, Haiti’s rich cultural heritage (museums, libraries, archives) was also severely damaged. The cultural collections that managed to be saved were stored in poor conditions or remained trapped under rubble. If Vodou heritage was in trouble before that catastrophe, what do you imagine is the status today?

My research led me to the Cooper Hewitt, which sent a team to Haiti as part of the Smithsonian’s Haiti Cultural Recovery Program. Those conservators worked on Marianne Lehmann’s collection. She was lucky, her collection was not destroyed but it also had never been properly stored or documented.