Moondog Music in Coventry Cathedral

By Martin Longley

APRIL 2022 | Music

Coventry Cathedral invited Down Is Up from London, an ensemble dedicated almost solely to the music of Moondog, that old inhabitant of New York City. The cathedral is famed for both being bombed into destruction (1940) and optimistic rebirth (1962), providing a suitably majestic setting for the works of composer, performer, and Viking-robed street musician Louis Hardin.

The Birth of Music out of the Spirit of Critical Idolatry?

By Seth Brodsky

DEC 21-JAN 22 | Critics Page

“Sounding the idols”—wait, isn’t this what music already does? What music is? Everything music touches—and it touches everything—seems to appear after the fact as having been an idol, or at least idol-like: hollow, silent, still. A drum, a mouth, a score for sure. A room, a premise. Maybe images above all? None dead, none even all that mute, and yet music, once it arrives on the scene, makes them seem as if they had been dead and mute, refuges for a kind of unearned authority. No idols without unearned authority.

Willie Birch: Chronicling Our Lives: 1987–2021

By Amanda Millet-Sorsa

MAY 2022 | ArtSeen

Willie Birch has exhibited his work in New York for the first time since 2000 at the Fort Gansevoort Gallery located in the Meatpacking District. Originally from New Orleans, Birch is no stranger to New York City. Aside from Broken Dreams (Tattered White Picket Fence) (2020–21), the exhibition centers on Birch’s New York period (1983–1997).

Kara Walker: Prince McVeigh and the Turner Blasphemies & The Book of Hours

By Susan Harris

DEC 21-JAN 22 | ArtSeen

Installed in the first of the two back galleries of Sikkema Jenkins are several suites of modestly scaled drawings from the series “Book of Hours.” Referencing medieval Christian books of hours, the drawings on view reinforce the primacy of privacy. Viewers bear witness to the outpouring of stream-of-conscious thoughts, feelings, and reactions that Walker channels through line and liquid media onto paper.