Art – Emisiaband

As the Hudson Valley has celebrated the 400th anniversary of its discovery by Henry Hudson in a Dutch expedition, art exhibitions focusing on contemporary Dutch culture have been especially rich. “Fendry Ekel — The Witness,” a show of a dozen works in its final week at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, is among them.

Born in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1971, Mr. Ekel, who has never exhibited before in this country, lives in Amsterdam, where he belongs to an artists’ collective that includes the sculptor Folkert de Jong. Mr. Ekel is primarily a painter, producing colorful works on paper that mix media and techniques, including gouache, acrylic painting and drawing.

Each of the paintings being shown here is well crafted and attractively presented in the mezzanine gallery. While there is nothing especially innovative about the style — a loose expressionistic realism — the content gives you pause for thought, and the economical use of symbolic imagery gives the pictures raw visual force.

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Since 1952 “The Actor,” a rare Rose Period Picasso, has hung prominently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, along with other examples of early paintings by this Spanish master. But on Monday it could be found in a new, temporary home, the Met’s conservation laboratory, where experts there are trying to determine the best course of action for this 105-year-old painting’s brand-new feature: an irregular, six-inch tear running vertically along the lower right-hand corner.

On Friday afternoon a woman taking an adult education class at the museum accidentally fell into “The Actor,” causing the tear. Officials at the museum said that since the damage did not occur “in the focal point of the composition,” they expected that the repair would be “unobtrusive,” according to a statement released on Sunday.

The accident recalled another human-canvas run-in involving a Picasso. In 2006 the Las Vegas casino owner Stephen A. Wynn put his elbow through “Le Rêve” (“The Dream”), a 1932 Picasso of the artist’s mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, leaving a sizable hole that has been so artfully repaired that the untutored eye would never know such a fate had befallen it.

But it is difficult to compare a 1932 Picasso with one painted in 1904-5. The early canvases are more delicate and the oil paint is thinner than the enamel-based kind the artist was known to have used later in his career. And then there is the question of whether there’s only one image involved.

“The Actor” was painted when Picasso was only 23. “He was very poor, and these canvases were expensive,” said John Richardson, the Picasso biographer. He explained that if Picasso made a mistake, he couldn’t afford to throw out the canvas, but rather painted over it. “Nearly all these early canvases have something painted underneath,” Mr. Richardson said.

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When the remains of hundreds of colonial-era Africans were uncovered during a building excavation in Lower Manhattan in 1991, one coffin in particular stood out. Nailed into its wooden lid were iron tacks, 51 of which formed an enigmatic, heart-shaped design.

The pattern was soon identified as the sankofa — a symbol printed on funereal garments in West Africa — and it captured the imagination of scholars, preservationists and designers. Ultimately, it was embraced by many African-Americans as a remarkable example of the survival of African customs in the face of violent subjugation in early America.

The sankofa was widely invoked in 2003, when the 419 remains were reinterred at the site, now known as the African Burial Ground, following painstaking examination. It was chiseled into a black granite memorial unveiled in 2007. It is featured in an interpretive display in the federal building at 290 Broadway (the construction of which led to the discovery of the graves), which describes it as a direct link to “cultures found in Ghana and the Ivory Coast.” And it serves as a logo for the African Burial Ground as a whole.

Michael A. Gomez, a professor of history at New York University and an authority on the African diaspora, said the design’s apparent link to 18th-century Africa “is of enormous meaning and carries a lot of symbolic weight.” For decades, historians and anthropologists have debated the extent to which the continent’s cultural practices endured and came to influence art, language, music and religion in the Americas — a question with particular resonance for the African-American community.

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JEREMY ECCLES charts a celebratory course to taste art in the Yarra Valley.

TarraWarra Museum of Art

Healesville

Tuesday to Sunday, 11am–5pm

TarraWarra Museum of Art (TWMA) is extolled by its director, the legendary Maudie Palmer, as “the first significant museum in the country funded by private individuals”. This, of course, is in contradistinction to those who have built fine collections and donated them to public galleries — the Smorgons to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, for instance, and John Kaldor to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In the near future, we’ll see David Walsh’s Museum of Old and New Art outside Hobart and Judith Neilson’s Contemporary Chinese collection at a newly completed artspace in inner Sydney’s Chippendale.

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ANDREW NICHOLLS tracks the new direction of Paul Uhlmann’s recent works, in part made possible by a residency program.

Amidst the crippling shortage of inner-city studio space currently being suffered in Western Australia, Fremantle Arts Centre has been providing relief in the form of a residency program being run from a small studio in its picturesque grounds.

This initiative is proving critical in allowing early and mid-career artists to produce less commercial, exploratory works that may otherwise have gone unrealised. A

case in point was sculptor Susan Flavell’s superb Unhorsed exhibition of large-scale cardboard works, produced in the space during 2007 (see aAR Issue 15). The latest artist to take advantage of the residency is Paul Uhlmann, one of Western Australia’s most prominent mid-career artists, whose practice incorporates painting, print and photography.

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