Visual Arts

Ari Post • January 11, 2016

Among our intermingling generations of highly fluent arts enthusiasts, there are loose classifications and widely shared sentiments around various periods that evolve into a kind of shorthand. Certainly one of the most common collective opinions is the steadfast exaltation that we reserve for painters from about 1870 through the 1920s. No recent period in art history elicits as much untethered adoration in the popular consciousness as that from, say, Gauguin to Picasso.

At the Phillips Collection through Jan. 10, “Gauguin to Picasso: Masterworks from Switzerland” showcases a sensationally good collection of work that goes from Impressionism through early Modernism, never before exhibited in the United States. Centered around the collections of two pioneering supporters of the arts, Rudolf Staechelin (1881–1946) and Karl Im Obersteg (1883–1969), the show is rife with rare and famous masterworks from many of our favorite painters, as well as striking paintings by lesser-known artists of the time that will stake immediate claims in the territory of our memory.

To start with the heavy hitters, there are some breathtaking pieces by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Pissarro, Cézanne and Picasso, as well as by Chaim Soutine and Marc Chagall. Van Gogh’s “The Garden of Daubigny” shows us one of his most intriguing and lovely compositions, which says a lot for an artist of such unparalleled sense for arrangement. In “The Red Herrings,” he pulls light from darkness with stunning visual force, and the scaly terrain of this dusky, greasy pile of fish comes to life in a way rarely seen from the painter.

What might be the centerpiece of the entire exhibition, Gauguin’s “When Will You Marry? (Nafea faa ipoipo)” is a rather trance-inducing portrait of two Maori women in a colorful, idyllic landscape. With the demure, statuesque, impenetrable faces of the mysterious green-skinned women, this is an exemplary representative of the artist’s Tahitian paintings.

A double-sided panel by Picasso sits like a throne in the center of the main gallery. On one side, “The Absinthe Drinker” is a comically glum and charming portrait. On the verso, “Woman at the Theater” is a rare treat of muddy, exploratory brushwork from our crown prince of Modernism, the subtle pomposity of her posture perfectly attuned to her character.

The works by Soutine are just great. Using a palette of evening sea foam and raw clay, “Dead Pheasant” recalls the shriveled, cold weight of dead game with brushwork and an inherent sense of suffering that would make Francis Bacon drool.

And, of course, Chagall. Is there anyone better, more stylistically precise, more endlessly creative in arrangement and color? Chagall was so attuned to the joys of geometry that just to stand before his work is a treat. Compounding Fauvism and Cubism into his own singular, exuberant expression of Judaic pseudo-iconography, his cultural specificity was both brave and innovative in his time. His three portraits of rabbis in the final gallery of the exhibition are worth the price of admission.

The exhibition also features works by less familiar artists that stand up admirably to the big names, most notably Ferdinand.

Among our intermingling generations of highly fluent arts enthusiasts, there are loose classifications and widely shared sentiments around various periods that evolve into a kind of shorthand. Certainly one of the most common collective opinions is the steadfast exaltation that we reserve for painters from about 1870 through the 1920s. No recent period in art history elicits as much untethered adoration in the popular consciousness as that from, say, Gauguin to Picasso.

At the Phillips Collection through Jan. 10, “Gauguin to Picasso: Masterworks from Switzerland” showcases a sensationally good collection of work that goes from Impressionism through early Modernism, never before exhibited in the United States. Centered around the collections of two pioneering supporters of the arts, Rudolf Staechelin (1881–1946) and Karl Im Obersteg (1883–1969), the show is rife with rare and famous masterworks from many of our favorite painters, as well as striking paintings by lesser-known artists of the time that will stake immediate claims in the territory of our memory.

To start with the heavy hitters, there are some breathtaking pieces by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Pissarro, Cézanne and Picasso, as well as by Chaim Soutine and Marc Chagall. Van Gogh’s “The Garden of Daubigny” shows us one of his most intriguing and lovely compositions, which says a lot for an artist of such unparalleled sense for arrangement. In “The Red Herrings,” he pulls light from darkness with stunning visual force, and the scaly terrain of this dusky, greasy pile of fish comes to life in a way rarely seen from the painter.

What might be the centerpiece of the entire exhibition, Gauguin’s “When Will You Marry? (Nafea faa ipoipo)” is a rather trance-inducing portrait of two Maori women in a colorful, idyllic landscape. With the demure, statuesque, impenetrable faces of the mysterious green-skinned women, this is an exemplary representative of the artist’s Tahitian paintings.

A double-sided panel by Picasso sits like a throne in the center of the main gallery. On one side, “The Absinthe Drinker” is a comically glum and charming portrait. On the verso, “Woman at the Theater” is a rare treat of muddy, exploratory brushwork from our crown prince of Modernism, the subtle pomposity of her posture perfectly attuned to her character.
The works by Soutine are just great. Using a palette of evening sea foam and raw clay, “Dead Pheasant” recalls the shriveled, cold weight of dead game with brushwork and an inherent sense of suffering that would make Francis Bacon drool.

And, of course, Chagall. Is there anyone better, more stylistically precise, more endlessly creative in arrangement and color? Chagall was so attuned to the joys of geometry that just to stand before his work is a treat. Compounding Fauvism and Cubism into his own singular, exuberant expression of Judaic pseudo-iconography, his cultural specificity was both brave and innovative in his time. His three portraits of rabbis in the final gallery of the exhibition are worth the price of admission.

The exhibition also features works by less familiar artists that stand up admirably to the big names, most notably Ferdinand Hodler (1853–1918) and Alexej von Jawlensky (1864–1941). (Neither Hodler nor Jawlensky are pushovers. Jawlensky’s canvases regularly fetch in the millions at auction and Hodler is one of the most popular Swiss painters of the 19th century. But when put alongside the names that have just been tossed around, any artist can look like small potatoes.)

Jawlensky’s “Child” is a boxy, marionette-like seated portrait of a funny little girl. Like many children, she is severe in expression but made ridiculous by the very condition of her youngness. With overly rouged cheeks and a demeaning red bow fastened atop her straw-blond head like a cherry on a sundae, her entire existence up to this point amounts to following with aloof expectancy the dictates of her parents. Jawlensky was an Expressionist who moved from Russia to Germany as a young man and became a member of the prominent Blue Rider group alongside Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky. In the context of “Child,” his bold and sun-kissed colors take on new meaning.

A trio of paintings by Hodler are the most sobering in the exhibition, recording the slow death of his lover and fellow painter Valentine Godé-Darel. In two, both titled “The Patient,” she is shown lying in bed. They will remind anyone who has gone through a loved one’s passing of the acrid tinge and fleeting jolts of pained hope that encircle the terminally ill. The final painting, “The Dead,” is immediate, blunt, austere and troubling. The stark accuracy of the hard mattress and chunky pillow, the dead weight of the body stretched across them with its hollow, bloodless face, make it devastating.

Perhaps we should try to end on a lighter note, but, alas, this is sometimes where art takes us. Nevertheless, “Gauguin to Picasso” is a show that will refresh your senses in that particular way that only great paintings can.
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Richard Selden •

The Freer Gallery of Art, the oldest of the Smithsonian Institution’s art museums, will be closed for renovations from Jan. 4 through the spring or summer of 2017. The Sackler Gallery, to which it is linked underground — forming a bicameral museum of Asian art — will remain open.

Along with its extraordinary Asian holdings, the Freer is the home of a major collection of works by American expatriate artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler, of “Whistler’s Mother” fame (that painting, formally known as “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1,” is owned by Paris’s Musée d’Orsay), including his stunning Peacock Room.

On the third Thursday of the month at noon, the Peacock Room shutters are opened, allowing its flamboyantly colored and decorated walls and ceramics-packed shelves to be bathed in natural light. The last opportunity to experience this for a year and a half is this Thursday, Dec. 17.

Jan. 2-3 is “Say Goodbye to the Freer” weekend, with many family-friendly activities from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

Julian Raby, director of the Freer-Sackler since 2002, was the speaker at Georgetown Media Group’s Nov. 5 Cultural Leadership Breakfast at the George Town Club. In his remarks, Raby brought to life the beginnings of the Freer Gallery of Art, dedicated in 1923 and spawned by the ideals of its founder, Charles Lang Freer, a full-cloth American self-made man.

“There was no silver spoon in the mouth of Charles Lang Freer,” he said, noting his beginnings as a maker and developer of railroad cars, which made him nearly a billionaire and allowed him to retire at age 47. He also had the good fortune, spurred by an interest in art collecting, to meet and be associated with Whistler, from whom he at first bought just a modest etching.

“The relationship was an extraordinary match,” Raby said. “Whistler was choleric, quixotic, and Freer was an extremely thoughtful man. It was a match that would lead to the acquisition of 1,300 works which formed the foundation of the collection and started a passion in Freer, and even obsession, with Asian art and culture, prints and screens and with China.”

“Imagine,” Raby said, “a relationship somewhat like what Velázquez might have had with the hidalgos” (a phrase you won’t hear every day). The complex history of the Peacock Room, created for British shipping magnate Frederick Richards Leyland and setting off a bitter feud between patron and artist, is currently the subject of a special Sackler Gallery exhibition, “Peacock Room REMIX.” The show’s centerpiece is “Filthy Lucre,” a recreation of the room in ruins by painter Darren Waterston.
Regarding the original Peacock Room, says Raby, “when we open the windows and let the light in, it’s still spectacular.”

Ari Post •

John Blee at Cross MacKenzie

For John Blee, painting is poetry and color is its language.

“Color determines the voice of each painting,” he says. “It can never be exactly repeated. So when I find the right colors in the process of painting, they are like keys that open the works for me.”

His recent work, on view at Cross MacKenzie Gallery, 1675 Wisconsin Ave. NW, expands his “Orchard” series, which began in 2007. These lush, atmospheric environments of color and delicate shapes are a sensory envelopment, recalling the painterly geometric abstraction of Hans Hofmann and the alluring garden scenes of Pierre Bonnard.

Yet Blee finds much of his inspiration in poetry. The origin of this series is connected to the late French poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, specifically his collection “Vergers,” (French for “Orchards”).

Regardless, his paintings are for those among us who adore the secret life of paint itself. They are for those who lean in close to explore the trails of the brush, tracing its path and listening for the echo of colors scratched gently across the taut canvas. For this writer, paintings do not get much better. These are paintings I would like to live with.

Wolf Kahn at Addison/Ripley and Gallery Neptune & Brown

Wolf Kahn is one of the greatest living American landscape artists, able to evoke with his soft, exuberant palette the fleeting essence and particularities of time and place in nature. His work is beloved because he so beautifully communicates his own love for the world so clearly.

Born in Stuttgart in 1927, Kahn came to the U.S. in 1940. He studied painting with Hans Hofmann in New York before venturing across the country on his own, beginning to distill his visions of nature. Kahn’s current work at Addison/Ripley Fine Art, 1670 Wisconsin Ave. NW, is a continuum of his steadily unfolding oeuvre. There are trees, hills, fields and skies, painted and drawn in colors that feel as if they were plucked right out of the sky at dawn.
The exhibition at Gallery Neptune & Brown, 1530 14th St. NW, presents Kahn’s limited editions and unique monotypes, suitable for seasoned collectors and recent devotees alike. It includes both early and recent works on paper that display his iconic use of gestural line, compelling composition and ever-evolving mastery of color and light.

Dana Westring at Susan Calloway

Dana Westring looks for the beauty found in timeless forms. Interpreting the grand, awe-inspiring ruins of Cambodia and Angkor Wat, his watercolors and drawings are meticulously created, with rendering both gestural and precise. Westring’s work, on view at Susan Calloway Art, 1643 Wisconsin Ave. NW, aims to draw us into shadows, scattered across the mysterious terrain of a lost history.

Georgetowner • November 19, 2015

Let’s cut to the chase: “Wonder,” the inaugural exhibition at the Smithsonian’s newly reopened Renwick Gallery, is the greatest experience you will have at a Washington museum this year.

It is a show about experiencing, about feeling, about living and engaging in the 21st century. Its lifeblood is the sort of here-and-now splendor that is a hallmark of this generation — for better and for worse — and certainly an example of all that is right about those attitudes. So I won’t play the usual game of art historical connect-the-dots, because in this context it really does not matter.

“Wonder” is the kind of cultural event that leaves rapturous feelings and surges of ecstatic words crackling in your mind like Pop Rocks, the kind of exhibition that at once caused my pen to ramble and my words to fail. I want urgently to say something grand, to alert others to share in this experience, but what foams up from my larynx is just a swooning, breathless yawp.

In short, this is a marvelous achievement, a contemporary tour de force of which I don’t think any of us figured the Smithsonian was capable. It shines a light into the future of contemporary art in Washington and brings our fair, lumbering city finally into the throws of the cultural conversation.

Walking into the newly renovated Renwick, you are greeted by a grand staircase with a swirl of red carpet that courses through its center like a winding river. Above hangs a new chandelier by Leo Villareal, the light artist who illuminated the moving walkway between the National Gallery’s East and West buildings like an astronomic vortex. You are tempted to take the stairs, but beyond them — down a narrow corridor and peeking through a small door — there is an enormous twist of reeds that seems to sprout like Jack’s beanstalk through the floorboards.

As you approach, the smell hits you before you see it: hemp, earth, the sweet smoke of a wet forest floor. Then you walk into a wonderland.

Tornadoes of sapling branches vault, swirl and contort all around you. The room itself is a forest of monumental, woven woodland spirals, like architectural tumbleweeds or the fantastical aftermath of a Seussical hurricane. Artist Patrick Dougherty has created a homespun vehicle of imagination and earthly whimsy, as if Andy Goldsworthy constructed the set of a fairytale.

Compared to the rustic tactility of Dougherty’s work, Gabriel Dawe’s installation in the conjoining gallery is ethereal. While made up of floss-thin string, the rainbow structure that vaults overhead in a threaded rainbow from floor to ceiling makes you feel caught in the split of a light spectrum. The installation is so fleeting and divine that it becomes hard to believe it is made of any physical material, as it pleasantly confounds your sense of space and perspective. (Just don’t bump into it.)

Tara Donovan’s Post-it Note stalagmites take the notion of material to the next level, recreating a landscape of the Badlands from office supplies. It takes mass-produced materials and creates something undeniably organic.

John Grade’s installation, “Middle Fork (Cascades),” plays similarly with our understanding of what is or isn’t natural. A full-sized hemlock tree hangs on its side, floating from suspensions in the middle of the room. However, it is not a real tree, but a tree constructed in a Jacob’s-ladder pattern out of small off-cuts of reclaimed old-growth Western cedar. Having made a plaster cast of the original tree, he built this model from the mold. If this is difficult to envision, then you better come revel in it for yourself.

There are too many great works to name them all, but I would be personally remiss if I didn’t make mention of Jennifer Angus’s gaspingly lovely “In the Midnight Garden.” It is basically a giant pink room covered with preserved insects that are arranged in patterns like Día de Muertos wallpaper. It is certainly peculiar, but I am curiously hard-pressed to remember anything I have found more beautiful or enchanting. I think Henri Matisse would have loved it.
Utilizing the works of these artists, this exhibition shows us what a contemporary museum should be: fun, beautiful, provocative, searching, mysterious and yet inviting, imploring you to think, explore and experience. It is very exciting to have this in our city.

Art has always had its own language, and a hallmark of modernity — the revelatory force that pushed us into the realm of abstraction — is our recognition and implementation of this phenomenon. Work like that in “Wonder” takes this idea to the next level, creating a bridge to connect the art with the very space we occupy, so that we are not just looking at something, but wrapping ourselves in it, truly existing in and as a part of the work.

The artwork in this exhibition is also extraordinarily attuned to the architectural space of the beautifully renovated galleries. They crawl up the walls, they hang from the ceilings, they spring up around you from the floor, they float.

Perhaps most importantly, this work is of today. Most of these artists would not have been able to conceive their installations without the help of computer design programs and digital renderings, and yet they are all singularly made craft objects built with human hands and using many traditional art processes. It is a seamless braid of digital influence and traditional craft, in many ways a laudable definition of today’s best contemporary art.

And it certainly does provoke a sense of wonder. This is a gut-check of a show. Do yourself a favor and go see it, for it will remind you of what you loved about art in the first place: that it made you feel and it showed you something you could never have imagined.
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Ari Post • November 5, 2015

In preparing to write a piece on a new exhibition, I often sit down with the catalogue after my visit and bookmark certain pages with cut-up bits of paper, on which I write little notes and reminders to myself. If someone were to stumble upon one of these marked-up catalogues, seeing it stuffed full of paper shreds with scribbled words — “Victor Hugo,” “divine bones,” “gothic horror!” — they might well believe its owner to have been a mild schizophrenic.

But if someone found my latest catalogue, from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s “Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty” (on view through March 20), they?d be staring down the barrel of something more akin to an art student?s nervous breakdown.

Irving Penn is one of the most iconic photographers of our time. Both a commercial and art­house sensation throughout a greater portion of the 20th century, he is among the rare breed of artists who successfully survived for his entire career in the narrow, highly combustible space between mainstream and critical popularity.

Penn began as an art student in 1930s Philadelphia. After working as a freelance designer, he did a brief stint in 1940 as the artistic director of Saks Fifth Avenue, before dropping it all to spend a year traveling and taking photographs around the United States and Mexico (some of these shots are included in this exhibition).

Returning to New York, Penn took a design position with Vogue magazine, where his director suggested he try working with photography. His first cover shot for Vogue hit the stands in October 1943. Penn was not quite 26 years old.

Over the next sixty years, Penn took some of the most unforgettable photos of our time, with a meticulous eye that redefined and obliterated the perceived limitations of photography as art. He ran the gamut of fashion photography, commercial and advertorial work, portraiture, photojournalism, formal studies of still lives and Romanesque nudes, and the lid-popping delirium of avant-garde experimentation.

He composed and lit every subject with equally compulsive attention, from Truman Capote and Alberto Giacometti to used cigarette butts that he had his assistants pick up off the street. He played with chemicals and exposures in the darkroom the way a painter experiments with glazing mediums, extenders and stabilizers. His tones were rich and warm, and his manipulation of light and atmosphere bore such lush and striking contrast that his subjects seem to flower from seeds of darkness.

As fine as his technique was, however, this isn?t what made Penn?s work so beloved and admired (any more than Picasso is remembered for his brushstrokes). There are a lot of technically talented photographers in the world. It is the spirit of what he captured through his lens, the ineffable artistic matter of both beauty and relevance, that left such an indelible mark across the ether of American iconography.

I suppose it is this that I am expected to decipher as a writer and an observer of fine art, but frankly I?m not sure that I can. So many artists attempt to do exactly what he did and fall short. To make work that is emotionally charged, aesthetically fresh, innovative and transfixing is a colossal achievement. To do it for over half a century is nearly supernatural.

Penn could maneuver so deftly through such vast stylistic ranges it is mind­boggling. In some cases, his still life studies — stacked marrow bones and steel blocks — are as buttery, geometric and tonally delicate as those painted by Giorgio Morandi. In others, such as in “Composition with Pitcher and Eau de Cologne” of 1979, they take on the overwrought bounty of 17th-century Dutch still-life traditions.

His studies of muddy gloves and cigarette boxes buzz with the textural amplitude of Chuck Close’s immense portraiture. His own portraits, however, range in style from nightmarish surrealism (“Two Rissani Women in Black with Bread”) to formal (his portrait of Giacometti is a master class in value study) to Winogrand-like cultural snapshots and smoky, dreamlike odes to women and haute couture (fashion has never looked better than through his lens).

If there is a shortcoming to Penn?s work, it is clear that he was better in a controlled studio setting, over which he could exercise his aesthetic governance, than the uncooperative, disorderly environment of the outside world. The few images within the exhibition of urban street scenes and natural environments — all of them from very early in his career — are oddly disconnected from their subjects.

There is a mystifying painterly essence to his photographs. Your eyes traverse his terrains of texture, gradation and tone not like a typical photographic image — where you seek to gather the necessary informational content of “what is it?” — but with the nervous curiosity of a painted abstraction, for which we have trained our minds to seize esoteric intellectual feelings as literally as physical ballasts.

In a nutshell, this is why my brain blew an art fuse. Not that I mind. In fact, it?s one of the greatest meltdowns I?ve ever experienced.

the Georgetowner • October 15, 2015

The 11th Annual DC JazzFest will take place June 10 to 16. At this exclusive peek “backstage,” executive director Sunny Sumter will talk about the plans for 2016 and how the festival is building a new audience for jazz through education and partnerships. Be at the George Town Club at 8 a.m. to catch the action.

RSVP to Richard@georgetowner.com.

Ari Post • September 17, 2015

“The Divine Comedy,” the National Museum of African Art’s current exhibition, on view through Nov. 1, toys with the gravity of religious symbolism and points an ambiguous, often irreverent eye toward the grandeur of shared mythologies. It is also a sincere and moving exploration of the notions of faith, belief and tradition, which gracefully entwines many conventionally rigid boundaries of religion. Further, it deals with troubling histories of colonialism in Africa and the assertion of Christianity and Western ideals over native spiritual systems.

However, to put it more plainly, it is also one of the most beautiful, visionary and elegantly composed shows in the city this summer.

Curated by the internationally acclaimed writer and art critic Simon Njami, “The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists,” reveals the ongoing relevance of Dante Alighieri’s 14th-century epic as part of a shared, globalized intellectual heritage. This dramatic multimedia exhibition includes original commissions and renowned works of art by roughly 40 contemporary artists from 19 African nations and the diaspora. An ambitiously expansive show that runs in pieces throughout three full floors, it is also the first exhibition to take advantage of the museum’s pavilion and stairwells, taking over the space like vines spread across a brick wall.

Celebrated artists like Kader Attia, Wangechi Mutu and Yinka Shonibare explore the themes of paradise, purgatory and hell with video, photography, printmaking, painting, sculpture, fiber arts and mixed-media installation. In so doing, they probe diverse issues of politics, heritage, history, identity, faith and the continued power of art to express the unspoken and intangible of this life and beyond.

Hell is in the basement. With a dark and cavernous open floor plan, the gallery is transformed into a harmonious chaos of navigable space, a cacophony of sounds and eerie spectacles where artworks and installations literally fall on top of one another. (This author chose to start at the bottom, preferring, if you will, the ascent to heaven to the descent into the netherworld.)

One of the most troubling if beautiful pieces in the gallery is a heavy boat made of burnt poplar by Jems Robert Koko Bi, “Convoi royal (Royal Convoy),” which is filled to the brim with roughly carved wooden heads. Reminiscent in spirit of paintings by American artist Kerry James Marshall, this is an incredibly redolent confrontation with the strange, spectral atrocities of the Atlantic slave trade and the subsequent loss of identity among countless native African cultures.

In a similar vein, it is impossible to ignore “Tyaphaka” by Nicholas Hlobo, a lumpy, python carcass-like sculpture made from rubber inner tubing and ribbon that sprawls across the gallery floor. It feels almost nauseating, like a sack of bodies devoured by a monster, or the snake leaving Eden and taking with it in its belly the now tainted souls of man.

At the entrance (or in my case, the exit) sits a monumental sculpture by Wim Botha, “Prism 10 (Dead Laocoön).” Blurring the lines of historical connection, this sculpture is a take on the Greek Hellenistic masterwork “Laocoön and His Sons,” as if it were set on fire to reveal that beneath the white polished marble of the original sculpture lies a framework of brittle, jagged and black coal. It is the veritable fruit of the underworld, the destructive but necessary commodity of industrial progress that is excavated under oppressive labor conditions and transformed to smoke in order to fuel our economic consumption.

Purgatory lines the stairwells and the pavilion, and here there is no work more transfixing than “The 99 Series” by Aida Muluneh. A series of manipulated photographs of a woman covered in chalky white paint and wrapped in striped cloth, the duplicity and fractured spirit of the individual is starkly and breathtakingly rendered, as the disorientation of space, dimension and human anatomy speaks for a sort of judgment and inquisition, either by one’s self or a higher power.
Walking into the galleries of Heaven is bewitching, for this is a paradise represented not in the image of angelic Hollywood depictions or in the Vatican gift shop, but as a sort of pagan, polytheistic cabinet of curiosities, where all are welcome — but not as it could ever be imagined.

The toxic, ethereal beach scenes of Youssef Nabil have a violently saturated exuberance. The photographs show a man wrapped in cloth by the ocean with the sun setting radiantly on the horizon, portraying an almost overwrought notion of heaven’s divine beauty as something that we can’t really see, perceive or understand through our earthly lenses.

Of course, the relentless, bizarre, Hieronymus Bosch-like sculptural installation by Jane Alexander is totally unignorable. Like a fairytale nightmare, a bizarre, incomprehensible drama unfolds on a field of granular red clay, with figures of mice on men’s bodies leading a cart being dragged by bird-headed slaves. The cart is wrapped in freight packaging, and on the top sits a leather chest with an inlaid postcard of the Madonna and Child, upon which a lamb presides over the entire scene. There are more birdmen guarding and directing traffic up a rickety wooden ladder that leads through forced perspective up into the presumed heavens. There is also a sort of voodoo colonialist ghost with scythes and machetes on his belt, black feathers for a head and giant foam hands the likes of which you typically only see at a Green Bay Packer’s game.

There is almost nothing more I can say — or, rather, I don’t want to infect the curiosity by trying to connect it to literary or literal metaphors — but this exists and it has to be seen. I have never in my life experienced a piece of work provoke so much discussion among museum attendants.

Every one of us has a unique understanding of life, love, death and the beyond. Whether or not we believe in heaven and hell, our moral compasses are invariably catalyzed by that eternal logic of good versus evil, decency versus vulgarity. Through “The Divine Comedy,” the Museum of African Art helps reveal that one person’s vision of heaven, purgatory or hell might not match another’s, yet we are all driven by our conflicts and trials with humanity.