The Museum of Modern Art’s grand, sometimes grating 40-year survey of the German sculptor Isa Genzken is a disturbance in the force of the New York art world. It counters the season’s trend of big retrospectives devoted to male artists and increases from a paltry four to a still paltry five the number of full-dress sixth-floor retrospectives the Modern has bestowed upon women since taking back its expanded building nine years ago.

“Isa Genzken: Retrospective” also makes the museum feel alive and part of the art world, rather than a tourist destination where everyone lines up for the Magritte show or throngs the modernist parts of the collection even as galleries devoted to overthought, pleasure-averse displays of recent art stand virtually empty. The dour, largely color-free sampling of art since 1980 in the museum’s large second-floor galleries is a perfect example.

Upstairs, the best parts of the Genzken show present a markedly different species, one that is brash, improvisational, full of searing color and attitude and that decimates taste and frequently looks nothing like art. Inspired by popular culture and historic events, and influenced by its creator’s many annual trips to New York, Ms. Genzken’s mature efforts are bristling assemblages and installations that she began making in 1997, using cheesy materials and objects to concoct a raw, unapologetic beauty and a weirdly elliptical if literal-minded social commentary, often about the United States, power and war. Their seemingly jerry-built components run to office furniture, tiny toy soldiers and cars, baking pans, torn beach umbrellas, mirrored foil, metallic tape, ribbons, jewelry, fabric and all manner of bright colored plastic — flowers, chairs, rain boots, American eagles, bowls, buckets. Architecture is a frequent inspiration and reference.

Ms. Genzken, who turns 65 next week, has spent so much time in New York that she might almost qualify as a German-American artist. It is hard to imagine her work without the city’s skyscrapers, street life, trash and style, not to mention Canal Street and its rich vein of cheap shiny materials and job lots, already exploited by artists across generations and as diverse as Lucas Samaras, Lynda Benglis and Steve Keister. And while it may be largely a coincidence, most of her best work has been done since the Sept. 11 attacks, which she witnessed during a visit here and has made one of her themes, especially in the superbly assured works in the show’s final and strongest gallery.

Slide Show | ‘My Work Is Very Difficult to Understand’ A look at the work of the German artist Isa Genzken, the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.

The first comprehensive Genzken exhibition in an American museum, this show has been organized by Laura Hoptman, the Modern’s curator of painting and sculpture, and Sabine Breitwieser, its former curator of media and performance art and now director of the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, Austria. They collaborated with curators at the museums to which it will travel: Michael Darling of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Jeffrey Grove of the Dallas Museum of Art. Ms. Genzken is unusually prolific, and the group’s effort provides plenty to look at and only improves as it goes along, cycling and recycling through an extraordinary range of postwar styles, from Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimalism and Conceptualism up to the present.

This exhibition is a one-artist celebration of the increasingly loose-jointed, detached form of assemblage that may be the central, most robust aesthetic of our time. This tendency was explored in 2007 at the New Museum with “Unmonumental,” a broad survey of 30 assemblage artists. As the oldest participant in “Unmonumental” by at least 14 years, Ms. Genzken was its presumptive éminence grise. Yet her originality and influence, while often alluded to, are rarely parsed in detail, and the Modern’s catalog continues this habit. I don’t doubt her influence on many younger, especially European artists. But she is one of a host of women who began in the late 1980s to view assemblage — the piecing of disparate parts into unruly wholes — as an expansive, unbounded, antiheroic mode that could be simultaneously personal, political and formal.

Several of these women — including Jessica Stockholder, Cady Noland, Sarah Lucas and Rachel Harrison — actually began expanding assemblage before Ms. Genzken. Sadly, the catalog essays associate Ms. Genzken only with established names like Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter (to whom she was married in the 1970s and ’80s), Eva Hesse, Dan Graham and a few others. It omits Sigmar Polke, whose pop-culture-based, often tawdry paintings are at least a precedent, and Rosemarie Trockel, another female German artist of her generation struggling in a field that was and maybe still is unusually male. Whether by the writers’ choice or Ms. Genzken’s directive, these omissions perpetuate the myth of the artist as isolated genius unconnected to a crowded field. The same questions apply to the catalog, which does not mention that her grandfather — whom she may have met only once — was a Nazi, which is strange for an artist for whom catastrophe is a theme.

But back to the show, which begins by setting the teeth on edge with 12 raucous new sculptures in the form of bizarre looking “Schauspieler” (“Actors”) mannequins. Clustered a bit too densely outside the entrance, they are garbed in strange combinations of garments and headgear and festooned with swaths of fabric and various masks. Forming a very mixed gathering that evokes the homeless, loners, extreme fashionistas, transvestites and members of other subcultures, these beings pay tribute to difference, eccentricity and imagination. Yet they are so outlandish that the mannequins also serve as pedestals for the assemblage sculpture they wear.

And as if this weren’t enough, the walls behind them are covered with posters for her previous exhibitions. Impressively large, some feature photographs of her, including one in which she slouches in a chair in a black jacket and pants. Suggesting a well-known image of Marlene Dietrich in a tuxedo, it is evidence of the cool, clearly competitive, sexually ambiguous persona Ms. Genzken often presents.

In the galleries, the works move in roughly chronological fashion, in distinct, often startling series, presenting an artist who seems to become younger and more vital with each decade, as her work becomes more spontaneous and grounded in reality. Sleek, painted-wood, low-lying floor pieces — evoking futuristic weapons or spaceships — and a few feints at found objects and Conceptual art give way to rough ruinlike structures from cast concrete and paint. While not terribly original, they strike a haunted emotional note and, shown with a series of translucent resin pieces resembling French windows, turn the show’s largest gallery into an eerie indoor Monument Valley.

Around the edges of these early series are undistinguished paintings, some openly derivative of Mr. Richter’s work, and glimpses of spontaneity: a few small aggressively modeled forms in plaster, one garnished with bits of trash and two wiglike formations of bright epoxy resin poured over cloth, slowly rotating on motorized iron poles, looking a little like severed heads.

Some of these pieces reveal a talent for conjuring competing senses of scale and reality, the way painters often combine contrasting notions of space. First, the concrete pieces have high steel pedestals that enable them to loom above the viewer. In later works, she juxtaposes everyday objects with small figures that give them a monumental scale. In one of the “Ground Zero” works, a stack of plastic, basketlike tables becomes a vast, alienating parking garage with the addition of rows of minuscule cars.

The second half of the show is more or less explosive. Ms. Genzken breaks into her assemblage style, first with a group of modest hanging mobiles from 1997 made of shiny aluminum kitchenware punctuated with a burst of spray paint, then with a series that sends up the Bauhaus (from 2000, with an unprintable title). It combines splintery plywood bases, neon colors and disjointed buildinglike forms, one covered with seashells and tiny architectural-model trees. She circles back to Minimalism, with corrupting elegance, in the next series, tall squared-off columns covered in various sheets of mirror metal and wood veneer. Then follow small tableaus, on pedestals at eye height, of calamities and conflicts, piled with debris and sometimes manned by the toy soldiers. Finally, there are the “Ground Zero” sculptures, whose shiny forms read as resilience.

Although Ms. Genzken sometimes seems to change ideas and approaches rather than develop them, her work accumulates with an insistent force and momentum that will keep you alert to what turn she will take next.

“Isa Genzken: Retrospective” runs from Saturday through March 10 at the Museum of Modern Art; moma.org.

George Lindemann Journal

Eric M. Lee, director of the Kimbell Art Museum, was proudly escorting a reporter through the main gallery of his institution's new Renzo Piano-designed addition when his smile suddenly faded. Velázquez's "Don Pedro de Barberana," the full-length portrait installed in front of the glass wall at the far end of the expansive 7,100-square-foot south gallery, appeared to have lost his pulse. Mr. Lee quickly summoned one of his staffers to lower the second of the window's two layers of gray-scrim window shades. No longer upstaged by the sunlight behind him, Don Pedro quickly sprang back to life.

More challenging than the complexities of achieving proper levels of natural light (also regulated via adjustable, preprogrammed louvers on the roof) may be deciding how Mr. Piano's expansive, flexible yet in some ways prescriptive spaces can best be adapted to the diverse types of art they will contain.

Loosely subdivided by movable walls that appear to touch neither the ceiling nor the floor, the temporary layouts devised for the inaugural installations in the Piano galleries lure you forward and sideways to works in the next groupings. Covered by the same ivory fabric used on walls that subdivide the galleries in the original Louis Kahn-designed building, the Piano Pavilion's interior walls will be reconfigured or eliminated, depending on what's being shown there.

Although the pavilion's inaugural display consists of European, Asian, African and Oceanic art from the Kimbell's celebrated permanent collection, in February its main gallery will become the new home for the museum's rich, varied program of temporary loan shows, beginning with Samurai armor from the Dallas-based Barbier-Mueller Collection, to be followed next fall by French Impressionist portraits from the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

The space requirements of such loan shows were the driving force behind the new glass-and-concrete, freestanding Piano Pavilion: For many years, the 41-year-old Kimbell has desperately needed permanent space for its superlative and growing permanent collection, much of which had to be hauled into storage whenever the museum mounted major exhibitions, such as this year's acclaimed "Bernini: Sculpting in Clay," co-organized with the Metropolitan Museum.

Visitors who traveled from afar to see a broad representation of the Kimbell's roughly 350-work trove often had to settle for a small selection of its must-sees, such as signature works by Duccio, Caravaggio, de La Tour and Cézanne, which have been joined by stellar recent acquisitions of newly rediscovered early works by Michelangelo and Guercino.

Just as architecture aficionados will inevitably compare the physical attributes of Mr. Piano's pavilion with those of its acclaimed 1972 sister structure, so museumgoers are likely to compare how art is experienced in the two buildings. Whereas the Kahn's closed, barrel-vaulted spaces feel chapel-like, inspiring an almost religious reverence and awe, Mr. Piano's airy, open spaces are transparent, populist and unintimidating.

The ethereal, silvery glow of Mr. Kahn's light is the museum equivalent of Carnegie Hall's gold-standard acoustics. Measured against this high bar, the effectiveness of Mr. Piano's elaborately engineered illumination solution for his pavilion will likely receive intense scrutiny.

Seen over two sunny-to-partly-cloudy days, the relative merits of each building's qualities of light are almost impossible to compare—not only because they're so different, but also because the skylights of each yield variable conditions, depending on the time of day and amount of cloud cover. But the Kahn's glow seemed richer in the early morning, while the paintings in Mr. Piano's building appeared more vibrant in the afternoon.

Each building succeeds better with particular kinds of art. The subtleties of color and composition of European Old Master paintings, mainstays of the Kimbell's permanent collection, seem overmatched and subverted by the cold gray concrete walls of the Piano Pavilion. Even Caravaggio's renowned "The Cardsharps" (c. 1595) seemed less vibrant there than in the Kahn building.

Temporarily displayed for a two-month run in Mr. Piano's new space, the Kimbell's Old Master paintings and sculptures will rejoin its 19th- and 20th-century holdings this March in the Kahn building, where the beige travertine walls provide a warmer, richer backdrop for Old Masters. Currently displayed there (through Feb. 16, 2014) is "The Age of Picasso and Matisse : Modern Masters from the Art Institute of Chicago." Opening last month, the show was an irresistible opportunity that arose on short notice because of the Art Institute's decision to close until April the top floor of its Piano-designed 2009 Modern Wing to make certain fixes. The Kimbell's officials had already decided that they preferred to inaugurate the new, untested spaces with their own familiar holdings.

The paintings that look best in the new space, as Mr. Lee noted, are those suffused with a bluish cast, most notably François Boucher's 1769 series of four monumental, fleshy Rococo renderings of Roman mythological subjects, which occupy one long wall in the new pavilion—the first time the Kimbell has been able to show them side-by-side.

Architectural concrete, an unaccustomed material for Mr. Piano, has seldom been used by museums for walls on which paintings are hung. Although the mixture devised for this project created an unusually smooth, light gray wall surface with a titanium-enhanced luster, its characteristic mottling, splotches and "telegraphing" (dark horizontal striations caused by metal reinforcing bars inside the concrete) distract from a focus on the art.

On the other hand, sculptural works with a dynamic physical presence make a stronger statement in Mr. Piano's austere surroundings than in the elegant Kahn building, where they compete with the pitted texture of the travertine walls. In the Piano Pavilion's main gallery, Houdon's gleaming 1779 white marble bust of a stout nobleman, Aymard-Jean de Nicolay, prominently holds court at the end of one of the two long main pathways created by freestanding interior walls.

In the smaller west gallery, home to Asian art from the collection, the concrete serves as a compatible backdrop for a gray schist stela, "Bodhisattva Khasarpana Lokeshvara" (Bengal, India; c. 11th-12th century). But it clashes with the delicacy of the gold-leaf, six-fold Japanese screen in the same gallery—"Spring and Autumn Flowers, Fruits and Grasses" (Edo period, 18th century).

At Tuesday's press preview, Jennifer Casler Price, curator for Asian and non-Western art, observed that too much light was leaking into the Asian art gallery, the only one without a skylight, where illumination was supposed to be kept very low to protect light-sensitive scrolls. The offending rays were coming from an unshaded expanse of glass along the corridor leading to the gallery. The glare made it difficult to view works installed on either side of the gallery's entrance, and it also reflected off the layer of glass protecting a Japanese hanging scroll, Shibata Zeshin's "Waterfall and Monkeys" (1872).

Selections from the permanent collection of Asian art will remain in the Piano building (as will African and Pre-Columbian art, in the north gallery), after the European paintings leave. The Asian art may sometimes be supplanted by temporary shows of other light-sensitive works, such as prints and drawings.

And George T.M. Shackelford, the museum's deputy director, who set up some provocative new dialogues among familiar paintings in the Piano installation, can be counted on again to reshuffle the deck, maybe even adding one or two acquisitions he has his eye on, once the European paintings return to the Kahn flagship.

Now, at least, the Kimbell has sufficient space for its vaulting ambitions.

Ms. Rosenbaum writes for the Journal on art and museums, and blogs as CultureGrrl at www.artsjournal.com/culturegrrl.

George Lindemann Journal

George Lindemann Journal

Fort Worth, Texas

Italian architect Renzo Piano has enjoyed a career of many highs, from the 1977 Pompidou Center (with Richard Rogers ) in Paris to the opening last year of Europe's tallest tower, the Shard in London. Through his obvious skill and incomparable charm, he has also come to dominate a less enviable niche as the go-to guy for projects demanding as much deference and diplomacy as design.

Mr. Piano softened the hard white edges of the Atlanta High Museum without unduly offending the original architect, Richard Meier ; he wrapped the velveteen Italianate interiors of the beloved Morgan Library & Museum in a crisp contemporary box; at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, he deployed layers and layers of glass to heighten the experience of arriving at the real heart of the place, the courtyard. Tucking turfed-over duck-blind nun's cells out of sight of Le Corbusier's sublime Ronchamp Chapel in France was the architect at his most acquiescent. Until now.

With his $135 million addition to the Kimbell Art Museum here, Mr. Piano has topped his own track record for sensitive responses to someone else's work of genius. He should stop now and concentrate exclusively on his own architecture.      

Adding to the Kimbell would rightly unnerve anyone. Designed by the American architect Louis I. Kahn and completed in 1972, it is the most universally admired modern museum building in the U.S., and equally celebrated throughout the world. (I sent an iPhone photo of just the water fountain to a European architect with no other information about my location. In a minute, he emailed back, "Must be the Kimbell.")

Beginning in the 1980s, the Kimbell could no longer easily accommodate the demands of showing both its small but choice permanent collection and temporary exhibitions. But proposals to expand by adding wings and replicating its iconic vaulting roof flamed out in the face of protests. Mr. Piano has met the space challenge by keeping his distance. The new Piano Pavilion (apparently the architect protested the honor, saying "I am not dead yet!") sits 65 yards away from the original building and adds more than 16,000 square feet of gallery space, plus an education center, 298-seat auditorium and parking garage for 135 cars.

Across a green lawn dotted symmetrically with elm trees, it stands face to face in what modernists call "dialogue" with the 1972 structure, which sits on a raised platform edged by reflecting pools. That slightly higher ground is literal as well metaphorical. The Kahn building remains as self-possessed as an oracle with its cycloid vaults rippling evenly across the roof and only breaking to form a courtyard (and light wells) and two open travertine porches of cloistered stillness.

The Piano Pavilion (designed with the Houston firm Kendall/Heaton Associates as executive architect) is the same length but two feet shorter in height and is almost invisible through the young trees from the Kahn. Both are complex poems to proportion, and trying to figure out how the overlapping double squares of the Kahn plan relate to the tripartite sections of the Piano will occupy numbers buffs for the ages. The rest of us will either feel the tension as an enhancement or restlessly compare and contrast. I fell more into the latter group.

The Kahn sits in sublime wordless serenity (Kahn himself was given to sibylline pronouncements such as "light is the giver of all presences" and material is "spent light"), while the Piano natters away. It's not so much the glass awnings at high salute over the entrance and colonnaded sides or the pairs of glued laminated timbers that overhang the walls that distract. It's the five caps at the end of every beam indicating where the supporting tension cables are anchored. The characteristically heavy stress on showing off the structural detailing may be contrapuntal to the archaic-looking simplicity of the Kahn vaults, but those five buttons come across as fussy. The lobby, otherwise vast and open, also is tricked out—with thick glass fins projecting from glass panels to enliven, unnecessarily, the view across to the Kahn building. The spacing of the floorboards may be an ingenious way to filter the flow of air throughout the galleries, but again the boardwalk look of it feels overdesigned. Both Kahn and Mr. Piano have thin glass clerestories atop gallery walls, but somehow Kahn's glow while Mr. Piano's look like the strips they are.

If the Kahn weren't there, would this be a great Piano building? Not really, as the tension I felt was not so much in the dialogue but in the sense of restraint, as of Mr. Piano holding himself back—literally, since half the building is actually bermed into the ground. His signature roof systems, which so famously allow natural light to wash evenly over space, here have a back-up of high hats on tracks to provide artificial light spots. The punch of color he sometimes applies to add a zing of heat is reduced to red seats in the auditorium. That said, the striking gallery walls made out of poured concrete work tremendously well. Not just any old mix, the concrete contains 2% titanium and has a velvety look and a magnetic blue cast especially well suited to show off the Kimbell's fine African and Asian collections.

Not that Louis Kahn made no mistakes. No lover of cars, and refusing to acknowledge that most people arrive in them, Kahn stubbornly placed the parking lot behind his building. And so visitors enter by a nondescript lower-level back door. In probably his most generous act of deference, Mr. Piano placed right in front of his own building two staircases with canted walls leading Orpheus-like up from the underground parking garage. Now, instead of his own new building, the first thing visitors will see is the Kahn as Kahn meant it to be seen.

Ms. Iovine writes about architecture for the Journal.

George Lindemann Journal

Ryan McGinley, the Pied Piper of the Downtown Art World

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Protégés of Ryan McGinley, from left: Phoebe Pritchett, Michael Bailey Gates, Sandy Kim, Chad Moore, Christian Storm and Benjamin Morsberger.

By NATE FREEMAN

Published: November 20, 2013

The social orbit surrounding the photographer Ryan McGinley can sometimes feel like the world’s most exclusive nightclub, populated by good-looking and talented 20-somethings, who with their perfect skin and classic faces all seem to have walked out of a Kerouac novel, an idyllic Midwestern town or an American Apparel ad.

But these are more than just hangers-on. They are also newcomers in a downtown art scene carved out by Mr. McGinley.

There’s Petra Collins, 20, who curates a women’s art collective called the Ardorous; photographs for Tavi Gevinson’s online magazine, Rookie, and designs extremely graphic T-shirts.

There’s Sandy Kim, 27, a taboo-breaking photographer known for nudes and bodily fluids, who hosted parties at the recently closed East Village bar Heathers, and shoots for Purple and Vice magazines.

And there’s Chad Moore, 26, who came to New York as a BMX-riding extreme sports guy and now has two books of his own photography, shows at the Lodge Gallery on the Lower East Side and has shot for Coca-Cola and Creatures of the Wind.

They have all apprenticed for Mr. McGinley and are now living a kind of bohemian archetype of what it’s like to be young, supremely talented and scene makers.

It is a story line that Mr. McGinley knows well. Back in the early 2000s, he was at the center of a hard-partying crew of artists, most prominently Dan Colen and the late Dash Snow, who created a new myth of the downtown artist. Now 36, the former enfant terrible parties a little less (Mr. McGinley no longer drinks) and has matured into an improbable dean to the next generation of scrappy artists, with his Chinatown studio serving as a de facto clubhouse.

“It’s an education,” Mr. McGinley said recently in his studio, a tin-roofed loft on Canal Street that he originally shared with Mr. Colen. Surrounded by a hive of stylish assistants, Mr. McGinley sat in an anteroom that serves as his primary work space, still looking boyish in a white T-shirt and leather motorcycle jacket.

“In a way, it’s a curriculum, as I can give people advice because I’ve been through it,” he said.

“I was the first person to get attention within my crew, and I wanted people to share the success that I was enjoying.

“There’s no manual for being an artist,” he added.

As Mr. McGinley tells it, he did not set out to become a role model. He just wanted to keep the party going, partly because his band of merry pranksters inhabits the same waiflike world that his photography captures.

That’s how he met Ms. Collins earlier this year: the two were dancing at the Beaver, a raucous bar in Toronto, when they were introduced. “He’s a really great dancer and I am, too, I like to think,” Ms. Collins said. They exchanged numbers, and the next day, Mr. McGinley happened to stop by a student art show curated by Ms. Collins and others at the Ontario College of Art and Design called “Period Piece: The Gynolandscape.”

“I got a text from him with a selfie he took in front of a piece he wanted to purchase,” said Ms. Collins, a lithe woman with deep, penetrating gray-green eyes and blond hair that curls into ringlets.

Mr. McGinley invited her to come along as a model on a road trip. She said yes immediately, and they became fast friends as they traveled through West Virginia and Georgia, shooting in tree houses and mucky swamps. “He’s kind of like the big brother I never had,” she said. “There is just such a realness you get from him that is so rare to find in people.”

Ms. Kim, the photographer, met Mr. McGinley at the 2010 Pitchfork Music Festival, where she was tagging along with her boyfriend, Colby Hewitt, then the drummer for the band Smith Westerns. They were introduced backstage, and bonded over the allure of photographing rock stars. (Christopher Owens, the former lead singer of Girls, is a favorite subject of Mr. McGinley’s.) Soon after, McGinley began dropping Ms. Kim’s name to friends and in interviews.

“For a while, he was telling everyone I was his favorite photographer, which shined a lot of light on me,” said Ms. Kim, who has since had solo gallery shows in New York, San Francisco and Tokyo. “He’s very supportive of young artists, and will always push for the ones who he believes in.”

Mr. McGinley doesn’t only seek out future members of the avant-garde. He sometimes also looks for what he calls “recovering jocks,” citing the drive and discipline instilled in a person who played sports growing up.

“Ryan used to always love the fact that I was an athlete in high school and in a fraternity in college, yet I loved the Smiths and studied art,” said Christian Storm, 27, who became the photo editor at Vice magazine after Mr. McGinley recommended him for the job.

Mr. Moore, the former BMX rider, whose work also focuses on beautiful youngsters, met Mr. McGinley after applying for an internship on a whim. At the time, he treated photography as little more than a way to capture his bicycle tricks, but starting thinking critically about his pictures after assisting Mr. McGinley on various shoots.

“The people he photographs become part of the family,” Mr. Moore said. “I feel like Ryan would rather hang out with them than go to some fashion dinner or something like that.”

Those who visit Mr. McGinley’s studio often feel as if they’ve stumbled upon some latter-day Warholian factory populated by millennial nymphs.

“I have met countless models, assistants and interns, and they always appear such likable, genuine, fascinating and hard-working people,” said José Freire, the owner of the Team Gallery in SoHo, which represents Mr. McGinley. “They make you curious about what they do outside of Ryan’s studio.”

Before he was a big-name artist with a cultlike following, Mr. McGinley was himself a young rudderless teenager. He grew up in Ramsey, N.J, the youngest of eight children raised by a churchgoing Catholic mother and a father who worked at a fiberglass manufacturing plant.

He was closest to his brother Michael who returned home ravaged by AIDS. The family told neighbors he had cancer. In 1995, not long after Michael died, Ryan moved to New York to attend Parsons, where he quickly came of age. He lived in an apartment at 177 Bleecker Street, where he would do odd jobs like wash the dishes for the female dominatrix who lived upstairs. After continually rebuffing her advances, Mr. McGinley found himself one night making out with a boy named Harry on a dare, and he never dated a girl again, he said. Since then, he identifies himself as gay.

His life as an artist blossomed, too. One night, when he was 19, he met Jack Walls, an artist who once dated Robert Mapplethorpe. “He was really like a godfather to me and Dan and Dash,” Mr. McGinley said. “He taught me how to be an artist.”

Though Mr. Walls downplayed his role, he nonetheless opened Mr. McGinley to a new world. “I would tell him about daguerreotypes, and he’d be like, ‘What’s a daguerreotype?’ ” Mr. Walls said.

When Mr. McGinley was ready to display his early pictures, Mr. Walls helped secure a location, a then-vacant space at 420 West Broadway. The show, called “The Kids Are Alright” was a collection of vivid snapshots he took of his rail-skinny, often-naked friends getting in trouble on the streets and intimate in bedrooms, and it was a sensation. A book by the same name became samizdat, passed around by the art cognoscenti.

In 2003, Mr. McGinley became the youngest artist (he was 25 at the time) to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He was also named Photographer of the Year by American Photo Magazine. “I’ve seen this happen twice,” Mr. Walls said. “I’ve seen it with Robert Mapplethorpe, and I’ve seen it with Ryan.”

While his early works didn’t require anything beyond his keen eye and a cast of nubile beauties willing to gallivant around downtown, his later works were more logistically complex (road trips to the amber fields of Oklahoma, treks to the blue caves of Idaho) that required a battalion of assistants — not to mention fresh faces. So he hired young artists and found himself teaching them his methods of photography.

“Ryan is incredibly generous,” Mr. Walls said. “At one point there was a young photographer, and Ryan was giving him all his equipment. The trampoline, the smoke machines, everything.”

Mr. McGinley also opened doors and forged introductions. He introduced Arthur Stachurski, an intern just out of high school, to the film director Harmony Korine, who hired him as a production assistant on “Spring Breakers.” He helped Felix Frith, 27, a former intern, become an agent at Artist Commissions, his management agency. He got Jeff Luker, 28, another former intern, a gig shooting ads for a Levi’s billboard campaign.

And like alums from an elite university, Mr. McGinley’s acolytes have, in turn, helped one another out, sometimes collaborating on new projects.

Benjamin Morsberger, a former intern, formed an indie rock band, Cable, with Tracy Antonopoulos, yet another former intern. “Almost everything I do these days somehow traces back to Ryan,” said Mr. Morsberger, 24, who recently returned from Paris, where he played in Dev Hynes’s band Blood Orange. “The friends I’ve made, my girlfriend, jobs, my cologne. The list goes on.”

Back at his studio, Mr. McGinley told an assistant to turn off a video camera that was recording the interview, as he surveyed the hubbub around him. Technicolor images were sputtering out of printers, books were being stacked and emails were being dashed off.

There was much work to do. A retrospective of his work was opening at the Daelim Museum in Seoul in on Nov. 4, and his first show with Galerie Perrotin, which represents him in Paris was opening Nov. 13. Plus, Team Gallery has a booth at Art Basel Miami Beach next month.

Yet even as his assistants fluttered about in the narrow Chinatown loft, each clearly in awe of the rebel-turned-legend, Mr. McGinley still looked like a kid himself, like the wide-eyed character from the French New Wave film “The 400 Blows.”

“When I photographed Petra this summer, I didn’t realize she had such a presence,” Mr. McGinley said. “I remember one day looking at her Instagram, and she had a picture from our trip and I said, ‘Oh my God, Petra, you have 17,000 Instagram followers?’ I was mind-blown. I thought it was like the coolest thing.”

Mr. McGinley paused and turned his chair to look at a giant print of Ms. Collins lying naked in mud, her enormous eyes fixed upward. “You talk about being a mentor, but it goes both ways,” he said. “I’m learning just as much hanging out with Petra as she is hanging out with me.”

George Lindemann Journal

"Portrait of American Taste on the Eve of Dallas"

By

Tom L. Freudenheim

Updated Nov. 20, 2013 12:07 a.m. ET

Fort Worth, Texas

The compelling little exhibition "Hotel Texas: An Art Exhibition for the President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy, " now on view at this city's Amon Carter Museum of American Art, provides yet another insight into the presidency cut short a half century ago Friday. There are no assassination conspiracy theories to ponder here. Rather, this exhibition includes 12 of the 16 works that were placed in the Kennedys' two-bedroom hotel suite for their Texas visit, and it's like a mirror reflecting the taste, art and cultural perceptions of that time.

'Hotel Texas: An Art Exhibition for the President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy'

Amon Carter Museum of American Art

Through Jan. 12, 2014

At $75 a night (about $550 today), Suite 850 was only the second-most-expensive of the Hotel Texas's accommodations; the Will Rogers Suite on the 13th floor of the Fort Worth hotel cost $100. Compared with what we might expect of today's presidential lodgings, the 1950s "Chinese modern" décor looks like a down-market affair, especially for a venue that would house a president who was perceived as a harbinger of high culture's acceptance in official America: The Kennedys were presumably lifting us above the social and cultural banalities of the Truman and Eisenhower eras. Pablo Casals had entertained at a state dinner in 1961, and the following year JFK had invited the Western Hemisphere's Nobel laureates to the White House and cleverly quipped that "this is the most extraordinary collection of talent…that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

Small wonder that five days before the president's arrival, a small group of Fort Worth's cultural leaders scrambled to assemble some presentable art from two public and five private collections to tart up the prosaic hotel suite. Given today's astronomical art prices and insurance costs, as well as increasingly restrictive standards for the handling and display of art, it's unlikely that even local collector-philanthropist Ruth Carter Johnson (later Stevenson)—daughter of noted civic booster and publisher Amon Carter —and her art friends would today be able to put together a hotel room display of this quality. But they rose to the challenge, and the cultural elite of Fort Worth were presumably also making a statement about their place in the city's longstanding competition with Dallas. That rivalry, as well as that moment in time at that place, are explored in several excellent essays by Olivier Meslay, David M. Lubin and others in the exhibition catalog. Mr. Meslay, who conceived of the exhibition and is a curator at the Dallas Museum of Art (where it was first shown), is a native Frenchman; Francophile Jackie would likely have approved.

In November 1963, national art magazines were featuring stories on abstract painter Clyfford Still, various artists (among them Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Dine and Robert Indiana) discussing Pop Art, and interviews on the "culture boom" with painters as varied as Larry Rivers, Adolph Gottlieb and James Rosenquist. But other than a very small, if fine, Franz Kline "Study for Accent Grave" (1954), perhaps a token bow to Abstract Expressionism, there was none of this available for the Kennedy's delectation in their suite. It's easy to forget that Irving Sander's first comprehensive study of that movement, "The Triumph of American Painting," wasn't published until 1977.

Rather, this exhibition hints at the variegated ways of looking at art that could serve as some sort of "official" (if informal) display fit for a president. It's not even the expected celebration of American artists, since six of the 16 works are by Europeans—Raoul Dufy, Claude Monet, Henry Moore, Vincent van Gogh, Eros Pellini and Pablo Picasso. The quality of the works varies greatly, which is exemplified by two small bronzes: Moore's exquisite "Three Points" (1939-40) and Pellini's dreary "A Girl From Lombardia" (1958-59). Both reflect the tone of the entire exhibition in fence-sitting on the matter of abstract art. Mid-1950s dissension over a Picasso exhibition in Dallas had led to a splintering into art factions and the founding of the Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts, which remerged with the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (now the DMA) in 1963. Perhaps this explains why two of this exhibition's finest works—"Manhattan II" (1940) by Lyonel Feininger and "Spirit Bird" (c. 1956) by Morris Graves—were displayed in a corner of the sitting room along with the Kline.

The most iconic work in the exhibition is surely Thomas Eakins's "Swimming" (1885), a view of six naked young men at a swimming hole that fuses a casual sense of immediacy with a classically formal composition.Placed above what was intended to be the president's bed (although apparently Jackie slept there the night of Nov. 21), it suggests all sorts of JFK allusions, as Alexander Nemerov explores in his catalog essay. These include both the celebrated Kennedy athleticism as well as the survival swimming involved in JFK's PT 109 experience in World War II's Pacific theater. Considering more recent homoerotic readings of these Eakins paintings, I wonder whether it would make the cut for a presidential setting today. Yet there's no evidence that JFK even noticed the work. Rather, as writer James Reston reminds us in his recent recasting of the motive for the Kennedy assassination, on the morning of the 22nd the president gazed from the window of that hotel room prior to his brief talk in the parking lot below, and remarked to his aide Kenneth O'Donnell: "Just look at that platform. With all these buildings around it, the Secret Service couldn't stop someone who really wanted to get you."

This poignant exhibition is also a reminder that the museum scene in both Dallas and Fort Worth has burgeoned in the years since 1963. And it reveals bits of the underbelly of how museums operate. Following contentious public debate, "Swimming" was deaccessioned by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and purchased by the Amon Carter Museum in 1990. On the other hand, a wonderful late Marsden Hartley painting included here, "Sombrero With Gloves" (1936)—one of only two "western" paintings in the show (the other is a Charles Marion Russell view of Indians in a snowstorm)—was deaccessioned by the Amon Carter and is now in a private collection.

By conveying various histories—communal, institutional, taste and art—this exhibition wisely pays homage to, but also moves beyond, commemorating that singularly tragic moment in the American past.

Mr. Freudenheim, a former art-museum director, served as the assistant secretary for museums at the Smithsonian.

George Lindemann Journal

Enduring Nazi Law Impedes Recovery of Art

Gordon Welters for The New York Times

Wolfgang Büche, curator of the Moritzburg Foundation in Halle, Germany, where works were looted by the Nazis.

By MELISSA EDDY and ALISON SMALE

Published: November 19, 2013

HALLE, Germany — Wolfgang Büche was amazed this month when a watercolor seized by the Nazis from the small museum in this eastern city, where he is the curator, reappeared, part of a vast trove uncovered in a Munich apartment.

But his excitement at seeing the work, “Landscape With Horses,” a possible study for a 1911 painting by the German Expressionist Franz Marc, was tempered by one fact he called “irrefutable”: The 1938 law that allowed the Nazis to seize it — and thousands of other Modernist artworks deemed “degenerate” because Hitler viewed them as un-German or Jewish in nature — remains on the books to this day.

The German authorities say they believe that 380 works confiscated from German public museums under the Nazi-era law may be among the more than 1,200 paintings, lithographs and drawings found stashed away in the apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt, the reclusive 80-year-old son of a Nazi-era art dealer.

The law’s existence renders slim the likelihood that Mr. Büche’s museum or dozens of others in Germany can reclaim their works, German legal experts and museum and government officials say. And that law is likely to remain in place.

The Nazis sold thousands of the confiscated works on the open art market to fill wartime coffers. Repeal or reform of the 1938 law could unravel an intricate web of art deals involving such works that have been negotiated around the world in the decades since, something that even many museum curators like Mr. Büche are loath to consider.

Despite the lengths Germany has gone to to repair the moral and material damage done during World War II, for decades the restitution of confiscated art was not a topic of discussion or action here, and no German government has sought to repeal the Nazi law.

“The legal situation is relatively obvious and clear,” said Mr. Büche, who oversees the collection at the Moritzburg Foundation in Halle. “With art taken from Jewish collectors, there are sometimes legal or at least moral circumstances under which they can seek to have their works restituted. We can only seek to buy them back.”

Indeed, those works confiscated from public German museums stand in a separate category from works seized or sold under extreme duress by private Jewish collectors, whose heirs may still have legal claims to the art. Some have initiated new actions to retrieve works found in Mr. Gurlitt’s apartment.

But for museums like Mr. Büche’s, the legal path is far knottier. What is more, legal and museum experts say, if Mr. Gurlitt can prove he legally inherited the works — and the statute of limitations on any wrongdoing may long ago have run out — they could well remain his, unless a deal with the government can be reached.

While the German authorities have come under criticism abroad for their handling of the Gurlitt case — in particular, keeping the discovery of the art trove secret for almost two years — questions have been raised in the German news media about whether they had the right to seize Mr. Gurlitt’s entire collection. While he is under investigation for tax evasion, he has yet to be charged with any crime.

On Tuesday, the state prosecutor in Augsburg, Bavaria, where the case is being handled, said he would urge the task force appointed to clarify the provenance of the collection to tell him as soon as possible which works are irrefutably Mr. Gurlitt’s, so that they can be returned. Mr. Gurlitt has made clear he considers the works his property and wants them back.

Mr. Büche, the curator, would like his pictures back, too. Yet, in his three decades at the Moritzburg museum, he has been able to celebrate the return of just 16 prewar items, a tenth of a collection that once ranked among the most impressive in the country.

Some of the museum’s prewar works now hang in the Museum of Modern Art in New York or at Harvard University after having been traded on the open market like many so-called degenerate works once confiscated by the Nazis.

Only occasionally do those works travel back to Halle on loan. Such special exhibitions are the biggest draw to the museum, which, despite a renovation in 2008, struggles to attract 60,000 to 70,000 visitors a year.

“We always try to buy back our works, when they turn up, but as a state-funded museum, we can’t compete against big bidders,” Mr. Büche said.

With their swirling, sweeping necks and hindquarters, the Expressionist gray-blue horses in the Marc painting that was once displayed here ran afoul of Nazi tastes. It was confiscated as part of the law, passed in May 1938, that sanctioned the removal of more than 5,000 “entartete,” or “degenerate,” works from public museums.

Historians say the Soviet powers sought to have the law nullified in the early 1950s but claimed that the Western Allied powers, for reasons that are unclear, did not support the idea. So Hitler’s rejection of works that did not reflect the Nazis’ sentimental view of art lives on.

Last weekend, the respected conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung condemned the law’s endurance as part of the “unsurpassed hypocrisy” of German dealings with the art the Nazis plundered.

“It is hard to believe, but this Nazi law has never been overturned by the German government,” said Ulrike Lorenz, director of the Kunsthalle Mannheim, which lost its Modernist collection, some 800 works, to the Nazis.

Ms. Lorenz says she is determined to press the museum’s claims. Together with three other museums that have recognized works from their prewar holdings in the first 25 works from the Gurlitt collection posted at lostart.de, she is examining what legal recourse might be possible.

Such claims could proliferate once the works, probably hundreds, seized from museums and found in the Gurlitt collection are more widely known.

The Kunsthalle Mannheim began early on to collect works by the German Expressionists, including Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner, whose “Melancholy Girl,” a print described by Ms. Lorenz as an important and very personal work, was found in the Gurlitt collection. Ms. Lorenz would like to see it hanging again in Mannheim.

“Of course, we will seek to have the work returned,” Ms. Lorenz said. “Carefully put, I think that the public museums have a certain moral claim to the art that once belonged to them.”

Some art historians point to the precedent set by Bernhard Böhmer, who, like Mr. Gurlitt’s father, Hildebrand, was one of four dealers tapped by the Nazis to sell the so-called degenerate works. After he took his own life in 1945 in the East German town of Güstrow, the Soviets handed over most of his collection to the state, which returned the works to museums or sold them back at a nominal price.

Others warn that nullifying the 1938 law could have far-reaching implications.

“If that law were to be nullified, then all the transactions would have to be annulled,” said Sabine Rudolph, a lawyer who specializes in the restitution of art confiscated from Jews. “If one museum that recognizes a work in the Gurlitt collection insists, ‘I want that back,’ they may suddenly realize they have several works that previously belonged to other museums that they would then have to return.”

The secret buyer of Bacon’s $142M triptych is …

By Emily Smith

November 19, 2013 | 3:41am

Modal Trigger

Photo: Christie's Images Ltd/Handout via Reuters

The buyer of the Francis Bacon triptych at Christie’s for a record $142 million last week was shrouded in secrecy — but Page Six can exclusively reveal it is Qatar’s Sheikha Mayassa, the most powerful woman in art.

“Three Studies of Lucian Freud” made history as the most expensive artwork ever to be sold at auction. It was purchased by New York’s respected Acquavella Gallery on behalf of a client who numerous sources tell us is the sheikha — official title, Her Excellency Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani.

Sheikha MayassaPhoto: AFP/Getty Images

 

While she is just 30, the sheikha, daughter of the former emir of Qatar and sister of the current emir, is said to control billions of dollars that the royal family wants to spend on art to display in museums it is building. The Qatari royal family is spending more than $100 billion as it prepares for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. The sheikha heads the Qatar Museums Authority, and her role is to turn the oil-rich nation into a cultural powerhouse. The jewel in QMA’s crown will be a national museum, designed by Jean Nouvel, to open in 2016.

Last month the sheikha was named the most powerful person in art by the ArtReview Power 100, an annual ranking of all the most important collectors, dealers, curators and artists. She was placed ahead of powerful American dealers David Zwirner, Iwan Wirth and Larry Gagosian, who had bid $101 million on the Bacon.

The sheikha was also the reported buyer of a Mark Rothko, a Francis Bacon and a Damien Hirst recently auctioned at Sotheby’s for more than $160 million. Her family spent a record $158 million for Paul Cezanne’s “Card Players” last year and a reported $310 million for 11 Rothkos.

She graduated from Duke in 2005 and took an internship at Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal’s Tribeca Productions, where she kept her royal identity under wraps. After she returned home, she revealed herself and successfully negotiated to bring the film festival to Doha.

A rep for Acquavella declined to comment, and calls to the Embassy of Qatar in Washington, DC, were not returned last night.

The George Lindemann Journal

The Whitney Museum of American Art announced nearly a year ago that a trio of outside curators would be organizing the 2014 Biennial, each taking a floor of the museum. Each brings a different set of eyes and interests to the show.

They are Stuart Comer, the chief curator of media and performance art at the Museum of Modern Art; Anthony Elms, an associate curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia; and Michelle Grabner, a professor in the painting and drawing department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as an artist with an exhibition this month at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland.

Elisabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders — the Whitney curators who put together the highly praised 2012 edition — will act as advisers overseeing the giant survey, which runs from March 7 through May 25 and takes the pulse of what’s happening in contemporary art today.

As the biennial — the last in its Marcel Breuer building at Madison Avenue and 75th Street — takes shape, details about its content are finally emerging. For starters, the show will include the work of just over 100 artists and collectives, more than twice the number of the 2012 Biennial. And as with the previous edition there is no overarching theme.

“Each curator chose a floor and divided up the artists very organically,” said Mr. Sanders, adding that these decisions, as well as the content of the biennial itself, have been made by the three curators. “Having three perspectives means you will get a mix of performance and media,” he said. “Visitors will also get an eye into the curatorial process.”

As it has in the past, the selection of artists includes a multigenerational mix, including some whose careers span the decades (Robert Ashley, Sheila Hicks, Louise Fishman, Sherrie Levine); dead artists (Sarah Charlesworth, Gretchen Bender and Tony Greene); and a hefty dose of emerging artists. There will also be more artist collectives or collaboratives than ever before, a reflection of a growing trend.

While in 2012 the curators devoted one floor solely to performance, this time around performances will pop up in different spaces throughout the entire building. “They chose a different path,” said Mr. Sanders. “Each curator naturally found their own voice.”

Among the artists involved in dance are Miguel Gutierrez, Taisha Paggett and Yve Laris Cohen, while Kevin Beasley, Charlemagne Palestine and Sergei Tcherepnin are all doing sound pieces. There will also be contemporary “operas” from the 1970s, including one by Mr. Ashley in collaboration with Alex Waterman, and performance pieces by Ei Arakawa, working with Carissa Rodriguez, and the performance group known as My Barbarian.

In selecting the artists, certain trends are inevitably starting to emerge. Among them, Ms. Sussman and Mr. Sanders said, will be a focus on artists involved in a multiplicity of disciplines, for instance writers who paint, painters who are also poets, filmmakers who create sculptures, and photographers who draw.

Craft seems to be part of the equation too. Lisa Anne Auerbach, a conceptual artist based on the West Coast, has knitted sweaters; artists including Shio Kusaka, John Mason and Sterling Ruby have made ceramic works. There will also be textiles by Ms. Hicks; tooled leather wall pieces created by Carol Jackson and woodworking from the sculptor Alma Allen.

As was evident at this year’s Venice Biennale, there will be an emphasis on archival materials. Joseph Grigely, the artist, “got the archive of critic Gregory Battcock and will have vitrines showing all kinds of ephemera from it,” Ms. Sussman said.

Mr. Sanders added, “There’s a definite response to new media.” Triple Canopy, an online journal, will be presenting a project in the gallery and Semiotext(e) will also present a new series of publications.

In years past the Biennial has been criticized for the absence of painting, but Ms. Sussman and Mr. Sanders said there will be lots of it this year, especially works by abstract artists like Rebecca Morris, Molly Zuckerman Hartung, Laura Owens, Jacqueline Humphries, Louise Fishman, Amy Sillman, Suzanne McClelland, Etel Adnan, Dan Walsh and Elijah Burgher.

Frequently there is something outrageous to ogle. (In 2012, the Los Angeles artist Dawn Kasper moved into the museum.) Mr. Sanders said it was still too early to say if there would be any off-the-wall moments because many of the performance projects are still being shaped.

There have also been years when the Biennial has extended beyond its own four walls, striking out into Central Park and once at the Park Avenue Armory. This year the multimedia artist Tony Tasset will be creating out an outdoor sculpture in Hudson River Park.

“Hudson River Park is a place people actually use,” Mr. Sanders said. “It also takes you outside the fray of the city.”

A LITTLE COLOR FOR WINTER

Two public art projects scheduled for February and March will be especially visible in the city’s bleak winter landscape.

In Madison Square Park — that six-acre swath of green between Madison and Fifth Avenues, from 23rd to 26th Streets — the Brooklyn-based Chilean artist Iván Navarro will create a site-specific installation on view from Feb. 20 through March 30. Called “This Land is Your Land,” from the 1940 Woody Guthrie folk song, it will consist of glowing neon words reflected within three water towers installed throughout the park. Seven feet in diameter and resting on eight-foot-tall supports, the water towers, an integral part of New York’s skyline repeat their neon message perpetually.

“It’s our 28th exhibition over the last 10 years,” said Debbie Landau, president of the Madison Square Park Conservancy.

Uptown, at the Doris C. Freedman Plaza at 60th street and Fifth Avenue, the Swiss-born artist Olaf Breuning has created six clouds rendered as childlike drawings and fashioned from polished blue fiberglass that tower 35 feet high. On view from March 4 through Aug. 24, the work is a playful, almost cartoon-like, installation.

“There is a D.I.Y. quality to it,” said Nicholas Baume, the Public Art Fund’s director and chief curator who organized the project.

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A version of this article appears in print on November 15, 2013, on page C26 of the New York edition with the headline: The Whitney’s 2014 Biennial Starts Taking Shape.

The George Lindemann Journal

Brad Kahlhamer: ‘A Fist Full of Feathers’

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Some of the handmade figures included in “Bowery Nation,” a room-size installation that is part of Brad Kahlhamer’s show “A Fist Full of Feathers,” at the Jack Shainman Gallery.

By HOLLAND COTTER

524 West 24th Street, Chelsea

Through Saturday

The four new paintings in Brad Kahlhamer’s show, his first local solo since 2006, spin out references to contemporary Native American and postpunk urban culture in figures drawn in filament-fine-ballpoint lines, in graffiti-like phrases and in spray-painted stains that look like scorch marks. Basics of Mr. Kahlhamer’s personal history are embedded here: a Native American born in Tucson, he was adopted by a German-American family as an infant and has lived in New York City, near the Bowery, for decades.

The major work, though, is the room-size installation called “Bowery Nation,” an assemblage that incorporates 100 handmade, roughly foot-high figures that the artist has been working on since 1985. Composed primarily of street finds — scraps of fabric and wood, coat hanger wire, pigeon feathers — along with taxidermy pieces, the figures are roughly modeled on Hopi and Zuni katsina dolls, cult objects that embody forceful spirits and are used to convey moral lessons to children.

After keeping the figures to himself for years, Mr. Kahlhamer recently began exhibiting them as a group on a platform put together from studio furniture: a work table, stepladder, sawhorses. The result was meant to suggest a flatbed float of the kind that appears, carrying costumed performers, in powwow parades, though the effect isn’t exactly celebratory. The float is decorated not with Native American “traditional” designs, but with the repeated logo of the Lakota Thrift Mart. Two dozen figures of scrawny, predatory birds hang from wires overhead.

And the sculptures themselves convey mixed messages. No two alike, together they’re as vivaciously inventive as Calder’s “Circus.” But they’re also morbid, death-haunted, a circus risen from the grave.