Mini Review: Lauren Greenfield's "Generation Wealth" Exhibition
Photo: Sharon Choe
Photojournalist and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield’s new exhibition at the International Center of Photography (ICP) Museum on the Bowery showcases 25 years of her work documenting the changing values vis-à-vis material wealth in American life and abroad. The Los Angeles-raised artist’s first, and perhaps most innocent, project, “Fast Forward,” captures the spectrum of experience among L.A.’s youth in the ‘90s, affected by the culture of money and Hollywood. Opening with sunny images of teenagers driving up California’s Pacific Coast Highway, the photo series unfurls to reveal the darker psychology of drug abuse, cultural appropriation, and preoccupation with appearances underlying the lives of children and young adults coming of age in the City of Angels. The obsession with money and looks in this formative series presages Greenfield’s subsequent explorations into celebrity culture, eating disorders, plastic surgery, grotesque wealth, and material destitution. Curated by the artist herself, the collection chronicles the perversion and degradation of the human experience in the last quarter-century through people’s increasing deification of the superficial. The images, vivid in color and graphic in content, provoke a visceral reaction in the viewer who cannot escape recognizing the contemporary values at play.
The exhibition “Generation Wealth” by Lauren Greenfield will be on display now through January 7, 2018 at the ICP Museum, 250 Bowery, New York, NY 10012.
Published by Straus News.
All Art is Political: Teens Take the Met!
“It’s not just a mansion on Fifth Avenue,” said Will Crow on a balmy Friday evening as he stood next to a long line of teenagers outside the 81st Street entrance of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The kids in plaid shirts, primary-colored sweaters, and alternating Nikes and Vans fidgeted and bounced in the nebulous mass, some still sporting backpacks from the school day. Oscillating mid-air at the end of the queue were five glossy, golden letter balloons that spelled TEENS.
“We want them to know that this is a place for them,” emphasized the museum’s educator Crow. “This is their museum.”
Across the museum’s Beaux-Arts façade, hundreds of teenagers, in groups of classes and cliques, descended upon the limestone steps as an additional wave of students crossed the street from every direction not far behind, followed by a suite of coach buses filled with teens from all five New York City boroughs.
The teenagers, ages 13-18, had arrived for the museum’s seventh annual Teens Take the Met!: a free night of art-making, musical performances, live theatre and other events hosted by over 40 arts and youth partner organizations of the Met from around the city.
Of the thousands of students who attend the event every year, nearly half of them say it is their first time visiting the museum, reported Crow. “It’s a way for them to really get a taste of what all these different organizations in the city offer, so that hopefully they get more involved in arts, culture, and museums.”
Inside the Great Hall museum staff directed the adolescents towards the welcome center located down the stairs to the left of a corpulent ionic column from the Temple of Artemis before the Greek and Roman gallery.
Below dozens of staff and volunteers in yellow t-shirts flitted from one nonprofit booth to craft table in a vast, low-ceilinged room packed with hordes of children excited to paste on temporary tattoos, decorate their own tote bags, and make Morse code key chains.
Once finished with these amuse-bouche activities, students were invited to explore the museum’s other galleries offering an endless choice of workshops, performances, and other novelties. They could move from a head-phoned silent dance party in a lecture hall to a poetry salon in the European sculpture court, and then to the rooftop garden where they could play and interact with The Theater of Disappearance, an exhibition by Adrian Villar Rojas.
Perched above the neoclassical columns of the main entrance in the Great Hall, a trio of teen musicians dressed in dark blue and black concert attire was playing a suite of original music in a performance put on by the 92Y. They seamlessly transitioned from one piece to another, changing arrangements of instruments in between, as their music dispersed among the clinking glasses and chattering of middle-aged guests in the balcony bar.
“I actually have never played here before; I actually have never been here before either,” said Kelvin Rojas, a tall, soft-spoken senior from Celia Cruz Bronx School of Music. He had just finished playing his second and final set of piano for the evening, and was slightly out of breath.
“The acoustics in here are amazing,” he added in an ingratiating manner, beads of sweat dotting his forehead.
Having started playing piano at just age “two or three,” Rojas has learned to persevere in his life’s pursuit: “Don’t stop. You’ll have a lot of ups and downs; and of course, a couple of bad concerts, but just don’t stop,” he said.
“People my age tend to go through a couple of hardships, you know. Music can act as a friend when they don’t have any,” reflected the young musician. “Music has gotten people through hard times….. Music, it’s everywhere, and I think that makes life more enjoyable.”
In the Modern and Contemporary Art gallery, Edward Salas from the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens was teaching kids how to make DIY thaumatropes, an optical toy from the 19th century that converges one image into another. Sophomore Mika Mentors-Cort from James Madison High School held a folded piece of paper by rubber bands on either end which untwisted to reveal his separate illustrations of stars and a galaxy merging together in a live animation.
Mentors-Cort heard about the event from the IT coordinator at his high school in Brooklyn. He visits events, like tonight’s, which she recommends to him, “as a sign of respect to her. I just try to come out and do different things and explore.”
His primary interests are in space and animation. “When I watch YouTube, I see a lot of animators, how they’re able to tell stories through their images. It inspires me to want to be able to tell my story and different experiences through drawing, and show it to other people so they know that maybe some experience that they’ve had, they’re not alone in having the same experience.”
Twenty minutes before the end of the night, a handful of students in uniform black t-shirts with “I am Epic” emblazoned across the chest energetically waved passerby into gallery 355 in a last-minute rush to fill the audience of their theatre troupe Epic Next’s last show of the night.
About a dozen young actors performed “Uniform: A Part to Play,” a piece highlighting the social issue of inequality across educational communities with the gallery’s various artifacts: tribal masks, statues, and rugs from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas in the background. The short play followed a day in the life of students from a privileged high school and those from an underprivileged one. The players closed the performance taking turns crying pithy truths over a low-pitched, haunting hum:
Boy: Society today normalizes the wrong.
Girl: They would rather hide behind their own shadows and point fingers.
Chorus: Instead of judgment, learn to love me for me and us for us.
After the show, Ignus Francois, a principal player from the fictional privileged school who attends the 10th grade at Chelsea Career & Technical Education (CTE) High School in real life, said that between acting and technology, he prefers technology. However, he admits that art, “it inspires me to go after and do more things with my life.”
The museum should function, Crow mused, as “a place where people should feel they can come and talk about ideas, they can talk about difficult topics that relate to the art, they can talk about cultural exchange, or sometimes cultural conflict.”
The notion of the museum as a gathering place for the public originated in the article, “The Museum: A Temple or The Forum?” by Canadian museologist Duncan Cameron in 1971. “I think museums often find themselves in a real place of tension between those two things. But definitely tonight, Teens Take the Met!, it is definitely more on the side of forum,” added Crow with a smile.