Summer in New York

One of the delights of Chelsea is coming upon the unexpected treasures. For me there were two discoveries. One was Kelly Akashi’s “Infinite Bodies” at Tanya Bonakdar—a truly sublime grouping of sculpture and installation, some pieces displayed on rammed-earth pedestals in a very spare space. The pieces featured parts of her body: a slim torso, dangling legs and hands, along with bronze, glass and found objects.

In the second half of May, I took my first trip to New York in four or five years. The beat of the city is back, with bars and restaurants filled to the brim, and the Met packed with long lines for two blockbuster shows (Karl Lagerfeld and van Gogh). The Roof Garden Commission featured a Lauren Halsey installation, a series of sculptures that recreates ancient Egyptian columns and statuary with African faces and African-American graffiti on block walls made to look like walls of ancient tombs. I also passed through the Cecily Brown show. She has never been one of my faves, but I like these recent paintings, with her confident handling of very drippy paint that feels extraordinarily playful and luxuriant.

One afternoon I spent wandering Chelsea, where galleries are so densely packed you can easily drop into a dozen over a few hours. At David Zwirner was Yayoi Kusama’s “I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers” (up through July 21) which included painting and epic sculpture—one room was filled with three large undulating screens covered with polka dots, as if her pumpkins had unfurled; another room contained a couple of her gigantic psychedelic flower sculptures. Unfortunately, to enter the new Infinity Mirror, there was a line down the block, so I skipped that.

Interviewing Kusama in Japan over 20 years ago was one of the most riveting professional moments of my life—she was semilucid, although her memory was selective, recalling, for example, how frugal her onetime boyfriend Joseph Cornell was. They once went out to dinner with another couple and she recollected that he "decided that the four of us would share one dish between us.” She recounted all this with her deadpan face, but there was a certain humor in the way she told the story—breathlessly, with hardly a pause, as if she were rushing to get the story out.

Kusama became known for her net paintings in which she knit together a series of wavy lines across the canvas, creating a “net” effect. These were largely monochromatic, with occasional introduction of other background colors, such as yellow. In contrast, her recent paintings are a riot of color, and quite brilliant arrangements of lozenges, fat lines and human faces. It’s her gift that they somehow work together.

The other discovery was Colombian photographer Ruby Rumié at the Nohra Haime Gallery, in the exhibition "Us, 172 Years Later." There were two portrait series here, both of Colombians with their favorite foods; one close-up and the other full-length. The way Rumié has arranged the foods, such as peppers, cherimoya and blue crab, is both whimsical and strangely beautiful—many of them are worn as headgear. Then there are the faces of her subjects—old, young, male, female—faces that have remarkable character and directness, grounded in dignity and a powerful sense of identity. The background has been taken from 19th-century colonial-era prints, which to me suggests the history behind each person. It's also a way to visually flatten the background and let us focus on the faces and personal attributes.

I especially love the way the artist depicts herself. In one enlargement (C-prints mounted on aluminum), she’s walking barefoot wearing a long, off-white cloak with matching trousers and carrying a big bundle of bananas. She’s holding them up against her face so that you can’t see her features. This tells me she’s a chronicler—that her face is not important, but her story is. I really look forward to seeing much more from her.