Joe

Wed, 11 May 2005 15:50:33 -0500

The Ofili exhibit is well worth seeing. Also worth seeing at the Studio Museum is the excellent Bill Traylor/William Edmondson exhibit upstairs.

ellen jean

Wed, 11 May 2005 09:29:56 -0500

There was elephant dung on the canvas, but it was hardly "smeared" - it was a clump on (and below?) the canvas. That's what was so irritating about this 'controversy'... From New York magazine's recent art review: The painting in question showed a black Madonna with a small dollop of elephant dung affixed to her breast. Perhaps you remember it. It caused something of a stir. In the following weeks, Ofili’s work would loose a torrent of outrage: angry pickets, sputtering sound bites, even a nut job’s crashing the museum and splashing the portrait with white paint. Most famously, Mayor Giuliani denounced the exhibit as “sick stuff”—he’d not seen it himself, but he’d read about it in a Daily News article under the headline GALLERY OF HORROR—then tried to choke off the Brooklyn Museum’s funding and shut down the show. Subsequent articles described Ofili’s painting as “smeared,” “splattered,” or, in one vivid linguistic curlicue, “festooned” with dung—escalating descriptions that, when distorted in game-of-telephone editorials across the country, made it sound as though Ofili had packed a tennis-ball machine full of wet shit and was firing it at his painting from across the room, while cackling. http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/arts/art/reviews/11877/

Gothamist: Chris Ofili Watercolors at the Studio Museum of Harlem

Joe

ellen jean