Seven museums, seven deadly sins.
Seven members of the Fairfield/Westchester Museum Alliance in Connecticut and New York are presenting a joint exhibit, “The Seven Deadly Sins.” Each museum has been assigned one of the classic pathways to eternal damnation — pride, wrath, envy, lust, greed, gluttony and sloth — and has been allowed to interpret them all in a manner of each curator’s choosing.
None of the exhibits remotely resembles the others. Sinful interpretations encompass the classical and contemporary, representational and abstract, in a variety of media and an assortment of attitudes. For examle, one, focusing on Sloth, is just fearlessly goofy.
Exhibition schedules vary at each museum. Some exhibits have been open for a while and close soon. Others open soon and will continue for several months. But for one week, July 19 to 26, all seven shows will be open. Choose your favorite sins and head out for a fun summer museum road trip.
PRIDE
Pride is well-situated at Bruce Museum in Greenwich, a town perceived by many as an epicenter of overweening hubris. The elegant show is framed by royal-purple walls and low lighting that both preserves the works on paper and “sets a tone of turpitude,” said co-curator Amanda Skehan.
Depictions of egotism from 1498 to the present show recurring themes of peacock motifs and mirror-gazing women. Gabriel Schachinger’s lovely 1886 oil “Sweet Reflections” has both. The model’s enigmatic assessment of herself encapsulates the question at the root of the exhibit. “Why is pride a sin? Aren’t you supposed to be proud? If you look pretty isn’t that a good thing?” said co-curator Susan Ball. “Where do you find the line between healthy self-esteem and arrogant self-aggrandizement?”
Imagery illustrating pride in Renaissance-era printmaking includes Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit and Phaeton and Icarus falling from the skies to their deaths after their misbehavior in the heavens. Gustave Doré and M.C. Escher contribute depictions of the ultimate Biblical story of pride: the construction of the Tower of Babel.
Pride is usually represented with primarily female images, but some artists frame pride from a male perspective. These, however, often result in men taking on non-masculine attributes. Honoré Daumier’s hilarious 1834 caricature of a self-important journalist whom Daumier hated showed the man as a fat woman in a low-cut gown. “Pride,” an egg-tempera work created in 1945 by gay artist Paul Cadmus, who lived in Weston, depicts a visually repellent hermaphrodite.
Vice in various forms is shown in an adults-only video, by Antoine Roegiers of Belgium. The 18-minute continuous loop co-opts images from Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Breugel to illustrate all seven deadly sins. The violent, funny, scatological and sexual display is worth multiple viewings to catch all the various monstrous permutations of evil. The “Madagascar” exhibit in the science gallery will keep kids entertained while grown-ups indulge in this mesmerizing bit of sin.
WRATH
Unlike Pride, Wrath seems an unlikely subject for its venue. Wave Hill, a peaceful 28-acre public garden, overlooks the Hudson River and the Palisades in The Bronx, N.Y. Visitors outdoors can while away a summer’s day taking in the view or admiring the landscaping. But inside Wave Hill’s gallery, all hell breaks loose. Curator Jennifer McGregor chose contemporary artists focusing on violent changes in the natural world, often worsened by human intervention.
Decay is the theme of Jon Rappleye’s acrylic and spray paint-on-paper drawings, which show human beings in stages of rot, skeletons with mottled flesh and bones turning into wood inhabited by vermin. Julie Heffernan’s fantastical oils depict worlds carrying on after a seeming apocalypse, with snapping wolves and heavily armed survivors. Brian Adam Douglas’ painstakingly applied painted paper collages portray the chaos following a flood.
Tameka Norris’ “Bernadine,” a tattered, painted quilt, evokes the destruction of Hurricane Katrina. Anne Peabody’s “Wildfire” envelops a marble fireplace with sculpted copper, wood and glass flames. Diane Burko’s oils-on-canvas are based on aerial views of a volcano and a polar cyclone.
The destructive power of ocean storms are suggested, rather than spelled out, in Brian Novatny’s oil-on-shellacked paper paintings of maritime disasters. Alexis Rockman’s oils-on-paper picture nondescript landscapes loomed over by inexplicable oncoming cataclysms.
McGregor says interpretations may vary in how to construe all this. “Is this the wrath of God? Is God angry at us? Or at the world?” she said. “Nature is provoking us. Have we provoked nature?”
ENVY
At the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, N.Y., Envy is different from the “Wrath” exhibit in that it bears no resemblance to the ravages of the real world. The museum places its chosen misdeed in a milieu where it thrives robustly: fairy tales. Photographs by Adrien Broom, whose studio is in New Haven, depict heroines, heroes, villains and villainesses of classic folklore about stepsisters, stepmothers, servants and brothers who resent what others have.
Despite this, covetousness is not easy to interpret visually. “Of all the sins, it’s the most internal, a psychological state,” said Bart Bland, who curated the show and conceived the idea for the entire seven-exhibit collaboration. “Envy is smoldering and disguised. It’s often considered the most feminine of sins, the distaff version of wrath.”
Broom’s world is more startling than in the Disneyfied versions of these tales. Broom’s sources are the original stories by the Brothers Grimm and others, whose content is often more, well, grim. Snow White watches emotionlessly as the Evil Queen is tortured and killed as punishment for her jealousy. Beauty’s sisters, who urged her to forsake the Beast, are turned into stone pillars at the gate of Beauty’s home, forced to bear witness to their despised sister’s lifetime of joy. Cinderella’s sisters cut off parts of their feet to try to fit into the slipper and almost succeed in fooling the prince.
Nonetheless, as in Disney stories, spite never wins. Even if it takes years, innocence triumphs, as in the lesser-known tale of “The Goose Girl.” Her beheaded, enchanted horse rescues his mistress and seals the fate of her deceitful servant, who is put in a barrel full of nails and rolled until she is dead.
LUST
Lust is sure to be a popular exhibit, given the ubiquitousness of Internet porn. Visitors have only until July 26 to see this show, before Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill, N.Y., turns out the lights on its artistic exploration of sexual excess. No one younger than 18 is admitted to the second-floor exhibit. A tamer, more family-friendly show, “Love: The First of the 7 Virtues,” is on view on the first floor.
Licentiousness mixes with violence, politics and paranoia in Entang Wiharso’s fascinating brass wall sculpture “I Want to Live 100 Years,” which shows a jumble of human and animal bodies, some aggressors, some victims, some looking with three eyes for what’s coming around the corner.
Larry Clark’s photo series of young people shooting heroin and sharing beds show a different kind of lust. “The people are nude, but they are more concerned with the drugs than with their bodies,” said curator Livia Strauss.
Strauss said the exhibit focuses on the violent and funny aspects of lust, and on “the narrow boundary between lust and love, how some things, in the context of a loving relationship, would be called passion, not lust.” Violence is seen in a Cindy Sherman photograph of broken-up dolls in sexualized positions. Ashley Bickerton’s “The Vlaminko’s” shows a nude woman meditating serenely beside her bound-and-gagged husband.
Other artists go for humor. Keegan Kuvach placed a vibrating, moaning sofa in front of a video showing an increasingly lurid kiss. Emily Wardil’s “All the Clothes of an Imelda I Know” drapes a pair of white lacy panties over a wooden Cubist-inspired sculpture of a face. Tony Matelli’s “Ideal Woman” sculpture is a visual interpretation of an old sex joke. His “Ideal Woman” is 4 feet tall, unclothed, with huge ears, no teeth and a flat head.
GREED
Historically, Greed has been best symbolized by gold. Monarchs coveted it, conquistadors killed for it, California was founded on the lust for gold. When curators at Neuberger Museum of Art at SUNY Purchase were assigned to exhibit “Greed,” they changed the name of the show to “Gold.” That is, they imported the “Gold” exhibit from Bass Museum of Art in Miami because it perfectly exemplified their sin. “Gold, the representations of gold, the ideas about gold, shifted the vision we had of ourselves, geographically, historically, politically,” said Neuberger director Tracy Fitzpatrick.
The 24 artworks are photos of gold, items made of gold or covered in gold paint, gold lame, gold plate or gold leaf, or items made of a substance that looks like gold. A running theme is commonplace items covered in gold: a McDonald’s cup, thrift-store toys, street posters, a trash can, a newspaper. Todd Pavlisko covers a wall with 10 years’ worth of found coins, most of them pennies, plated in gold. “Gold is being used to deceive the senses, making things look way more special than they are, to something we envision as precious,” said Neuberger assistant curator Avis Larson.
Two memorable pieces are James Lee Byars’ “Golden Divan,” a gold lamé Victorian fainting couch, and Glenn Kaino’s gold-colored replica of an Olympic medal podium. Kaino’s work is accompanied by a series of altered photos of the 200-meter dash in the 1968 Mexico City games. During that medal ceremony, American gold medalist Tommie Smith and American bronze medalist John Carlos raised their gloved fists as a form of racial protest and looked down during the National Anthem, leading to condemnation nationwide by the press and the public. Kaino’s piece is a symbolic support for Smith, who collaborated with him.
Robin Rhode’s gold-plated shovel symbolizes exploited South African gold miners. But not all items have political interpretations. Sherrie Levine’s “Loulou” draws on the history of literature, creating a shiny parrot based on “A Simple Heart,” a Gustave Flaubert story about a taxidermy parrot.
GLUTTONY
Gluttony is a sin relatable by everyone in 21st-century America, obsessed as we are by ingredients, finger-wagging and scare tactics. Emilie Clark doesn’t go there. In a one-artist show at Katonah (N.Y.) Museum of Art, “The Delicacy of Decomposition,” Clark avoids judging people for what they eat, instead focusing on “food’s impact on the world, not food’s impact on you,” said Margaret Moulton, the show’s visiting curator. Clark added, “I’m not interested in a moral interpretation. I’m more interested in framing the issue than telling people what they should or shouldn’t do.”
Clark’s end result — piles and piles of food — looks a lot like a portrait of gluttony. Jars and bottles filled with rotting food waste — coffee grounds, fish, chicken bones, hot dogs, salads — cover a table and are surrounded by other detritus of months’ worth of her family’s meals: egg shells, dried citrus peels, etc., mounded on top of each other. The table is surrounded by five large abstracted watercolor drawings of other jumbles of food.
Clark said she has composted for years. But for this project, instead of throwing all organic food waste into a common pile, she separated food items into jars to get an idea of what her family eats, how much they eat, and at what times of the year. “I wanted to visually see what the waste was,” she said. “I wanted to see the little things that you don’t think about that wind up in the sink drain, like the end of the cucumber that you hack off that you really could cook, things that you waste that you don’t necessarily need to.”
Clark said assembling her installation changed the way she dealt with food. “I’ve always been a healthy eater, but it made me think. Like I was coring a zucchini, and I wondered, how am I gonna preserve the core? So I just ate it,” she said. “I’m making more soups, making broth into bones, using the whole animal. I’m more careful grocery shopping. I noticed I had a lot less leftovers in 2013 than I did in 2012.”
Ironically, the project’s theme ended up as the opposite of gluttony, Moulton said, and shares a lot with the theme of the “Wrath” exhibit. “We hope this will get people to start asking questions about life, eating, food waste, our footprint on the world, what human beings are doing to the planet.”
SLOTH
Sloth is the wrongdoing chosen by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield. “We thought it was a funny sin, something that was out of place in the modern world, with productivity and hyperactivity so prevalent,” said exhibitions director Richard Klein. Sloth opens July 19.
Laziness is not illustrated by art. Rather, Aldrich goes full interactive, urging visitors to commit the sin. (The Lust exhibit, presumably, could not take this approach.) Swedish artist Mats Bigert and Cabinet magazine editor Sina Najafi set up Bob-O-Pedic recliners in a gallery, where visitors can flop down and veg. “You can sit in a chair and watch brief videos about all the other shows,” Klein said. “We’re letting all the other curators do the work.”
Still and all, the Aldrich’s exhibit is the only “Deadly Sins” show to acknowledge the existence of the other consortium members. “We are being lazy but we really are collaborating with everyone else,” Klein said. “It’s tongue-in-cheek. We really do hope people go see the other shows.”
Sloth’s exhibit “catalog” was created by other people, too. It will be in the form of a tabloid newspaper. (The similarities between cheesy journalism and idleness can be inferred by visitors.) The catalog is filled with sound bites about inertia from famous thinkers throughout the ages.
Oscar Wilde, Henry David Thoreau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, Soren Kierkegaard, Evelyn Waugh, Gertrude Stein and others chime in on the subject. So does Mark Twain. The veteran lazybones Nutmegger wittily summed up his lifelong love of laying around doing nothing: “I am no lazier now than I was 40 years ago, but that is because I reached the limit 40 years ago. You can’t go beyond possibility.”
THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS: PRIDE, ENVY, LUST, GREED, GLUTTONY, SLOTH, WRATH: Each museum’s schedule is different. Check websites for exhibit dates, days and hours of operation and directions: brucemuseum.org, adrichart.org, wavehill.org, hrm.org, hvcca.org, katonahmuseum.org and neuberger.org.
