Page 86 - Contemporary Art and Old Masters

GREGG BORDOWITZ: JOSEPH E. YOAKUM:

I WANNA BE WELL WHAT I SAW

MoMA PS1 The Museum of Modern Art

I Wanna Be Well, the first comprehensive overview of the
New York artist’s prodigious and influential career. Born in
Brooklyn and raised primarily in Queens, Gregg Bordowitz
(American, b. 1964) has been living with HIV for more than half
of his adult life, and transformed his art practice in the mid-
1980s in response to the AIDS public health crisis. Working
with New York’s ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and
several video collectives that he co-founded, he organized and
documented protests against government inaction, advocating
for health education and harm reduction. During this time,
Bordowitz created remarkable video portraits of himself and
others living with the disease, often using his “personal history
as a way to tell a story shared by many.

Installation view of Gregg Bordowitz Drive (2002/2019/2021) in exhibition
Gregg Bordowitz: I Wanna Be Well on view at MoMA PS1 from May 13 to
Joseph E. Yoakum (American, 1891 – 1972). Grizzly Gulch Valley Ohansburg
October 11, 2021. Image courtesy MoMA PS1. Photo: Kyle Knodel
Vermont, n.d.. Black ballpoint pen and watercolor on paper. 7 7/8 × 9 7/8″ (20
× 25.1 cm). Gift of the Raymond K. Yoshida Living Trust and Kohler Foundation,
Inc. 1793.2012. Photo: Robert Gerhardt.

The Museum of Modern Art announces Joseph E. Yoakum:
What I Saw, the first major museum exhibition of the artist’s
work in over 25 years, on view at MoMA from November 28,
2021, through March 19, 2022. At age 71, Joseph Yoakum
(1891–1972) began making idiosyncratic, poetic landscape
drawings of the places he had traveled over the course of
his life, creating some 2,000 extraordinary works that bear
little resemblance to the world we know. This exhibition is
comprised of over 100 of those works, predominantly from
the collections of the artists in Chicago who knew him and
nstallation view of Gregg Bordowitz Pestsäule (after Erwin Thorn) (2021) in admired and supported his work.
exhibition Gregg Bordowitz: I Wanna Be Well on view at MoMA PS1 from May
13 to October 11, 2021. Image courtesy MoMA PS1. Photo: Kyle Knodell
Yoakum was born in Ash Grove, Missouri (despite his own
later claim that Window Rock, Arizona, was his birthplace)
just 25 years after the end of the Civil War. He left home as
a child to work with several popular traveling circuses, and
this took him across the United States and abroad, as did
his service in an all - African American noncombat unit in
Europe during World War I. Yoakum’s familiarity with far-
flung landscapes, then, was real; he claimed to have visited
every continent except Antarctica. These travels, paired
with a worldview informed by religious faith and the tenets
of Christian Science, shaped his artistic vision. “Wherever
my mind led me, I would go,” Yoakum once said. “I’ve been
all over this world four times.”

86 WORLD of ART