“I Saw Stars”

By Holland Cotter

This wry group show is a mild acid bath for a strain of swoony celebrity worship in recent art. A couple of stars actually do appear. Janeane Garofalo is one, seen in Alyson Levy’s ”Parent Trap”-type photographic tableaus. Another is the Mexican comedian Enrique Cuenca, in a daffy video by Miguel Calderon.

Larry Krone, who harbors ambitions to be a country-western luminary, takes a star turn with a personal fashion statement: a full suit of denim cowpoke gear with glittery chaps, floret buttons and a designer label reading, ”Made with tender loving care by the tender Big Lar.” It’s some kind of major.

Momenta Art
72 Berry Street
Williamsburg,
Brooklyn
Through June 5

The New York Times
May 19, 2000
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company

“Representing” Investigates Provocative Images

By Phyllis Braff

Designed as a project that would allow high school students to work with two guest curators, Katherine Gass and Ingrid Schaffner, this theme show investigates provocative art images, develops a
contemporary analytical sensibility, and brings to the Parrish a broad range of pieces by a number of major artists as it fleshes out the exhibition’s subtitle, ”A Show of Identities.”

The exhibition’s title derives from the language of youth culture, in which the word representing means showing what you stand for. It is not surprising that figures in many selections appear to be posturing or somehow giving overt signals. In some of the more complicated examples, photographs by Cindy Sherman, Alix Lambert and Larry Krone, the costumed artist is assuming an adopted role. Among works that are more direct psychological probings, Eve Fowler’s color photograph of a female participant in a traditional male sport is particularly striking.

Parrish Art Museum,
25 Job’s Lane, Southampton.
Through April 27

The New York Times
April 27, 2000
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company

“Deterritorialization of Process”

By Holland Cotter

The artists in this group show, organized by Michael Joo, are united in their low-tech, even homely approach to what was once the high-concept terrain of the systematic in art.

Larry Krone, for example, writes out the moony lyrics of country-and-western love songs in separately framed words shaped from strands of human hair.

Artists Space
38 Greene Street
Through March 25

The New York Times
March 17, 2000
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company

A Country Kick (in the Ribs)

An exhibition commemorating the 20 years of PS 122, a nonprofit gallery and performance center in a former elementary school at 150 First Avenue (Ninth Street), will be on display at a benefit for the gallery. Larry Krone and Family, a group of performance artists, will put on a country and western parody.

October 17, 1999
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company

Fine Art and Outsiders: Attacking the Barriers

By Roberta Smith

There’s something to be said for an exhibition that bites off more than it can possibly chew, even when it grabs from as many different plates as “A Labor of Love,” the latest exegesis in museological chaos from the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Organized by Marcia Tucker, the founding director of the museum, this exhibition has the imaginative yet injudicious sprawl that Ms. Tucker has honed into something of a curatorial style.

Ms. Tucker’s entirely admirable aim in “A Labor of Love” is to deliver further blows to the barriers that have traditionally divided fine art from the work of so-called outsiders — be they self-taught folk artists, prison inmates or mental patients — and especially from the crafts. These barriers have been crumbling for most of this century, but their deterioration has gained pace over the last three decades with the elevation to important-artist status of such figures as the turn-of-the-century American ceramist George Ohr and outsiders like Adolf Wolfli, Martin Ramirez and Henry Darger.

Many things catch the eye here: the minuscule figures that Tom Emerson fashions from bits of debris (not unlike Donald Lipski’s early work); the more glamorously attired beaded figures, also small, by Larry Krone, and a radically scaled-down man’s suit by Charles LeDray, its violently shredded lower regions creating a frightening aura.

New Museum of Contemporary Art,
583 Broadway
Through April 14.

February 9, 1996
Copyright 1996 The New York Times Company

Selections: Fall ‘94 Installations

By Holland Cotter

It is possible to see this attractive show of installation-size works on paper by four young artists as being about the traditional uses of drawing writ large, whether in the form the abstract expressive line, the geometric grid, the outline of the figure, or the written word.

Drawing’s potential for intimacy and self-revelation — perhaps it’s most appealing function — is nicely touched on in Larry Krone’s two contributions, each of which copies out the lyrics of a pop love song, with individual words placed on separate sheets of paper. No big deal, really, except that each word, “written” in classic if slightly shaky Palmer Method, is formed from a few strands of the artist’s hair: making drawing from the head as well as from the heart, in other words.

The Drawing Center
35 Wooster Street
Through Oct. 22

September 23, 1994
Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company