#Aliza Nisenbaum

[thunderstruck9]

Aliza Nisenbaum (Mexican, 1977), Mis Cuatro Gracias (Brendan, Camilo, Carlos, Jorge) [My Four Graces (Brendan, Camilo, Carlos, Jorge)], 2018. Oil on linen, 75 x 95 in.

[theaskew]

Aliza Nisenbaum (Mexican b. 1977, lives and works in New York City), Neena dreams of DJing, 2021. Oil on canvas, 63 x 57 in. | 162.6 x 144.8 cm.

[weepingwidar]

Aliza Nisenbaum (Mexican, 1977) - Pink Bouquet (2022)

[anniekoh]

elsewhere on the internet: jewish currents

Jewish Currents has consistently published articles that I think about for days afterwards. Here are a few pieces from recent issues.

Can Tourist Be Liberatory

Raphael Magarik: People often think of tourism as shallow, consumerist, and apolitical. How is solidarity tourism different? Jennifer Lynn Kelly: In solidarity tourism, guides educate tourists about their context, their conditions, and their freedom struggles. In each of the tours considered in my book—which range from the week-long tours across historic Palestine, to day tours of cities or villages in the West Bank, to two-hour tours in the eastern part of occupied Jerusalem or in West Jerusalem—guides focus on the history of Palestinian displacement and provide an alternative to Zionist narratives. For example, on bus tours through the West Bank, guides will point to sprawling Palestinian terraces and explain how Palestinians have always cared for the land. In doing so, they are intervening in the Zionist idea that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land.” By assembling these kinds of itineraries, the guides are pressing tourism into the service of anti-colonial work.

JLK: Tourism often aspires toward authenticity: unfettered access to an unscripted world. That is a consumerist desire. Solidarity tourism is not exempt from this tendency, but it reveals and subverts the script of tourists’ expectations. For instance, in the book I talk about a moment where a tourist was looking at a blackened wall in Nablus and asked, “What happened here?” And the tour guide said, “Someone was spray painting their bed frame.” In these moments, tour guides are interrupting tourists’ desire for a narration of violence and only violence.

RM: The Israeli siege of Gaza essentially renders in-person tourism impossible. How do guides respond to this problem? JLK: In Gaza, some guides might walk tourists virtually through their space and answer questions about their conditions. Others use recorded snippets to create a hypothetical tour where they say, “If you were to take a walking tour in Gaza City, here is where I would take you.” There are also virtual tours that help visitors imagine a vibrant, thriving tourism industry in Gaza after liberation. Like solidarity tourism, these virtual experiences are a true refiguring of tourism. The result is not just a camera leading tourists through a space but an exercise in imagining liberation.

Portraits of Encounter

Aliza Nisenbaum’s exhibition at the Queens Museum is bookended by a pair of paintings that create an echo. At one end hangs La Talaverita, Sunday Morning NY Times (2016), in which a teenage girl and her father read the paper on a couch.

...

“The best portrait painters working today introduce something new into art not through stylistic innovations, but by whom they choose as subjects,” Dushko Petrovich wrote in an article that discusses Nisenbaum’s work published in T Magazine in 2018. Certainly, there’s gratification in seeing marginalized people get the kind of sumptuous treatment they receive in Nisenbaum’s paintings. But reading Nisenbaum primarily through the lens of representation elides important aspects of her practice—for example, she paints dancers and flowers, and she gets as animated about color as she does about her subjects.

Portraiture gives Nisenbaum a framework in which to encounter other people. In this she’s like the artist Alice Neel, who famously canonized friends, neighbors, and art-world figures in portraits so penetrating, they can be uncomfortable to look at. Neel called herself a “collector of souls”; Nisenbaum, by contrast, seems less interested in baring people’s true selves on canvas than in capturing something of their profound unknowability. Her subjects are often lost in thought or activity, like Marissa in La Talaverita and Pedacito de Sol. Others are immersed in settings filled with material culture—like Andra, a facilities staffer at the Queens Museum whom Nisenbaum depicts in his office,

She also developed a policy of compensating sitters. Before she was selling her work, she would cook for them and give them their finished paintings. (These small gestures of care sometimes yielded significant results; during the Covid-19 pandemic, when they were struggling with unemployment, Marissa and her mother were able to sell two early Nisenbaum pieces to Anton Kern Gallery, which represents the artist.) Now that there is a market for her work, Nisenbaum pays her subjects, and donates to organizations that are somehow aligned with the people she’s depicting in a given project. In the case of the current exhibition, that’s the La Jornada and Queens Museum Cultural Food Pantry, which takes place at the museum every Wednesday.

Such practices build on Levinas’s idea of an ethics grounded in the face-to-face encounter. In the process, they help Nisenbaum mitigate the exploitation that has been a hallmark of art history, especially when the people being portrayed come from groups on the margins of society. But beyond payment, Nisenbaum is interested in mutual relationships as both a standard and a subject. For example, the exhibition includes a large painting of the pantry titled Eloina, Angie, Abril y Marleny, Despensa de Alimentos, Queens Museum (2023). It’s a vertiginous scene of flattened perspective in which produce, volunteers, and “shoppers” form a sweeping, colorful loop of activity.

Bad Memory

an editorial column written by members of the Jewish Currents staff and reflects a collective discussion.

Germany is acclaimed for its efforts to atone for the Holocaust. But its method of repudiating the past has become a tool of exclusion.

..

To show itself fit to enter the community of Western European nations, a new, reunified Germany set out to prove, over the next two decades, that it had sufficiently repented. Germans even coined a new word—Vergangenheitsbewältigung—to name the process of “coming to terms with the past” that has become a linchpin of German national identity. Seeking to bolster its claim to penitence, the newly reunified country trumpeted a “Jewish renaissance” driven largely by immigration from the former Soviet Union—an influx of Jews that, as the scholar Hannah Tzuberi has put it, became the “most valuable guarantor of [Germany’s] democratic, liberal, tolerant character.”

[rihaaish]

"Neena dreams of DJing" by Aliza Nisenbaum (2021), oil on canvas

[oldsardens]

Aliza Nisenbaum - Tumbao de Omambo. 2020

[sheltiechicago]

Pedacito de Sol (Vero y Marissa), 2022, oil on canvas, 75 × 95 inches.

Aliza Nisenbaum

Paintings of the individual and the community.

Photos by Thomas Barratt.

Eloina, Angie, Emma, Abril y Marleny, Despensa de Alimentos, Queens Museum, 2023, oil on canvas, two panels: 95 × 75 inches each.

El Taller, Queens Museum, 2023, oil on canvas, two panels: 95 × 75 inches each.

[abwwia]

Portrait of Aliza Nisenbaum (b. 1977, Mexico City). Photo credit to Brad Ogbonna/ Courtesy of Vogue.

Aliza Nisenbaum, "Tumbao de Omambo" (2020). Oil on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Anton Kern Gallery.

source & more HERE

[quo-usque-tandem]

Susan, Aarti, Keerthana and Princess, Sunday in Brooklyn 2018 by Aliza Nisenbaum

[obsessioncollector]

Aliza Nisenbaum, Yessi (2014)

[rob-art]

Aliza Nisenbaum

[thunderstruck9]

Aliza Nisenbaum (Mexican, 1977), Dálida and Michael (Serenata del Tres Cubano) from Aquí Se Puede (Here You Can), 2021. Oil on canvas, 64 x 57 in.

[ehleeze]

Aliza Nisenbaum

Aliza Nisenbaum (b.1977, Mexico) is a New York based painter best known for her portrayal of human stories. With her magically exuberant color palette, she paints people, individually or in groups, with their countenance, posture, and immediate surroundings organically composed to depict their humanity.

Jenna and Moises, 2018

Bodies, with their color and their nuance and their materiality, are so different in person than on social media,” the Mexican painter Aliza Nisenbaum told me last month, in her Harlem studio. She was putting the finishing touches on a group portrait of the staff at the Kern gallery, where her exhibition of taut and tender pictures must be seen in person to be fully appreciated. Nisenbaum spends hours painting people from life, an intimate process with social-justice roots: the artist met her first sitters in Queens, in 2012, while teaching English at Immigrant Movement International, a community center founded by the Cuban artist-activist Tania Bruguera. The first picture that greets visitors is the kaleidoscopic “Jenna and Moises,” from 2018, a portrait of art and civics intertwined: Jenna is both a salsa dancer and an immigration attorney. Still, as the Marxist Mexican muralist Diego Rivera wrote, "Every good composition is above all a work of abstraction." As politically minded as Nisenbaum is, her work is also about the sheer joy of color, pattern, and perception.

— Andrea K. Scott

installation view, Tales of Manhattan, Anton Kern Gallery, 2021

[weepingwidar]

Aliza Nisenbaum (Mexican, 1977) - Tumbao de Omambo (2020)

[terminusantequem]

Aliza Nisenbaum (Mexican, b. 1977), Ximena and Randy, Sunrise, 2018. Oil on linen, 64 x 57 in.

[huariqueje]

Jenna , Friday Night in Brookling  -   Aliza Nisenbaum, 2019.

Mexican, b. 1977-

Oil on canvas, 64 x 57 in    162.6 x 144.8 cm.