Dennis Hollingsworth

Aaron and Sharon in NYC

Dear friends since grad school, Aaron Parazette & Sharon Engelstein, now favorite Houston artists, visited us in NYC during the week before we flew to Spain. We made the rounds of the art scene as the weather shifted from the dregs of an offshore hurricane to the near perfect and slid after that into the heat-baked during the final days of their stay.

What did we see? A few notes on the fly: Some of us saw Kara Walker and some of us were caught up with another rendezvous as we sort of waited in a line that wound more than six blocks to get into the former Domino Sugar factory. Jeff Koons at the Whitney: I thought it was overstuffed, it could have used a tighter installation, as if there was too much anxiety in showing all that was special about him; and there was the complicated issue of how to treat his shadow years with Cicciolina, which was tucked in a too discrete corner as if there was some lingering shame to it. Either champion or erase it, one or the other. MoMA's Sigmar Polke and Ligia Clark: there's always something to learn with every visit, Polke seems more modernist every time I see the exhibition and Clark is a study of how hard edge abstraction could spin off into a near cult-like version of another Expanded Field.