“Chris Ofili: Night and Day” Exhibit at New Museum Proves Shocking, Thrilling

WASHINGTON SQUARE NEWS 
By Alex Greenberger

Chris Ofili's new show, "Chris Ofili: Night and Day," featuring colorful
and jarring paintings, can be found in the New Museum. (Alex Greenberger)

NEW YORK---“Chris Ofili: Night and Day,” the New Museum’s retrospective of the controversial British artist, opens with a shock to the system, the kind that makes it easy to forget that the rest of the exhibition even exists. In a classic moment in New York art history, former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani temporarily pulled city funding from the Brooklyn Museum after it showed Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” (1996) in its 1999 show “Sensation.” The work of art, like any of the paintings in this gallery, is still sensational today. It depicts a familiar personage — the blue-robed Virgin Mary, shown with her left breast exposed, depicted just as any Renaissance painter might have done it. It is not outlandish, however, to say no Renaissance artist would have painted the Virgin Mary as a black mother figure. The New Museum’s exciting show is proof that Ofili cannot be pigeonholed into being a black artist who makes art about race. It may be less interesting when he leaves the topic he is known for, but “Night and Day” is nothing less than thrilling. [link]