Art Review
The Power of Making Art From a Prison Cell
A show demonstrates how deeply meaningful creative processes can be for incarcerated people and the larger public.
Brian Karl
Art
The Slouching Beast of Southern California
Alternately ominous and transcendent, Doug Aitken’s panoramic Lightscape cycles through scenes of human movement enthralled by highways and city streets.
Art
Mary Ann Peters’s Obscured Memorials to Buried Histories
More context could have resulted in greater connections between viewers and the tantalizing glimpses of profound and difficult human experiences in Peters’s art.
Art
Troy Lamarr Chew II Depicts Social Invisibility
The artist’s transparent portraits reveal the larger forces of culture and society that define and marginalize his Brown and Black subjects.
Art
David Bayus’s AI-Infused Gender Burlesque
The artist unspools a playful and dark-edged narrative that refracts art deco and noir melodrama through the late-modern styles of video games, manga, and fantasy.
Art
A Portrait of Martin Wong Between Text and Image
SAN FRANCISCO — Curated by students of the Curatorial Studies program at the California College of the Arts, this compact, well-considered gathering of work across many media by Martin Wong is a marvel of what the small-scale and seemingly ephemeral can communicate.
Art
Mass Surveillance Hidden in Plain Sight
SAN FRANCISCO — It’s been two centuries since Jeremy Bentham introduced the panopticon into structures of confinement and surveillance, including penitentiaries and mental institutions.
Art
Alec Soth's Photographs Mine the Margins of the US
SAN FRANCISCO — Alec Soth’s latest multi-year investigation of life in the hinterlands of the United States is a refined version of the now venerable notion of the photographic road trip.
Art
Underpaid Labor at the Art Show
My friend was trying to convince me the other day that $20 was not an unreasonable amount for a museum to ask visitors to pay. We were standing in the lobby of the Whitney shortly after the Biennial had opened, and maybe I was having none of it simply because I was feeling snarky while remembering p