In Soles of My People, Khari Turner channels elements of Midwestern waterways into figures awash with global histories of triumph and struggle.
Author Archives: Debra Brehmer
Debra Brehmer is a writer and art historian who runs a contemporary gallery called Portrait Society in Milwaukee, WI. She is especially interested in how portraits convey meaning.
The Last Tourist in Assisi
A writer reflects on Giotto, St. Francis, and what it means to have faith amid a pandemic.
The Transcendent, Spiritual Fiber Art of Lenore Tawney
More than 40 textile works dating from the 1950s to her death in 2007, at age 100, float in the artist’s retrospective at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.
A Show of Saccharine, Seductive Greeting Card Paintings Sponsored by Deep Conservatism
William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Belle Epoque paintings suggest that anything can be bought as a balm against the harsh conditions and human expense required to build America.
Envisioning Inclusive, Soulful Spaces for Artists
Can the terms of the art world really change from competitive creative genius to notions of collective power and proximity?
Portraits that Feel Like Chance Encounters and Hazy Recollections
Nathaniel Quinn’s first museum solo show features work which suggests that reality might best be recognized by its disjunctions rather than by single-point perspective.
Dorothea Tanning’s Surrealist Depictions of Women’s Pain
Overshadowed in her lifetime by her famous husband, Max Ernst, the American painter gets a major retrospective in Madrid.
Kiki Smith Makes a Subversive Sculpture of Alice in Wonderland at the Foot of a Skyscraper
Outdoor sculpture should not be an addendum but an interruption, an incongruity, a hole piercing the day’s fabric.
William Kentridge’s Real and Metaphorical Cages Illuminate a Protest on Deportation
How interesting that William Kentridge envisioned the cage as the equivalent of a piece of luggage or a goat, something that we cannot leave behind.
How Kerry James Marshall Rewrites Art History
CHICAGO — When he studied art history in the 1970s in Los Angeles, Kerry James Marshall was struck by the absence of black artists in the “canon.”
Carl Andre, Museum Etiquette, and Me
MILWAUKEE — As I look at this photograph of myself, lying flat with arms outstretched on the Carl Andre, I wonder about my violation of museum etiquette.
Reckoning with Pop Art’s Irrepressible Popularity
CHICAGO — Three major exhibitions devoted to Pop art that opened last year broadened the purview of this movement as a primarily Western (American) phenomenon by unearthing lesser-known artists to provide a global view of art in the 1960s and ‘70s.