The Chazen Museum of Art in Wisconsin didn’t quite know what to do with a controversial emancipation statue of Abraham Lincoln in its collection until Sanford Biggers stepped in with an idea.
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.
Posted inArt
For William Kentridge, Art and Life Animate One Another
In an exhibition that consists of mostly small-scale black and white works on paper, viewer engagement almost magically awakens the sleepy room.
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The Joyous Kitsch and Lingering Simmer of Nick Cave’s Art
With explosions of color and materiality, Cave has his own enigmatic ways to funnel the funk through histories of adversity.
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A Barbara Kruger Retrospective Mixes Capitalism and its Critique
Kruger never seemed to mind that the very world she critiqued co-opted her style and spit it back into advertising.
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Adventure and Spirituality Collide in Joseph E. Yoakum’s Visionary Art
Yoakum had said repeatedly that the drawings were “spiritual unfoldments,” meaning that faith guided his patterns and passages.
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The Triumphant Tangles of Christina Quarles’s Canvases
In Quarles’s paintings, boundaries dissolve as the artist grinds up the fixed binaries of Black/white or male/female.
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Alice Neel’s Haunting Portrait of Domestic Abuse
Alice Neel: People Come First yielded a work I had never seen and that I will never unsee.
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A New Home for Immersive Artists’ Environments at the Kohler Art Preserve
Part of the John Michael Kohler Art Center, the new institution celebrates the ingenuity of a long undervalued form of art making.
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Bisa Butler’s Worlds in Cut Cloth
Birds and airplanes soar, horses gallop, purples meet yellows, cerulean blues tango with magenta in geometric patterns, foliate designs crash into damask.
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Avedon’s Father, My Mother, and Processing Death
People say you should talk to the dying to reassure them, but words felt too pedestrian for this profound space of transition.
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Raphaël Barontini’s Slick and Stylish Historic Inversions
Interjecting the power poses of Western art history with heroic Black revolutionary figures from the Caribbean, Barontini’s work manages to be seductive yet also ceremonial.
