In Quarles’s paintings, boundaries dissolve as the artist grinds up the fixed binaries of Black/white or male/female.
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.
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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.
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Tender, Yet Monumental Figures Crafted From the Tides
In Soles of My People, Khari Turner channels elements of Midwestern waterways into figures awash with global histories of triumph and struggle.
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The Last Tourist in Assisi
A writer reflects on Giotto, St. Francis, and what it means to have faith amid a pandemic.
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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.
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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.
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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?