How does one begin to tell — or unravel — the story of Agnes Martin (1912–2004), one of modern art’s most original and self-effacing artists, especially when so many aspects of her personal history are shrouded in mystery, misinformation, myth and misunderstanding?
Edward M. Gómez
Edward M. Gómez is a graphic designer, critic, arts journalist, and author or co-author of numerous books about art and design subjects, including Le dictionnaire de la civilisation japonaise, Yes: Yoko Ono, and The Art of Adolf Wölfli: St. Adolf-Giant-Creation. He has written for the New York Times, Art in America, the Brooklyn Rail, Salon, Reforma (Mexico), the Japan Times (Japan), and other publications. Edward is the senior editor of Raw Vision, the London-based, international, outsider-art magazine. He is based in New York and London.
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“The Curator,” an Art World Fantasy: Excerpts
The Curator woke up one morning to the alarming realization that she understood nothing about art and that it was possible that she would never understand anything about art.
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MoMA’s ‘One Woman Show’: Now, the Ballad of Yoko
Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971, an exhibition that opens tomorrow at the Museum of Modern Art, examines in depth the early work and ideas of a well-known, influential Fluxus and multimedia artist.
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The Swinging Sixties’ Grooviest Art Dealer: In London, Remembering Robert Fraser
LONDON — Looking back at history, one encounters certain individuals who reflect the changing attitudes, social values, or cultural trends of their times, while certain others seem to define and embody them; they’re the ones who become the symbols of the spirit of an age.
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Wölfli’s World: Fifty Shades of Grau — and Technicolor Visions
MARIA GUGGING, AUSTRIA — It’s something of a trek to the Museum Gugging, one part of a legendary arts facility that also features a gallery, bookshop, creativity atelier (where even the word “art” is too limiting) and artists’ residence — a place that has nurtured some of the most renowned talents in the world of art brut.
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From the Deep South, an Overlooked Chapter in Art History
ATLANTA — Is Bill Arnett enjoying the last laugh?
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Topless but Far From Helpless: Charlotte Moorman’s Avant-Garde Life
So-called revisionist art history has made room for numerous, formerly overlooked or ignored artists in Western Civ’s recognized canon, but what is that establishment narrative to make of a big-boned Southern gal who played avant-garde cello in the nude while submerged in a Plexiglas tank filled with river water?
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Donna Sharrett’s Art of History, Remembrance and Time
Donna Sharrett’s work is both emblematic of its time and difficult to classify.
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“George,” the Maciunas Film: An Emerging Portrait of an Influential Enigma
The Lithuanian-born, New York-based American artist, graphic designer, architect, urban-housing activist, and art-culture-and-society visionary George Maciunas (1931–1978) is best remembered as the conceiver and self-appointed leader of Fluxus.
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André Robillard Takes Aim at Cast-off Junk — and the Stars
In Europe, the self-taught French artist André Robillard is one of the best-recognized practitioners of this kind of art-making, although his achievements are still not so well known in the US, even among aficionados of outsider or self-taught art.
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The Topic Is Change, and Artist Robert Waters Sweats It Out
TOKYO — Robert Waters is a 40-year-old Canadian conceptual artist who was born and brought up near Toronto. Later he lived in Mexico City, where he explored the rituals, beliefs and symbols associated with colonial and post-colonial Mexico’s variety of Roman Catholicism.
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Explosive Drawing: Susan King’s Mash-ups, Strange Landscapes, and Other Worlds
Very few creations are as hard to pin down as those produced by the most original self-taught artists, who primarily make their art for themselves rather than for the market or the public.