Guadalupe Maravilla’s first New York museum show resolutely harnesses the otherness of illness, while never surrendering to the notion of suffering as a totalizing narrative.
Ela Bittencourt
Ela Bittencourt is a critic and cultural journalist, currently based in São Paulo. She writes on art, film and literature, often in the context of social issues and politics.
Posted inArt
Building an Art Community From the Ashes of Destructivism
Ortiz’s radical approach to art led from unleashing of aggression through ritualistic performances to political engagement and the founding of El Museo del Barrio.
Posted inArt
Lorraine O’Grady Still Won’t Play It Safe
Much like her writing, O’Grady’s photomontages pressure binaries until something other, something “both/and” emerges.
Posted inArt
Mary Beth Edelson Celebrated the Goddess Within
Edelson followed the hunch that if women artists didn’t create this history for themselves, no one would.
Posted inArt
A Spirit of Confident Feminism at Salon Zürcher
The small New York art fair celebrated its 26th edition with the works of 11 women artists.
Posted inArt
Cosmos and Earth Collide in Pier Paolo Calzolari’s Alchemical Art
In Calzolari’s recent paintings, organic and metaphysical forces are one: vapors are rudimentary atmospheric gas particles, but they also signify wonder and bliss.
Posted inArt
Marina Abramović Is Suspended Between Self-Sacrifice and Spectacle
Abramović’s art embodies a dark, personal truth: one overcomes punishment through self-sacrifice, denial, turning the hurt into a weapon of liberation, at times literally bought in blood.
Posted inArt
Betsy Kaufman Puts Pressure on Geometric Abstraction
Kaufman’s sculptures can go from orderly to helter-skelter, making them seem like willful renegades from an industrial assembly line.
Posted inArt
Art as an Exercise in Moving Through Grief
What’s clear in These Conditions is artist Adelita Husni Bey’s ambition to push art to be more than an exercise in spectatorship.
Posted inArt
“Women’s Work” as an Aesthetic Provocation
While I cheered at the idea that a largely forgotten woman Dadaist was finally getting her due, I couldn’t help but wonder why the art world’s recognition of Sophie Taeuber-Arp has been so spotty.
Posted inArt
The Edgy and Lucid Video Art of Rafael França
Video art was something you watched “with the lights on,” as França insisted, without pretenses of high art.
Posted inOpinion
Remembering Jaider Esbell and How His Activism Challenged Art Institutions
Jaider Esbell showed us that future biennials will need to look to art activists and ethnic collectives not as contingent collaborators but as authoring agents.