Interview
Beer with a Painter: Rebecca Morris
I heard Rebecca Morris speak earlier this year in Chicago, and was struck by how she discussed becoming an abstractionist at a time when both abstraction and painting were under attack.
Jennifer Samet
Jennifer Samet is an art historian based in New York City and the Hudson Valley.
Interview
Beer with a Painter: David Humphrey
What I hoped to get from talking to David Humphrey were answers. The images in his paintings are zany, raunchy, and wild: a girl in a lawn chair holding monkeys by their scalps; a woman absent-mindedly marking another woman’s buttocks with daubs of paint; cats sitting beside slices of white bread pa
Interview
Beer with a Painter: Todd Bienvenu
Todd Bienvenu’s studio is filled with stacks: art books on the floor, paintings leaning against the wall. Bienvenu’s work deals with omnivorous appetites – for company, pleasure, fun, music.
Interview
Beer with a Painter: Eric Aho
When I first met Eric Aho in New Hampshire two summers ago, we were sitting in the grass in front of the bakery at Orchard Hill Farm. We bonded over the best bread in the world (really!) made by his former student at the Putney School, and the next day I visited his studio, just across the Vermont b
Interview
Beer with a Painter: Jenny Dubnau
In Jenny Dubnau’s Long Island City studio is a vertical mirror with adhesive stenciled letters spelling out the name “Jennifer.”
Art
Shape Shifting and Body Politics: Amy Sillman at Bard College
Considering that I had always thought of Amy Sillman as an abstract painter, I was surprised to encounter, after seeing her mid-career retrospective at the Hessel Museum of Bard College, an oeuvre that was entirely about the body, touch, and the awkwardness of human interaction.
Interview
Beer with a Painter: Catherine Murphy
When I arrived at Catherine Murphy’s home in Poughkeepsie, New York, I was led down a long outdoor path to her studio. Murphy was working on a painting of a pie crust; she asked her assistant to put the dough on ice while she spoke with me.
Interview
Beer with a Painter: Graham Nickson
Graham Nickson and I met in his offices at the New York Studio School, where he has been Dean since 1988. There was a pointed severity to our meeting-place, which offered no distractions from the task at hand.
Art
The Opulence of Restraint: Robert De Niro, Sr.
It is hard to imagine a more striking presentation of the life and work of Robert De Niro, Sr. (1922–1993) than the current exhibition of his work at DC Moore Gallery and the documentary, Remembering the Artist Robert De Niro, Sr., which premiered on HBO June 9.
Interview
Beer with a Painter: Mark Greenwold
I was surprised when Mark Greenwold gave me his address, because it was, like my own apartment, in “upstate Manhattan,” a far remove from the center of the art world.
Interview
Beer with a Painter: Josephine Halvorson
Josephine Halvorson and I met on a late winter day when the chill was starting to melt, and talked over omelettes at the window of the Red Cat in Chelsea. It was early on a weekday, the restaurant felt quietly elegant, the light outdoors mellowed by cloud cover. As Halvorson noted, even the potatoes
Interview
Beer with a Painter: Chris Martin
A couple of years ago, I heard Chris Martin give a talk to Columbia MFA students. Rather than the standard artist’s slide lecture, Martin brought along his conga drums and a small band, a girl wearing a metallic dress and carrying a boom box, and a couple of people who tore sheets from a book of Ita