John Yau

Art

Drawings of Migration and Pandemic

In her dozens of pastels on handmade paper, Mie Yim seems to start each one over, never attempting to make a variation on a theme.

Art

Altoon Sultan’s Powerful Challenge

Sultan’s works implicitly reject the corporate scale of the Minimalists in favor of a domestic and intimate space

Art

Martin Puryear’s Open Questions

To focus on Puryear’s devotion to craft and the handmade is valid, but now seems too narrow a view.

Books

Writing from Another World

Eric Baus’s sentences follow the rules of grammar, but something inexplicable happens by the time you reach the end.

Art

The Independent Spirit of Herbert Gentry

Gentry was one of a number of Black artists who had to navigate the art world’s demand to emphasize their racial identity in the “right” way.

Art

Rudy Burckhardt’s Innocent Eye

Burckhardt was never surreptitious; he did not hide his camera, and his subjects often knew they were being photographed.

Art

Some Thoughts About England’s Obsession With Portraits

With the possible exception of Howard Hodgkin, not a single English abstract artist has attained anything comparable to the status achieved by Lucien Freud or David Hockney.

Books

Did You Know That Robert Hershon Is a Major Poet?

I cannot think of another contemporary poet who is willing to expose his vulnerability, worry, and pettiness through the lens of humor.

Art

The Chance Meeting of Robert Rauschenberg and Coho Salmon in a Dream

Everything connects; you just have to find out how.

Art

Steve DiBenedetto’s Raw Nerves

Whatever the impulse that initiated the paintings, DiBenedetto clearly works everything out on the surface.

Art

George Condo’s Cutism

Condo’s paintings play to his viewers’ sense of superiority; it gives them something to smile at without thinking too deeply into the work.

Art

Anne Truitt’s Spiritual Quest

As her death approached, was the artist starting fresh or beginning to let go?