Art
A Painter's Dissonant Geometry
Gary Petersen is a highly intelligent painter, which is to say he has absorbed a lot of art history and, more importantly, is at ease with it.
John Yau
John Yau is an award winning poet, critic, curator, and publisher of Black Square Editions. He has published over 50 books of poetry, fiction, and art criticism.
Art
A Forgotten Painter and Her Visionary Abstraction
During her lifetime, Sonia Gechtoff was feted on the West Coast and for many years showed her work in New York, but the art world has yet to adequately address her achievement.
Art
Paintings Where Women Punch Back
Rebecca Morgan has absorbed the basic tenets of Neoclassical drawing and applied them to raunchy, sexually explicit subject matter, something you cannot imagine Nicholas Poussin or Jacques-Louis David ever doing.
Art
Traveling to China, Finding the Core of Art
If there is a folly to what Zhang Wei has done, there is also a defiance of the commercial aspect of the art world.
Art
Figures in Clay, Embarrassed and Alive
The tension between classicism and chaos is one of the many things that sets Bruce Gagnier’s art apart from figurative sculpture stretching back to Auguste Rodin, Camille Claudel, and Edgar Degas.
Books
When a Poet Becomes Invisible
Facing her mortality, Mary Ruefle does not ask for pity or sympathy, because death is democratic.
Books
The Rise and Fall of Three Actresses
In Amanda Lee Koe's debut novel, the lives of Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong, and Leni Riefenstahl are intertwined with changes in the world and with one another.
Art
Catching Up with Taiwanese Art
We in America have some idea of what is going in art in China, Japan, and South Korea, but we seem to know almost nothing about contemporary Taiwanese art.
Art
Jess, a West Coast Visionary
It is clear to me now that seeing Jess's art was the beginning of my awareness that there was a multitude of what John Ashbery called “other traditions.”
Art
Seeing American History Through the Art of a Black WWI Soldier
Horace Pippin was a self-taught artist out of necessity, as the society in which he lived had shut most of its doors on him.
Art
Roger Brown’s Innovative Still Lifes
Brown was interested in mishaps and disasters, but above all, he was interested in what it meant to be American.
Art
In Praise of Painting's Ambiguity, Part 3
Jasper Johns breaks down the image of a broken man.