Art
Ian Hamilton Finlay's Philosophical Gardening
For Finlay, the garden was not simply a place of beauty, but rather a liminal space bordered by nature and culture, where visitors are invited to meditate on the different ways time passes.
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
Kyle Staver's Historical Revisions
Without resorting to parody or cynicism, Staver undoes the tropes we associate with depictions of heroic and mythical.
Art
Ellen Berkenblit’s Outcasts, Animals, and Body Parts
Berkenblit’s mastery is the visual equivalent of someone who can write fluently in three different languages.
Art
The Making of an American Original
In the age of 40-character electronic announcements and Instagram, Kathy Butterly has slowed looking down to a snail’s pace.
Art
Paintings Glimpsed from a Taxi
Stephen Westfall seems to be the geometric painter who cannot do variations on a motif, which gives his work an interesting twist.
Art
Marilyn Lerner's Random and Deliberate Geometries
I have long thought of Lerner as an outlier whose inspirations include Hilma af Klint, gameboards, tantric art, and her trips to Turkey, Africa, and Southeast Asia.
Art
A Little-Known Chapter of Ralph Humphrey’s Career
There is something inelegant and unstylish about these paintings.
Art
Frank Bowling, or the Odd Man Out
After starting out as a figurative artist, Frank Bowling began pouring paint in 1973; he has always been the figure who doesn’t fit.
Art
Demotic Abstraction with a Twist
By concentrating on detail, which is a central feature of Barbara Takenaga’s work, she has gone against the reductive tendencies of Minimalism that still haunt painting.
Books
What Is a Poet?
Deeply suspicious of anything that smacks of self-importance, of making a blanket statement or pronouncement, Clark Coolidge resists nailing down what the poet and poem are.
Art
A Less Explored Side of Jasper Johns
When I visited Johns a few months ago, I saw two works that led me on a search for paintings that did not neatly fit in with his larger oeuvre.
Art
A Painter of a Different Magnitude
Catherine Murphy makes paintings that get under my skin, that haunt me, that seem inexhaustible and mysterious.