John Yau

Art

A True Renegade Painter

The humor running through Sally Webster’s paintings can be goofy and good-natured. The intensity of her devotion to detail makes them more than that.

Art

Edvard Munch’s World Without Pity

Munch absorbed avant-garde styles but never became an avant-garde artist.

Art

Nina Chanel Abney Paints on the Edge of Violence

Abney locates much of her work on the recognition that abuse and violence are an integral part of the everyday consciousness of people of color.

Art

Laura Owens and the Death of the Auteur

Owens’s mid-career works feel completely sterile, mainstream, and middlebrow — with just enough insider info to flatter the viewer who knows something about Roland Barthes.

Art

Four Bay Area Iconoclasts and Eccentrics

For New Yorkers, the artists Jean Conner, Wally Hedrick, Deborah Remington, Franklin Williams range from little-known and neglected to unknown altogether.

Art

Totems for a Religion of One

Michelle Segre’s rejection of commodity fetishism and a society that worships shiny surfaces is to be admired because she does it with such verve.

Art

Matt Bollinger’s America

This is the American dream gone wrong.

Art

Irving Petlin’s Armada of Discontent

Whatever your life story, it is part of a larger history – this is what Petlin recognizes and is perhaps why he suppresses the personal or anecdotal.

Art

When a Painter Enacts a Ritual

There is a ceremonial aspect to the way Alison Hall makes these works, from the sanding of the plaster to the painting of the surface, to the drawing of the dots, to whatever she does next.

Art

The Undiscovered Ceramic Art of Stanley Rosen

Stanley Rosen’s ceramic sculpture is like a country that many of us never knew was there until now.

Art

Weekend Studio Visit: Victoria Civera on Broadway, Lower Manhattan

Exploring the work of an artist who rarely shows in New York.

Art

The Gritty Poetry of Elizabeth Murray’s Paintings

Murray was having fun while making art, which is practically a sin, even now.