Art
Romare Bearden’s Fevered Dream
Derived from memory, Bearden’s bayou is at once real and mythic, the Black counterpart to William Faulkner’s apocryphal Yoknapatawpha County.
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
Jeff Donaldson’s Celebration of an Alternative History
Donaldson wanted to replace the history of demeaning stereotypes of Black people that had been presented by white, mainstream culture. By connecting his work to Africa and developing a powerful transnational view, he aimed to develop an alternative history rooted in struggle.
Books
Alan Felsenthal Emerges from His Song Cave and Sings to Us
In all of his poems, you feel Felsenthal finding his way from word to word and from line to line: he is not trying to tell a story or replay an anecdote so much as go where the words and phrases, sounds and meanings, lead him.
Art
Peter Acheson’s Argument with Painting
Instead of thinking of Acheson’s works as paintings, I have come to think of them as battered talismans, unfinished letters, and broken odes to his heroes, many of whom are artists.
Art
R. B. Kitaj Hugs a Ghost
One thing that has bugged critics of Kitaj is that his work can be simultaneously accessible and full of allusions.
Art
Ron Gorchov’s Guardians
In responding to Judd and Greenberg, it is apparent that Gorchov wanted to find his own way past what he saw as the limits of their theorizing and make something that was recognizably his.
Art
Beuford Smith’s Americans
If you want to understand what happened in the 1960s or you want to know about race in America, Smith is one of the essential photographers to look at, as are the other members of the Kamonigen to have shows in recent years.
Art
Julian Schnabel’s Flowers
Do you ever feel like you are getting the hard sell or being bludgeoned into submission?
Art
Elliott Green Can See for Miles and Miles and Miles
Elliott Green has channeled the landscape paintings of the early Northern Song dynasty along with the fantastical landscapes of the Sienese painter Ambrogio Lorenzetti.
Art
Robert Mangold’s Sense of Things
For Mangold, more than any other artist of his generation, painting is contingent, rather than self-sufficient. It is part of an active relationship.
Art
David Reed Did Not Go Along with Those Who Threw the Baby Out with the Bathwater
Making a brushstroke painting in the mid-1970s — a decade after Greenberg, Stella, and Lichtenstein gleefully presided over its burial — was foolhardy and brave.
Art
Jack Whitten’s Walls
Jack Whitten is the most relentless experimenter with materials in a generation of abstract artists who have yet to receive their due, perhaps because no one has come up with a catchy and marketable name for them, like the “Minimalists” or “The Pictures Generation.”