Josephine Halvorson transcribes the anonymous, weather-beaten traces left by those who might otherwise have left no other mark of their existence behind.
John Yau
John Yau has published books of poetry, fiction, and criticism. His latest poetry publications include a book of poems, Further Adventures in Monochrome (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), and the chapbook, Egyptian Sonnets (Rain Taxi, 2012). His most recent monographs are Catherine Murphy (Rizzoli, 2016), the first book on the artist, and Richard Artschwager: Into the Desert (Black Dog Publishing, 2015). He has also written monographs on A. R. Penck, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol. In 1999, he started Black Square Editions, a small press devoted to poetry, fiction, translation, and criticism. He was the Arts Editor for the Brooklyn Rail (2007–2011) before he began writing regularly for Hyperallergic. He is a Professor of Critical Studies at Mason Gross School of the Arts (Rutgers University).
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Richard Baker Kicks Out the Jams
For the past decade, Richard Baker has developed two distinct but related bodies of work, one in oil and the other in gouache: the oil paintings depict tabletops covered with all sorts of printed ephemera and bric-a-brac; the gouaches are of book covers and, more recently, record covers.
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Weekend Studio Visit: Albert Contreras in Santa Monica, California
Albert Contreras, who was born during Franklin Roosevelt’s first term as President, is a lean and cheerful man around eighty years old. He lives and works in a small apartment two blocks from the Pacific Ocean.
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A History Waiting To Be Written: Ed Clark’s High-Spirited, Abstract Paintings
David Hammons’ thoughtful curation of the exhibition, ‘Ed Clark: Big Bang’, currently at the Tilton Gallery helps establish a much needed context for an important artist of the New York School, who, now in his late 80s, continues to make boldly exuberant paintings.
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Weekend Studio Visit: Squeak Carnwath in Oakland, California
In July 2006, during a conversation we had in her studio, Squeak Carnwath made a series of statements that have stayed with me, beginning with: “I am a painting chauvinist.”
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How To Look Indifference in the Eye: New Work by Dan Douke
I am always dazzled by at least one work in a Dan Douke exhibition, and often more.
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Why Does Wayne Thiebaud Love Goop So Much?
SAN FRANCISCO — Wayne Thiebaud, whose exhibition Memory Mountains recently closed at the Paul Thiebaud Gallery in San Francisco, turns 94 this year. Consisting of nearly fifty paintings and drawings of mountains and mesas done between 1962 and 2013, this survey exhibition reveals another side of a painter best known for his impasto paintings of frosting-slathered cakes, thickly crusted pies and sticky pastries.
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Stephen Westfall’s Breakthrough
I went to Stephen Westfall’s exhibition, Jesus and Bossa Nova, at Lennon, Weinberg (November 7, 2013–January 4, 2014) twice on the same day. The second time I walked through the gallery’s long narrow space verified my initial thought, which is that the layout of the exhibition could be read as a narrative that revealed Westfall’s movement from pattern and repetition to a far more complex and engaging compositional possibility.
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After All These Years: Richard Van Buren’s Work of the ’70s
You never know when a work of art might become part of your DNA, the visceral memory of which you carry around with you, even if you seldom have occasion to think about it.
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Weekend Studio Visit: Melissa Meyer in Midtown Manhattan, New York
Over the past decade, Melissa Meyer, rightfully characterized by David Cohen “as virtually without a peer as a lyrical abstractionist,” moved from the lyrical to the disjunctive.
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What Happens When We Run Out Of Styles?
What does it mean when you hook up your work to that of a late modernist giant working in a reductive vein – Ad Reinhardt, Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, or Donald Judd, for example – like a caboose?
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Necessary Ambiguity: Sangram Majumdar’s Recent Work
In a media-riddled world where images rapidly circulate, moving from momentary commodity (“gone viral”) to forgotten waste, Sangram Majumdar is interested in “what stays.”