Art
Under No Obligation
We should all be inspired by Alma Thomas’s optimism.
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
Encounter with a Gazillion Teddy Bears
Partners (The Teddy Bear Project) is the centerpiece – one might say the heart of — The Keeper, organized by Massimiliano Gioni, with Margot Norton, and Natalie Bell and Helga Christoffersen for the New Museum.
Art
Impure and Arcane
One of the interesting things about Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) is that neither she nor her work can be written into the early history of abstract art.
Art
Every Day Is Black Friday in Doha
In her memoir, The Girl Who Fell to Earth (2012), Sophia Al-Maria, who was raised as a bicultural Muslim, says she feels like a “deep-sea diver, adjusting constantly to the pressures of […] two very different environments.”
Art
Indelible Stains
If you should not judge a book by its cover? What about the living room you grew up in? What do its contents say about you? Does its décor reflect who you are?
Art
The Two Faces of Grace Jane
Margot Bergman paints boldly simplified portraits of women on top of found paintings, which she salvages from flea markets.
Art
Upbeat and Edgy
With the rise of artists desperate to align themselves with one compromised avant-garde tradition or another, it is useful to remember that Stuart Davis never fit in.
Art
Better Days
In 1987, Joe Becker, Lee Collins, and Mark began investigating the possibilities of generating a Universal Coded Character Set (UCS) that would, among other things, enable a computer to encode, transmit, and translate one language into another.
Art
Fault Line
The first paragraph of Lev Manovich’s groundbreaking essay, “Database as Symbolic Form” (1999) came to mind about three minutes after I began pouring over the weird, wacky, wild and wooly stuff displayed under glass in Tony Oursler: The Imponderable Archive at the Hessel Museum of Art.
Books
Killed By the State
A few weeks ago, while I was reading In the Empire of the Air: The Poems of Donald Britton, edited by Reginald Shepherd and Philip Clark, I was reminded of A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos (2011), edited by David Trinidad. This happens with poetry – one poem or book leads to another, l
Art
An Artist Who Possessed a Third Eye
Working in painting, drawing, assemblage, film, photography, photograms, performance, collage, and printmaking, Bruce Conner (1933–2008) made more discrete bodies of work across more mediums than any other postwar artist.
Art
Summer Carousing and Revelry
It must be summer. There are group shows galore all over Manhattan. This is when you get to discover new artists, get enthusiastic, become disenchanted, fall in love, fall out of love, all of the above, and none of the above, in one day, and still have time to sit back and read a book of poems in th