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
When I first wrote about Mary Heilmann for Artforum (January 1987), one thing I had in mind was the strong impression that her first great painting, “Save the Last Dance for Me” (1979), had made on me some years earlier, when I saw it at the Holly Solomon Gallery.
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Peter Saul has an uncanny ability to seamlessly combine the hilarious and the hideous to great effect. In the middle of chortling at one of his wacky, indecorous paintings, you are apt to suddenly notice an odd and even disturbing detail.
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What do Richard Diebenkorn and John Walker have in common? When they sink their teeth into something, they aren’t likely to let it go.
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Squeak Carnwath’s exhibition, What Before Comes After, at Jane Lombard is the artist’s first with the eponymous gallery (formerly Lombard Fried) and her first in New York since 2000.
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The exhibition Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting, currently at the Guggenheim Museum, is the first large-scale survey of this artist’s work in America since the museum’s previous survey in 1978.
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There are five artists among the Chicago Imagists who did reverse paintings on Plexiglas between the late 1960s and the mid-70s: Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Ed Flood, Karl Wirsum and Barbara Rossi.
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In a letter dated July 23, 1938, sent by the Japanese modernist poet Yone Noguchi to the Nobel Prize winning author Rabindrath Tagore — the first non-European to receive the award — Noguchi wrote the following justification for his country’s invasion of China, effectively ending their friendship:
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McArthur Binion’s exhibition, Re: Mine, currently at Galerie Lelong stirred up a swarm of associations while I was looking at it, and the buzz did not die down after I left the gallery and decided to walk home amidst the late afternoon din of Manhattan traffic and people in a rush to get home.
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It has been two years since Patrick Strezelec had his first exhibition of sculptures in New York in more than a decade.
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I was unexpectedly reminded of the wonderfully irreverent filmmaker Seijun Suzuki while looking at Dana Schutz’s painting, “Slow Motion Shower” (2015), which is included in her current exhibition, Fight in an Elevator, at Petzel.
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I had not seen Kyle Staver’s frieze-like clay sculptures before encountering two of them in Kyle Staver: Tall Tales, her current show at both Lower East Side spaces of Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects.
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NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ — In 1963, while living in Los Angeles, Melvin Edwards welded “Some Bright Morning” out of different pieces of steel scrap metal, including a heavy chain and a dagger-like fragment extending from a circular, collar-like form.