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
I have been thinking about the difficulty of characterizing Michael Mazur in part because, while he became highly celebrated as a printmaker, his paintings have never received nearly the same attention. Once a label is attached, it takes years to remove it.
Art
Currently on view in the exhibition Jasper Johns: Sculptures and Related Paintings 1957–1970 at Craig F. Starr is “Book” (1957), a work I suspect many people either don’t know about or are not likely to have seen, even in reproduction.
Art
There is something wonderfully incongruous and deeply disquieting about Gladys Nilsson’s art, which is primarily done in the medium of watercolor.
Art
Like Serra, Puryear went to Yale’s famed M.F.A. program (1969-71), but he attended five years after Serra had graduated. In fact, Serra and Robert Morris were visiting artists while he was a student there.
Art
It is easy to forget that Richard Serra (b.1939) and Martin Puryear (b.1941) were born only two years apart. The different relationships that they developed toward craft and materials makes it all too easy to overlook that they are nearly contemporaries.
Poetry
Mark Ford’s blurb on the back of Lee Harwood’s most recent book of poetry, The Orchid Boat (London, Enitharmon, 2014), inspired me to look up the original review from which it was quoted.
Art
Catherine Murphy calls herself “an observational painter,” but that modest self-characterization tells only part of what she has been up to for the past twenty years.
Poetry
A few years ago, in an essay called “Why I am a Member of the Christopher Middleton Fan Club,” I stated the need for “a selected prose that brings together all the different kinds of writing he has done." Loose Cannons: Selected Prose, which includes an insightful foreword by one of Middleton’s most
Art
The focus of Jane Corrigan’s first solo show at Kerry Schuss is young female athletes who, by virtue of their age – they are adolescents – are likely to be undergoing biological changes as well.
Art
In the foreground of the painting, “Dwarf, Goat, Woman, Man and Head” (2014), a young woman in a striped red and blue bikini is standing in a forest, where it has recently snowed, multitasking. She cradles a decapitated head in the crook of her left arm, while, with her right hand, she is about to p
Art
The key to Harriet Korman’s work is drawing. However, until this exhibition, Harriet Korman: Line or Edge, Line or Color, New Paintings and Drawings, at Lennon, Weinberg she has tended to show only a few drawings at a time.
Art
I have been waiting to see a large selection of James Bishop’s paintings since the mid-1970s, ever since reading John Ashbery’s appraisal in a secondhand copy of Art News Annual 1966.