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
There is a lot to say about Deborah Grant’s installation at the Drawing Center, Christ You Know it Ain't Easy!!, which was curated by Claire Gilman. What is so delicious about it is that at some point you will not be sure whether any of narratives you’ve applied to the work makes sense.
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Josephine Halvorson transcribes the anonymous, weather-beaten traces left by those who might otherwise have left no other mark of their existence behind.
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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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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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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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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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I am always dazzled by at least one work in a Dan Douke exhibition, and often more.
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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 p
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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 nar
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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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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 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?