Art
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.”
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
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.
Art
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 p
Art
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 nar
Art
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.
Art
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.
Art
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?
Art
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.”
Books
Why I Am a Member of the Ron Padgett Fan Club
One mind-stumping sensation a reader is likely to glean from Ron Padgett’s Collected Poems (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2013) is that the poems wrote themselves, and that he just happened to be in the room when they showed up. There is even a substantial section in Collected Poems that Padgett
Art
Are We Ready for the News that Peter Young Delivers Us?
In the summer of 1969, Peter Young left New York – and his studio on the Bowery – and set off for the American West, where he drifted around for nearly two years before settling down in Bisbee, Arizona, where he still resides.
Art
India’s Nasreen Mohamedi Belongs to Everyone
After the filmmaker Nagisa Oshima was called the “Japanese Godard” for what must have been the umpteenth time, he wittily replied by calling Godard “the French Oshima.” I thought of Oshima’s response once more when I went to Nasreen Mohamedi: Becoming One at the Talwar Gallery (September 13–November
Art
Jake Berthot Doesn’t Need To Be Original
For the past twenty years Jake Berthot has painted his vision of the Catskill Mountains, where he has lived since 1994, after living in Manhattan, much of it on the Bowery, for thirty years. A painter of what he calls “small sensations,” Berthot has included fourteen paintings and six drawings compl