Art
The Allusive, Improvisational Artworks of Thaddeus Mosley
The formal aspects of Mosley’s work have been thoroughly considered over the years, perhaps at the expense of exploring symbolism in his individual works.
Julia Friedman
Art
The Many Blues of Matthew Wong
A rising art-world star, Wong planned his exhibition Blue before his suicide in October. The show reveals a marked tension between beauty and melancholy, making it difficult at times to keep his biography and work separate.
Books
A Feminist British Illustrator Who Satirized the British Middle Class
Posy Simmonds was known for her particularly wry voice, but Paul Gravett's book gives its namesake short shrift, not placing her clearly enough in the context of other illustrators.
Art
Composites of a Constantly Changing Female Identity
Zohra Opoku's sensitive and nuanced consideration of female, cultural, and cross-cultural identities are highly personal and profoundly politically relevant.
Art
Tackling Gentrification and Other Injustices Through Landscape Painting
Eddie Arroyo decidedly updates the genre of American landscape painting, recording real-estate developments and gentrification and capturing the flux of contemporary urban landscapes.
Art
Edmund de Waal's Relationship to Precious Materials at the Frick Collection
The exhibition Elective Affinities draws viewers into stories of the Frick's permanent collection and a contemporary artist's intellectual and aesthetic reckonings and inventions with them.
Art
Dismantling Beauty Through Extreme Self-Portraiture
Artist Mari Katayama uses objects both to reference her body and to submerge the viewer in a world where the expected limits of the bodily form are reimagined.
Art
An Artist Provides a Stage for Us to Make Political Decisions
Björn Meyer-Ebrecht’s objects provide a stage, and the viewer is the actor who must perform the uprising.
News
An Iconic Collection of African American Culture Moves Back to Its Harlem Home
The Art & Artifacts division of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem has finally moved its collection back home after years of offsite storage.
Art
The Disturbing Yet Hopeful Paintings of an Outsider Artist
Bernard Gilardi's exhibition suggests a positive grouping of misfits, a hopeful interpretation of the ambiguity within Gilardi’s paintings as a sanctuary for the odd.
Art
Candida Höfer Takes Her Expansive Lens to Mexico
In Mexico foregrounds Höfer's images as records of a site’s architectural and sociopolitical history.
Books
A Book Traces the Evolution of Smooching for the Camera
People Kissing: A Century of Photographs begins in the Victorian era and traces attitudes about kissing from “chaste” to “performance for the camera.”