The Art & Society Census, a new project launched by the Brooklyn Public Library, hopes to take stock of changes in culture.
Author Archives: Laura Raicovich
Laura Raicovich is a New York-based writer and curator. Most recently, she co-curated Mel Chin: All Over the Place, a multi-borough survey of the artist's work, and served as the director of the Queens Museum. She also launched Creative Time's Global Initiatives, was Dia Art Foundation's Deputy Director, and has held posts at the Guggenheim and Public Art Fund. She is the former Emily H. Tremaine Journalism Fellow for Curators at Hyperallergic, is working on a forthcoming book on museums and neutrality, and is co-curating a public seminar series titled Freedom of Speech: A Curriculum for Studies into Darkness at the New School's Vera List Center for Arts and Politics. lauraraicovich.com (Photo by Michael Angelo)
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Gauging the Possibilities of Impermanence at the New MoMA
MoMA’s recent expansion embodies the tension between the ways in which cultural spaces can offer visitors comfortable narratives and on the other, how they can suggest the potential for radical inclusiveness by iteration, reinvention, and reinstallation.
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Hans Haacke’s Sharp Metaphors and Maps of Power
Exposing systems of injustice and how they operate is Haacke’s great skill. At the New Museum, the artist draws the connections, and we follow along, wondering what our role is in this circuit.
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Abraham Cruzvillegas’s Sculptures Echo the Precariousness of Place
Cruzvillegas’s forms embody the precariousness and hope, if not the danger, of contemporary notions of borders, and the forces at work that make them porous or impenetrable.
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The Pioneering Painted Sculptures of Melvin Edwards
Edwards’s sculptures, on display at Alexander Grey Associates in New York, establish him as a master of his various crafts with with an acute sense of rhythm and movement.
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Jeffrey Gibson’s Artistic Remixes, From Song Lyrics to Indigenous Craft
Gibson’s ongoing explorations of identity and art history have produced a dizzying range of forms over the course of his career.
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LaToya Ruby Frazier Looks Beyond Blue-Collar Stereotypes
In The Last Cruze, the artist hones in on the vast inequities that persist in US society, as well as the tender relationships that enable survival and persistence in spite of them.
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Centering the Equator in Global Conversations About Art
With its focus on art from Indonesia and Southeast Asia, this year’s edition of the Biennale Jogja offers a fresh take on discussions of centers and peripheries.
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Janine Antoni Traces the Passage of Time in a Cemetery’s Catacombs
The artist’s new commission leaves much to contemplate simultaneously — mortality, desire, and the ways in which absence and longing are such a fundamental part of life.
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Why Libraries Have a Public Spirit That Most Museums Lack
A broad swath of society seems to feel more welcome in a public library rather than a museum. I examined the Brooklyn Public Library as a model of heightened engagement through collective knowledge creation.
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An Encyclopedia Connects Record Labels to Political Movements Around the World
Graphic designer and activist Josh MacPhee’s third edition of Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels unlocks a whole world of political storytelling.
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The Defiant Spirit of Wangechi Mutu’s Caryatids at the Metropolitan Museum
In reflecting on Mutu’s recent commission for the Met’s façade one morning, I realized that her sculptures make space for excellences and joys that dominant Eurocentric histories have ignored and excluded.