These are what have been for me the most troubling and beautiful aspects of being a full-time critic and writer.
Seph Rodney
Seph Rodney, PhD, is a senior critic for Hyperallergic and has written for the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and other publications. He is featured on the podcast The American Age. His book The Personalization of the Museum Visit was published by Routledge in 2019. In 2020 he won the Rabkin Arts Journalism Prize. Find him at sephrodney.com.
Posted inArt
At the Baltimore Museum of Art, Joy That Is a Little Askew
Richard Yarde’s watercolors make a historical document into something personal, wistful, more a vision than a visual fact.
Posted inArt
Why Joan Mitchell’s Paintings Can Never Die
Unlike the more celebrated painters around her, she didn’t resolve herself to working the same issues over and over; she kept asking herself other questions, pushing the paint to do what it had not quite done before.
Posted inArt
Bits and Pieces of Our Mortality
The images in Vik Muniz’s exhibition Scraps tempts that implicit human tendency to fill in the blanks, complete that which is partial, fragmentary.
Posted inArt
Jennie C. Jones and the Music of Chance
Jones’s playful asymmetry doesn’t seek so much to declare what order should look like as it is simply engaged in ongoing negotiations around balance and presence.
Posted inArt
Byron Kim Achieves Equilibrium
Perhaps these paintings are what it feels like for the artist to be in a state of not being harried, anxious or in deep existentialist dread.
Posted inArt
Jennifer Packer Shows Us the Responsibility of Seeing
Most everything in this show, is unsure, a maybe, might be there, might not be, could fulfill your hopes, might leave them by the side of the road.
Posted inArt
A Remarkable Online Show of Young Photography
What is wonderful about the online photography exhibition What Have We Stopped Hiding? is that one is given entrée to the internal monologue of the artists featured in the show.
Posted inArt
Subtle and Finessed Depictions at the Master Drawings Fair
The close, careful, and subtle observation I found this year is representative of precisely why I continue to gravitate to this fair.
Posted inOpinion
The Contrast Between Institutional and Personal Remembrances of Martin Luther King
When we honor King publicly, as many in the art circle did on Monday, we use these moments to do more than just remember and pay tribute.
Posted inArt
Saying Maybe to the Yes Men
As much as I appreciate the collective’s culture jamming initiatives, I don’t know that their putative premise ever bears meaningful fruit.
Posted inArt
The Getty, Google Arts, & Banana Craze Create Three Online Shows Worth a Visit
What unites all these projects is a clear sense that they exist in a world unto itself: the digitized space.