We want public art to interrogate social injustices, fill us with love and joy, and brush aside human flaws, but it rarely ever lives up to these expectations.
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
Discovering How Black Women Might Forge a Path to Freedom
The “Loophole of Retreat” symposium at the Venice Biennale demonstrated that the personal is not only political; it’s also where most of humanity lives.
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A Show About the Great Migration Strikes a Timely Chord
At a moment when the future of this country seems precarious and uncertain, A Movement in Every Direction demonstrates that Black Americans have been among this nation’s most stalwart heroes.
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Art Criticism as a Way to Live
These are what have been for me the most troubling and beautiful aspects of being a full-time critic and writer.
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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Richard Yarde’s watercolors make a historical document into something personal, wistful, more a vision than a visual fact.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
