Art
Five New York City Shows to See Right Now
Catherine Murphy, Dorothy Hood, and David Kennedy Cutler are among the artists who are taking us off the path of the everyday and into the inexplicable this week.
Tim Keane
Art Review
Dorothy Hood’s Landscapes of the Psyche
Labels such as “Modernism,” “Surrealism,” or “Color Field” fall away in the abstract painter’s first New York show in half a century.
Art
Sarah Grilo’s Prescient Abstraction
By laying numbers, words, and phrases onto otherwise abstract imagery, the late Argentinian artist prophesized the dread-inducing news alerts of our time.
Art
A Ceramicist Who Defied Art Hierarchies
Ruth Duckworth’s legacy is an unwavering commitment to clay as a medium that expanded beyond the potter’s craft.
Art
The Seductive Music of James Joyce’s Ulysses
Ultimately the legacy of the classic modernist novel may reside in how attentively and scrupulously it concentrates on the music of tentative, shambolic, open-ended urban lives.
Art
The Hidden Truths of Lou Reed's Musical Poetry
Reed’s terse song-stories rely on humorous and torqued and poignant metaphors, and serve up pop cliches in order to turn them inside out and reveal hidden truths.
Books
The Iranian Poet Who Became an American Action Painter
A new book introduces two Manoucher Yektais: the stateless, anti-historical Modernist painter and the poet writing narrative verse exclusively in Farsi.
Art
Reuben Kadish's Enduring Portraits of Human Anguish
Kadish’s fossil-like heads, forms, and figures remind us that every civilization, including our own, eventually collapses.
Art
The Ceaseless Optimism of Woody Guthrie’s Activist Life
Somehow, the poisonous American anger that swirled around Guthrie never corrupted that innate creative optimism. Empathy was his reliable muse.
Art
Transformation and Dreams in Dorothea Tanning's Later Work
As Tanning took up midcentury painterly abstraction, key philosophical themes from her earlier phantasmal narrative paintings undergo transformations and reiterations.
Art
David Byrne's Hopeful Drawings
Byrne's drawings makes me wonder what else art is for, but to remind us that what we call “being reasonable” is too often our expedient alibi for not using our imagination.
Art
Reading Anne Ryan's Poetic Collages
Ryan harnessed visual art as a means for creating poetry through the relatively new, nonverbal idioms of American abstract art.