Pittsburgh-based artist Francis Crisafio’s ongoing project HOLDUP in the HOOD extends the definition of the selfie, bringing in a directorial component similar to the one seen in Oli Rodriguez’s rendition. For more than a decade, Crisafio has been documenting an after-school arts program called FACES / a children’s arts collaborative, which works with inner-city youth from the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Manchester. Here, uncovering the self and the selfie requires understanding implications of race, class, and gender at a very young age.
Art
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Hannah Knox: Form Follows Fabric
LONDON — It seems bereavement can lead to a certain minimalism. “If you take everything away and then what are you left with?” asks Hannah Knox.
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A Pop Artist Who’s Never Conformed
SOMERVILLE, Mass. — Derek Boshier, who conflates the “pop” in Pop art with “pop” as in “pop in and out,” never has conformed to art world expectations.
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Courtauld Institute Attempts to Catalogue Every Work of Gothic Ivory Art
The last time anyone attempted to catalogue all known Gothic ivory sculpture was a three-volume publication from a French scholar in 1924, but now the Gothic Ivories Project at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art is taking a 21st century stab at it with an online database.
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The Poet-Magus of the Lower East Side
Imagine the following scenario: You and your wife live on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. You start a greeting card company, Ink Weed Arts, in 1951, just after the two of you get married. You are a poet and she is a dancer who works as a hand and foot model in advertising. The two of you want to offer an alternative to the insipid messages of Hallmark Cards.
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Parallel Strains: Arlene Shechet’s Ceramic Abstractions
Brimming with knockabout energy, Arlene Shechet’s polymorphous clay sculptures at Sikkema Jenkins — exuberantly colored columns, clumps and sacks of glazed ceramic — feel almost illegitimate in their sensuality and humor, a reaction that immediately calls into question why a word like “illegitimate” would spring to mind in the first place.
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Moral Distortions: Versailles, Qatar, and Kings
With inadvertent timeliness, a retrospective of the world’s richest artist opened in one of the world’s richest cities in the middle of the run of Robert Polidori’s elegiac photography exhibition, Versailles.
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An Exhibition and Workshop for Animated GIFs
SAN FRANCISCO — I’ve often called internet ephemera, like visual memes and animated GIFs, the street art of the social web. But as with physical street art, the ability to make a masterpiece requires a wide variety of technical skills.
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Frieze 2013 Report: The Doors of Reflection
LONDON — If all art is subjective, mirrored art is doubly so. And if there is one tendency at Frieze this year which cannot be ignored it is the use of reflective surfaces, as if to cause you twice as much grief in judging the work.
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Memories of American Malls
CHICAGO — I remember my first mall — Lincolnwood Town Center just north of the Indian and Hasidic Jewish blocks of small business on Chicago’s Devon Avenue.
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Adorable Mid-Century-Inspired Theremins You Can Play
A crowd of whimsical theremins is currently residing in a Bowery gallery, ready to play out their eerie music from mid-century-inspired handmade forms.
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Reflecting on Our Mustache Moment
The epitome of our pervasive mustache culture is captured in the photography of Greg Anderson, who traveled to New Orleans to photograph the 2013 Beard and Mustache Championships.
