It’s a quiet week in New York. Holidays are a good time for museums, so the doctor recommends a few exhibitions, plus an art and new media festival and a few more Hurricane Sandy benefits. Happy Turkey Day!
Art
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MoMA’s Hilariously Bizarre Silent Screams
With one version of Munch’s renowned The Scream series on display at MoMA, New Yorkers and tourist are mimicking the bald figure’s extreme expression much the way tourists to Oslo have long been doing — though some aren’t very successful at it. Some people may think it’s tacky, I think it’s a scream.
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Superfluous Men Can’t Get No Satisfaction
For all of their “nearly oppressive flawlessness,” Stichbury’s paintings and drawings do not look back to “the repository of classical ideas,” but to a world replete with cosmetic surgery, Photoshop, Facebook, Twitter and reality television, just to name a few of the ways society exhibits new and improved faces.
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Political Art, Galloping Out of the Past
“The Ozymandias Parade” by Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz has landed in the Pace Gallery like a DIY UFO — a frenzied agitprop vessel clattering into the 21st century from the Reagan era’s heart of darkness.
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Is Mark Bradford the Best Painter in America?
I didn’t expect to write about the new show from Mark Bradford, who has been called by Guy Trebay of The New York Times “if not the best painter working in America today then certainly the tallest,” when I walked into Sikkema Jenkins on Tuesday morning. Despite the whimsy of Trebay’s “best/tallest” assertions, a credible case can be made for the former.
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Going East in the Southwest: A Studio Tour of Austin
AUSTIN — At a photography exhibition during the East Austin Studio Tour (EAST), visitors wondered aloud if Big Medium, the nonprofit that organizes the 11-year-old event, would ever jury the participants. The EAST catalogue, they noted, had expanded to nearly 550 pages to accommodate more than 400 artists and many “happenings.”
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Finding Connections in the Montreal/Brooklyn Exchange
Part One in a series of posts on the Montreal leg of the continuing Montreal/Brooklyn, or Brooklyn/Montreal, exchange.
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A View from the Easel
CHICAGO — The 30th installment of a series in which artists send in a photo and a description of their workspace.
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Small Town Gay Community
CHICAGO — Johannesburg-based South African artist Sabelo Mlangeni’s photographs depict a celebratory, positive, and campy-funny queer life in the countryside.
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Queer Art’s not Just About Gender — A Chicago Survey
CHICAGO — Just because you say art’s queer doesn’t mean it’s about depictions of dicks and vajayjays, man. Over the past few months, two large-scale exhibitions dealing with changing notions of what “queer art” even is have overflowed into Chicago’s art world.
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Being Odie in a Garfield World
LOS ANGELES — Audaciously exuberant, Odie, the lovable dog from Jim Davis’s Garfield comics, was a yellow-furred dream come true for any child of the 1980s. It was also, interestingly, artist Jim Drain’s emotional North Star when it came to his latest solo exhibition, Drain Expressions, at Los Angeles’s Prism Gallery.
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A West Coast Press Turns 50
SAN FRANCISCO — The main focus of the de Young Museum, located in Golden Gate Park and given a big redesign by architects Herzog and De Meuron in 2005, is American art past and present, encompassing ancient art of all the Americas as well as art of the United States from the colonial era up to today. There are several temporary exhibitions running at the moment that are worth going to see if you’re visiting the Bay Area. One of them, the William S. Paley collection, is sort of self-evidently marvelous, with its classic examples of Gauguin, Picasso, Matisse, Degas, and other titans of the School of Paris. The other, Crown Point Press at 50, shows work that is less well known but deserves to be equally celebrated.
