“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.
Art
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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.
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A Place Where Art and Religion Meet
The close relationship that art and religion maintained for several millennia has in recent decades eroded so drastically that it’s difficult to imagine fine arts and contemporary religion having anything in common. Art is, on the whole, a secular enterprise, and religion is frequently more anesthetic than aesthetic in character. The two worlds happily foster vulgar understandings of each other almost to a point of pride. Some might even suggest that adherence to one entails a rejection of, or at least critical distance from, the other. But not everyone is content with this scenario.
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Something Shared, Artissima Giornale #5
TURIN — Things are shared, and time exists only in the present tense. I wanted to journal about the movements surrounding Artissima, Torino’s international art fair, because I’m curious to think about how art can live or die depending on the conditions in which it is placed. Recently I’ve found globally recognized artworks to have in common a certain sterility, often heavily based on theory and intellect, that keeps them very safe. In these journals, I was interested in placing internationally established works in the same space as traces left behind in an apartment, for example, in order to feel something, feel soul.
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An Art Space, a Kickstarter, and a Community
At the risk of generalizing, one might say that community spaces get short shrift in the art world. It’s not entirely clear why, but most likely it has something to do with their lack of marketability, their focus on engaging people rather than money — and perhaps more specifically, people without much money to spend on art. Community spaces are often seen as provincial, the official “art world” as — well, worldly.
