Art Review
Contending With Fashion Photography's Artifice
Lillian Bassman spent decades crafting commercial images. After leaving the industry, she was finally free to experiment in the darkroom.
Art Review
Art Review
Should We See Peter Hujar’s Contact Sheets?
Though not made for public consumption, the darkroom work prints reveal his portraits as excerpts of a conversation, rather than memories snatched from the ether.
Art Review
The Album Art Music Left Behind
Two projects examine the visual art and design that shape our perception of music, from Raymond Pettibon’s Foo Fighters record covers to the ephemera of bygone bands.
Art Review
The Unruly Ceramic Beings of Kathy Butterly
The artist’s quasi-vessels incorporate folds, indentations, apertures, and coverts, which hint at bodily, biomorphic, and natural forms.
Art Review
Gertrude Abercrombie’s Band of Midwest Magic Realists
A pair of exhibitions at the Milwaukee Art Museum underscores the support, comradeship, and spirit of rebellion shared by the Surrealist and her friends.
Art Review
John Giorno Put Poetry on the Line
In iconic works like his "Dial-a-Poem," the artist offered a moment of sustained attention, a sense of relation, a novel perspective.
Art Review
In Two Chicago Exhibitions, Liberation Takes the Floor
Shows at MCA Chicago and Wrightwood 659 chart a path from colonial dispossession to the possibilities of dance, music, and community.
Art Review
The Ruthless Portraits of Elizabeth I’s Reign
An exhibition in London traces how depictions of the monarch projected an image of authority, power, wealth, and the right to be regarded as a god in all but name.
Art Review
Charles Seliger Painted Nature’s Invisible Architecture
One of the youngest Abstract Expressionists, the artist charted an independent path guided by the beauty and intricacy of cellular structures.
Art Review
Philip Guston’s Lines of Poetry
A show of his works from 1964–1978 focuses on the artist’s transformation and on his wife, poet Musa McKim, as a principal supporter and source of inspiration.
Art Review
vanessa german’s Shrine to Forgotten Black Girls
In new sculptures that vibrate with color and movement, the artist vivifies the stories of the girls who attempted to escape from a Louisville detention center in 1913.
Art Review
“Helter Skelter” Can’t Look America in the Eye
Nancy Spector’s curation cannot face the racial implications of Richard Prince and Arthur Jafa’s work.