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Lucio Fontana's Proto-Technologism
PARIS — If you want to leave all imagery behind for a free-fall into the immersive deep space of the virtual, Lucio Fontana is your quintessential man.
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Lethal Consumption and Silenced Clarinets
FERNDALE, MI – Often placing his work along the periphery of an exhibition space, Michael E. Smith turns the boundaries between his work and its architectural setting into a porous membrane.
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The Way West: Photographs by Peter Kayafas from America’s Open Road
When you stand on the shoulders of giants, what do you see — especially if you’re looking through an old Leica M6 rangefinder with a single, well-traveled, 35-millimeter lens, which, over a quarter of a century, has seen a lot?
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Homage to Absurdity: The Restless Legacy of Dennis Oppenheim
Everything moves in It Ain’t What You Make It's What Makes You Do It, a quirky funhouse of a show currently spinning, tapping, and pounding away at Valentine. And almost everything makes noise — a lot of noise. If you want to finish up the 2013–14 art season with a bang, this is the place to go.
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The Inescapable Sounds of the Everyday
SAN FRANCISCO — I visited during a hell of a week for the City by the Bay. With temperatures soaring into the 90s, the sounds of fans, ice cream trucks, and San Franciscans complaining about the heat wave and lack of air-conditioning filled the air.
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Social Practice for Domestic Workers: The NannyVan
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Recently, I watched as a group of artists and activists stood outside the main branch of the Cambridge Public Library beside the brightly colored NannyVan, talking to a steady stream of nannies about their rights and the obligations of their employers.
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A Children’s Tour of the Metropolitan Museum: 2034
Twenty years in the future at a little museum called the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Nostalgia for the Disappearing Danger of Mid-Century Playgrounds
There's a lot of nostalgia around old playgrounds, for the burns in summer on the overheated metal slides or the nauseating spinning play on the whirl. Those brushes or hits with danger are why most of them are gone, replaced with safer, less rusty, contraptions.
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Invoking the Absence at a Veterans Memorial
CHICAGO — At the eastern end of Diversey Avenue in Chicago stands an impressive classical-style rotunda, overlooking a short stretch of parkland that gives way to Lake Shore Drive and Lake Michigan.
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Biodiversity Traced in Over 2 Million Natural History Museum Images
From rows of tiny pinned insects to drawers of stuffed birds of prey, the holdings of natural history museums are as varied as the biodiversity they collect. However, accessibility is often a problem, as is the connection of data across institutions.
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Striving for Utopia on a Grand Scale in the Kabakovs' Strange City
PARIS — Beneath the bombastic Beaux-Arts dome of the Grand Palais in Paris, artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov have installed an explorable city of white arches and curious pavilions dedicated to attempts and failures to reach a mystical plane.
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Inside the Newly Renovated Chrysler Museum of Art
NORFOLK, Virginia — A museum redesign today conjures the towering ambition of statement architecture, images of an aesthetically belabored addition jutting out from an austerely classical building. But the Chrysler Museum of Art, which reopened May 10 after a significant overhaul and extension, is n