Art
A Bag Lady by Any Other Name
There are many dystopian futures out there. Mary Mattingly’s, recently on view at Robert Mann Gallery, is oddly disjunctive, containing the requisite pessimism imbued with occasional broad strokes of optimism.
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Radically Rethinking the Architecture of Death
What happens when you die? Well, in a literal way, what happens to everyone else. You're likely to have a traditional, costly, funeral, and then a small slot of land in a quiet sprawl of cemetery will be yours.
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An American in Paris: Shirley Jaffe’s Paintings from the 1970s
About her work, Shirley Jaffe has stated: “I want a certain tenseness, a congestion or a combination of forms in which none is stronger than any other. I’m interested in the idea of coexistence.” In her current exhibition, Shirley Jaffe: Paintings from the 1970s at Tibor de Nagy (October 17–November
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How to Kiss the Sky: Kyle Staver’s Recent Paintings
You don’t see Kyle Staver’s dark, moonlit domains so much as become their invisible and unacknowledged witness and ally. In an age riddled with cynicism and laced with irony, she envisions a shameless alternative in which mythological figures, such as Daphne, Andromeda, Syrinx, Perseus, and a satyr,
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The Cultured and the Creepy: Balthus's Parting Shots
Balthus: The Last Studies at Gagosian Gallery offers a kind of endnote to Balthus: Cats and Girls — Paintings and Provocations, the exhibition a couple of blocks away at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s a denouement that disentwines the cultured from the creepiness in Balthus’ work, leaving only
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Visions of the World in Pieces
Rarely have I spent so much time looking in amazement at the skill of an artist to transform paper as I did with Brian Adam Douglas's excellent How to Disappear Completely at the Andrew Edlin Gallery.
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Biennial Fail: Making It Make Sense
MINNEAPOLIS — Unlike similarly named convocations in Venice or New York or Sao Paulo, Minnesota’s biennial art exhibitions have little to do with market vogue or value. These shows take stock of trends, maybe, but amount to little more than a (usually) thoughtful regional survey — an occasion for se
Art
For One Night, a City Lights Up with Art
DALLAS — Aurora illuminated the Dallas Arts District last Friday, featuring 90 site-specific light and sound installations covering 19 blocks of downtown from 7 pm until midnight. An estimated 30,000 people gathered and wandered through the city, taking in the transformation that molded buildings, i
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Iraqi Exile and Lament Through a New Lens
DENVER — Flown in from Dubai, an enormous collodion camera dominates a corner of Denver’s Robischon Gallery. The apparatus belongs to artist Halim Al Karim, whose show of ghostly portrait photographs is an unlikely meeting of 19th-century photo processing techniques and a personal reflection on his
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The Challenges of Preserving Modernist Landscapes
While even the most coldly Brutalist buildings have found their proponents, the modernist landscapes that were built in plazas and public space in the mid-century have been slower to be embraced for preservation. Yet there’s an increasing dialogue of how, and why, modernist landscape architecture should be preserved. In
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Revealing the Invisible With Early X-Ray Photogravures
The X-ray had just been discovered when two Austrian photochemists used the emerging field of photography to create what are still some of the most beautiful captures of the hidden interior world of organisms.
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Critical Halloween Art and Architecture Costume Competition
Halloween is next week, which means we're really looking forward to Storefront for Art and Architecture third annual Critical Halloween, which brings the city's design, architecture, and art cognoscenti under one roof for a costume part like no other. This year's theme is … wait for it … "Corporate