Art
By all accounts, Pearl Blauvelt (1893–1987) was a recluse who lived in northeastern Pennsylvania in a house without running water, plumbing or central heating. Her neighbors referred to her as the “Village Witch.” In the mid 1950s, she was declared incompetent and moved to a facility where she resid
Art
The reemergence of Pocket Utopia — not in Bushwick but on the southernmost lip of Manhattan’s Lower East Side — in partnership with the uptown fine prints and drawings dealer C. G. Boerner, might strike some as an offbeat, even aberrant choice. But having gotten to know Austin somewhat after writing
Art
Moving through Caroline Cox’s immersive installations at the Clocktower, the venerable exhibition space on the 13th floor of a city-owned building in Lower Manhattan, is like peeling free from gravity. Although you don’t literally leave the ground, the sculptures’ pulsing aureoles do their best to c
Art
The most galvanizing room, hands down, in the current Whitney Biennial is the Forrest Bess micro-retrospective put together by sculptor Robert Gober. And on Tuesday, in what could be a trend, another museum-quality exhibition opened, organized by another sculptor — Matthew Day Jackson’s “Science on
Art
In the last several years, the term “pop up” has become ubiquitous in the art world. The majority of these related, newfound endeavors — brief exhibitions, stores and happenings — make charming use of relatively sparse, small storefronts. In this vein, I've come to expect a bit of space-maximizing i
Art
The curious history of a former retirement home for wealthy elderly people fallen on hard times and the contemporary Bronx community now surrounding that home provide rich material for the 32 artists in No Longer Empty's current exhibit, This Side of Paradise. Sharing its name with F. Scott Fitzgera
Art
This week, the brand new New York art fair weekend has finally arrived and your doctor is worried.
Art
Whenever I find myself strolling in the hutongs near Gulou and see the entrance of Bed Bar, images of Liang Tao's 2005 cross-gender performance come to mind. I met her that same year in the 798 art district, just after her performance "Madhouse in Paradise" at Marella Gallery. For that piece she bui
Art
Yesterday’s May Day protest in NYC might have failed to shut the system down, but it did successfully galvanize Occupy’s disparate interest groups into one powerful amalgamation, proving the movement’s lack of cohesion, more accurately its complexity, is a strength that defines it.
Art
National Poetry Month reminds us that some words can boogie, and dance they do at two exhibitions on the Lower East Side. A fiery tango between word and image takes place in solo shows by both Natalie Czech and Jeff Gibson. This tango — like when a caption twists an image’s meaning, or an illustrati
Art
LOS ANGELES — Everyone's done it at some point — crank up the water on the hose on a sunny day just to see that wonderful prism of light. Now, Mexican-born artist Gabriel Dawe does us one better by bringing rainbows to life, one thread at a time.
Art
Mounting an exhibition anywhere in the neighborhood of occupation aesthetics can be precarious nowadays, for people are increasingly fed up with the same reiterations of ideological conceptualism and the ultra–politically correct, derivative works that skim the surface of real world problems precipi