Art
The Skeletal Welsh Horse You Must Beat in a Battle of Rhymes
In the Welsh folkloric tradition of Mari Lwyd, a horse skull visits your home around Christmas, and you must best it in poetry or allow it inside.
Art
Art
Who Profits from Waste? A Tale of Two Bay Area Cities
In San Francisco, artists in residence at the city dump are valorized for their work. In West Oakland, homeless people who rely on independent recycling centers are criminalized.
Art
Required Reading
This week, bad but effective design, Time magazine's "subversive" cover, a good bad review of the Trump Grill, the alt-right targeting of left-wing art spaces, and more.
Art
Weekend Words: Oil
"Formula for success: rise early, work hard, strike oil."
Art
With an Eye to Our Common Future
Some painters — following in the footsteps of Arthur Dove — offer us received images of transcendence. John Dilg isn’t one of them.
Art
Why Give a Name to It?
I liked Outside In because I found out what five artists whose works I have followed are doing these days.
Art
An Unsettling Room and Feeling Like You Belong
An unusual gallery installation in Manhattan raises questions about belonging.
Art
Katharina Wulff: Sachlichkeit in Marrakesh
Katharina Wulff grew up in East Berlin and moved to Marrakesh some fifteen years ago. Her work reflects her situation amid the elaborate, distinctly Islamic decoration that adorns traditional architecture in Morocco.
Art
A Gift to Be Simple: John McLaughlin's Paintings Pose Fundamental Questions
The beautiful large-scale retrospective of this major but often forgotten artist’s work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is a truly revelatory exhibition.
Art
Bill Scott’s Bittersweet Fictions
Bill Scott acknowledges that the Garden of Eden is a fiction, and yet he is willing to paint his versions of that place, not as a way to make that garden great again, but to insist that pleasure is a crucial ideal for survival.
Art
Another Hidden Chapter of ’70s Abstraction
The nine artists in 1970’s: 9 Women and Abstraction infuse their art with an unexpected warmth, humanity, and quirkiness that feel all the more invigorating when compared with the cerebral objectification prized by their male Minimalist counterparts.
Art
Reconstructing the Tattered History of a Fictional 19th-Century Family
Titus Kaphar's The Vesper Project is a complex, multimedia project that dissolves the boundary between reality and fiction.