Posted inArt

Art, Work, and the Workaday

The lobby gallery at the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill-designed midtown office tower at 1285 Avenue of the Americas, with its partitioned walls flanked by floor-to-ceiling windows on the north and south sides of the building, is unusually well-suited for both casual and concentrated encounters with art.

Posted inArt

Conspicuously Absent: When Art Goes Undercover

Even in today’s anything-goes environment, it’s not all that common to encounter a work of art that hews so closely to the mundane that it risks not being recognized as art at all. Let alone two or three in a single show.

But that’s the case with Conspicuous Unusable, a group exhibition at Miguel Abreu that’s a refreshing throwback to a time (the 1970s) when the division between art and life was in a constant state of flux and gallery press releases routinely began with a quotation from Martin Heidegger.

Posted inOpinion

US Ambassadors Get Awesome Art Through Embassy Program

At the Winfield House in London, US ambassador to England Louis B. Susman and wife Marjorie are using their diplomatic powers for artistic good, showcasing modern American artists in the Neo-Georgian space. What’s interesting about this display of American artistic diplomacy, with Mark Rothko, Ellsworth Kelly and Brice Marden all leaving their mark, is that it was made possible by a US State Department program called ART in the Embassies, a project that works to place American art and artists abroad on a large scale. This includes offering travel fellowships, commissioning art installations and bringing foreign artists to the US.