The inaugural exhibition at the new Whitney Museum of American Art, which opens to the public today, is predicated on the elusiveness of a cohesive and stable national identity in the United States.
Glenn Ligon
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From Calder to Kruger, the New Whitney Museum’s First Show
The inaugural exhibition at the new Whitney Museum is not perfect, but it is pretty damn good.
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From the Couches to the Conservation Labs, the Whitney Museum’s New Building
They say you don’t realize what you were missing until you get it. Well, New York City was missing a building for showing modern and contemporary art.
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Novel Takes on a Blue-Chip Art Collection in Queens
Thematic exhibitions present a unique dilemma; if a curator follows a theme too rigidly, the exhibition can become stifling. If applied too loosely, the curator essentially undermines their own role.
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Artists Redraw Their Own Books
Some unique artist books are currently on view at Christie’s in New York.
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8th Berlin Biennale Curator on Berlin, Contemporary Art, and Gentrification
BERLIN — Juan A. Gaitán is a typical hyphenated global art professional. The Canadian-Colombian independent writer and curator is based in Mexico City and Berlin, and he was chosen to curate the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, which opens today.
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All the Art That’s Fit to Print
It’s not clear who scooped whom, but there are two gallery shows now on view in New York that examine the relationship between art and the newspaper.
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Big Name Artists Hit the Street With Bowery Murals
As part of the Festival of Ideas For the New City anchored by the New Museum, a group of major artists have sprinkled the Bowery with murals. In collaboration with the Art Production Fund, painters including Mary Heilmann, Richard Prince and Jacqueline Humphries created murals for the roll-down metal gates of restaurant supply stores on the historic street. The trick is that these murals are only visible at night, after the stores close. Over the course of one evening’s sunset, I went on a scouting mission to photograph the works in their native habitat. Click through for the photo essay.
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The Limits of Text and Image: Glenn Ligon at the Whitney
It is perhaps telling that the first piece in the exhibition Glenn Ligon: AMERICA, the most comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work to date, is not one of the text-based paintings for which he is best known, but “Hands” (1996), a massive canvas tacked to the wall of the exhibition’s entrance with pushpins, bearing the image of outstretched palms against a black background. Drawn from a mass-media photograph of Benjamin Chavis and Louis Farrakhan’s 1995 Million Man March, enlarged to the point of degradation and then screenprinted, what appears here is a copy of a copy of a copy, an image that can no longer articulate what it once represented.