Art Review
Sable Elyse Smith Reveals the Shapes of State Violence
The artist’s critique of the prison-industrial complex simultaneously deepens and skewers the legacies of Minimalism.
Review
Art Review
Emory Douglas’s Lifetime of Revolutionary Art
At age 83, the former Black Panther Party culture minister continues to explore the possibilities of unapologetically political art.
Art Review
Beyond the Myth of Chico da Silva
Presenting da Silva with Amazonian artists of different generations undermines the Western notion of the artist as an isolated genius.
Art Review
You Can Love David Hockney and Still Hate His iPad Paintings
No amount of curatorial artspeak counters the sense that the late artist’s massive digital painting lacks the inventive mark-making and use of color that characterized his life’s work.
Art Review
SVA Grads Make Art out of History’s Rubble
The Art Practice MFA thesis exhibition rewrites what came before, pushing back against harmful systems and inventing better ways of living together.
Book Review
Helen Levitt Captured the Poetry of New York City
A new survey publication serves as a testament to the photographer’s belief that the city’s working-class communities of color possessed a beauty and drama all their own.
Film Review
A Homerist Reacts to Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey”
“This is a tale of a man affected by trauma, but without any sense that it changed him at all.”
Art Review
The Sunflower Effect of Kyung-Me
The artist’s current series marks a shift in her practice, evoking the life span of a sunflower — from blooming to dying, from sharply defined forms to rivulets of dissolution.
Art Review
Trevor Winkfield’s Cheerfully Sinister Worlds
His rejection of certainty is an urgent reminder that imagination should not be neglected in the pursuit of art.
Art Review
The Artists Working in Velvet, Amethyst, and Relics
An exhibition showcases works by Sky Hopinka, vanessa german, April Bey, and others that have connections to spiritual practices and rituals.
Film Review
Four Centuries Later, We Still Don't Get Caravaggio
A British docudrama serves as a salutary primer on the Baroque master’s greatest works, but we should be wary of what it tells us about the personality of its subject.
Book Review
The Many Lives of Frederic Edwin Church
Victoria Johnson’s biography is a nuanced portrait of the artist, whose landscapes conveyed the anxieties of a nation struggling over slavery, war, and disunion.