Art Review
For Michael Asher, the Museum Was the Medium
A survey of the conceptual artist reveals his deep engagement with institutional machinations, though it sometimes feels like inside baseball.
Review
Art Review
Contending With Fashion Photography's Artifice
Lillian Bassman spent decades crafting commercial images. After leaving the industry, she was finally free to experiment in the darkroom.
Art Review
Should We See Peter Hujar’s Contact Sheets?
Though not made for public consumption, the darkroom work prints reveal his portraits as excerpts of a conversation, rather than memories snatched from the ether.
Art Review
The Album Art Music Left Behind
Two projects examine the visual art and design that shape our perception of music, from Raymond Pettibon’s Foo Fighters record covers to the ephemera of bygone bands.
Book Review
The Story of Printmaking Is the Story of Democracy
Holly EJ Black deftly weaves a narrative that integrates varied geographical and cultural perspectives, centering figures who may not have been artists themselves.
Art Review
The Unruly Ceramic Beings of Kathy Butterly
The artist’s quasi-vessels incorporate folds, indentations, apertures, and coverts, which hint at bodily, biomorphic, and natural forms.
Art Review
Gertrude Abercrombie’s Band of Midwest Magic Realists
A pair of exhibitions at the Milwaukee Art Museum underscores the support, comradeship, and spirit of rebellion shared by the Surrealist and her friends.
Book Review
The Hidden History of Stock Photography
In her first book, scholar Simona Supekar mines the history of stock imagery as a vessel for racism and sexism and considers its role in the age of AI.
Art Review
John Giorno Put Poetry on the Line
In iconic works like his "Dial-a-Poem," the artist offered a moment of sustained attention, a sense of relation, a novel perspective.
Book Review
John Constable’s Four Seasons
Art historian Susan Owens's exquisitely illustrated new book narrates the painter’s story through his relationship to weather, place, and time.
Art Review
In Two Chicago Exhibitions, Liberation Takes the Floor
Shows at MCA Chicago and Wrightwood 659 chart a path from colonial dispossession to the possibilities of dance, music, and community.
Art Review
Philip Guston’s Lines of Poetry
A show of his works from 1964–1978 focuses on the artist’s transformation and on his wife, poet Musa McKim, as a principal supporter and source of inspiration.