Art
Portrait of an Invisible Portraitist
I cannot think of another person who has given us such intimate portraits of everyone from Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, and Jasper Johns to Eartha Kitt, Toni Morrison, and Patti Smith.
Review
Art
Philip Taaffe, Symbolist and Naturalist
Taaffe is able to bring the exterior, visible world as well as the interior imagined world into his paintings. To me, this is what distinguishes him from his contemporaries.
Film
A Hidden Life Is a Passionate, Damning Meditation on Faith and Fascism
Terrence Malick’s latest film makes me feel the way church never did, capturing an essence of the divine through aesthetic sublimity.
Art
Abraham Cruzvillegas's Sculptures Echo the Precariousness of Place
Cruzvillegas’s forms embody the precariousness and hope, if not the danger, of contemporary notions of borders, and the forces at work that make them porous or impenetrable.
Film
The Directors Mixing Fact and Fiction at the Forefront of New Chilean Cinema
In a charged political moment, hybrid documentaries speak to Chilean identity and struggle better than any other form of filmmaking.
Art
An Artist Activates Histories Through Memory
In Zineb Sedira’s work, archival material is not dead and past, but is active, suggesting that there is no such thing as “frozen in time.”
Art
The Illusive, Intimate Nature of Mary Corse's Paintings
One must spend time with Corse’s paintings, which evolve depending on whether the paint applied to the canvas is thick or thin, whether the work is in natural or artificial light, and whether you are close or far away from the painting itself.
Art
#BlackGirlMagic Takes Form In Vanessa German’s Sculptures
German’s commitment to dynamic and sometimes riotous formal strategies expresses an amalgamation of Black femme iconography, including shrines to Serena and Venus Williams with butterflies.
Art
Ebony G. Patterson Transforms the Gallery Into a Garden
At Hales New York, Patterson’s collages meditate on the entropy and delicate elegance of our natural and built environments.
Art
Finding Crystalline Clarity in the Seemingly Chaotic
The technical mastery of Annie Lapin's paintings is like that of a juggler who can simultaneously toss balls, bowling pins, flaming torches, and a chainsaw.
Art
The Pioneering Painted Sculptures of Melvin Edwards
Edwards's sculptures, on display at Alexander Grey Associates in New York, establish him as a master of his various crafts with with an acute sense of rhythm and movement.
Film
Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a Queer Homage to the Labor of Women Artists
More than being one of the greatest lesbian romances, Céline Sciamma’s latest is a beautiful film about artistic labor and the social contexts that uplift some artists above others.