Art
Still Life Mayhem
These days you can’t walk out of the house without tripping over an abstract painting.
Review
Art
The Sounds of Greenland's Melting Glaciers
A carefully random scattering of chairs filled ISSUE Project Room’s Beaux-Arts style theater last Friday night. With the ability to sit facing any direction, choosing the optimal seat felt crucial, though there was no indication as to which way was best. The sole light source, a blue spotlight illum
Art
Nancy Cunard's 'Black Atlantic'
PARIS — The display for Black Atlantic by Nancy Cunard at the Musée du quai Branly evokes a period when the artistic and literary avant-garde became intertwined with the political and the glamorous.
Art
Unmanned Archival Vehicle: Wafaa Bilal at Driscoll Babcock
For whom do images of a conflict zone, as those Wafaa Bilal has recreated in his Ashes Series, bear witness? How is this memory constituted? In his first solo show at Driscoll Babcock, the artist and NYU professor takes as his starting point newswire photographs of destruction in Iraq, transforming
Art
Art That Gives Directions
Run by Lacey Fekishazy and Jon Lutz, Sardine is as small as its name suggests. And the Bushwick gallery takes space into special consideration: it isn’t an ostensibly typical neighborhood art space, one that makes the white walls look cramped, but there is instead a certain regard taken to consider
Art
Julian Schnabel’s Formula for Greatness
Since Julian Schnabel first gained attention with his broken plate paintings in the 1980s, he has been predisposed to working on found surfaces – animal skins, velvet, corduroy, sail cloth, tarpaulins, canvas flooring from boxing rings, wallpaper, navigation maps, flags, Kabuki theater backdrops, an
Art
Go Figure: Dona Nelson's "Phigor"
Dona Nelson's paintings are by turns joyous, confounding, risky, mysterious, straightforward, difficult, tied up in knots and freewheeling. One thing they are not is uniform. Nelson has long resisted a signature style, committing herself instead to an adventurousness in her means of expression.
Art
Burning into the Night: Maria Lassnig’s 70 Years of Painting
Maria Lassnig’s retrospective at MoMA PS1 is the largest survey of her work ever mounted in the United States. It reveals an idiosyncratic artist whose quirks and caprices, especially in her later work, can feel willful, even perverse — up to a point.
Art
Meditations from the Middle
KANSAS CITY, Missouri — There is nothing in the center, because it’s the middle and the middle doesn’t matter. At least, that’s what interest in smaller non-coastal American cities historically tends to be.
Art
The Artistic Influence of an Overlooked Explorer
Prussian explorer Alexander von Humboldt has his name immortalized on a bay in California, a mountain range in New Zealand, towns all over the world, an orchid, and even a squid. Who exactly this man of wanderlust was, however, remains less familiar. A new exhibition at the Americas Society on the U
Performance
The Facebook Martyrdom of a Digital Activist
I'm not sure why plays without actors have become a trend in theater, but between Gabriel Lester’s “Super Sargasso Sea (phantom play #1)” at Abrons Arts Center last November during Performa 13 and this week's production of Rabih Mroué and Lina Saneh's “33 rpm and a few seconds" at Asia Society, the
Art
Pushing Paper in Quebec
MONTREAL — Entry was free but the carpet still red, a rain-sodden lilt up entrance stairs. And under drab skies the people came. Here, tonguing the periphery of Montreal's infamous red light district, was Papier14, the works-on-paper fair's seventh annual iteration.