Art
Channeling Ryan Trecartin in Brooklyn
Ryan Trecartin is the voice of a generation ... of monkeys who WhaTevEr. His films make me want to kill myself, like in a good way, because she is just.so.current.
Review
Art
A Performance Artist's Tribute to Nelson Mandela
On December 11, performance artist and sculptor Angela Freiberger offered a succinct and touching “Homage to Mandela” at the Tambaran Gallery.
Art
The Utopian Vision of Jean Paul Gaultier
Sailor stripes, corsets, and men’s skirts are not just the cheeky trademarks of a brilliant designer, but tools for a deeper excavation of culture.
Art
Some Where’s Rainbow: Pink Floyd and Dorothy Land in Bushwick
Last week Brooklyn’s Where Gallery celebrated the close of its inaugural show with Dark Side of the Rainbow, the live over-dubbed experience of Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939) as synchronized with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (1973).
Art
Single Point Perspective: Paweł Althamer’s Grass-Fed Surrealism
Inside the second floor galleries housing the contemporary collection of the Museum of Modern Art, a sculpture called “Bruno” (1998–2012) stands in quiet command of the room. Made primarily of grass and cow intestines, its materials transform the human body into a mediation on mortality via the dige
Art
Painting, Perception, and the Emphatically Handmade
The recent resurgence of interest in contemporary painting has posited the unique object — especially the handcrafted, the slapped-together, and the aggressively tactile — as yin to neo-conceptualism’s yang, a raggedy-edged refutation of the factory-finished, the reproducible, and the overly cerebra
Art
Barbara Stanwyck, Proto-Feminist Hollywood Star
It’s a sure sight for sore eyes to see the name “Stanwyck” emblazoned on a cinematheque marquee. Then again, not everyone today may be familiar with this name — but the uninitiated have every reason to stop in for one of the afternoon or evening double bills playing all through December at Film Foru
Art
Breeding the Perfect Chair
Good or bad, every experiment starts with a hypothesis. For Dutch-born designer Jan Habraken with New York-based design studio FormNation, it was the question: "What if we apply the science of genetic engineering to an inanimate object?"
Art
The Shock and Awe of George Grosz
George Grosz in Germany, on view at the New York Studio School Gallery, offers a rich overview of Grosz’s development as an artist and dissident.
Books
Beautiful Books, Terrible Times: The Free Expression of Soviet Children's Lit
The 1920s in Russia weren't exactly what people had hoped they would be. After the 1917 Russian Revolution brought down the old regime and the Soviets took over, there was a swelling sense of hope in a potential egalitarian Communist future. Yet only a few years later, censorship was curtailing art
Art
Made in New England: The 2013 deCordova Biennial
SOMERVILLE, Mass. — Stashed away in the tony suburbs just west of Boston, the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum and its engagement with the wider, grittier world outside its gates has sometimes been called into question. But the museum has begun focusing its attention every two years on local arti
Art
Painting for Oneself: On Peter Heinemann’s Self-Portraits
Forty years passed between my first hearing about Peter Heinemann’s self-portraits and my actually getting a chance to see them. A number are currently installed in a garret-like room at the National Academy Museum as one of several posthumous inclusions in the group exhibition See it Loud: Seven Po