Art
TURIN — Everything in this house moves … I’m living with a bunch of Italian artists in Torino (aka Turin), Italy. Outside, there are the diurnal tides of Porta Palazzo, Europe’s largest open-air market existing for over 150 years. Inside, we have a sea of peoples and energies contributing to a mood
Art
The Drawing Center reopens today in Manhattan's Soho neighborhood and the $10 million renovation not only provides 50% more exhibition space (4,300 sq ft) but a clean seemingly ego-less space that refracts slivers of natural ambient light into galleries and offers an ideal frame with which to look a
Art
NORTH ADAMS, Massachusetts — Framed on the faux-log-cabin wall of Kent Monkman’s piece “Two Kindred Spirits” (which depicts the American western characters of Tonto and the Lone Ranger as lovers in a sort of Horatio/Hamlet life-sized diorama death scene) is a hand-embroidered phrase: “The Love That
Art
BRIGHTON, U.K. — Perhaps it is little wonder the last time Jean Dubuffet was reviewed in a public gallery in the United Kingdom, the year was 1966 and the decade was swinging. The French painter’s love of raw creativity was of a piece with the social revolutions taking place. His invention of Art Br
Art
Curator Danny Orendorff's 19-artist exhibition All Good Things Become Wild and Free at Carthage College's H.F. Johnson Gallery of Art located in Kenosha, Wisconsin, is a textually rich, difficult-to-describe arrangement. It is a forest plucked from the sewage system of Candyland-meets-Edward-Gorey’s
Art
I always consider it fortunate that at institutions like the Metropolitan Museum, exhibitions continue to argue eloquently that art has evolved along manifold trajectories before postmodern discourses recognized it as so. In that vein, one of the highlights of the fall museum season, Designing Natur
Books
We know that the equation between word and thing can no longer be taken for granted, and that words are made up of both syllables and sounds. Does this mean a poet — one who uses transparent language and writes in an autobiographical mode — is incapable of exploring the conditions of meaning? By tra
Art
I was lucky enough to see Wayne Thiebaud: 70 Years of Painting at the San Jose Museum of Art (February 27–July 4, 2010) and write about it for The Brooklyn Rail (July–August 2010). As with that exhibition, many of the works now on view at the Aquavella Galleries’ posh, mirrored townhouse on Manhatta
Art
You’d never find Pablo Picasso or Jackson Pollock relegated to the corridors of the Museum of Modern Art. Rarely do artists deemed essential to MoMA’s historical narrative rub elbows with the throngs swarming the escalators and passageways in endless transit from galleries to café to restroom and ba
Art
Six days before all hell broke loose, I rode the subway uptown to attend the press preview of Edvard Munch: The Scream at the Museum of Modern Art. As the preview drew to a close and the already crowded room swelled with paying customers, I asked Ann Temkin, the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Cu
Art
I was at Catching the Light, Lois Dodd’s retrospective at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the August day I got the news that critic Robert Hughes had passed away at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx, New York. For many, myself included, Hughes’s prose did for art criticism what Shakespeare did fo
Art
Wrapping the tip of Roosevelt Island that points out to the sea, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park is a realm of stillness and meditation unlike anything else in the city. Designed as a memorial to the 32nd president, it is now just as much a call to remember its architect: the late lover