Book Review
How Painting Saved One of Our Most Iconic Designers
A visit to Michaels craft store helped restore book jacket designer Peter Mendelsund during a deep bout of depression.
Reviews
Art Review
John Wilson Spent a Lifetime Making Blackness Visible
His social realism style was well suited to the difficult subjects, including racism and other forms of oppression, he took on in his art.
Art Review
Edvard Munch Was a Magician of Light
A show at London’s National Portrait Gallery reveals the artist’s astonishing technical skills, but the wall texts are laugh-out-loud amusing at best and art historically dangerous at worst.
Book Review
A Visual Archive of Diasporican Liberation
A new book pulses with artistic forms by Puerto Rican artists born of necessity, urgency, collaboration, and activism.
Art Review
UChicago MFA Students’ Offbeat Aesthetics
Highlights are Eleonore Zurawski’s delicate and brutal sculptures and Rebekka Federle-McCabe’s explicit but tender dog sculptures.
Art Review
How Huguette Caland and Hai-Wen Lin Listen to the Body
Playful and witty, full of bright color and unexpected shapes, two of the most delightful solo shows up in Chicago right now concern human bodies.
Art Review
Tim Hawkinson Makes the Ordinary Otherworldly
His recent paintings of everyday life transcend the literal without becoming overtly symbolic; this is the tight rope he walks.
Art Review
Renée Green Questions the Meaning of Meanings
She combines text, images, and objects to orchestrate a distinct style of visual poetics that is grounded in language while rewiring it.
Art Review
Jim Shaw Peels Back American Pop Culture’s Facade
The more you connect the dots in his work, the more the insidious and catastrophic work of the US government, law enforcement, and military come to the fore.
Art Review
The Dark Side of Education
An exhibition at Amant reflects on the violence and complexities of the system by which we teach and are taught, primarily through the lens of those who’ve suffered under it.
Art Review
Apocalypse Art Has Never Been More Relevant
A Paris exhibition traces artists’ obsession with the Apocalypse, from rare Medieval illuminated manuscripts to Blake, Kandinsky, and Kiki Smith.
Art Review
Asian Diasporic Artists Ask How We Create Our Self-Images
A group exhibition focuses on the fragmented nature of identity and the circular loop of external and internal feedback involved in self-image creation.