What’s an artifact, what’s an artwork, what’s a prop, what’s decoration, what’s disposable — these are questions that Aguilar has taken up with great enthusiasm.
Reviews
Posted inArt
A Missed Opportunity to Bring an Eccentric Museum to Life With VR
In Space Popular’s presentation at the Sir John Soane’s Museum the VR content does not complement the physical, but widens the gulf between art history and contemporary art making.
Posted inArt
Penny Goring’s Emotional Body Horror
The interplay between bodies and emotions in Goring’s work, and their potential to be transformative, reveals the politics that pump through the artist’s ever-exposed heart.
Posted inArt
Jean Painlevé Revealed the Otherworldliness Beneath the Water’s Surface
His detailed images of microscopic aquatic creatures suggest a version of Surrealism’s dream realities.
Posted inBooks
New Book Asks, Why Do Artists Make Art?
In no small feat, Why I Make Art condenses artists’ multifaceted, meandering spoken stories into lively, relatable narratives that draw the reader in.
Posted inArt
Painting Against the Tyranny of Flatness
Korea’s Dansaekhwa artists eschewed the idea of art-about-art and commodity culture in favor of an abstract art imbued with traces of the struggle for liberation and cultural identity.
Posted inFilm
The Enigma at the Heart of Patricia Highsmith’s Story
From her personal writings, along with fragments of her work and recollections of friends and family, Loving Highsmith constructs a view of the author that is more intimate than most.
Posted inBooks
Miami, Chonga Girls, and Claiming an Aesthetics of Excess
Author Jillian Hernandez theorizes the intersecting formations of gender, class, and race in relation to the self-presentation of Black and Latina women and girls.
Posted inArt
Fred Wilson Summons Ghosts of the Past to Confront the Racism of the Present
Wilson’s installation challenges not just outwardly violent historical figures but subtle colonial aesthetics still embedded in the city’s more liberal public monuments.
Posted inBooks
In Lewis Warsh’s Poem Composed Over Many Decades, the Past Is Never Really Past
Mortality and memory are points of inquiry in this posthumous publication.
Posted inArt
An Artist’s Illness Inspires a Meditation on the Power of Pain
Guadalupe Maravilla’s first New York museum show resolutely harnesses the otherness of illness, while never surrendering to the notion of suffering as a totalizing narrative.
Posted inArt
52 Artists Challenges the Meaning of “Women’s Art”
What most stands out for me about 52 Artists at the Aldrich Contemporary is the sense of both engaging with and resisting categories.