In no small feat, Why I Make Art condenses artists’ multifaceted, meandering spoken stories into lively, relatable narratives that draw the reader in.
Reviews
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.
Posted inArt
The Vulnerable Painterly Worlds of Katherine Bradford
In Bradford’s color-infused world of superheroes and swimmers, viewers and her figures bathe together outside of time and space.
Posted inBooks
The Conflicted Inner Life of a Queer Literary Icon
A reimagining of the life of renowned queer author Patricia Highsmith isn’t a tale of admiration or condemnation, but one about the complex nature of womanhood.
Posted inArt
Mira Park Knows What We Dream About
In her art, Park is in touch with our collective anxieties about a future that seems to darken with each passing day.
Posted inArt
Picasso and Ingres Face Off in London
Can two paintings an entire exhibition make? Yes. Especially when it is a Spaniard called Pablo Picasso squaring up to a Frenchman called Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.