Art
Why Most People Don't Get Grant Wood
This exhibition of work by Grant Wood at the Whitney Museum, offers an opportunity to reconsider a very unusual artist who has been pigeonholed as irretrievably conservative and sentimental.
Reviews
Art
Reverent Photos of Young Punks and Their Irrepressible Mohawks
There’s a casual, almost candid quality in Ed Templeton's photos. His subjects look “cool,” most likely because he himself thinks that they are.
Art
An Artist Entangles Performance, Process, and Wire Sculpture
Tith Kanitha is known for her sculptures of steel wire that read like artifacts from some forgotten, ancient civilization, but she also stages performances and works in film.
Film
An Artist Excavates the Neglected Histories of a Gentrifying Neighborhood in Detroit
Nicole MacDonald’s Last Days of Chinatown hones in on the displacement of the poor and “unimportant” people to accommodate the march of progress in Detroit.
Art
The Bewildering Lexicon of Robert Gober
Is Gober taking stock and summing up his life at his latest exhibition at Matthew Marks? If so, he sure is breaking new ground while at it.
Art
The Japanese-American Painter Who Chronicled Early 20th-Century Life in the US
Chiura Obata's stirring paintings invite us to consider the representation of persecution and distress from the point of view of an immigrant in the early 20th century.
Art
A Botanic Garden Invited Artists to Transform Centuries-Old Trees Felled by a Storm
After dozens of trees — some as old as 250 years — came down in Bengaluru's Lalbagh Botanical Gardens last October, woodcarvers gave them new life.
Art
Unearthing Centuries of Interdependence Between Humans and Plants
Big Botany: Conversations with the Plant World explores how humans have historically understood the plant world, and how we ought to reconsider it as we degrade the planet.
Art
Whale Paintings Evoke the Giant Mammals' Suffering and Scarring
Juliette Dumas's large-scale paintings of whales' flukes manage to refresh a subject that has borne more than its share of sentimentality.
Art
The Remarkable and Polyglot Design Legacy of Ilonka Karasz
Ilonka Karasz’s designs span from the 1910s to the 1970s, across multiple media: textiles, industrial design, and illustration, including several New Yorker covers, all with a keen sense of the prevailing zeitgeist, and yet, I had never heard of her.
Film
A Film Tries to Make a Pioneering Feminist Intellectual More Than Just a Muse
Lou Andreas-Salomé — a novelist, essayist, and psychoanalyst who won the hearts of Freud, Nietzsche, and Rilke — led an almost infinitely varied life.
Art
Provocative Art about Blood and Masks
Daniel Pešta's paintings refute the conventions of classical beauty but their nightmarish imagery can be exquisite.