Art
It turns out that the CIA has its very own object and art museum for your online viewing pleasure. Although the collection is housed in CIA headquarters making it closed to the public, work does appear to travel to other museums and can be viewed anytime online.
Art
As a painting major in Albany, New York during the late 1980s, it was easy to sprint a few blocks from the art department over to the Nelson Rockefeller Art Collection to grab some inspiration from museum-quality art. Nostalgia for the collection's treasure trove of modernist work came to mind while
Art
This past weekend, hundreds of Brooklyn artists opened their studios to the public for GO Brooklyn Art, allowing visitors an intimate view of their work and processes. I headed to Fort Greene and Clinton Hill to see the how the neighborhoods' artists, many of whom work out of converted domestic spac
Art
When the artists of Red Hook, the waterfront neighborhood on the western edge of Brooklyn, opened up their studios for the GO Brooklyn weekend, it felt more like they opened Pandora's box. There was no limit to the creativity on view — every trend, mannerism, style, and strategy imaginable was on di
Art
The other day I saw two solo exhibitions: The Words by Jen Mazza at Stephan Stoyanov Gallery and Game Plan by Alighiero Boetti at MoMA. Both artists want to show you what they value in their lives, but they use their inspiration to different ends. Mazza paints unassuming still lifes of books. Boetti
Art
I'm skeptical of crowd-curating and crowd-sourced art-prize voting. I've written about it here on Hyperallergic. Still, as the date approached, I found myself really excited about this past weekend's GO open studios event, organized by the Brooklyn Museum — not because I wanted to vote for who would
Art
It all started with a write-up on the Gallerist blog about Jordan Eagles’s new show at the Krause Gallery where his blood paintings are currently displayed. I immediately cringed when I went on a journey following all of his press, posts about him on Facebook and Twitter, and real life opinions with
Art
The waterfront of Sunset Park in south Brooklyn was a major hub for military shipping and related industry from the world wars until its decommissioning in 1960, and, as happens with underused monumental warehouse spaces, artists have now moved into some of these towering structures. This past weeke
Books
Here is a fun literary experiment: substitute the words ill or illness in Virginia Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill” (1930) with the words hung-over and hangover . It works, right? “Hangover is the great confessional”; “In a hangover words seem to possess a mystic quality”; “Incomprehensibility has an en
Books
It’s hard to talk about spirituality in the US today without bringing up a lot of baggage — conflicts between religions about who has it right or who is the most righteous, not to mention all the stereotypes that accompany each religion and its practitioners. And it’s certainly not easy to talk abou
Art
Samsara, a Sanskrit word that means “world” or “cyclic existence,” is also a recently released documentary by Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson. It’s a collection of mind-blowing, Planet Earth-style shots, but instead of taking on the natural world, the film’s directors chose to represent a topic that’s
Books
It can be a subtle thing — the way in which an organization or collective comprised of ambitious and purposeful people working toward a clear set of goals starts to slip into something a bit murkier; something that seems to be more about self-perpetuation and outsiders’ goals than about that origina