The inaugural exhibition at the new Whitney Museum of American Art, which opens to the public today, is predicated on the elusiveness of a cohesive and stable national identity in the United States.
Richard Serra
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New York City Bill Could Give Citizens Greater Say in Public Art Process
New legislation to be submitted to the New York City Council on Tuesday could bring an end to a decades-long debate surrounding democracy and public art.
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9 Minimalist Boxes for Boxing Day
Boxing Day is a holiday celebrated by aesthetes the world over. In order to purify ourselves after the rampant commercialism and visual over-stimulation of the past month, we devote this day to the solemn contemplation of square and rectangular Minimalist sculptures.
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Some Thoughts About Richard Serra and Martin Puryear (Part 2: Puryear)
Like Serra, Puryear went to Yale’s famed M.F.A. program (1969-71), but he attended five years after Serra had graduated. In fact, Serra and Robert Morris were visiting artists while he was a student there.
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Some Thoughts About Richard Serra and Martin Puryear (Part 1: Serra)
It is easy to forget that Richard Serra (b.1939) and Martin Puryear (b.1941) were born only two years apart. The different relationships that they developed toward craft and materials makes it all too easy to overlook that they are nearly contemporaries.
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Thoughts on Richard Serra in Qatar
DOHA, Qatar — This spring, Richard Serra has made his mark on the Arab Gulf in a characteristically big way. Several important pieces are currently on view in Qatar, two of them permanent installations commissioned by the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA).
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The Brute Classicism of Joel Perlman
It’s been over twenty years since we’ve seen Joel Perlman’s large-scale sculptures on exhibition in New York City. The size and weight of his mighty works in welded steel can be a challenge to show, but Loretta Howard Gallery has pulled out all the stops rigging in five new large-scale works (four in welded steel and one in aluminum).
Posted inOpinion
A Google Earth Perspective on Land Art
Earlier today @museumnerd tweeted out a link to a view of Michael Heizer’s land work “Double Negative” (1969) in Google Maps. Viewed in satellite, from high above, Heizer’s 1,500-foot-long trenches looks almost incidental, like cuts made with scissors into the skin of the earth.
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It’s a Man’s World: Inside a Postwar Art Time Capsule
There may be some great-looking specimens of postwar art in Re-View: Onnasch Collection — an exhibition that turns Hauser & Wirth’s cavernous Chelsea outpost into a mini-museum offering the kind of intimate experiences that have been all but lost in New York’s uptown behemoths — but the show also arrives with some huge caveats.
Posted inOpinion
Monuments, Man: Charlie Rose Gets Weird with Richard Serra
For his third-to-last show of 2013, professional interlocutor Charlie Rose brought on lapsed steelworker Richard Serra for a conversation about the artist’s ongoing exhibition of new sculptures at the Gagosian Gallery.
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The Pursuit of Art, 2013
Memories fade. That’s the one good reason, as far as I can see, to compile an end-of-year list. It’s sometimes startling to retrace what attracted my attention over the course of a year; it is also instructive to determine where such a miscellany of shows fits in with ongoing areas of interest, and which ones, in hindsight, merited the time it took to review them.
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Mr. Big Stuff: Richard Serra Piles It On
Once in a blue moon a show arrives that excuses the inexcusable — delivering actual aesthetic dividends from the tentacular global reach, bottomless capital and self-aggrandizing, macho scale endemic to the top tiers of the art game. Despite my expectations, that show turns out to be Richard Serra’s extravaganza now filling both of Gagosian’s Chelsea hangars.
