Art
Books, Wefts, and Black Lives Matter at the Baltimore Museum of Art
The rewards of what is in plain sight far outweigh what is tucked away.
Weekend
Art
Pippa Garner's Crossover Art of Gizmos, Gadgets, and Gender
Garner has been an absurdist for four decades, satirizing consumerism, marketing, and waste in performance art, videos, sculpture, installations, drawings and magazine editorials and art pages.
Books
A Study of Art Galleries Reveals Their Aesthetic of Transcendental Experience
David Carrier’s The Contemporary Art Gallery is a small but well-stocked treasury of first-hand observations by someone who’s spent a lot of time in art galleries, but who has retained enough critical distance to see them with a certain objectivity.
Art
Required Reading
This week, the world's largest watercolor painting, the bedcover Rauschenberg stole, the language of autocrats, Crapumenta, Apple's new HQ, and more.
Art
Weekend Words: Delay
"We will never be an advanced civilization as long as rain showers can delay the launching of a space rocket."
Music
The Intentional Fallacy Is Evil: Festival Anthems, Fifty Shades Darker, Workout Motivation, 35 Hits from the ‘70s & ‘80s
With any number of noncanonical, shelf-filling compilations released on the market every day, the failure to review them makes sense, as they're rarely any good — but rarely doesn’t mean never.
Books
Crosscutting Tales: Donald Breckenridge's Novel And Then
Satisfying both on the level of story and style, And Then is a thoughtful meditation on the residue that remains: the ghosts that people our lives, the dead we cannot forget.
Art
Sylvia Plimack Mangold’s Spring and All
I cannot think of another artist devoted to nature who chooses such unlikely, decidedly plain, almost unsightly views, but never makes that act the point of the painting.
Art
Don Voisine Makes Geometry Sexy
Every color in a Voisine painting has its own material identity. Even the narrow bands edging or running through the panel’s border colors convey a distinctive feel to their physicality.
Art
Before the Bath
All the time that we spent going about our business, slowly but surely a Trump presidency became inevitable.
Art
Inquiry Meets Imagination in Jen Durbin's "Jackie Series"
In a series of drawings derived from frames of the Zapruder film, Durbin tracks the shifting spatial orientation of Jackie Kennedy's pink pillbox hat — and by implication, Mrs. Kennedy's bodily response to the unfolding horror.
Art
Easy Does It: The Slow Surprises of Stanley Whitney
Best known for arranging blocks of thrumming color into large rectangular canvases, Whitney’s major achievement has been to spark a slow burn of surprises, within the least esoteric medium around, large-scale oil painting.