Books
A Poet Yearning for Knowledge
Ron Padgett’s poems make me gnash my teeth.
Weekend
Art
Mosaics of Motherboards, Keyboards, and Wire
Ethiopian artist Elias Sime makes wall sculptures from castoff computer parts that evoke the toxic dumping of these materials around the world.
Art
The Southern Gothic Moods of Allison Janae Hamilton
Hamilton’s immersive installation allows visitors to wrestle with a mysterious land, its racial realities, and its mythic past.
Music
Ragnar Kjartansson’s Panorama of Love and Death
The artist’s Death Is Elsewhere conveys an understanding that humans — relatively recent additions to a 4.5-billion-year-old planet — will come and go. The planet will remain.
Art
Marley Freeman Charts the Abstract Space of Memory
Freeman transmutes a recollection into a color-based relationship between abstract forms.
Art
The Divine Light of Josef Strau
Strau's collage-paintings merge the word and the light, while positing the shared slipperiness of language and faith.
Art
Required Reading
This week, roadside America, Alexandra Stock hates Christoph Büchel’s Venice project, quitting Instagram, failed utopias, the AirPods disaster, and more.
Art
Two Women in a Man’s Art World
You are not likely to find the work of Mimi Gross and Marcia Marcus in the permanent collections of any major New York City museum. I find that both predictable and troubling.
Books
Why Matisse Thought “A Picture Should Always Be Decorative”
For Matisse, decoration was never a secondary matter.
Art
How Do Artists Get Into the Whitney Biennial?
I made a spreadsheet to find out what the participants in the Whitney Biennial have in common.
Art
Paradise Lost: Paul Davies's Fictive California
The painter's depiction of breezy palm trees and picturesque mountain ranges contain eccentric, discordant details.
Art
The Ideas Hidden in One Artist's Embroidery
Elaine Reichek uses hand-embroidery to emulate the handwriting of authors whose ideas she makes her own.