When Art Finds Your Inner Child
What children can teach us about art and making, "Benito Bowl" memes, a NYC guide to an offbeat Valentine's Day, and the aesthetics of liminality.
On this Valentine's Day, I'm thinking about the place of art in love, and how artistic observation, appreciation, and disagreement have helped me cultivate compassion in my own relationship. My partner and I are both passionate, hard-headed people (I'm an Aries, he's a Taurus, pray for us), and when we're at odds, neither of us is good at surrendering. But in our shared experiences of art — in conversation and in quiet reflection — we bare the soulful sensitivity that is the fertile soil of empathy. Our edges soften; our breath deepens. We make room for nuance. Art, as Agnes Martin so precisely said, “is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.”
In this week's edition, artist and educator Mónica Palma shares her own discoveries in art and making through her work with children, finding inspiring expressions in their intimate, often physical engagements with the world. Damien Davis muses on the meaning of an artist's archive and the pain of its loss, and Ed Simon breaks down the uncanny aesthetics of liminality. Finally, whether you're spending today with your lover(s), friends, or solo, we put together a guide of art-filled (and a little sexy) events in NYC for inspiration.
—Valentina Di Liscia, senior editor
Teaching Children Taught Me How to Be an Artist
Biting surfaces, tasting toys, and producing an orchestra of incomprehensible sounds are mundane activities for young children, but for Mónica Palma, these interactions revealed new ways to understand her body, her identity, and her practice. “From all the ages that I worked with, my favorite were the two-year-olds,” Palma writes. “One child in my classroom had only a handful of words and a finger for pointing. With those minimal tools, she knew how to speak to the world. I didn’t notice shame or frustration, just presence.”
News
- Amy Sherald’s American Sublime made headlines last year after she withdrew the show from the National Portrait Gallery over concerns that they'd censor her painting of a Black trans woman. Now, it's breaking attendance records at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
- MoMA PS1 released the list of 53 artists included in the sixth edition of Greater New York, opening in April. Kenneth Tam, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Farah Al Qasimi, and Taína Cruz are among the participants this year.
- Our socials were on fire with art and memes after Bad Bunny's Super Bowl half-time show, now lovingly dubbed “Benito Bowl,” a celebration of Puerto Rican, Latine, and Caribbean culture.
- A large Pride flag was quietly removed from NYC’s Stonewall National Monument after a directive from the Trump administration. It was triumphantly re-hoisted on Friday by local activists and officials.
- Photographer Jerry McMillan, a stalwart of the LA art scene and pioneer of photo-sculpture, died on Tuesday at age 89.
- A “Wall of Tears” zip-tied to a fence in Brooklyn lists the names of 18,500 children killed by Israel in Gaza. Artist Phil Buehler hopes the public work will confront people with the scale of the loss.
From Our Critics
The Importance of Making “Degenerate” Art
Here, the term is reclaimed not as an insult but as an ethical position: art that refuses neutrality, civility, or institutional comfort. | Tara Anne Dalbow
Does It Have to Mean Something to Be Great?
Joanne Greenbaum’s cacophonous symphony of individual marks, shapes, and colors coheres without obscuring the individuality of each element. | John Yau
Spain’s Cosmic Mother of Modernism
Maruja Mallo viewed herself as an extension of her modernist paintings, in which female energy is a conduit for natural and even otherworldly forces. | Lauren Moya Ford
A Surprisingly Enjoyable Show About Critical Theory
An exhibition about the influence of French critical theory on American art finds inspiration in diasporic thinkers like Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. | Cat Dawson
Amanda Ross-Ho Finds Herself in Her Parents’ Art
The artist’s current show is a moving reflection on the ways our identities are inexorably entangled with our relationships and surroundings. | Alex Paik
More to See in NYC
Your Guide to a Sexy, Artsy, Non-Boring Valentine’s Day in NYC
A Brooklyn zine fair, an exhibition on sex and cults, and other activities to spend the day with your lover, your polycule, or just yourself. | Greta Rainbow
Five Shows to See in New York City Right Now
Three millennia of storytelling at the Morgan, Goya’s visions of war, Alison Nguyen’s diasporic tale, and Indigenous artistry in every medium imaginable. | Lisa Yin Zhang and Valentina Di Liscia
Opinion
When Artists Lose Their Archives
I couldn’t afford my storage unit anymore. After it was auctioned off, I found out that parts of my lost work were being sold online. | Damien Davis
Israel’s Plan to Artwash Genocide at the Venice Biennale
The artwork at the heart of the pavilion promises to continue the project of denying Palestinian existence.
NYC Deserves a Culture Commissioner Who Cares
The city is in a deep affordability crisis that is reshaping who can live and work here, and which institutions can survive. | Gonzalo Casals and Mauricio Delfin
Art in the Threshold
The Unruly Politics of Glitter
In the visual arts, glitter has been used to make the presence of such marginalized identities impossible to overlook. | Francesco Dama
How Liminalism Became the Defining Aesthetic of Our Time
This crowd-curated digital movement is one of the most pertinent and explicit reactions to our particular slice of dystopian late capitalism. | Ed Simon
Community
Beer With a Painter: Mary Lovelace O’Neal
“At this marvelous hard-won age, the days of jumping and dancing with the paintings are over. But I don’t feel limited,” the 84-year-old artist, educator, and Civil Rights luminary tells Jennifer Sammet in an interview. O’Neal splits her time between Oakland, California, and Mérida, Mexico, where she was staying when she spoke with Sammet over the phone in December.
Art Problems: Should I Sell My Work to People Whose Politics I Hate?
In an art market flush with conservative collectors, it might seem challenging to avoid selling work to patrons with abhorrent politics. But art advice columnist Paddy Johnson explains that artists have more agency than they think to do the right thing. "You might need sales to survive, but any given collector is usually replaceable," she writes in the latest Art Problems.
Art Movements: Another Artforum Editor-in-Chief Is Out
Tina Rivers Ryan steps down from the disgraced publication, the Studio Museum names three artists-in-residence, Queens Museum names a new leader, and a deeply unnecessary new Jeff Koons collab in our weekly roundup of industry news.
A View From the Easel
This week, Ileana García Magoda from Acatitlán, Mexico, and Renee Levin from Rumson, New Jersey, experiment with papier-mâché and crave natural light. "Getting sun helps me focus and acts as a warm-up before painting,” says García Magoda. Your studio could be next!
Required Reading
Gladys Nilsson subverts ageist myths, letters from children in ICE detention, Heathcliff and whiteness, Toñita at the Super Bowl, Japanese incense clocks, and more must-reads from around the internet.
From the Archive
Cupid Shoots Through Millennia of Art
The god of love and desire has fascinated and inspired artists since antiquity. | Hakim Bishara
