En route to the new Whitney Museum press preview, I take the 14th Street crosstown bus to Ninth Avenue, turn south on foot past Little West 12th Street, then hang a right on Gansevoort where the last façade of temps perdu is that of long-gone Florent, the 24-hour restaurant of the gleaming zinc bar and the fanciful personalities. I flash on Ru Paul living at the Jane West Hotel in 1986. More …
A Salty River Phoenix doesn’t care about art. That’s the way I felt growing up there, and that’s the vibe I took with me when I left for Albuquerque in 2001. Even then, the city had more money than God but seemed to spend most of it on sprinkler systems and freeway plants. Art rarely happened, and when it did, it was usually along a hyper-palatable stretch of Scottsdale’s Marshall More …
“A radical rethinking of SITE’s signature exhibition,” and a “reimagined series,” were just two of the phrases that SITE Santa Fe Phillips director and chief curator Irene Hofmann used on Monday night at the Farmer’s Market Pavilion in Santa Fe to describe what will become, in summer 2014, the first of a three-part series of biannual exhibitions focused on contemporary art of the Americas. Replete with a new name and More …
About a week before Election Day I encountered, at Aaron Payne Fine Art, a painting titled Circle of Flowers (1969) by Alma Thomas. President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama selected two Thomas paintings for the White House after President Obama’s first election, borrowed from institutions including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Alma Thomas then was singled out for mention in a critic’s notebook by Holland Cotter, in The New York Times, More …
The tribute to Yayoi Kusama at the Whitney Museum of American Art is intended to bring some fun and whimsy to Manhattan this summer. The show that was already at the Tate Modern is now in the city where Kusama, now 83, let her hair down. She fell in with hippies in the late 1960’s – and she never got the psychedelia out of her system – or the Op Art. The polka More …
You have to stay through 1:08 of the video below (and see also 6:59) to see in situ the four diptychs of the Lorraine OGrady photo-mural at the Whitney Biennial, paralleling the white ambulance-hearse of The We Love America and America Loves Us installation by Bruce High Quality Foundation. This dyadic room, which curator Francesco Bonami has said he would pick as a “snapshot” of his show, deals in an More …
Theres no theme to the recently opened Whitney Biennial, in a year when the themes of collapse and disillusion that haunt the real world and the film world couldnt be more apt. This themeless-ness may be the only way in which the Whitney is bucking trends in the show that has defined the museum. The other theme might simply be that all the artists are American, which could mean anything More …
Artist Jay De Feo was for the duration of her life associated with the Bay Area, and sometimes mistaken, by her name, for a man (some speculate that being named Jay helped her win the 1951 UC Berkeley fellowship that took her, after graduation, to Europe and North Africa for a year and a half, Florence for six months of that). However, her work is that of a brilliant changeling More …
When I walked in to David Floria Gallery the morning I left Aspen I had the sense I knew everything about Herbert Bayer, even though I actually knew very little. The creator of an all-lower-case typeface he used in Bauhaus publications called universal, Bayers life followed a trajectory from Bauhaus graphic designer to New York emigre to Aspen artist who worked in lithography, painting and sculpture – much of the More …
On Sunday morning if you were watching “This Week with Christiane Amanpour” you would have heard the bells of ancient (25-year-old) contemporary art history tolling. Gary Bauer of “Our American Values” (“protecting life, marriage, faith, and freedom” is the tag line), offered up that when back in the 1980s an artist suspended a crucifix in “a vat” of urine, Christians didnt “riot.” Maybe no, but the body blow to culture More …
The 2001 edition of The 20th-Century Art Book defines Abstract Expressionism as a post-World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York in the 1940s. Ab Ex came to describe a specific group of primarily male artists committed to an expressive and profoundly emotional art that arched to individual ideals of universalism. So where have the Abstract Expressionist women been? Jackson Pollock is usually credited with revolutionizing art because of his More …
As Prospect.3 gets under way in New Orleans (opening to the public on October 25th), the state of the conversation about contemporary art biennials keeps re-telling a story of the festival staircase and the critical railing that biennials have to ascend and grasp at the same time. Biennial or bust? (“What’s the point?” wrote the Art Newspaper in 2011.) Battle of the Biennials ensued in The Economist in 2012. The issue had actually gotten More …