Choose your location
Art in America
Venice Diary Day 3: The Biennale’s Best Pavilions Capture the Absurdity of Art in this Moment
I have a favorite pavilion—if you’ll permit me a superlative, despite not having seen every single one. For five days, I ran around Venice pounding cappuccinos, my step count uptick fueled by FOMO. Still, this was not enough time to see everything I wanted. (Is it just me, or are there more good collateral shows than ever before?)For Venice Biennale Artists, a Very Real Halo Effect in the Market Never mind—I can’t get the Austria pavilion out of my head. There, in the Giardini, the Ukrainian ballet dancer Oksana Serheieva rehearses at the barre. I watched for a while, mesmerized, before...
Venice Diary Day 2: The Vatican Sent Me to Prison
The Venice Biennale’s most exclusive and elusive show is at a women’s prison. Put on by the Vatican pavilion, the show is at Giudecca Women’s Prison; the bouncers are prison guards, and it’s hard to get an appointment. It seems that the prison, and the Vatican, care little for art world credentials—as it should be. But many visiting Venice for the opening aren’t used to hearing “no.”Indigenous Artists Take Venice Biennale's Top Prizes as Mataaho Collective, Archie Moore Win Big After I showed up for my appointed time slot—which I booked a week in advance, so that they could run...
Mexican Painter María Izquierdo Gets Her Due After Decades at the Venice Biennale
María Izquierdo was born in 1902 in San Juan de los Lagos, a commercial center and home to the Basilica de la Virgin de San Juan, the second-most-visited religious sanctuary in Mexico. Both these facts figure intimately in Izquierdo’s art starting in the 1930s. While Frida Kahlo became better known, Izquierdo ranks alongside her as an admired and studied in the pantheon of Mexican women artists—and foreigners such as Tina Modotti, Leonora Carrington, and Remedios Varo—whose careers developed there.Indigenous Artists Take Venice Biennale's Top Prizes as Mataaho Collective, Archie Moore Win Big Izquierdo features in the 2024 Venice Biennale’s “Foreigners Everywhere”...
Elias Sime’s E-Waste Abstractions for Venice Are Tightly Linked With His Community Projects in Ethiopia
When Elias Sime was in art school, his teachers threw his work in the trash. It was the late 1980s, the final years of Ethiopian communism, and art students were expected to produce socialist realism. But Sime was more interested in materials—in trash, as it were.In the Venice Biennale's Historical Sections, Overlooked 20th-Century Figures Come into Focus Today, Sime is now known worldwide for gargantuan abstractions—a new series debuts today at Spazio Tana in Venice—comprising intricately arranged e-waste that he buys, often by the truckload, in Addis Ababa’s Mercato market—the largest open-air market in Africa. When I visited in the market...
Former Child Star Charmaine Poh Uses AI To Confront the Tension Between Visibility and Privacy
What are the stakes of being visible? Singapore-born and Berlin-based artist Charmaine Poh explores the possibilities and dangers in her intimate portrayals of queer feminine bodies. In a series of photographs titled “How They Love” (2018–19), she invites collaborators to express their desires toward their romantic partners on their own terms. Poh captures couples in the considered and contained site of the photography studio, where they are free to use props and gestures to express themselves and their bonds with one another. Poh says she “was thinking about the surveillance of queer bodies in Singapore,” about the families who did...
At the Venice Biennale, Ana Segovia Mocks Machismo
In February 2020, during Mexico City’s art week, Ana Segovia staged an intervention in La Faena, a cantina downtown not far from the Zocalo. At one end of the bullfighting-themed bar hangs a large painting of a man holding a red cape as he crawls through a barbed wire fence into a pastoral landscape filled with bulls. Segovia painted an almost one-to-one replica of the work in his signature, decidedly femme palette, somewhere between neons and pastels. In Segovia’s version, the man’s red cape is white, and he holds a rose while dawning a salmon sweater and a baseball cap.In...
Venice Diary Day 1: A First Look Inside the Biennale’s “Foreigners Everywhere” Main Exhibition
Representation and opacity are the two primary tensions that artists have been grappling with in recent years. This year, the Whitney Biennial took the softer, less legible, more protective approach. At the Venice Bienniale, meanwhile, visibility trumps vulnerability.For Venice Biennale Artists, a Very Real Halo Effect in the Market In “Foreigners Everywhere,” some culturally specific references get lost in translation to be sure, but being represented, and being seen, is framed as a good thing. Some curators might have hesitated to include works made by an artist confined to psychiatric institutions (Aloïse Corbaz), or drawings by a Yanomami shaman done in collaboration...
Pierre Huyghe Takes on AI and Nonhuman Evolution in Venice
At a moment of growing anxiety about AI’s potential to usurp and overwhelm human intelligence, Pierre Huyghe offers neither reassurance nor prophecy of catastrophe. Instead, he proposes to take human consciousness out of the equation altogether. “Liminal,” an exhibition at the Pinault Collection’s Punta della Dogana, extends the French artist’s longtime exploration of otherness, conceived here as the experience of reality in biological, chemical, and technological entities that are not human. Huyghe sets up situations that allow such entities to evolve on their own, and to communicate with each other in the absence of human intervention. His work careens between...
Oliver Beer Herds and Harmonizes Cats
This essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.Taking Over the Australian Pavilion, Archie Moore Celebrates 2,400 Generations of First Nations People Herding cats is notoriously difficult, but how about making them harmonize? That is a hypothetical taken up long ago in a curious 17th-century musical text—and again more recently by the British sound artist Oliver Beer. His latest gallery show in New York, “Resonance Paintings – Cat Orchestra” at Almine Rech, involves a probably apocryphal contraption (one hopes!) called the Cat Piano devised...
Is Malta the New Kassel?
Will there ever be another edition of Documenta? Last November, the entire selection committee responsible for selecting the esteemed quinquennial’s next artistic director resigned en masse, showing solidarity with Ranjit Hoskote, a committee member whom Documenta denounced after he signed a letter (issued by the Indian division of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement) comparing Zionism to Hindu Nationalism. The turmoil foreshadowed a major meltdown for Germany’s art scene as a whole: once a crucial cultural hub with coveted state funding for the arts, the nation has proven itself hostile to artistic expression that dissents in any way from the government’s...
Joan Jonas’s MoMA Retrospective Reveals the Enduring Influence of Japanese Culture on Her Work
In a vitrine in Joan Jonas’s exhibition at MoMA lies a peculiar artifact: a Noh drama notation book open to facing pages showing a schematic on the left and columns of calligraphy on the right. Upon encountering the 14th-century Japanese theatrical tradition, Jonas wrote in a journal displayed beside the book (a souvenir from a trip she took in her mid-30s): “The Noh was the deepest in the La Monte Young sense.”Joan Jonas, a Performance Art Pioneer, Gets the Super-Size MoMA Retrospective She Deserves At the start of the 1970s, Jonas, who was born in New York, had been exposed to...
Kay WalkingStick’s Layered Landscapes Get Under the Genre’s Surfaces
IN HER 1997 DIPTYCH VENERE ALPINA, Kay WalkingStick sets a painted image of a hulking mountain in the American Rockies beside a dramatic umber slit. The artist sliced open the brown canvas, bisecting it vertically, and under the crisp incision, a crusty layer of fake gems sparkles in the light. Here as elsewhere, WalkingStick makes the land feel corporeal as she tends to its wounds. New-York Historical Society Promotes Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto to Chief Curator A member of the Cherokee Nation who is also of European descent, WalkingStick has been exploring relationships between people and the earth for five decades....
Shana Moulton’s MoMA Show Is for Anyone Who’s Ever Googled a Mysterious Symptom
More than 20 years ago, Shana Moulton created an alter ego named Cynthia—a hypochondriac who wades through WebMD articles, shops for New Age healing products, and becomes overwhelmed by options and information that take turns providing comfort and alienating her from her own body. Cynthia—played by Moulton in a wig—is the star of the artist’s video series Whispering Pines (2002–2019), which has only grown more piercing in its commentary in the intervening decades; now, algorithms observe our bodily anxieties and target them with ads.Recipients of the 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship Announced, Including Nicholas Galanin, Lorraine O'Grady, and More A rejoinder to this...
German Museums Celebrate Caspar David Friedrich’s 250th Birthday and His Iconic Visions of People Confronting Nature
IF TOURISTS’ SNAPSHOTS ARE ANY GAUGE, we remain under the spell of Caspar David Friedrich. The German painter is known for the motif of the Rückenfigur—a picture of a figure posed with their back to us before an expansive view. A quick glance at Instagram confirms that people still like to assume that pose in front of majestic vistas. In the Rückenfigur’s most famous incarnation, Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1817), the artist staged an iconic confrontation between human and nature. The figure, positioned on the threshold of a mountainous panorama, primes the viewer to experience nature’s grandeur...
Raven Chacon Summons Earthy and Ethereal Sounds from Landscapes and Guns
Drawing on music, video, and installations that evoke the presence of environmental sights and sounds, Raven Chacon is a composer and artist whose work focuses in part on land and its many different inhabitants. Born in Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation, and currently based in Upstate New York and New Mexico, Chacon (Diné) has created compositions and artworks inspired by a distinctive sense of place, however specific or impressionistic that sense may be. Nicholas Galanin’s Pointed Public Sculpture Inspires Glorious Noise in New York He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2022 and was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2023....
Sheida Soleimani On Her Collectible Print for A.i.A.’s Spring Issue
Each issue of A.i.A. comes with a limited-edition artist’s print, and in our Spring issue, we invited Sheida Soleimani to contribute a special collectible work. Soleimani interrogates the narratives disseminated by the press and social media in a practice that fuses sculpture, performance, and photography. In her ongoing series “Levers of Power,” the Iranian American artist recontextualizes images of public figures to reveal how seemingly simple gestures—a pointed finger, a clenched fist—inform perceptions of people both familiar and foreign. Armita (2024), the special pull-out print that accompanies the Spring issue, is a new entry in the “Levers” series. Below, Soleimani...
Anu Põder Pushed Delicacy to the Brink of Brutality
A version of this essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.Chicanx Artists rafa esparza and Guadalupe Rosales Reflect on Their Relationships to Mexico Growing up, Anu Põder wanted to be a ballerina. But her small body failed to conform to the discipline’s impossible standards, so she turned to art, where misfit physiques soon became her primary preoccupation. The feminine forms that resulted—made of materials including fat, surgical plastic, and found fashion—comprise the Estonian artist’s retrospective “Anu Põder: Space for My Body” at Switzerland’s Muzeum Susch, a...
In Melancholy Prints and Drawings, Käthe Kollwitz Opened Eyes to the Many Sorrows She Witnessed
“I want to be effective in this time in which people are so perplexed and in need of help.” Käthe Kollwitz wrote in her diary toward the end of 1922. She had just completed “War,” a series of seven woodcuts expressing what she saw as the deluded fervor and emotional scars of the recent European war. In 1920s Germany, that disaster, with its tragic consequences, was a subject on everyone’s mind. MoMA Apologizes for Denying Entry to Visitor with Keffiyeh: 'We Made a Mistake' Kollwitz saw suffering firsthand, not only in Berlin streets and demonstrations but in the medical practice of...
A Whitney Biennial with No Heroes and No Villains
Can you tell an interesting story with no heroes and no villains? The 2024 Whitney Biennial, “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” sure tries. In this edition, you won’t find the bold assertions, the grand gestures, the finger pointing—in short, the controversy—that typically make Biennial headlines. The works of the 71 artists on view here invite empathy and contemplation more than anger or applause.Gwangju Biennale Names Artists for 2024 Edition, a Show Billed as a 'Soundscape of the 21st Century' This year’s edition is brimming with fragile materiality: soft materials are at odds with firm frames. Dala Nasser drapes fabric, dyed...
Art in America
883+
Posts
2M+
Views
Since 1913, Art in America has published groundbreaking critical insights about contemporary art and culture.
Welcome to NewsBreak, an open platform where diverse perspectives converge. Most of our content comes from established publications and journalists, as well as from our extensive network of tens of thousands of creators who contribute to our platform. We empower individuals to share insightful viewpoints through short posts and comments. It’s essential to note our commitment to transparency: our Terms of Use acknowledge that our services may not always be error-free, and our Community Standards emphasize our discretion in enforcing policies. We strive to foster a dynamic environment for free expression and robust discourse through safety guardrails of human and AI moderation. Join us in shaping the news narrative together.