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Art in America
Across the Iron Curtain, A Vibrant Art Scene Thrived Above and Underground
An easel, an upturned doll, some houseplants, some rolled-up papers, a basket, a chair: these are some of the items that appear in a sun-dappled living room, as captured by Czech photographer Jan Ságl in 1973. The living room belonged to him and his wife, artist Zorka Ságlová, but neither they nor their children are present. Ságl shot the image after learning that his home was being monitored by the police: he wanted to document the scene, so that if they meddled in his home, he’d be able to tell. He called the series “Domovní prohlídka” (“House Search”). Then, fearing...
Science and Storytelling Collide in Shanghai Shows
Before it won me over, Shubigi Rao’s exhibition at Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum, titled “These Petrified Paths,” gave me pause. Rao’s installations and videos concern the Armenian genocide as well as earthly extraction and the destruction of books—and the parallels she draws between them left me skeptical. She says the works, made between 2003 and 2023, are meant to show “how the normality of our daily lives relies on violence.” India's Kochi-Muziris Biennale Returns After Two Years of Delays, Full of Hope and Sound I care deeply about the nonhuman world, yet I hesitated at Rao’s suggestion that oil extraction, banned...
Why Meredith Monk’s Munich Exhibition Made Me Cry
Prior to seeing “Meredith Monk. Calling,” I’d cried in an exhibition twice in my life. This show at Haus der Kunst in Munich—Monk’s largest survey to date and her first solo in Europe—marked the third time. Here, tears fell due to a combination of the art, a recent familial loss, and an emotionally vulnerable conversation with one of the show’s curators about death but also, importantly, life—particularly Monk’s celebration thereof. Though the 81-year-old artist’s interdisciplinary works form an oeuvre largely about cycles of life, only two of her earliest pieces concern death. Everything else circles around growth and renewal. In...
Richard Mosse’s Amazonia Dazzles and Devstates
This essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about about art that surprises us, about the works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.Corporate Photography Reveals a Dehumanizing Gaze It started with a blast of static that faded away to reveal a gentle pulse of animal sounds: a serene reprise from seemingly alien birds and bugs going about their business on a planet other than our own. An enormous 60-foot screen showed aerial views of former forest land, where trees—or what remains of them—blaze in otherworldly colors. Then a jarring jump cut shifts to close-up footage of young...
Stephen Thaler’s Quest to Get His ‘Autonomous’ AI Legally Recognized Could Upend Copyright Law Forever
When he was two years old, Stephen Thaler had a near-death experience. Thinking it was candy, he ate two dozen cold medicine tablets, and washed them down with kerosene that, in a parenting misstep too common in the 1950s, had been stored in a Coke bottle. New Data 'Poisoning' Tool Enables Artists To Fight Back Against Image Generating AI “I had the typical experience of falling through the tunnel and arriving at what looked like a blue star. Around it I saw little figures, little angels around a sphere,” Thaler, now 74, told Art in America from the suburban Missouri office...
Juana Valdés’s Sculptures and Installations Address the Complex Struggle of Global Displacement
Time and tide wait for none, they say. But art can direct those unrelenting forces to its own expressive purpose. That is the insistent implication of “Embodied Memories, Ancestral Histories,” Juana Valdés’s retrospective at the Sarasota Art Museum. Currents of all kinds pass through the exhibition, beginning with a large photomural that dominates the space. It shows the artist crouching down below Havana’s Malecón—the city’s main boardwalk—launching little paper boats into the water. Valdés made the boats from pages torn from Cirilo Villaverde’s classic 1882 novel Cecilia Valdés, a story of love and revenge set against the racist colonial caste...
Pussy Riot Retrospective Proves Why the Group’s Activism Should Be in an Art Museum
Pussy Riot is generally referred to as a punk rock band and performance art ensemble. But at least as it appears in Montreal, the group’s first museum survey does not disclose much in the way of musicality or visual sophistication—except in its brilliantly cacophonous exhibition design. Anyway, such qualities might be beside the point.New Banksy Artwork In London Is Taken Shortly After Being Installed A sort of retrospective in the form of a colorful multimedia show that originated at Kling & Bang in Reykjavik before traveling to the Louisiana Museum of Art, followed by overlapping iterations in Montreal and at the...
Shilpa Gupta Gives Voice to Silence and Resilience
This essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about about art that surprises us, about the works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday. “I was walking on the street. A car stopped, a few men stepped out, and pushed into my mouth, a liquid. The mouth froze.”Those haunting words open two New York shows devoted to Shilpa Gupta, a Mumbai-based artist who has taken over Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Chelsea as well as Amant, a non-profit space in Brooklyn. The text is etched into a brass plate hung next to a small sculpture—a cast of an open...
The Climate Crisis Demands That We Collaborate with Other Species. These Artists Are Showing Us How.
IN THE EARLY 1980s, artist Garnett Puett “kind of ran away,” as he told me on Zoom, from his life in rural Georgia, where his family had kept bees for four generations. He set his eyes on the New York art world, arriving as an MFA student at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Up North, he was disinclined to talk about his childhood beekeeping, assuming the artsy sophisticates he rubbed elbows with would find it hickish. In his sculpture class, however, Puett found a new use for his knowledge when he was introduced to a traditional bronze technique called...
Artist Edgar Calel Leads a New Wave of Institutional Critique
Museums have long been compared to mausoleums, lifeless places in which objects are permanently laid to rest. In most cases, this is true: artworks tend to spend a lot of time stacked in storage once they enter institutions. Edgar Calel’s 2021 installation The Echo of an Ancient Form of Knowledge (Ru k’ox k’ob’el jun ojer etemab’el) tests that logic and refuses to be confined.In Open Letter, Artists Accuse Western Museums of 'Silencing and Stigmatizing' Palestinian Voices There are seven versions of the installation, one for each star in the Big Dipper. This year, two versions premiered in biennials: one in Gwangju,...
Chinese Ink Master Liu Kuo-sung Paints the Moon Without Using a Brush
Some artists, for good reason, hesitate to reveal their tricks, so as to avoid any chance of diminishing their work’s mystery. But learning how Liu Kuo-sung makes his moon paintings doesn’t take away from the enigma—it only enhances the effect. The 91-year-old artist’s lunar series—begun in the late 1960s and revamped in the 2010s—features in a retrospective at the National Gallery Singapore. All of the 60 works on view are the product of the decades that the Chinese ink master spent innovating ways to paint without a brush.Artist Edgar Calel Leads a New Wave of Institutional Critique You would be forgiven...
Brice Marden Was a Painter of Rare Power
It seemed as though Brice Marden had always been there and always would be. That was an illusion, of course, but a comforting one. His first show, at the Bykert Gallery in 1966 when he was just 28, is one of those legendary debuts that shook the art world (then defined as about 100 New Yorkers)—like that of Jasper Johns at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958, or Frank Stella’s at the same venue two years later. Have gallery shows since then ever seemed to take on such historical importance?The Best 2023 Black Friday Deals on Artists' Tools and Supplies But...
Harmony Korine Finds New Forms for His Twisted Visions
After shooting his latest movie, Aggro Dr1ft, in the seaside wilds of Miami, Harmony Korine turned to what he considers another sort of sanctuary—his art studio—to transform scenes from the film into a series of paintings. The movie was shot with infrared cameras, to render the underworld it surveys in the garish and alien hues of a video game, and he wanted the paintings to elicit the same effect. In the studio, he knew how to get in the mood. “I’ll put on some music, things that are on loops. Sometimes I can listen to the same song on a...
Why Climate Protesters Should Keep Targeting Museums
ON FEBRUARY 28, 1974, Tony Shafrazi walked into the Museum of Modern Art in New York and spray-painted kill lies all in red across the achromatic surface of Picasso’s Guernica (1937), in protest of United States atrocities in Vietnam. The next day, his action appeared on the front page of the New York Times, as he had intended: Shafrazi had notified news agencies in advance.National Portrait Gallery Scrutinized for Sponsor's Ties to Energy Sector On October 14, 2022, nearly 50 years later, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland walked into the National Gallery in London, opened a can of tomato soup, and...
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