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Art in America
Iconoclastic Artist Alice Shaddle Re-Emerges in Chicago Exhibition
A curator recently shared with me a digital folder containing scanned slides of Alice Shaddle’s art, a lifetime of sculptures, collages, paintings, and installations, some of them representational, many others almost unclassifiably baroque. As I browsed the works—most constructed from paper, latex, or vinyl—two words kept recurring in the captions: whereabouts unknown. An unnamed 1960s sculpture of an overdressed little girl jutting forward with sinister pomp: whereabouts unknown. Camel (1969), a work that looks less like a desert animal than a two-headed bird in the throes of a delirious molt: whereabouts unknown. Gardener (1974), a sculpture that resembles a carnivorous...
Asian American Art Survey in LA Highlights the Power of Artists Living in Community
For centuries, art history has wheeled and dealed in the myth of the artistic genius solitarily toiling away in the studio. But a number of recent exhibitions have looked at the ways in which networks and communities have been essential to the development of artists and their practices. The latest of these comes in the form of “Scratching at the Moon,” an exhibition that looks at an intergenerational cohort of 13 Asian American artists with deep ties to Los Angeles at the Institute of Contemporary Art in downtown LA.Yong Soon Min, Artist Who Incisively Analyzed Her Asian American Identity, Dies...
Marian Zazeela Draws and Dreams on Her Own
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.Rarely Seen and Seldom Heard: Dia Plots Projects with Reclusive Experimental Artists Marian Zazeela and La Monte Young The drawings in Marian Zazeela’s exhibition at Artists Space in New York look like words being born. Most of them are not even words, exactly, but accumulations of marks making their way through transformative stages somewhere between the embryonic and the etymological. Zazeela’s ornate style of drawing and calligraphy has been synonymous for decades with the work...
Thomas Heatherwick: The Architect of Our Neoliberal Hell
Years later, it still seems unbelievable. A designer is tapped to build a grand public structure, with a budget of $75 million, as the centerpiece of a Manhattan real estate project. As he works, the cost rises above $150 million—more than the annual expenses of the Whitney Museum, more than the price of an F-35 fighter jet, more than any artist before could ever possibly hope to have at their command. Eventually, it is said to climb further, to $200 million, with some landscaping added.Andy Warhol Museum Director Patrick Moore to Resign Amid Scrutiny Over Pop District Project The design is...
Remembering the Trickster-Artist Pope.L
On the 8th floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Tom and Diane Tuft Trustee Room—a minimalist wood-paneled chamber in a Renzo Piano–designed building—offers a stunning view north, toward the Hudson River, the High Line, and the Standard Hotel. It was here, one October evening in 2017, that I watched as Pope.L received the Bucksbaum Award for his contribution to the 2017 Whitney Biennial, an exhibition I curated with Mia Locks. For each Whitney Biennial since 2000, one featured artist has received this award for their potential to make a lasting impact on American art, and it’s safe...
Before AI, Two Japanese Artists Took the Human Hand out of Gestural Brushstrokes
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.Prisms of Influence: "Slip Zone" at the Dallas Museum of Art In 1952, the New York–based critic Harold Rosenberg famously described a seismic shift taking place in American painting. No longer, he wrote, were artists coming to a canvas with a predetermined composition that they’d already worked out in a sketch. Now, a painter slathered on strokes and dribbled paint directly. A few years later, halfway around the world, two Japanese artists, Kazuo Shiraga and Akira Kanayama, took Rosenberg’s idea a step...
In Her Prismatic Paintings, Joan Semmel Builds Feminist Worlds
Joan Semmel’s 1974 painting Intimacy-Autonomy shows a man and a woman lying naked in bed side-by-side, presumably post-coital. They’re realistically rendered, though their skin is a grayish green that should feel sickly but doesn’t. Instead, improbably, the figures feel sexy. The blue wall at the end of their foreshortened bodies makes the edge of their peach blanket look like a horizon, the breasts and knees like mountains. The painting is larger than life, bold and assertive, yet also tremendously tender.Iconic Mark di Suvero Sculpture in Venice Beach Is Officially Slated for Removal In the 1970s, Semmel’s subject of choice, sex, and...
Joan Semmel Details Her Painting on A.i.A.’s Latest Cover
Joan Semmel, whose painting Couch Diptych (2019) appears on the cover of the Spring 2024of Art in America, is profiled in a story by Emily Watlington. From her SoHo studio, Semmel told A.i.A. the backstory of the artwork on the cover, which is a detail of a larger work shown below in full.Liste's Director Leaves as the Fair Undergoes 'Management Restructuring' I use myself as a model, but I don’t think of my works as self-portraits. Portraits talk about characters in more specific ways, whereas I just use myself as the model because it’s convenient, and because I don’t want to...
Art in America’s Spring Issue Features Joan Semmel, A Crash Course in Indigenous Art, and More
A remarkable moment in Emily Watlington’s profile of Joan Semmel in this issue: it’s 1972, and Semmel has just completed a group of paintings she calls the “Erotic Series,” paintings of men and women who’d agreed to be depicted having sex in her studio. They were not works of pornography but instead an attempt to represent intimacy—still, no dealer would show them. So Semmel took matters into her own hands: she rented a New York storefront, hung her paintings, and sat in her show daily, watching the reactions of people who came in to take a look. In Semmel’s lifetime...
Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio Captures the Materiality of Disappearance and Resistance
While planning his debut museum solo at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio faced an unexpected setback in the form of a permitting issue. For the first time in 40 years, the City of Los Angeles wasn’t going to grant MOCA a permit to open the elevated gallery at its Geffen Contemporary location—unless, for fire safety reasons, they were able to reduce the room’s size by 600 square feet by adding several false walls. That solution didn’t appeal to Aparicio. Instead, he proposed installing a sprawling work on the floor in the gallery’s center,...
A Filmic Meditation on Sirens and the World in Which They Resonate
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.Rosa de la Cruz, Collector Who Shaped Miami's Art Scene, Dies at 81 A drone from above slowly spins as it sets its focus on an abstract emanation from the ground. A tessellated pattern is small enough at the start to barely merit attention, but its design takes shape as the camera zooms in on what reveals itself to be a public address system for emergency management. More visceral than the visual, however, is the sound:...
Lacan’s Notorious Art Collection—and Its Impact on Artists to Come
In the 20th century, more than 3,500 philosophy programs—featuring the likes of Michel Foucault, Gaston Bachelard, and Gilles Deleuze—aired on French television, giving writers and philosophers a certain cultural cachet and a broad footprint. “Lacan, the exhibition. when art meets psychoanalysis,” a show at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, charts the impact of one such philosopher: Jacques Lacan, who was also a writer and psychoanalyst. His influence is widely felt in France and abroad, and in 1974, one of his 27 seminars, “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,” aired on national television.Frankenthaler Foundation Files Motions to Dismiss in Ongoing Legal Drama with...
Frankenthaler Foundation Files Motions to Dismiss in Ongoing Legal Drama with Former President
The Frankenthaler Foundation and its directors have filed motions to dismiss the ongoing legal saga with former board president, Frederick Iseman, according to court documents filed Tuesday.LA's Felix Art Fair, Dover Street Market Tap David Hammons, KAWS, Sterling Ruby, Lauren Halsey, and More for Collaborative Projects The two motions were filed on behalf of the Foundation and its directors and come amidst a backdrop of escalating tensions and a barrage of accusations, including alleged “pay to pay” schemes, that have captured public attention. The motions challenge allegations brought by Iseman, who is Frankenthaler’s nephew, and directed at each of the boards current directors:...
Chicanx Artists rafa esparza and Guadalupe Rosales Reflect on Their Relationships to Mexico
After a visit to Mexico, I often return to the immortal words of Gloria E. Anzaldúa, whose groundbreaking 1998 essay-memoir-poetry collection Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza articulated what it means to be Chicanx and live on the US-side of the US-Mexico border. “Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them,” she wrote nearly three decades ago. While a border serves as “a dividing line,” a borderland is “a vague and undetermined place,” one that is in “a constant state of transition.” LA-Based Artists Mario Ayala, rafa esparza, and Guadalupe Rosales Explore...
A Survey in Singapore Connects “Tropical” Art from Latin America and Southeast Asia
Rumor has it that, somewhere in New York City, sometime during the mid-20th century, the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera had a chance meeting with the Filipino painter Victorio Edades. This storied encounter centered around a formative conversation about the political power of murals, wherein both artists chatted with great gusto about how they’d paint their respective revolutions. While there is no real evidence as to whether this meeting actually took place, the tropical alliance the story suggests galvanized artists for generations to come.Investec Cape Town Art Fair Opens Its 11th Edition, With an Emphasis on Highlighting South Africa's Local Art...
Going About Daily Life while Learning of Relentless Horrors through Screens
An ass, stuck high in the air, jiggles inside fishnets. Then, it multiples threefold, repeating across a projection screen trifecta. Cut to a thong peeking out between the top and bottom of a patterned, vibrant set flecked with yellow and blue. People flash their best moves as dancehall music vibrates through the space, the soundtrack to a portrait of Black joy, the camera mostly capturing derrieres.Tate Picks Mire Lee, Sculptor of Goopy and Horrifying Installations, for Turbine Hall Commission Akeem Smith gathered this footage as part of his experimental archive of all things dancehall-related. It includes a party that took place...
German Feminist Icon Astrid Klein Gets Her New York Debut
Toward the beginning of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film Contempt, there’s a long take in which the camera roves around Brigitte Bardot’s nude body. We listen as her character takes stock of her shoulders, her mouth, her eyes, her nose, her ears, as she asks her lover if he admires them all. “Yes,” he responds. “I love you totally, tenderly, tragically.”The Fire, the Couch, and the Clit Ring: Kaari Upson at Sprüth Magers The German artist Astrid Klein also appears to love Bardot totally, tenderly, tragically. In her piece Untitled (je ne parle pas…), Klein offers two-rephotographed images of a vampy Bardot strutting her stuff. Blown up to...
In Tacita Dean’s Sublime Drawings, Climate Change Is No Distant Disaster
When Tacita Dean made the pilgrimage to see Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in the ’90s, she got lost. Then, she turned the minutiae of trying to find that deliberately remote work of land art into an artwork in its own right: a sound work titled Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty (1997). The piece is characteristic of her aleatory approach to art-making, a selection of which is currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney. Like Smithson, she makes work about time, environment, and ways of placing oneself in the world. But while his work can...
Charles Gaines Asks Heady Questions with No Easy Answers
A sense of impending doom, of something ominous about to happen, pervades this survey of Los Angeles–based artist Charles Gaines’s work made since the early 1990s. The mix of anxiousness and dread is best exemplified by one of the first works visitors encounter, Falling Rock (2000–23), one of two major installations by Gaines that has been re-created and updated at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (on view through March 17). Upon entering the second-floor gallery, I heard a crash that caused me to jump, and made me wonder if another museumgoer had knocked an artwork over. But I came...
Judy Chicago’s Work Aged Poorly. That’s a Good Thing.
Judy Chicago became the most famous feminist artist of her generation when, for her monumental Dinner Party (1974–79), she enlisted hundreds of women volunteers to contribute craftwork to her giant triangular table. On that table, Chicago set plates dedicated to notable women from history, from the goddess Ishtar to the artist Georgia O’Keeffe. But in lieu of food, she served each woman a unique ceramic vulva, decorated as a tribute to her work.Norton Batkin, Founding Director of CCS Bard, Has Died This iconic installation toured 16 venues in 6 countries, with a message to women everywhere: you are never alone, even...
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