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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...
Kikuo Saito’s Tantalizing Abstractions Speak a Language We’ll Never Understand
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.Juanita McNeely, Groundbreaking Feminist Artist Who Bravely Depicted Her Illegal Abortion, Dies at 87 Scribbled numbers, wiped-away letters, word-like scrawls: all of these recur in Kikuo Saito’s paintings of the early 1990s, a selection of which form a wonderfully mystifying solo show on view now at James Fuentes gallery in New York. The cryptic markings are cast against vast fields of color that, in the hands of an Abstract Expressionist like Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman, might inspire transcendence. But Saito’s color...
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...
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...
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