The RISD Museum balances an unusual identity. It is an important community museum, but also serves as the university collection for the nation’s preeminent art and design college. Unlike many university museums, which opened during the life of a college…
Over 100 people gathered at Lesley University on Wednesday June 4 to talk about “How We Get By.” Organized by Matt Kaliner, Tim Devin, and Jason Pramas, the event was billed as “a group exploration of how artists earn…
Let me introduce you to J. L. Austin1 and John R. Searle.2 These two guys were like my two best friends in college. Well, them and Stelarc, but Stelarc is kind of a weird guy . . . Anyway, if…
Contemporary art is losing its sheen. This despite the fact that hyper-expensive, hyper-polished sculptures from the studio of artist Jeff Koons fetch double-digit millions from collectors clamoring for ownership of such “tchotchkes.”1 Koons and kindred blue-chip artists certainly believe the…
For many years I have been wrestling with the lack of forward momentum in the critical dialogue surrounding Painting.1 A condition that is somewhat unique to the discipline, since other media or métier2 have successfully evolved beyond the dated confines…
Engaging Audiences panel, May 8, 2014; seated left to right: panel chair Molleen Theodore, Yale University Art Gallery; Tess Korobkin, Yale University Art Gallery; Cyra Levenson, Yale Center for British Art; Luis Croquer, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington; Marla…
Last week, in a locked room on the upper level of the Boston Athenaeum, I spent an afternoon leafing through the pages of a first edition copy of Francisco de Goya y Lucientes’s Los Caprichos. Bound in 1799 in crimson…
Everything Damien Hirst touches turns to hype. Would he be half as well liked or despised without his carnival of publicity? Much of what has been written about Hirst is unnecessary writing: Journalism and press agentry that will last like…
The history of cities is the history of how they’re represented and most of the time this is done by accentuating the classical, monumental structures that suggest power. The way we experience public spaces is more to do with the…
This winter, Courtney Klemens, Campus Community Outreach Coordinator for the List Visual Art Center at MIT, asked if I would give a gallery talk on the work of Pauline Curnier Jardin, through an explicitly feminist lens, representing both my role…
A corner is the intersection of different lines or edges, a place wherein one is both trapped and radically free to chose among different directions. Kazimir Malevich hung his Suprematist manifesto Black Square (1915) in the corner of the gallery,…
The last Biennial to be held at Marcel Breuer’s grey granite bunker on Madison Avenue, before the Whitney moves to a new building on the Highline, boasts a collaborative team of curators. Stuart Comer is Chief Curator of Media and…
On March 4, 2014, Ruin Lust opened at the Tate Britain. The show hosts a parade of famous artists from throughout the canon of art history who used scenes of architectural decay and environmental abandonment as central motifs in their…
Through abstraction, we shape the world. Through art, we translate thoughts, intuitions, feelings, and intentions into actions that transform reality. – Olafur Eliasson The first time I attended an Olafur Eliasson speaking engagement was at the Education + Activism Salon…
Bahar Yurukoglu Purple Sky I first encountered Bahar Yurukoglu’s work before I knew it was Bahar Yurukoglu’s. I remember walking into Primordial Future, her installation at the deCordova Biennial, because of the way its frozen geometries and shifting lights imposed…
I spent the latter half of my childhood in a small town in eastern Connecticut. Once it had been strictly rural, but by the latter half of the twentieth-century was slowly succumbing to the inevitable creep of suburbia. For the…
I like Finland probably more than I should.1 I haven’t gone so far as to stalk Finland (because really, where would that get me?) but I have tattooed Finland’s initials permanently on my body, written a love letter to Finland…
I remember some mild outrage rippling through the Twitterverse late last April over the claim, in a New York Times opinion piece on gender inequality in art collecting, that men far outnumber women among notable collectors because collecting “is more like…
At a recent speech in Wisconsin, President Obama drew the ire of many when he noted that a degree in art history are often less economically viable than some skilled trade jobs. While the economic facts behind his statement are…
