Newest Features
My favorite piece in the 2016 edition of the Montreal Biennial was also the oldest by nearly five centuries: Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Portrait of a Lady. Like any anatomically correct 16th century woman, her waist is the width of her neck, she seems to be side-eying the suite of amazingly boring Luc Tuymans paintings of empty galleries on the wall adjacent, and her right arm, which looks long enough to reach her kneecap, is crooked bizarrely out to her side. The painting’s intrigue, the wall text tells us, is in this…
“With my work I reaffirm black cultural values in the contemporary world.” – Juan Roberto Diago Durruthy, 1998 Curated by Alejandro de la Fuente, Diago: The Past of This Afro-Cuban Present at The Cooper Gallery presents Juan Roberto Diago Durruthy’s first retrospective. Diago’s work is expository; a knowledge producer, Diago reconstructs a new history of the Afro-Cuban cultural movement. In so doing, Diago’s work exposes the history of oppression from the perspective of both oppressed and oppressor, forcing acknowledgment and revision of subjugation. The vast exhibition encompassing 25 mixed-media and installation works, guides…
She agitates the quart developing tank in total darkness, our windowless bath; the cylinder slides inside against the film for ten minutes at 70 degrees. I can see the developer acid in the luminous dial of my watch: she adds the stop bath The hypo fix fastens the images hardening against light on her film and papers. I imagine her movement at night as her teeth grind: I know she dreams the negatives. -“The Negatives,” Michael S. Harper I am tired of symbolic things. We are fighting for our lives. -Fannie…
“For local control all you need is a place, political say and a way to make a living; it’s a practical matter. For local art you need a whole culture.” Donald Judd, “Imperialism, Nationalism and Regionalism,” October, 1975[i] Richard Van Buren, a Californian who moved to New York City in the 1960s, studied Spanish existentialism and ceramics in Mexico City before making his way to the Northeast. Fusing Minimalism with an impish hint of Pop cool, three of Van Buren’s sculptures establish the Center for Maine Contemporary Art’s latest Biennial. These works…
I first experienced Audrey Goldstein’s work at the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA), after she had won the SMFA Traveling Fellowship in 2007. Goldstein exhibited two healing machines: “Generosity Generator” and “The Medicine Cabinets”, which investigated our internal systems, and invited the viewer to evoke some sense of empathy and peace while examining their role in the imagined space. Goldstein’s last solo presentation Issues Of Trust II at Gallery Kayafas (2014) scrutinized the use of materials and invented spaces, physical and imaginative, about our increasing disconnection from the body’s perceptions. One…
Taylor Clough’s Is, And of The at Occam Projects features an assortment of paintings on canvas and paper, absorbingly and tauntingly saturated. Clough painted people as an undergrad, but her current sceneries are unpopulated. Though lacking in figuration, she paints these apartment views, subway seats, windows and waterless pools as she would people. Interiors build upon the canvas like mounds of flesh, smeared on in pileups of texture. “I don’t like to be dainty with it,” Clough says. She ditches the preliminary sketches, the hesitant, initial graphite that begins a canvas. “I…
The anniversary exhibition First Light: A Decade of Collecting at the ICA is composed of four small shows that are individually arranged by the Museum’s curators. Partway through the exhibit’s run, two of these and one of the video installations were switched. (For a review of the first installation, click here). Freedom of Information, arranged by Curatorial Assistant Jeffrey De Blois, replaced Question Your Teaspoons, curated by Assistant Curator Ruth Erickson. Rineke Dijkstra/Nan Goldin, organized by Curatorial Assistant Jessica Hong, was replaced by Louise Bourgeois, another Erickson show. Ragnar Kjartansson’s video The…
Dell M. Hamilton’s work draws on not only the historical conventions of photography and performance art but also on the history of black theater, the written and oral traditions of black & Latina women writers as well as the contradiction & exuberance of drag performance. In this interview, we spoke about her practice, our current socio-political landscape, and her recent photo series: Fallen Angels: Making Sense Out of Nothing, which investigates the relationship between persona, performance, and photography through the conflation of characters inspired by Central American folklore, personal memory, and family history. …