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27 Articles

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 of defiant moves, this one stands out for me: an artist’s determination to have her work seen, by hook or by crook. “I had something to say,” she tells Watlington. There…

Glenn Adamson Glenn Adamson is a curator, writer, and historian based between New York and London. He is artistic director for the new biennial Design Doha in Qatar, editor of the online quarterly Material Intelligence, and curator for the 2024 edition of Design Miami/. Additionally, this year, Adamson is curating an exhibition on the art of American ceramicist and painter Toshiko Takaezu at the Isamu Noguchi Museum in Queens. He was previously director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and head of research at the V&A Museum in London. Adamson’s latest book, A Century of Tomorrows, is slated for release in 2024. In these pages, he reviews the work of Juana Valdés at the Sarasota Art Museum in Florida. Kelly Presutti Kelly Presutti is an assistant professor of history…

Radiant: The Life of Keith Haring by Brad Gooch Signs of an enduring fascination with Keith Haring can be found everywhere, from the racks of Uniqlo to the walls of museums such as the Broad in Los Angeles, where his work was recently the subject of a big survey. Now Haring is getting the big biography treatment in this book by Brad Gooch (author of tomes on figures including Rumi and Flannery O’Connor), who reexamines well-trodden subjects like his connections in the New York street art scene of the ’80s and also promises a fresh look at his identity as a queer man who died too young of AIDSrelated causes. On sale Mar. 5 “Jamian Juliano-Villani: It” Gagosian A firebrand in every way, Jamian Juliano-Villani has spent the past couple years at the helm of O’Flaherty’s,…

1955 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 to say Pope.L has done just that. Adam Weinberg, then director of the museum, spoke about Pope.L’s uncompromising dedication to his art and his important critique of society before presenting…

Kay WalkingStick Moves Mountains

Q & A 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. 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. Diptychs are her signature format: often, she pairs landscapes with abstractions. Since the 1960s, her output has been marked by impressive range. During the ’70s, at the height of the feminist art movement, she painted brightly hued images of…

Kay WalkingStick Moves Mountains

Kathleen Ash-Milby

1 In northern New York state, Tuscarora bead workers created opulent, very heavily beaded objects called whimsies that they sold to tourists visiting Niagara Falls in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Native artist Jeffrey Gibson drew inspiration from the Tuscarora beaded whimsies in his paintings in the early aughts while working at the Field Museum. But there was very little written about these souvenirs because they were seen as having been produced for the market rather than the culture. It’s clear that they aesthetically influenced Gibson’s canvases, with surfaces of pigmented silicone that are beaded onto the canvas much like the stacked beadwork of the whimsies. Whimsies have a similar three-dimensional quality, both rising on the surface and stringing down over the edge. It’s difficult to be so…

Kathleen Ash-Milby

It was with a heavy heart that I closed my gallery last fall. Proud of all that the gallery had accomplished over the years, I noted some highlights in a closure announcement that I sent to our mailing list. I was flooded with warm responses, yet it saddened me that no art press reported on our departure. Our shows might not always have received significant reviews, but it would feel great to be recognized for the blood and sweat we poured into the business. Is it too late now to get any farewell coverage? Oh, downtrodden former gallerist, we see you flatfooting the earth among the unwashed masses. The art world is a fickle and merciless mistress who will never thank you for the diamonds, pearls, and quarter-page Brooklyn Rail ads…

Whitney Biennial vs. Venice Biennale

Best Post-Show Tipple Le Petit Pickle (Tito’s vodka, house-made brine) at Pastis vs. Aperol spritz at Café Paradiso Game-Changing Year 1993: The “Culture Wars” Edition vs. 2015: Okwui Enwezor’s “All the World’s Futures” Essential Snack Street-vendor hot dog vs. Tramezzini on the Via Garibaldi Party Spot Boom Boom Room at The Standard vs. The Terrace at the Bauer Hotel Nearby Public Art Day’s End by David Hammons vs. Monumento a Giuseppe Garibaldi Biggest Controversy Dana Schutz’s Emmett Till painting (2017) vs. Christoph Büchel’s Mosque (2015) Nature Break Barry Diller’s Little Island vs. Lido Beach What to Wear Balenciaga sneakers vs. Prada waders Mandatory History Lesson The Temple of Dendur at the Met vs. The Tintorettos at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco Mode of Transport A/C/E train vs. Vaporetto Culture Wars: Photo Geoffrey Clements/Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art, New York…

Whitney Biennial vs. Venice Biennale

MUST READ Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists There are many important surveys of Native North American art, often organized geographically, and typically emphasizing historic art and material culture. But Hearts of Our People, the catalog for a resplendent exhibition organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Art in 2019, is a key introduction that emphasizes the contributions of women to Native art across time. It surveys more than 115 artists from the United States and Canada over the span of a millennium, demonstrating women’s creative triumphs across medium, time, and place. Richly illustrated and featuring essays by leading artists and scholars (including Teri Greeves, heather ahtone, and Jolene Rickard), this is the definitive survey that turns the former patriarchal bias of Indigenous art history on its head. An Indigenous Present Choctaw/Cherokee artist Jeffrey…

Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio

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, effectively eliminating the required square footage. The resulting work, 601ft2 para El Playon / 601 sq. ft. for El Playon (2023), measures exactly 601 square feet. “How much more site-specific…

Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio

Stairway to 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. The design is closely guarded until 2016. Then, renderings are released. The grand reveal: this designer is planning to make … a tower of stairs—154 flights, to be exact, all arrayed in a kind of upside-down cone, like shawarma on a spit, stretching 16 stories (some…

Stairway to Hell

Alice Shaddle’s Mutability

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 flower that’s both torpid and overfed: whereabouts unknown. As much as it applies to particular works in her oeuvre, whereabouts unknown could just as well describe Shaddle’s own legacy when consulting…

Alice Shaddle’s Mutability

Can You Ever Put the Image Back?

Who gets to profit from the TikTok famous Renegade Dance? Or the viral catchphrase “on fleek”? When memes are by their very nature hyper-transmitted and endlessly remixed, is there any opportunity to “own” one’s innovations in the online cultural field? The problem of how to compensate digital labor and goods has animated scholars and popular thinkers for more than two decades now. Meanwhile, questions of appropriation as they relate to Black creators and subjects have been part of this discourse for nearly as long—time enough that a reviewer of Lauren Michele Jackson’s 2019 book White Negroes, about Black virality and appropriation, wrote that the topic might already have been “exhausted.” But Legacy Russell, author of the 2020 book Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto as well as executive director and chief curator…

Can You Ever Put the Image Back?

Painting Pleasure

Joan Semmel’s 1974 painting Intimacy-Autonomy shows a man and a woman lying naked in bed side-by-side, presumably postcoital. 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. In the 1970s, Semmel’s subject of choice, sex, and her medium, painting, were both taboo for feminist artists. The former was too risky at a time when women were asking not to be objectified. The latter was too commodifiable, and too burdened by centuries of patriarchal convention and bourgeois trappings to…

Painting Pleasure

READY-MADE RECY-CLED

When environmentalists launched the slogan “reduce, reuse, recycle,” they listed the verbs in order of priority: recycling was always meant as a last resort. But throwing packaging in a blue bin sure is more convenient than a major lifestyle change. And so, in the past few decades, our planet has been inundated with plastic that is sure to outlive us all. Now, we are starting to wonder where it will all go. Around the world, artists—known for their resourcefulness and finding new meanings for myriad materials—are trying out new approaches. Whether adopting zero-waste studio practices or repurposing what others might call refuse, they’re modeling creative ways to help us wade through the unfathomable quantity of trash overburdening our planet. Too often, we send our packaging away, never to be seen again.…

READY-MADE RECY-CLED

SHEIDA SOLEIMANI

On January 3, 2020, I was in Marfa, Texas, sitting at a bar drinking a Negroni. There was a TV in the bar, and I saw my last name flash across the screen. I thought, Oh god, this can’t be good. After 9/11 my family went through a lot of racism, so anytime that I see any Western media covering Iran, I get worried. The news was that Trump [had] assassinated [Iranian military officer] Qassemi Soleimani. We were in Texas, about to fly home, and, meanwhile, there was my last name all over the news. Suddenly, everyone that saw it—even friends of mine who I think are fairly enlightened or educated individuals—start texting me: “Are you okay?” “We’re so sorry for your family.” Meanwhile, no one knew that Qassemi Soleimani was…

SHEIDA SOLEIMANI

Perpetual Motion

Until it reopened in a $230 million new building this past June, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum was an anomaly among United States institutions: it held a world-class collection of modern and postwar art with nowhere to properly exhibit the bulk of it at once. Now, a 50,000-square-foot space allows masterpieces like Picasso’s 1906 La Toilette to return to view, along with showstoppers from the likes of Chaim Soutine, Andy Warhol, and a whole lot more. The way these pieces are displayed, however, changed vastly. The history of modernism and postwar art has long been peopled almost entirely by white men, from Henri Matisse to Jackson Pollock, and the small sampling of the AKG collection formerly presented to the public reflected that slant. The rehang following the four-year closure runs counter…

Perpetual Motion

WITNESSING GRIEF

“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. Kollwitz saw suffering firsthand, not only in Berlin streets and demonstrations but in the medical practice of her husband, Karl. A sweeping exhibition of 120 of her prints, drawings, and sculptures opening at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on March 31 is the first ever museum retrospective for Kollwitz in New York, and her first major United States museum…

WITNESSING GRIEF

NATURE IS MIND MADE VISIBLE

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 with that peculiar mix of awe and terror that the 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke termed “the sublime.” A sense of deference to forces greater than oneself, the sublime was a…

NATURE IS MIND MADE VISIBLE

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.” I care deeply about the nonhuman world, yet I hesitated at Rao’s suggestion that oil extraction, banned books, and ethnic cleansing belong together under the umbrella of “violence.” In a talk at the opening of her show, however, Rao convincingly insisted that the parallels are by no means metaphorical and, rather, relate to tragedies that are deeply intertwined. Armenian people, the…

“Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia”

Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC) October 25, 2023–March 10, 2024 A retrospective of sorts surveys points of similarity and divergence between art and activism. 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. 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 Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Polygon Gallery in Vancouver, “Velvet Terrorism” doesn’t put much stock…

“Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia”

“Charles Gaines: 1992–2023”

Institute of Contemporary Art November 16, 2023–March 17, 2024 A survey for the Los Angeles–based artist contemplates 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 ICA Miami. 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 to find a clock tower inside which hangs a 65-pound piece of granite. Every 10 minutes or…

“Charles Gaines: 1992–2023”

“Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom”

at MOCA Los Angeles November 12, 2023–June 16, 2024 A retrospective lays bare the fact that spectacles have become our culture’s new religion. The condition of being under the watchful eye of the camera at all times is perhaps a defining experience of the 21st century. If, in 1967, the Parisian theorist Guy Debord opined that we live in “the society of the spectacle,” by now, we seem to have upped the ante, as we witness the blurring of spectacle into surveillance. This is the conceit behind Paul Pfeiffer’s provocative midcareer retrospective at MOCA entitled “Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom.” The show dramatizes the sensations of seeing and being seen. The earliest work in the show lays out some stakes. In The Pure Products Go Crazy (1998), clips of Tom…

“Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom”

“Meredith Monk. Calling”

Haus der Kunst November 10, 2023–March 3, 2024 This survey of the storied artist and composer mixes mediums to moving effect. 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. One work addressing death on view in the first of the exhibition’s three rooms,…

“Meredith Monk. Calling”

“Juana Valdés: Embodied Memories, Ancestral Histories”

Sarasota Art Museum October 22, 2023–February 11, 2024 This retrospective shed light on an under-recognized artist deserving of more attention. Time and tide wait for none, they say. But art can direct those unrelenting forces to its own expressive purpose. That was the insistent implication of “Embodied Memories, Ancestral Histories,” Juana Valdés’s retrospective at the Sarasota Art Museum. Currents of all kinds passed through the exhibition, beginning with a large photomural that dominated the space. It showed 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 system; then she tossed them into the surf, one by one over the…

“Juana Valdés: Embodied Memories, Ancestral Histories”

“Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s”

Walker Art Center November 11, 2023–March 10, 2024 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 that investigators might discover these works in a search, Ságl hid them. For…

“Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s”

Vivacious Vulnerability

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 my myself as the model because it’s convenient, and because I don’t want to objectify anyone else. In this particular painting, I used two versions of the same model. The couch image has usually been seductive in nature, with a nude spread out and being relatively sexy. I’m painting myself, an older person, in contrast to that. One image is of my older body in a seductive pose, but the second image, [the one on the cover], shows me in a much more defensive posture. The figure is holding her arm up, almost as if warding off the viewer. The painting is a kind…

Vivacious Vulnerability

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