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UNDER THE RADAR

A spotlight for members.

Cindy Blakeslee

Recent Feature

Ripe for Rediscovery: Peter Miller

Ripe for Rediscovery: Peter Miller

Talk about “Surrealism” in conversation with artists and art lovers you are most likely to think of works by Dalí, Magritte, Tanguy, Ernst, or possibly Paul Delvaux. Mention “American Surrealism,” and the terrain gets tricky. Didn’t Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and...

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Recent Feature

L.A. Confidential

L.A. Confidential

The first in a series of reports on the art world.  In May, it seemed like we were almost entirely out of the woods with Covid-19, and then along came the Delta variant and the post-pandemic euphoria rapidly dissipated. Still, as long-time observers of the Los Angeles...

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From the Vasari21 Archives

Scams and Shams Part 2

About a decade ago, in the wake of yet another failed romance, I decided to visit the Florence Biennale, an art extravaganza that has been in the works since 1997. A fellow art journalist was going, meeting up with a curator friend from Texas…

My Blockhead Adventures with Blockchain Art, Part Two: “Your Move”

The Lady Bishop (detail) from Filippucci's "Chess Series" YOUR MOVE After getting acquainted with the basic elements of NFTs (see PART ONE), my next move was to purchase some Ethereum cryptocurrency to pay for the “gas” fees to have each “minted” and put up for...

What Is a Drawing? Part Eight

In this, the eighth round-up of drawings from members of the site, I find myself running out of more to say about this oldest means of making an image. And yet even if I fall short on words, the artists never cease to amaze me with new ways to make a drawing....

What Is a Drawing? Part Nine

After eight posts about drawings, it’s challenging to come up anything new to say about the medium, but if the materials remain largely the same, the circumstances for artists everywhere have changed dramatically in the last year. Many of the members included here...

What Is a Drawing? Part Four

Earlier in the week, I tried to imagine what kind of responses I would have gotten had I posed that question to one of the great masters of the Renaissance. “Signora,” I can hear Maestro Buonarrotti explaining, con pazienza, “a drawing can be many things. A quick...

Leslie Parke on Lori Ellison

I am drawn to work of modest means that has a monumental impact. The master of this kind of work was Lori Ellison, who died in August 2015…

Ripe for Rediscovery: Mary Lee Bendolph

One of the most radical abstract artists of the last 50 years is scarcely a household name, or even well known outside a small group of collectors, connoisseurs, and art historians. But Mary Lee Bendolph is a standout in the group of quilters from Gee’s Bend, a tiny...

My Blockhead Adventures with Blockchain Art, Part Four

Many say it’s all a bubble. I don’t agree because the world is sick producing extremes of weather and behavior, people are struggling and if creators can find a way to express themselves or promote a worthy cause AND make money then It is not going away anytime soon

Ripe for Rediscovery: Lee Lozano

  Several years ago, ARTnews ran a feature called “Ripe for Rediscovery,” polling curators, artists, and critics about which names had been unfairly lost in the shuffle of art history. Some of those who surfaced—Robert Irwin, Giovanni Boldini, and Rafael...

Three Great Summer Books—and One Only So-So

Why read two Diane Arbus biographies back to back? Because, after finishing Arthur Lubow’s recent life of the photographer, published a year ago, I found myself so annoyed with his detached and bloodless recitation of Arbus’s life that I turned to other reviewers to...

Archived Feature

Fantasy Curating: Hands-On and Lush

Fantasy Curating: Hands-On and Lush

 By Lee Albert Hill As a painter myself I am drawn to the work of other painters first and foremost.  Especially those who demonstrate a dedication to a lush, hands-on, painterly approach and an emphasis on refined craft and detail.  For this curation I have chosen...

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Archived Feature

Suggestions for Summer Reading

Suggestions for Summer Reading

Get a jump on the season with a beach-bag full of memoirs Perhaps because I’ve been working on one of my own (“Rotten Romance,” dispatched via Substack every Sunday), memoirs have been much on my mind. For purely recreational reading, I often prefer first-person...

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Archived Feature

Meghan Wilbar: The Long Road

Meghan Wilbar: The Long Road

It’s a brave artist who attempts to say something new about landscape. The genre has been around since ancient times, when frescoes of Arcadian vistas adorned the walls of upscale villas, and its popularity has waxed and waned according to the talents and interests of...

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Archived Under the Radar

Marietta Patricia Leis

Marietta Patricia Leis

Like many little girls, Marietta Patricia Leis first set her sights on becoming a ballerina. “At the age of seven I was entranced with wanting to be a ballet dancer,” she says. As a child in suburban East Orange, NJ, she studied dance every day after school, and...

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Archived Under the Radar

Susan English

Susan English

When Susan English was three or four years old, she lived in Belgium with her family for a couple of years. Years later she still remembers a babysitter named Hele placing a candle inside a child’s play igloo. “It made a big impression on me,” English says. “The light...

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 Archived Podcast

Alice Robb: Why We Dream

Alice Robb: Why We Dream

In the summer of 2011, science writer Alice Robb discovered a book called Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, which promised readers that they could control the plots of their dreams.

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