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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

The Monuments Contest: Part Two

Compared with the duration of empires past—like those of ancient Rome or Great Britain—the U.S. occupies a relatively tiny span of time, a little more 234 years as the great democratic experiment, if we date the founding of the country to 1776. And so our monuments...

My Blockhead Adventures with Blockchain Art, Part Three

Red Bishop (detail) from Filippucci's NFT Chess Series Collection NOTE: If you’re just seeing Part Three of my Blockhead Adventures, it might prove helpful to back up to Part One and Part Two first. MY FIRST NFT THAT IS NOT FOR SALE (yet). This animation will be set...

Artists Respond to the Pandemic

In newsletters, I’ve touched on the way artists respond to catastrophe—specifically war and widespread disease—from the Middle Ages to the present. Some, like Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer, may take decades for the horror of their times to percolate into their...

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...

A Sense of Place

What does it mean to be a “regional artist” today? By Millicent Young Bradley Sumrall, curator at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, posed this question in his juror’s talk for “Homeward Bound,” the Taubman Museum’s inaugural triennial for Virginia artists. I resisted...

Whazzup with All the Gallery Closings?

And what exactly does a "private dealer" do? When I heard early in the summer that the venerable Cheim & Read gallery in Chelsea was closing its doors to transition to “private practice,” my heart sank a little. The low-key establishment on West 25th Street was...

Courting the Dealers

To the young or emerging artist, the art world may seem like a forbidding maze, a complicated circuitry of inside contacts and arcane codes almost impossible for the newcomer to crack. How can the artist without…

Encaustic: An Overview

In three days in Provincetown, MA, this June, our intrepid reporter hit the ground running and offers a succinct guide to some of the many ways this seductive medium is in use among artists By Anna Wagner-Ott The art of encaustic has been around for centuries: it was...

The Value of an MFA

The degree has come under attack in recent years, but many say it's worth the investment. Just know what you're looking for—and consider a few alternatives. “MFA stands for yet another Mother-Fucking Artist,” declares one of the disgruntled students in a CalArts...

Linda Vallejo Chooses Charles Gaines

“The Brown Dot Project (TBDP),” a series of mine from 2015, has been deeply influenced by the renowned Los Angeles-based artist Charles Gaines, whose works investigate the way rules-based procedures construct order and meaning. Gaines, born in 1944, makes drawings…

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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