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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 “Aha!” Moment, Part One

Artists Share Moments of Discovery A few weeks ago, before making the great trans-Taos trek from Cottam Road to Camino del Monte, I asked Vasari21 members if they had ever experienced what I call the “aha!” moment—a sudden realization that a material, a way of...

Millicent Young on Ed Kashi

Reflections on a Famed Photojournalist's Images of Syria What I see first is beauty---saturated colors, an abstraction of forms in the picture plane, vertiginous compositions that plunge me from the immediacy of where I stand in the gallery into another realm. This is...

Michelle Cooke: Let There Be Light

In those halcyon days when people could still meet easily in restaurants—possibly late February or early March—I caught up with my friend Michelle Cooke, who divides her time between New York and Taos, NM, in a quiet corner of a local eatery called El Sabroso. What we...

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...

Fantasy Curating: Memory and Materiality

By Christine Aaron  I respond to art that simultaneously takes me both outside myself and more deeply inward. Though I respect work that is intellectually stimulating alone, the art that most engages me occurs at a physical level and insistently penetrates through the...

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...

The Curators Speak

In the world of museum exhibitions and gallery shows, the curator seems like the Wizard of Oz, the behind-the-scenes magician who pulls it all together and leads us Munchkins down a yellow brick road toward some kind of enlightenment…

Total Immersion in Brooklyn

Deep in the heart of Bushwick, Michael David's residencies offer an intense experience that may take your art to new levels.  “A cross between Black Mountain and Project Runway” is the way Michael David sums up the residencies he’s been sponsoring about four times a...

The Immortal Mona Lisa

A new novel recalls a famous heist. I’ve just finished reading Jonathan Santlofer’s hugely entertaining thriller The Last Mona Lisa, a lively yarn that taps into our present-day fascination with all things Leonardo and takes the reader into the sometimes violent...

Ripe for Rediscovery: Francis Picabia

Francis Picabia was a man way ahead of his times. Long before artists of our day became dedicated multitaskers—moving easily from performance to sculpture to video to whatever—Picabia (1879-1953) vigorously avoided any singular style or medium, forging a career that...

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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