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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

Cheryl Gross and Marta Wapiennik Choose Each Other

Artistic collaborations are nothing new in the annals of contemporary art—think of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Gilbert and George, or even Tim Rollins and his “at-risk” students, known as the Kids of Survival. But edgy illustrator…

Jeff Baker: Urban Abstractions

When I first saw Jeff Baker’s photos, at his home and studio in Taos, NM, about five years ago, I immediately thought of Aaron Siskind, the photographer most closely associated with mid-century American abstraction. In many of his black-and-white images, Siskind...

Ripe for Rediscovery: Helen Lundeberg

By Jane Barthes  As an artist originally from Europe—and one whose own path did not begin with abstraction—I confess I possessed a rather rudimentary knowledge of geometric abstraction, particularly American hard-edge abstraction. It was at Art Expo in Chicago in 2015...

What Turns Critics On (and Off)

When I was regularly writing reviews for ARTnews and The Wall Street Journal, two great gigs that petered out for different reasons, I was occasionally conscious of having biases toward work that rang my chimes in a big way and against art that confused me or left me...

Artists and Critics: Part One

Sometimes the best way to respond to a bad review is to take a long walk Photo credits: bottom of page About ten days after the September 2015 opening of Will Ryman’s…

It’s Not What I Expected I Would Do

An Artist Opens her New Home and Studio for ArtWalk Kingston By Millicent Young I had just landed in Kingston, NY, in early July with Niko, the dog of Perpetual Joy, and the four cats, a long chapter of life in rural Virginia completed. I was moving into my new...

The Price Is Right

How Dealers Decide What Your Artwork Should Cost As you might expect in a business that is guided by ineffable factors like talent, taste, trends, and individual potential for growth, galleries don’t have any one set system for determining what to charge for a work of...

What Is a Drawing? Part Six

After five posts, I’m running a bit low on things to say about drawing. But for a moment we might speculate about why drawing remains so popular among artists, when, let’s say, there’s hardly anyone around making frescoes these days. There is, of course, the amazing...

How are you? No, I mean, really, how are you?

Artists talk about altered states during the pandemic We are now about seven months into a worldwide catastrophe that has affected nearly every fiber and facet of our being. Many of us have been sheltering in place, limiting our contacts with the outside world,...

Critical Reversals

Even the Most Respected Critics Change Their Minds When a politician flip-flops on a position, the public and press alike are quick to cry foul, hurling accusations of bad faith or pandering. But when an art critic changes his or her mind, the ripple effect is likely...

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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