Connecting Artists

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...

The ins and outs of making your life and work a public affair When I first broached the topic of open studios to several Vasari 21 members, some said, “No way. I don’t want a lot of lookee-loos traipsing through my private spaces.” Or “I’m at the point where I have...

More reactions to the ugly zeitgeist We’ve now had a full year to take stock of the current administration in Washington and, as Melissa Stern points out, “Every day brings a new outrage, a new affront to common decency, an erosion of our democracy.” Some artists see...

“[When I was about twelve], my father took us on a rare excursion to the Museum of Art in Philadelphia. My parents worked very hard, and taking four children on a bus to…

Installation Artists Continue the Narrative Tradition Once upon a time, storytelling was one of the most ambitious missions of painting. Panel by panel, Giotto told the lives of Christ and St. Francis. Michelangelo presented the sweeping drama of the Old and New...

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...

Joanne’s work is about color first, “color beyond color,” color that resonates somewhere deep within me, somewhere beyond the eye. For me, it is to see color from the heart…

In looking over the images from Part One of this post, and from those below, it occurred to me how often art made from found objects and random detritus has a childlike quality about it, even though the trained eye knows there’s a sophisticated vision behind the...

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...

As a New Yorker gone rural, I live and work in a relatively isolated way in the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Winters are my deep rich studio time, and yet this past winter, I found myself, more than usual, in need of…