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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 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…

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...

The Motherhood Report

No one claims it's easy, but it is possible to combine two of the world's oldest callings: artist and mother Way back in the 1980s, in the era of linebacker shoulder pads and dressing for success, I worked on a short-lived publication that billed itself as the first...

The Fate of the Art at the Four Seasons

Photo credits: bottom of pageOver the holidays, I learned from a friend that the venerable Four Seasons  Restaurant in the landmark Seagram Building on Park Avenue would be closing this summer. I was a little late to that news, and it is not technically about to be...

Into the Woods with Dale Chihuly

By Susan Erlandson Washburn I arrived at Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, Arkansas—Walmart heiress Alice Walton’s inspired gift to flyover country—too late to see the Dale Chihuly exhibition in the gallery itself but in time to visit the “In the Forest” portion...

Joan Linder on Miriam Dym

History aside, when I think of an artist whose work I admire and who has had immeasurable impact on my work, I think of Miriam Dym. We met in graduate school nearly two decades ago. She has a particular, and idiosyncratic, vision that engages…

Laura Vranes and John McIntyre

Laura Vranes’ interests as a future collector were established early. “As a child, I went to a museum in New York,” she says. “I wish I could recall which it was, but I remember how much I loved the Andy Warhol Brillo Box in the collection. I wanted to sit on it so...

Signs of the Times: Part Two

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...

All About the New York Artists Circle

The very model of a modern-day generous, informative, and informed community More than two decades ago, when Barbara Ellmann was a young mother in the Tribeca neighborhood in New York, she began to experience those feelings of isolation that can afflict stay-at-home...

Studio Visits Revisited

In the fall of 2013, I published a story in ARTnews called “Show and Tell: The Dos and Don’ts of Studio Visits,” which went the art-world equivalent of viral—that is to say, scores, possibly hundreds, of people shared on Facebook because…

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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