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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

Artists and Critics: Part 3

When I first started working on staff at ARTnews, a little more than 20 years ago, I was on the brink of a divorce after several years of freelancing and corporate wifedom (at which I was not very good). The magazine represented both….

The Cooks, the Turkey, and the Formidable Formalist Critic

A brief memoir of catering, art-history classes, and friendship For part of my junior year in college I lived off campus with one of my best friends, Kate, a woman thirteen years older than myself, and in many ways a kind of big-sister to me (since I had none). Kate...

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 Four

Many say it’s all a bubble. I don’t agree because the world is sick producing extremes of weather and behavior, people are struggling and if creators can find a way to express themselves or promote a worthy cause AND make money then It is not going away anytime soon

So Long at the Fair?

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the art fair appears to be the major marketing phenomenon of our times. Artsy.com, a site primarily for collectors, lists 60 top fairs worldwide, with ballpark estimates for maintaining a booth at one ranging from…

Girl, Unexpectedly Interrupted

In which I try to have a romance with an older man, a real artist. But Mother knows better. During my last semester in college, I worked part time at the university store (fondly known as the “screw store” for its inflated prices on stuff like toothpaste and shampoo)....

Advise and Select

Artists reveal their secrets for smart editing and smooth studio visits Not too long ago, I paid a call on an artist who shall remain nameless, whose studio was such a shambles I was itching to get out of there within ten minutes. It seemed there were works from every...

Profile: Vince Aletti

Though short and to the point, the ten or so capsule reviews for art shows in the opening pages of the New Yorker each week are probably among the most widely read in the city, if not the nation.

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…

Another Opening, Another Show

The opening, duration, and end of a gallery or museum show can be cause for anxiety, depression, obsession, elation, relief, and any number of other emotional reactions that occur when you…

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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