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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

Afterthoughts on the 2015 Venice Biennale

Photo credits: bottom of pageMost reviews of the 2015 Venice Biennale came down hard on the curator’s “didactic,” “glum,” “joyless,” and un-spectacular show of conceptual, socially oriented works. It also disappointed those addicted to grandiose art spectacles, the...

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…

Me, Myself, and I

Adventures in self-portraiture Self-portraiture enjoys a long and illustrious lineage, probably reaching its peak in Western art with Rembrandt, who not only reveled in chronicling his changing fortunes—from ambitious youth to successful dandy to impoverished...

Dora and Carl Dillistone

  When I first moved to Taos, NM, about six years ago, a friend and I went on one of those house-and-garden tours put together by a local charitable organization. It seemed a good way to get to know the territory, and I’ve always loved to snoop inside other...

Making Book

Why and How a Catalogue Adds Cachet In an era when vivid high-quality images can be accessed in a nanosecond on almost any available screen, why bother with something as cumbersome as a hard-copy catalogue with glossy images and real pages? Because the tangible can...

Fantasy Curating: Fantastical Threads

By Adria Arch Lately, I have been especially drawn to both two- and three-dimensional artwork that uses fabrics and fibers. The vibrant colors and patterns, sculptural shapes, and thumbing-the-nose at the traditional stone-and-steel crowd are all part of what I find...

The Death of the Gallery? Part Two

The brick-and-mortar establishment is challenged on a number of fronts. What does that mean for galleries? And for artists? As reported a few weeks ago, mid-level brick-and-mortar galleries face a multitude of pressures, so much so that the mainstream press is...

What To Do When You Can’t Face the Studio

An artist’s life is generally isolated at the best of times, and that is the way most would have it. Unless you’re Andy Warhol running The Factory and possibly pathologically in need of company at all hours, you require solitude to do your best work. So, for some this...

Fantasy Curating: Big Things Have Small Beginnings

By Ed Grant "Big Things Have Small Beginnings" So many of the things around us are small, or at least start off small. Stalactites form one drop at a time. Viruses and bacteria evolve new ways around our defenses to become full-blown pandemics. Slime mold is used to...

Summer Reads: Two Feisty Women and a Bromance in Poetry and Paint

A few weeks ago my neighbor and Vasari21 member TJ Mabrey asked me why I didn’t suggest some books for the warm-weather season, when supposedly we all head for the country or the beach armed with a Kindle or a stack of paperbacks. Since I am always reading biographies...

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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