Articles
You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me: Part Two
Those calling the shots in the art world can be astonishingly cruel. Sculptor Stan Smokler, who maintains studios in New York and Pennsylvania, recalls sending out slides in the early days of his career…
Andrea Broyles
There is a gentle mystery in all of Andrea Broyles’ work, whether on paper or canvas or in any number of sculptural mediums, from clay to resin. The art historian in me wants to relate her to Surrealism, but her realm of fantasy seems…
You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me: Part One
The artist known as Swoon, now in her late thirties, gained a reputation early in her career for evocative and beautifully crafted street art and for wacky performance pieces, like crashing the 2009 Venice Biennale in a boat made of…
Reflecting on Vermeer
For years I’ve looked at different works by countless artists. I’ve looked at different objects from all different periods of time—ancient, Renaissance, modern, post-war, contemporary, along with the efforts of teachers, friends, and…
Anne Lindberg
I first encountered Anne Lindberg’s work about seven years ago, when she was in residence at the Omi International Art Center in upstate New York, and then a few months later, while she was…
Phillis Ideal
Phillis Ideal knows how to do a wonderful studio visit and interview. I meant to begin this profile in standard journalese, saying something like…
Blather and Bloat
I have been sleeping with a number of critics lately. Stacked on my bedside table, littered on the bed itself, are books by Roger Shattuck, Arthur Danto, Leo Steinberg, Robert Hughes, and Dave Hickey.
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…
First Love and Irresistible Impulses
My first boyfriend, in college, always smelled of Ivory soap. It was a clean, innocent scent, like baby powder or shampoo, and therefore perhaps appropriate for young love. For years after we broke up, whenever I smelled Ivory soap…
Marc Baseman
The world according to Marc Baseman is a strange, crowded, and mysterious place. In his tiny drawings—usually less than three inches on a side—a cast of odd characters and objects competes for our attention: birds and rodents…
By the Book
The very first art books I remember reading (or perhaps just looking at with awe and wonder) were part of the series called “Metropolitan Seminars in Art,” written by the critic John Canaday. Each slender gray volume…
Martha Russo
A tour of Martha Russo’s retrospective at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary art in Boulder, CO, is somewhat like a visit to admire the creepy-crawlies in a ten-year-old boy’s bedroom. There is a giant, slithery…
A Sculptor Turns Her Eyes and Ears on the Big Ears Festival
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…
Artists Behaving Badly
A recent report in the Huffington Post alleges that “narcissistic artists were determined to have higher market prices, higher estimates from auction houses, more museum shows, and more recognition from the art…
Kate Petley
Kate Petley’s glowing and lyrically reticent abstractions come about through a complex process that weds state-of-the-art digital with old-fashioned gestural painting, and sometimes it’s difficult to see where one leaves off and the other kicks in…
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