Articles
Going Postal
400-plus American Artists Collaborate to Protest Trump’s Threat to Privatize the U.S. Post Service By Melissa Stern This past January, Donald Trump began muttering about privatizing the U.S. Postal Service. By April, as the necessity for mail-in voting took hold...
Streaming van Gogh
Why set oneself the task of watching all the movies about Vincent van Gogh available for streaming during this period of lockdown and self-isolation? I believe the initial suggestion came from Amazon Prime, way back in February, when the site proposed Robert Altman’s...
Michelle Cooke: Let There Be Light
In those halcyon days when people could still meet easily in restaurants—possibly late February or early March—I caught up with my friend Michelle Cooke, who divides her time between New York and Taos, NM, in a quiet corner of a local eatery called El Sabroso. What we...
A Modest Proposal for Recycling Monuments
One by one the old, bad monuments come tumbling down. In the wake of the brutal murder of George Floyd, protesters removed statues deemed racist and offensive, focusing first on heroes of the Confederacy like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis. But...
Artists Respond to the Pandemic Part 3
We are now rounding out the fourth month of the Covid-19 pandemic, a worldwide catastrophe that, as of now, shows no signs of fully abating, especially in the United States and a few other countries that have been slow to realize the serious need of playing it safe....
Anne Gilman
Anne Gilman’s oversized scroll “drawings” unfurl across the floor, against walls, from the ceiling, and sometimes over tabletops with a graceful ease that belies their sometimes anguished or anxious content. I put drawings in quotes because there is so much more going...
Looking Back
Artists reflect on changes, shifts, departures, and continuity I’m fairly sure it was Chicago artist Sharon Swidler who mentioned a year or so ago that she was riffling through her inventory and remarking on the absence of abrupt departures in her work. I tucked the...
Artists Respond to the Pandemic Part 2
Here we are, now well into the third month of self-isolation, wearing our masks like good citizens if we go out at all, minding the headlines and the barrage of information, and perhaps generally adjusting to a global catastrophe whose true measure will not be known...
Lisa Blas
At the start of each week, subscribers to Lisa Blas’s RSS feed called “Monday’s Image” are treated to a visual puzzle, an intriguing exercise in compare and contrast, an introduction to a work by an artist you’ve probably never heard of before (paired with the front...
Life Drawing via Zoom
Drawing from the live, nude model has been the mainstay of artists at least since the Renaissance, and the tradition has been kept alive in academies that still value the kind of eye-hand coordination that can only come from careful study of the complicated apparatus...
Artists Respond to the Pandemic
In newsletters, I’ve touched on the way artists respond to catastrophe—specifically war and widespread disease—from the Middle Ages to the present. Some, like Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer, may take decades for the horror of their times to percolate into their...
Art Critics in the Time of Covid-19
What does an art critic do when the museums and galleries are closed? When classes are canceled (if you teach)? When your book spirals into limbo (if you have a publication in the works)? What does the future of art criticism look like as works migrate steadily to...
Grants and Financial Resources for Artists during Covid19
I spent about three days scouring available sources (Artnet, The Art Newspaper, the Internet) to see what sorts of funds are available for artists impacted by the Covid19 pandemic. The bad news is how little is out there, and many of the significant grants are only...
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...
What Is a Drawing? Part Eight
In this, the eighth round-up of drawings from members of the site, I find myself running out of more to say about this oldest means of making an image. And yet even if I fall short on words, the artists never cease to amaze me with new ways to make a drawing....
Start Connecting with Like Minded Artists
Art isn't easy. Going it alone doesn't make it any easier. Join a growing community of artists and get an insider's perspective on the professional art world today.