Articles
Ira Wright
There are many artists who might be said to channel the impulses of childhood into their mature works—Picasso, Klee, and Dubuffet are three who come to mind. But few I know of carry over a talisman from their earlier years as an important subject in their so-called...
Art Dealers Face Down the Pandemic
The fallout for small businesses—restaurants, shops, law offices, movie theaters, nail salons, you name it—during the global devastation wrought by Covid19 has been dire. And many art galleries, those not in the Gagosian or Pace stratosphere, qualify as small...
A Sculptor Turns to Urban Farming
In the fall of 2018, Jamie Hamilton went looking for a place to dispose of scraps for compost in Los Angeles, his adopted home since moving from Santa Fe, NM, two years earlier. Through an organization called LA Compost, he discovered the Solano Community Garden in...
What Is a Drawing? Part Seven
One evening in the fall of 1940, at the peak of the German blitzkrieg in Britain, Henry Moore took cover during an air raid in the Belsize Park underground station in London. There he encountered dozens of others who had also scurried belowground to seek shelter from...
Valeri Larko
For more than three decades, Valeri Larko has celebrated the strange appeal of some of the most desolate spots around her home and studio. Up until she moved to New Rochelle, NY, her favorite stomping grounds were close to Jersey City, NJ. “The beauty and the grit I...
Absolutely, Positively My Last Post About Instagram
Why does Patti Smith feel a need to post on Instagram? Is it important to her to have nearly 600,000 followers? When she uploads a photo, does she read all the comments (which can be as many as 2,000, last I checked)? Does she ever respond? She’s already a star—what...
Ripe for Rediscovery: Pat Passlof
The last few years have witnessed a surge of interest in the women of Abstract Expressionism, a loosely affiliated group of artists who came of age in the shadow of the male titans of the movement—Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, et...
The Fine Art of Recycling: Part Two
In looking over the images from Part One of this post, and from those below, it occurred to me how often art made from found objects and random detritus has a childlike quality about it, even though the trained eye knows there’s a sophisticated vision behind the...
Claire Lieberman
For most of her career, Claire Lieberman’s sculpture has walked a fine line between beauty and danger, seduction and destruction. Take her last show at Massey Klein Gallery in New York, for example, aptly titled “Unidentified Dangerous Beautiful Objects.” Elegantly...
Jeff Baker: Urban Abstractions
When I first saw Jeff Baker’s photos, at his home and studio in Taos, NM, about five years ago, I immediately thought of Aaron Siskind, the photographer most closely associated with mid-century American abstraction. In many of his black-and-white images, Siskind...
The Fine Art of Recycling Part One
The whole notion of recycling seems a very up-to-the-minute politically correct attitude for art in this day and age. And yet the tradition of integrating all manner of stuff from the real world into sculpture and onto two-dimensional surfaces begins more than a...
What Turns Critics On (and Off)
When I was regularly writing reviews for ARTnews and The Wall Street Journal, two great gigs that petered out for different reasons, I was occasionally conscious of having biases toward work that rang my chimes in a big way and against art that confused me or left me...
ART AND TECHNOLOGY: The Soul of the New Machines, Part 2
Throughout the history of art there have been innovations that have entirely revolutionized the way work is made, looked at, and thought about. Painting with oils, the technique invented and perfected by Early Netherlandish artists, meant that a higher degree of...
The Studios of Key West
Why Not Consider a Residency in the Tropics? Key West is a town unlike any other in Florida, an island city that marks the southernmost point in the United States. A stone’s throw from Cuba, it’s the end destination of U.S. Route 1, the longest north-south road in the...
Hot Wax Happiness
In which your intrepid reporter takes a class in encaustic monotypes with Paula Roland Given the number of Vasari21 members who work in encaustic (see Anna Wagner-Ott’s report from last summer), I thought it might be fun to get a firsthand look at why the medium is so...
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