Articles
Mila Dau
Two preoccupations have remained constant in the art of Mila Dau as it has unfolded in the last 25 years: a fascination with people and a love of architectural spaces, specifically the interiors of museums, here and in Europe. It seems inevitable that the two were...
Sandra Filippucci
A little more than 30 years ago, pregnant with her first and only child, Sandra Filippucci took a break from her marriage and spent a couple of months at her sister-in-law’s house in Normandy, France. Just behind the house, a former rectory, was a tiny chapel, which...
What Is a Drawing? Part Six
After five posts, I’m running a bit low on things to say about drawing. But for a moment we might speculate about why drawing remains so popular among artists, when, let’s say, there’s hardly anyone around making frescoes these days. There is, of course, the amazing...
The Soul of the New Machines
Using the computer to translate technology into art The first time I paid serious attention to the role computers might play in contemporary art was in 2012 (a little late in the game), when I saw the Whitney Museum of American Art’s solo for Wade Guyton, then 40. The...
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...
Editor’s Note: Amy Schumer Tackles the Tyranny of the Male Gaze
For nearly two weeks now I’ve been staring on and off at a photo of comedian Amy Schumer on the front page of the New York Times Sunday “Arts & Leisure” section. She is hugely, triumphantly pregnant, cradling her baby bump in one meaty hand. Her wavy hair streams...
Judy Sigunick
Judy Signunick It’s a rare contemporary artist who dares grapple with literary masters. Cy Twombly summoned the ancient classics through a series of paintings that pay homage to the gods and heroes of Greek mythology. Frank Stella has been inspired by the 18th-century...
Total Immersion in Brooklyn
Deep in the heart of Bushwick, Michael David's residencies offer an intense experience that may take your art to new levels. “A cross between Black Mountain and Project Runway” is the way Michael David sums up the residencies he’s been sponsoring about four times a...
What Is a Drawing? Part Five
In the third iteration of this series, I noted that the possibilities for drawing have expanded hugely in the last century or so. Picasso made drawings with a small electric light in a darkened room. Calder’s Circus can be seen as an assemblage of three-dimensional...
Peri Schwartz
Peri Schwartz’s affinity for the subjects that have preoccupied her for decades started when she was growing up in Far Rockaway, a seaside neighborhood in Queens, NY. She would set up objects to draw when her parents went out on a Saturday night so they could see...
Art in Embassies
Ask not what your art can do for you, but what your art can do for your country Among the many forward-minded initiatives launched by the all-too-brief administration of President John F. Kennedy, the Art in Embassies program is one that has...
Paul O’Connor
Paul O’Connor first fell in love with photography when he joined the navy at the tender age of 17. “My dad gave me a camera, an Olympus, and I started taking pictures—especially of clouds out at sea," he recalls. Those big billowing skies would prove equally...
All About the New York Artists Circle
The very model of a modern-day generous, informative, and informed community More than two decades ago, when Barbara Ellmann was a young mother in the Tribeca neighborhood in New York, she began to experience those feelings of isolation that can afflict stay-at-home...
What Is a Drawing? Part Four
Earlier in the week, I tried to imagine what kind of responses I would have gotten had I posed that question to one of the great masters of the Renaissance. “Signora,” I can hear Maestro Buonarrotti explaining, con pazienza, “a drawing can be many things. A quick...
Taking Charge
Artists who build careers on their own terms In the last three years, since launching this site, I’ve been struck by the increasing numbers of artists who take the business of showing and marketing their work into their own hands. Though some still nurse fond dreams...
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