Features
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...
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...
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...
The Critical Edge
Some tips for getting art writers to notice your work. Hint: a cow’s tongue probably will not do the trick. It’s the dream of every artist to be noticed by a prestige critic, like Roberta Smith or Jerry Saltz or any other of the noteworthy art scribes in urban areas....
First Encounters
The art that made artists want to be artists In almost every artist’s life there are inevitably one or more works that ignite a spark or at least plant a seed, provoking the notion that art could be a dedicated calling, or at least a subject of serious study....
Whazzup with All the Gallery Closings?
And what exactly does a "private dealer" do? When I heard early in the summer that the venerable Cheim & Read gallery in Chelsea was closing its doors to transition to “private practice,” my heart sank a little. The low-key establishment on West 25th Street was...
Fantasy Curating: Thinking Outside the Box
By Ruth Hiller It’s probably difficult to pinpoint the very first artist to make a shaped construction, an artwork that hovers somewhere between painting and sculpture. The possibilities for non-rectangular paintings begin as early as the 1920s with fanciful...
The Motherhood Report
No one claims it's easy, but it is possible to combine two of the world's oldest callings: artist and mother Way back in the 1980s, in the era of linebacker shoulder pads and dressing for success, I worked on a short-lived publication that billed itself as the first...
Margery Amdur Makes an Installation
When Margery Amdur was invited this fall to build an installation in a gallery at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, MN, the Philadelphia-based artist envisioned an immersive environment that would draw on the many interests she’s pursued over the years. Probably...