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Welcome to Vasari21. A community for working artists, a place to connect, find information, read about the new and the unknown, listen to podcasts, and learn about how the art world really works.

UNDER THE RADAR

Grace DeGennaro

A spotlight for members.

Recent Podcast

Recent Feature

Ripe for Rediscovery: Peter Miller

Ripe for Rediscovery: Peter Miller

Talk about “Surrealism” in conversation with artists and art lovers you are most likely to think of works by Dalí, Magritte, Tanguy, Ernst, or possibly Paul Delvaux. Mention “American Surrealism,” and the terrain gets tricky. Didn’t Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, and...

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From the Vasari21 Archives

Writing into the Gap

How to get a grip when a work of art leaves you almost speechless By Millicent Young It happened again. Within seconds: scalp tingling, forearms in goose bumps, the held breath released and then tears. I am in a gallery seeing Ursula von Rydingsvard’s work on a...

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...

The Woman Who Lives Inside Bonnard’s World

When painter Leslie Parke was a small child, she would head downstairs early in the morning and open one of her parents’ art books, squatting on the floor and pressing her face into the color reproductions of Fifty Centuries of Art. Her goal was not so much to study...

Afterthoughts on the 2015 Venice Biennale

Photo credits: bottom of pageMost reviews of the 2015 Venice Biennale came down hard on the curator’s “didactic,” “glum,” “joyless,” and un-spectacular show of conceptual, socially oriented works. It also disappointed those addicted to grandiose art spectacles, the...

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...

Ripe for Rediscovery: Maggi Hambling

By Jane Barthes  Maggi Hambling’s paintings and sculpture are not entirely new to me, but many outside the U.K. probably have little knowledge of this quintessentially British artist. I discovered Hambling’s work in the early 1990s, five years before I left London,...

Ripe for Rediscovery: Berthe Morisot

Having It All in the 19th Century Berthe Morisot’s subjects now seem among the tamest and most ingratiating imaginable: sun-drenched land- and seascapes, women and children casually posed in the garden or cozy domestic interiors, stylish Parisian beauties at their...

Say It with Flowers: Part One

Blooms, posies, blossom, and gardens will never go out of style About a year ago, somewhere on social media, I made the rather stupid observation that I thought flowers had become nonstarters as subjects for artists since the heyday of Georgia O’Keeffe. Elisabeth...

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...

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…

Archived Feature

Fantasy Curating: Hands-On and Lush

Fantasy Curating: Hands-On and Lush

 By Lee Albert Hill As a painter myself I am drawn to the work of other painters first and foremost.  Especially those who demonstrate a dedication to a lush, hands-on, painterly approach and an emphasis on refined craft and detail.  For this curation I have chosen...

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Archived Feature

The Monuments Contest: Part Two

The Monuments Contest: Part Two

Compared with the duration of empires past—like those of ancient Rome or Great Britain—the U.S. occupies a relatively tiny span of time, a little more 234 years as the great democratic experiment, if we date the founding of the country to 1776. And so our monuments...

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Archived Feature

Meghan Wilbar: The Long Road

Meghan Wilbar: The Long Road

It’s a brave artist who attempts to say something new about landscape. The genre has been around since ancient times, when frescoes of Arcadian vistas adorned the walls of upscale villas, and its popularity has waxed and waned according to the talents and interests of...

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Archived Under the Radar

Marietta Patricia Leis

Marietta Patricia Leis

Like many little girls, Marietta Patricia Leis first set her sights on becoming a ballerina. “At the age of seven I was entranced with wanting to be a ballet dancer,” she says. As a child in suburban East Orange, NJ, she studied dance every day after school, and...

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Archived Under the Radar

Susan English

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...

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 Archived Podcast

Liliana Bloch: Texas Strong

Liliana Bloch: Texas Strong

Gallerist Liliana Bloch has had one of the more unusual routes for an art dealer. In 1999, she fled war-torn El Salvador to forge a new life for herself in Dallas, TX…

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