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UNDER THE RADAR

A spotlight for members.

Cindy Blakeslee

Recent Feature

My Blockhead Adventures with Blockchain Art, Part Four

My Blockhead Adventures with Blockchain Art, Part Four

Many say it’s all a bubble. I don’t agree because the world is sick producing extremes of weather and behavior, people are struggling and if creators can find a way to express themselves or promote a worthy cause AND make money then It is not going away anytime soon

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Recent Feature

The Educated Eye Part Two

The Educated Eye Part Two

I opened up an intriguing cauldron of worms when I asked a bevy of art writers (call them critics, journalists, or simply reviewers) on what it means to have an “eye.” Why did they consider their judgments superior to those of the average museumgoer or art lover? The...

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From the Vasari21 Archives

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...

L.A. Confidential

The first in a series of reports on the art world.  In May, it seemed like we were almost entirely out of the woods with Covid-19, and then along came the Delta variant and the post-pandemic euphoria rapidly dissipated. Still, as long-time observers of the Los Angeles...

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...

So You Want To Learn How To Draw?

In which a writer and critic goes back to class Please note that this story is reprinted from the ARTnews issue of October, 1995. But 20 years later, the New York Studio School "drawing marathons" still continue along the same lines, under the expert guidance of the...

Fantasy Curating: Big Things Have Small Beginnings

By Ed Grant "Big Things Have Small Beginnings" So many of the things around us are small, or at least start off small. Stalactites form one drop at a time. Viruses and bacteria evolve new ways around our defenses to become full-blown pandemics. Slime mold is used to...

Art Advisers Redux

Almost five years ago I published a post about art advisers, those hard-working middlemen and women who match up artists with corporate clients, budding collectors, or homeowners in the throes of renovation. Enough has changed since that time that the subject seemed...

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...

Frank Stella Meets Jasper Johns

“The artist who launched Minimalism was Frank Stella (b. 1936), who was still a student at Princeton when he saw Jasper Johns’s 1958 show at Leo Castelli Gallery. He liked the repetition of the flags…

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...

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: The Contemporary Portrait

Fantasy Curating: The Contemporary Portrait

By Kate Petley Contemporary portraiture is so diverse that creating a comprehensive list of artists is futile. I selected these particular works for their power, humor, cleverness, rawness, and beauty. Reflecting a broad interpretation of what qualifies as a portrait,...

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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 Feature

Portfolio: Bob Richardson

Portfolio: Bob Richardson

There were times, when he was younger, that Bob Richardson felt a pull toward art. As a teenager in South Orange, NJ, he attended the Art Students League in New York, where he took drawing classes with a painter named Tom Fogarty, who taught him that “line has...

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Archived Under the Radar

Jeannie Motherwell

Jeannie Motherwell

First off, let’s get the famous forebears out of the way. Yes, Jeannie Motherwell is the daughter of that Motherwell, Robert, one of the titans of mid-20th-century American art. And the stepdaughter of Helen Frankenthaler, no less famous in the annals of art history...

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Archived Under the Radar

Paul O’Connor

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...

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