Connecting Artists

In the world of museum exhibitions and gallery shows, the curator seems like the Wizard of Oz, the behind-the-scenes magician who pulls it all together and leads us Munchkins down a yellow brick road toward some kind of enlightenment…

How Could We Manage Without Them? Last week I announced our first annual Studio Pet Photos competition, but they were all so adorable, it was a tough call. The grand prize, though, belongs to Mariella Bisson’s Senegal parrot and studio manager, Creature (shown above),...

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...

An Artist Opens her New Home and Studio for ArtWalk Kingston By Millicent Young I had just landed in Kingston, NY, in early July with Niko, the dog of Perpetual Joy, and the four cats, a long chapter of life in rural Virginia completed. I was moving into my new...

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...

For most of her 40-year career, Susan Chorpenning has in one way or another been involved with light, and “with the sensual experience of looking and the perceptual experience of seeing,” as she puts it on her website.  In one of her early “Light Rooms,” a temporal...

My father asked me this question during the last months of his life. As a young man he had made the decision to not pursue a life as a concert pianist, choosing a career that was both more stable and also protected the privacy of his passion…

Here we are, now well into the third month of self-isolation, wearing our masks like good citizens if we go out at all, minding the headlines and the barrage of information, and perhaps generally adjusting to a global catastrophe whose true measure will not be known...

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...

In the fall of 2013, I published a story in ARTnews called “Show and Tell: The Dos and Don’ts of Studio Visits,” which went the art-world equivalent of viral—that is to say, scores, possibly hundreds, of people shared on Facebook because…