Robert Straight

Robert Straight

Among Robert Straight’s fondest memories of growing up in Amarillo, TX, in the 1950s were the times his mother, a nurse and a seamstress, took him shopping for fabrics. “That made a big impression,” he says, “looking at all those patterns and colors and designs….” And...
Girl, Unexpectedly Interrupted

Girl, Unexpectedly Interrupted

In which I try to have a romance with an older man, a real artist. But Mother knows better. During my last semester in college, I worked part time at the university store (fondly known as the “screw store” for its inflated prices on stuff like toothpaste and shampoo)....
The Tie That Binds….Or Not

The Tie That Binds….Or Not

What do dealers owe their artists? And what do artists say they aren’t getting? The artist-dealer relationship is one of the most complicated, intimate, and loosely defined of all arrangements between an individual and a business. It can be “like a marriage in its...
William Norton

William Norton

“My work is all about shadows and voids,” says William Norton, a tall, rangy, bearded man in his early 60s, whose seven-foot-high “drawings” on plexiglass panels were inspired by trips on the subway to and from his job at the Whitney Museum of American Art. “These are...
Ripe for Rediscovery: Francis Picabia

Ripe for Rediscovery: Francis Picabia

Francis Picabia was a man way ahead of his times. Long before artists of our day became dedicated multitaskers—moving easily from performance to sculpture to video to whatever—Picabia (1879-1953) vigorously avoided any singular style or medium, forging a career that...