Under the Radar

A.J. Dungan

“For me, art was always about color before I was good enough ever to attempt a drawing or painting,” says A.J. Dungan. “When I went to the hardware store with my dad, I was mesmerized by the paint samples.” Dungan has served a long apprenticeship with color, beginning...

Annell Livingston

At first blush, Annell Livingston’s tightly gridded abstractions might appear to be successors to the Op Art frenzy of the 1960s, but on closer scrutiny her gently rippling canvases are not so much interested in playing visual tricks as in conveying the passage of...

Millicent Young

When Millicent Young was growing up in Manhattan, in a progressive and intellectual family who lived on the Upper West Side, “art was considered as important as being polite to people on the street and doing my homework,” she recalls. Her mother, a student of Margaret...

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...

August Muth

When August Muth was five or six years old, he would take his drawings, spread them out on the gravel in the driveway of his family’s house in Albuquerque, NM, and sell them to passers-by for three cents each. “I always had a lot of entrepreneurial spirit,” he...

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...

Under the Radar: Bonny Leibowitz

The unfolding of an artist’s life and work is a strange and mysterious process. If you’ve been following the posts in “Under the Radar,” you see that there’s no one-size-fits-all. Ted Larsen took several years off to rethink his direction. Phillis Ideal moved from one...

Melissa Stern

If you happen to get to Charleston, SC, before August 6, be sure to visit the Redux Contemporary Art Center and Melissa Stern’s multimedia exhibition “The Talking Cure,” a collection of sculptures that are only too eager to tell you about the complicated workings of...

Jan Marie Sessler

“Not everything has to shout,” Jan Marie Sessler said to me during a studio visit a couple of years ago. And indeed in her prints, paintings, and sculpture she shows a reticence and delicacy that would seem to belong to a bygone era—if not for the wit and spontaneity...

Kim Levin

Kim Levin is well known to many as an art critic for the Village Voice, New York’s most politically charged alternative tabloid, a post she held for more than 20 years, until 2006. She’s contributed to many art magazines, lectured widely, and written countless...

T.J. Mabrey

T.J. Mabrey’s life has taken her from Oklahoma to Dallas to Panama to the marble quarries of Pietrasanta to Singapore and Cairo and most lately to Taos, NM, where she has a buoyant installation—made almost entirely of paper…

Brian McCutcheon

On the “About” page of Brian McCutcheon’s website appears perhaps one of the scariest artist photos on the Internet. Under his right eye is a lurid green-and-purple bruise, and a few of his teeth seem to have…