I always think of a remark that the Italian artist Gino De Dominicis liked to repeat: all art exists in the present tense, and to think otherwise “would be like seeing a car from the 1920s coming and deciding to cross the street anyway, thinking that you couldn’t be run over because the car is from another era.” The witty title of Svetlana Alpers’s collection of a lifetime’s worth of essays, Is Art History?, suggests that for her too, the issue of art’s historicity and questions of how it impacts an observer in real time are recurrent concerns.Christie's Establishes its...

With a world in crisis and an art market spinning out of control, ace art-world consultants Chen & Lampert deliver hard truths in response to questions sent by Art in America readers from far and wide.Hard Choices: Are You a Gen Z Artist? I consider myself an artist even though I didn’t go to art school. Nothing is more soul satisfying than losing myself while painting and sculpting. Supportive friends and family tell me I should be showing in galleries or museums, but I read art magazines and websites and know it isn’t so easy. I’d love more opportunities to exhibit, but I just don’t...

In the epilogue to The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America, Sarah Lewis describes the foundations of racial hierarchy as “a photograph with no true negative.” It is an image without an index. She gives a clarifying example earlier in the book, while describing a ca. 1890 photograph showing the white painter Frank Duveneck and his class at the Cincinnati Art Museum. Duveneck is flanked by an idiosyncratic group of mostly white men and women, few of whom are gazing at the camera. At the corner of the frame, a painting of the upper body of a black...

“We can stand shoulder to shoulder with the world’s greatest artists.”The First English-Language Monet Biography Portrays an Artist Capturing Nature Eclipsed by the Industrial Revolution's Smoggy Haze So says Faisal Saleh, founder of the Palestine Museum US. Since 2018, he has directed the space. He also owns the building—an office complex in Woodbridge, Connecticut—and so is free from worry over upsetting the various bureaucracies who might hesitate to showcase Palestinian art. A soft ban on Palestinian artists is, and has been, all too pervasive. (Saleh tells me: “The name ‘Palestine’ is radioactive right now.”) This year’s Venice Biennale, with its theme “Foreigners...

Growing up in the ’90s in Yazd, Iran, Roksana Pirouzmand was surrounded by familial creativity. Her mother sewed all the family’s clothes, and her grandmother, remembering songs from her youth, played them on the daf, a Persian drum often used in weddings. Pirouzmand adopted a similar proclivity for making things with her hands, though she entered high school intending to study science, before cajoling her parents into letting her attend art school instead.Trey Abdella Is a New Kind of Bad Boy Artist After high school, Pirouzmand and several former classmates started an art collective; around 2008, they staged a series of...

In Trey Abdella’s gargantuan paintings, the American Dream is alive and well—or at least hooked up to some kind of terrible machine invented in a moment of desperation, keeping the blood pumping if only by a technicality. His beautiful blond figures have bright-blue eyes, but no warmth; their grayish skin looks corpse-like.After a Controversial Performance, Roksana Pirouzmand Pivoted to Sculpture, but Her Body Remains Emphatically Present Abdella grew up in West Virginia, surrounded by poverty and people who would eventually vote to “Make America Great Again.” He wound up in New York in 2013 after following a former girlfriend who had...

Mary Miss’s Greenwood Pond: Double Site (1989–1996), commissioned in the late ’80s by the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa, merges sculpture, study space, and landscape design within a wetland ecosystem. Arced boardwalks lead visitors over the surface of a pond, descending to meet the water—one leads to a sunken seating area for a close encounter with lily pads, frogs, and dragonflies. Pilings frame a section of the shoreline as a sculptural space. On land, an earthen mound echoes the curve of the shoreline and an open pavilion offers shelter.Netflix Cofounder to Transform Utah Ski Resort into Outdoor Art Park “I...

We meet a number of Monets in Jackie Wullschläger’s new biography—the first to be published in English on the acclaimed painter. First we meet Oscar, Claude’s given name, a teenage caricaturist sketching notable figures in the port city of Le Havre. By 1861, Oscar had grown into a brash young man headed to military service in Algeria. He returned a painter reinvented as Claude and apprenticing in the studio of Charles Gleyre. His fortunes waxed and waned over the years: he was poor in Paris, poor in Saint-Adresse, poor in Vétheuil; then lovestruck and lusting after his patron Ernest Hoschedé’s...

When I met Amanda Ba in her Bushwick studio this spring, she had just returned from a trip to China, where she spent a month filming for a 15+ minute video premiering in September at Jeffrey Deitch in New York. The film is part travelogue, part staged: her father narrates in voiceover how various scenes relate to Jean-François Lyotard’s idea of a libidinal economy, describing how the concept has manifested in contemporary China.Artist-Surfer Simon Benjamin Explores How Black People Relate to the Sea Filmmaking is new to the artist, who turns 26 in September; so far, she has focused on painting....

Of all the songs that played during my hours-long visit to Simon Benjamin’s Brooklyn studio, “The West” by Althea and Donna echoed in my head the most—partly because it’s catchy, and partly because its refrain (“the West is gonna perish”) complements Benjamin’s current question: “how productive is nationalism right now?”Amanda Ba's Prismatic Paintings Spotlight Strong Women and Big Dogs Benjamin is a multidisciplinary artist driven by curiosity. Previously an avid surfer, he’d travel to coastal regions from Hawaii to Senegal to surf on tranquil waves. These experiences made him question why he was often the only Black person in the water....

I had the unique pleasure of meeting Ms. Faith Ringgold many times throughout my life and journey as an artist. My very first encounter with her was in 1996, when my mother brought home Tar Beach. It was my favorite book as a child. I saw myself in Cassie, the precocious little girl in the picture book. I loved Tar Beach because I understood it, not simply on an intellectual level but on a deeply emotional plane. I understood the world built by Ringgold in the grace and clarity of her rendered figures, at leisure in Harlem and with family...

“I think we often want things to be resolved so that we can understand them,” Rachel Jones told me from her studio in London. “And it’s like, well, sometimes you can understand things in a more complicated way.” Jones’s work has always grappled with liminality: between painting and drawing, abstraction and figuration, the past and the present. She has been working as a painter for more than a decade now, after studying at the Glasgow School of Art and getting her master’s at the Royal Academy Schools in London in 2019. As she moves into a new stage in her...

I first encountered Be My AI last fall, when the app was in beta. Developed by Danish mobile app Be My Eyes and OpenAI, it uses ChatGPT-4’s vision model to provide robust, nearly instantaneous descriptions of any image and facilitate conversations about those images. As a blind artist, I collect image descriptions like others collect photographs. Be My AI has supercharged my interactions with visual culture.Suzanne Kite Is Making Sure Indigenous People Aren't Left Out of the AI Conversation Shortly after gaining access to the Be My AI beta last year, I encountered blind photographer John Dugdale’s work Spectacle (2000) in...

Amanda Ba, whose painting Bitch and Bull (2023) appears on the cover of Art in America’s Fall 2024 “New Talent” issue, is the subject of a profile in the magazine. From her studio in Brooklyn, New York, Ba told A.i.A. the backstory of the cover image, a detail of a larger work shown here in full.California Man Receives Three-Month Sentence for Smuggling Ancient Mosaic Looted from Syria This painting is part of a series from 2021, a galvanizing moment in my career that I’ve developed from since. I graduated the year before, into Covid. There wasn’t much opportunity, but there also wasn’t much pressure. Since nobody...

This is a strange and scary time to be making art. Wars continue to rage in Ukraine and Gaza, and a looming United States presidential election could spell the return to power of a charismatic leader with fascist tendencies whose most fervent followers regard him as a kind of savior. These conditions are not so different from those in the late 1920s and ’30s in Europe, when Surrealism flourished as artists labored to process the horrors of World War I and the lead-up to WWII. It just so happens that 2024 marks the 100th anniversary of Surrealism (see a handy...

In November of 2016—that harrowing month in American history—Teresita Fernández gave a lecture on Robert Smithson. In her talk, part of Dia’s acclaimed “Artists on Artists” series, Fernández offered a critique of the Land art icon, one left somewhat implicit. She intercut Smithson’s “nonsites”—those fictional and nonspecific places he concocted to play out hypothetical scenarios—with scenes from her life, and with the realities of actual places.Frank Walter Escaped Racism and Violence by Looking to the Stars One slide showed Smithson’s 1969 drawing of asphalt spilling out from a truck and seeping like a tributary, according to the path of least resistance....

IF RECENT HEADLINES are any indication, one of the most pressing issues right now is the threat posed by fake or manipulated images. The wide availability of generative AI, along with the increasingly user-friendly interface of image editing software like Photoshop, has enabled most people with a computer and internet access to produce images that are liable to deceive. The potential dangers range from art forgery to identity fraud to political disinformation. The message is clear: images can mislead, and the stakes are high. You should learn to detect the real from the fake.AI Technology Is Helping Transform Unreadable 3,000-Year-Old...

A version of this essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.Nicole Eisenman's Chicago Retrospective Places Her Among the Great Jewish Artists One morning in 1958, while researching his ancestry in the English city of Leeds, the Antiguan artist Frank Walter awoke to a disturbance. He looked out his window and noticed some aliens who appeared to glow. Rather than cowering in fear, he was awed by what he saw.  It was hardly his only encounter with realms beyond our world. Walter, who died in 2009, would...

In a room illumined by the light of a few candles, a group of women with veils over their faces conducts a séance. The year is 1896 and the women, who have recently formed a spiritualist collective called Da Fem (The Five), send a chorus of wishes skyward. Linking arms, they offer themselves as suppliants, as “open receptors” waiting to receive “our ancient truth [from] the ascended masters.”Spiritualist Art by Women Has Officially Made Its Way in from the Margins The stage is thus set for Hilma, a triptych of an opera about the eponymous Swedish artist and mystic, who was...

This piece originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.In Rome, a Blockbuster Survey of American Figurative Painting Portrays a Chaotic Country Nicole Eisenman’s painting Seder (2010) features objects familiar to anyone has celebrated Passover: a shank bone, lettuce leaf, and boiled egg, all assembled on a Seder plate; an open horseradish container, its contents expectantly awaiting consumption on Hillel sandwiches; and open Haggadahs, their pages wilted from years of use. In the foreground, bulbous pink hands break a piece of matzah in two, a reference to...