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Art in America
In Prismatic Paintings, David Huffman Pays Homage to Black Panther Protests of His Youth
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.How Ione Saldanha Flattened Space, Stretched It Out, Then Flattened It All Over Again Anyone who has been affected by the protests roiling college campuses in recent weeks—which is to say everyone, given the range of emotions they elicit and their magnitude in terms of reverberation and reach—would be advised to visit David Huffman’s current show at Casey Kaplan gallery in New York. A short walk away from the Fashion Institute of Technology,...
Hayv Kahraman Paints Resistance Against the Classification of Migrants and Refugees
Hayv Kahraman is an Iraqi–born refugee who escaped with her family and became a Swedish citizen. Informed by her experience with migration and assimilation, her solo exhibition “Look Me in the Eyes”—on view at ICA San Francisco through May 19—explores the connection between botanical classification and human subjugation.Multidisciplinary Creator Miranda July Shares Her Top Five Recent Obsessions In her work—including the painting Loves Me, Loves Me Not (2023), pictured above—Kahraman draws on a personal interest in binomial nomenclature, a naming system for living species started by Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in the 18th century, and its relation to refugees and migrants. How did...
How Ione Saldanha Flattened Space, Stretched It Out, Then Flattened It All Over Again
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. One of the most memorable sections of this year’s Venice Biennale is a vast room hung floor to ceiling with abstract works, many of them by dead artists. The star of this room—the pieces I can’t stop thinking about—appear not on the overcrowded walls, but in the space’s center, suspended from the ceiling.That series, titled “Bambus,” is by Ione Saldanha (1919–2001). The late Brazilian artist painted the works on pieces of bamboo that she’d let dry...
Legacy Russell’s ‘Black Meme’ Critiques Representations of Black Culture—But Doesn’t Chart a Way Forward
Who gets to profit from the TikTok-famous Renegade Dance? Or the viral catchphrase “on fleek”? When memes are by their very nature hyper-transmitted and endlessly remixed, is there any opportunity to “own” one’s innovations in the online cultural field? The problem of how to compensate digital labor and goods has animated scholars and popular thinkers for more than two decades now. Meanwhile, questions of appropriation as they relate to Black creators and subjects have been part of this discourse for nearly as long—time enough that a reviewer of Lauren Michele Jackson’s 2019 book White Negroes, about Black virality and appropriation,...
A Riotous, Edgy Alternative Fair About 1970s Art Returns to New York
For the second year in a row, far from Frieze New York in Hudson Yards, the SoHo art dealer Eric Firestone is hosting 18 New York galleries, all of whom are celebrating the 1970s.At Frieze New York, Young Galleries Reveal Untold Narratives and Spotlight Overlooked Talents The fair is situated on the upper floors of Firestone’s gallery on Great Jones Street, where painter Jean-Michel Basquiat and jazz musician Charles Mingus once lived. (Basquiat’s former home now houses Angelina Jolie’s clothing store Atelier Jolie.) Up the broad, creaky wooden stairs, on the third and fourth floors, Firestone assembled some of the buzziest galleries in...
How Arlene Shechet Makes Her Recalcitrant Materials Come Alive
This spring, Storm King Art Center is getting a serious makeover. Since its founding in 1960, the 500-acre sculpture park in the Hudson Valley has been gradually populated by world-class works: the modernist abstractions of David Smith and Mark di Suvero; Louise Nevelson’s glowering black cabinetry; towering monoliths by Ursula von Rydingsvard; and, most recently, Martin Puryear’s Lookout, an elegant viewing chamber in vaulted brick. The collection is all the more impressive for its beautiful setting, a landscape that has inspired artists for two centuries and counting.Dozens Arrested at Pro-Palestine Encampment at Art Institute of Chicago There has, however, been one...
In Collection Hangs, Major Museums Remix the Classics
Until it reopened in a $230 million new building this past June, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum was an anomaly among United States institutions: it held a world-class collection of modern and postwar art with nowhere to properly exhibit the bulk of it at once. Now, a 50,000-square-foot space allows masterpieces like Picasso’s 1906 La Toilette to return to view, along with showstoppers from the likes of Chaim Soutine, Andy Warhol, and a whole lot more.Frank Stella, Trailblazing Artist Who Pushed Abstraction to Its Limits, Dies at 87 The way these pieces are displayed, however, changed vastly. The history of modernism...
Are We Supposed to Believe Maurizio Cattelan Is Sincere Now?
Maurizio Cattelan is usually “dismissed as a prankster,” per the press release for his new show at Gagosian in New York. That’s because he duct-taped a banana to a wall and sold it for $120,000, made a sculpture of an asteroid hitting the pope, and—for his last New York show, a 2011 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum—dangled his art from the rotunda’s ceiling, making it hard to get a good look and leaving viewers wanting more.The same press release insists that he is in fact “a deeply political artist,” and the evidence is supposed to be the new work in...
Esther Mahlangu’s South African Retrospective Asks: Whose Abstractions Count as “Modern”?
In 1989 Esther Mahlangu (b. 1935) participated in “Magiciens de la terre” at the Pompidou Center in Paris. One of the first exhibitions to mingle artists from across the globe, it remains influential—largely for the troubling issues it raised. One critic, Rasheed Araeen, pointed out the “biases of the way in which the organizers of the exhibition selected artists—searching for the ‘authentic,’ bypassing anything truly modern in Third World cultures.”Paul McCartney's Rarely Seen Photography Gets a Big Museum Show in New York Decades later, critics and curators are still grappling with the politics of inserting artists from the Global South into...
Learning from Lagos: Lessons from the Megalopolis’s Growing Art Scene
When the Lagos Biennial debuted in 2017 at a railway terminal, there was a sense that the event was remarkable for the way it captured the do-for-self disposition of Nigerian artists, who’d been starved for years of institutional support. Directed by the artist Folakunle Oshun, the mood of that edition was makeshift—with scant concern for charting easy paths to navigate a weed-strewn place, or for presenting artworks with any kind of pristine veneer.Potential Legal Heir Emerges to Claim Long-lost Klimt Portrait Auctioned in Vienna Oshun’s choice of an unconventional locale as an art venue was memorable—a gesture that seemed to me...
Hard Truths: Can a Closing Gallery Get a Little Respect from the Press?
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.John Cage's Frequently Misunderstood 4'33" Remains a Masterpiece It was with a heavy heart that I closed my gallery last fall. Proud of all that the gallery had accomplished over the years, I noted some highlights in a closure announcement that I sent to our mailing list. I was flooded with warm responses, yet it saddened me that no art press reported on our departure. Our shows might not always...
Venice Diary Day 3: The Biennale’s Best Pavilions Capture the Absurdity of Art in this Moment
I have a favorite pavilion—if you’ll permit me a superlative, despite not having seen every single one. For five days, I ran around Venice pounding cappuccinos, my step count uptick fueled by FOMO. Still, this was not enough time to see everything I wanted. (Is it just me, or are there more good collateral shows than ever before?)For Venice Biennale Artists, a Very Real Halo Effect in the Market Never mind—I can’t get the Austria pavilion out of my head. There, in the Giardini, the Ukrainian ballet dancer Oksana Serheieva rehearses at the barre. I watched for a while, mesmerized, before...
Venice Diary Day 2: The Vatican Sent Me to Prison
The Venice Biennale’s most exclusive and elusive show is at a women’s prison. Put on by the Vatican pavilion, the show is at Giudecca Women’s Prison; the bouncers are prison guards, and it’s hard to get an appointment. It seems that the prison, and the Vatican, care little for art world credentials—as it should be. But many visiting Venice for the opening aren’t used to hearing “no.”Indigenous Artists Take Venice Biennale's Top Prizes as Mataaho Collective, Archie Moore Win Big After I showed up for my appointed time slot—which I booked a week in advance, so that they could run...
Mexican Painter María Izquierdo Gets Her Due After Decades at the Venice Biennale
María Izquierdo was born in 1902 in San Juan de los Lagos, a commercial center and home to the Basilica de la Virgin de San Juan, the second-most-visited religious sanctuary in Mexico. Both these facts figure intimately in Izquierdo’s art starting in the 1930s. While Frida Kahlo became better known, Izquierdo ranks alongside her as an admired and studied in the pantheon of Mexican women artists—and foreigners such as Tina Modotti, Leonora Carrington, and Remedios Varo—whose careers developed there.Indigenous Artists Take Venice Biennale's Top Prizes as Mataaho Collective, Archie Moore Win Big Izquierdo features in the 2024 Venice Biennale’s “Foreigners Everywhere”...
Elias Sime’s E-Waste Abstractions for Venice Are Tightly Linked With His Community Projects in Ethiopia
When Elias Sime was in art school, his teachers threw his work in the trash. It was the late 1980s, the final years of Ethiopian communism, and art students were expected to produce socialist realism. But Sime was more interested in materials—in trash, as it were.In the Venice Biennale's Historical Sections, Overlooked 20th-Century Figures Come into Focus Today, Sime is now known worldwide for gargantuan abstractions—a new series debuts today at Spazio Tana in Venice—comprising intricately arranged e-waste that he buys, often by the truckload, in Addis Ababa’s Mercato market—the largest open-air market in Africa. When I visited in the market...
Former Child Star Charmaine Poh Uses AI To Confront the Tension Between Visibility and Privacy
What are the stakes of being visible? Singapore-born and Berlin-based artist Charmaine Poh explores the possibilities and dangers in her intimate portrayals of queer feminine bodies. In a series of photographs titled “How They Love” (2018–19), she invites collaborators to express their desires toward their romantic partners on their own terms. Poh captures couples in the considered and contained site of the photography studio, where they are free to use props and gestures to express themselves and their bonds with one another. Poh says she “was thinking about the surveillance of queer bodies in Singapore,” about the families who did...
At the Venice Biennale, Ana Segovia Mocks Machismo
In February 2020, during Mexico City’s art week, Ana Segovia staged an intervention in La Faena, a cantina downtown not far from the Zocalo. At one end of the bullfighting-themed bar hangs a large painting of a man holding a red cape as he crawls through a barbed wire fence into a pastoral landscape filled with bulls. Segovia painted an almost one-to-one replica of the work in his signature, decidedly femme palette, somewhere between neons and pastels. In Segovia’s version, the man’s red cape is white, and he holds a rose while dawning a salmon sweater and a baseball cap.In...
Venice Diary Day 1: A First Look Inside the Biennale’s “Foreigners Everywhere” Main Exhibition
Representation and opacity are the two primary tensions that artists have been grappling with in recent years. This year, the Whitney Biennial took the softer, less legible, more protective approach. At the Venice Bienniale, meanwhile, visibility trumps vulnerability.For Venice Biennale Artists, a Very Real Halo Effect in the Market In “Foreigners Everywhere,” some culturally specific references get lost in translation to be sure, but being represented, and being seen, is framed as a good thing. Some curators might have hesitated to include works made by an artist confined to psychiatric institutions (Aloïse Corbaz), or drawings by a Yanomami shaman done in collaboration...
Pierre Huyghe Takes on AI and Nonhuman Evolution in Venice
At a moment of growing anxiety about AI’s potential to usurp and overwhelm human intelligence, Pierre Huyghe offers neither reassurance nor prophecy of catastrophe. Instead, he proposes to take human consciousness out of the equation altogether. “Liminal,” an exhibition at the Pinault Collection’s Punta della Dogana, extends the French artist’s longtime exploration of otherness, conceived here as the experience of reality in biological, chemical, and technological entities that are not human. Huyghe sets up situations that allow such entities to evolve on their own, and to communicate with each other in the absence of human intervention. His work careens between...
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