Tears of the Moon
Roy Lerner's painting “Tears of the Moon” can be seen on FX TV drama “Pose.” The show will air in 2018, with a record number of transgender cast. Director Ryan Murphy.
Kara Walker Show
It was as horrifying as it was life-changing, the lack of any facial feature or details erased from her quasi-cartoonish figures engaging in a chaotic interplay of violent revenge and total domination, confronting the viewer with the stubbornness of slavery’s legacy that had been transmuted into 150 years of racist governmental policy and cultural stereotypes.
David Hammons Flag Honors Barack Obama in Chicago
The Over Holland Foundation donates David Hammons African-American Flag to MOCA Chicago.
Poem for David's Installation
Tribes' fearless leader, "Blind Guy," Steve Cannon penned this poem to accompany David Hammons' exhibit on Charles White and Leonardo DaVinci at the Museum of Modern Art. Dig it!
Ai WeiWei's Good Fences Make Good Neighbors
Hey folks! Check out Ai WeiWei's Good Fences Get Good Neighbors at Washington Square Park and other locations around the city for some thought provoking public installation art.
Boom for Real: A Glimpse into the Formative Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat
A beautifully produced feast for the eyes, Sara Driver’s new documentary, Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat is chock-full of information, (skillfully edited) entertaining, uplifting, informative, gripping, and, most of all, a love letter to artists, art lovers, and the East Village.
The Post-Woke Brilliance of American Koko
Is everyone a little bit racist? And if so, what does that mean for a country that just eight years ago was trading in casual talk about a post-racial America?
We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-1985
Brooklyn Museum’s, We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women1965 -1985, retrospective, which closed on September 17, brings many fascinating pieces of work out from the archives to showcase a more idealistic and hopeful time.
Norman Douglas is Compelled to Present Several Thoughts that He Believes Worth Sharing with Respect to the Exhibition at Sikemma Jenkins of Artworks Created by Kara Walker
‘Skin me, Brer Fox,’ sez Brer Rabbit, sezee, ‘snatch out my eyeballs, t’ar out my years by de roots, en cut off my legs,’ sezee, ‘but do please, Brer Fox, don’t fling me in dat brier- patch,’ sezee.
Co’se Brer Fox wanter hurt Brer Rabbit bad ez he kin, so he cotch ’im by de behime legs en slung ’im right in de middle er de brier-patch.’
Kara Walker Exhibit at Sikkema Jenkins
EMPIRES WILL FALL, ALTHOUGH WHICH ONES, ONLY TIME WILL TELL.
Paradise Regained: Erich Erving’s Bona Breviary of the Fabulosa Innocents
It is characteristic of our cultural moment that sincerity often sits uneasy in our stomachs. We’ve heard all the lines before. We know them from a million b-list movies we can’t quite recall, but which form a background of white noise to everything we take in today.
Whitney Biennial Review
Biennials are a strange thing by their nature. Meant to represent the cream of the artistic crop, these biannual events offer an implicit promise for both artistic excellence (however one chooses to define that these days) and sharp social commentary. In this way the art displayed at a biennial serves a dual purpose: to assure highbrow connoisseurs that quality fine art is still being produced, and at the same time to reflect the zeitgeist. This zeitgeist does not belong to the rarified air of the New York art world, however, or the downtown scenesters sipping wine out of plastic cups in the antiseptic spaces of Chelsea art galleries. The zeitgeist is messy. It consists of violent video games, mass shootings, mind-boggling inequality, opiate addiction, racial tension, social media, and a consumer economy based on cheap labor, disposable products, and omnipresent advertising. In other words, it is about as far from 19th century French impressionism as one could possibly get.
Too Late: Lane Sell and Philipp Rabovsky Interview
On the occasion of “Too Late: the European Can(n)on is Here,” their second dual exhibition together at Shoestring Press, artists Lane Sell and Phil Rabovsky sat down with curator Madeleine Boucher in a tiny Brooklyn living room over no small amount of whiskey.
The Clothes Make the Painting (Hyperallergic)
Medrie MacPhee’s newest paintings are made from the shapes and contours of disassembled garments, giving “pattern painting” an entirely new meaning.
At the Met: Irving Penn and Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons
Currently on view are exhibits featuring the work of Irving Penn and Rei Kawakubo for fashion house, Comme des Garçons. I went to view both spectacles in the same day and saw Irving Penn’s photographs first. This retrospective of Penn’s work is the largest to date and celebrates the centennial of the artist’s birth.
Escape from New York: This Year’s Whitney Biennial
The Whitney Biennial was a breath of fresh air this year. There weren’t too many dark, disturbing installations of dismembered animals or humans to wander through.
Barkley L. Hendricks (April 16, 1945 – April 18, 2017)
s there a more backhanded compliment for an artist than “artist’s artist?” This term denotes an artist whose work is of such quality that it was really only celebrated by other artists during their time.
A Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Prints at Japan Society
It is a curious show. Curious even for me who was born & grew up in Japan & knows its culture. VERY curious for a non-Japanese who knows little about it.