Daddy Says: Ed Ruscha in Other Words
Ed Ruscha is a great American art daddy, such that he has been called “the deadpan laureate of American art,” “the great American Pop…
Sidestepping Violence: The German Pavilion’s Failure to See the Present in the Past
At first glance, the earth spilling out from behind the tall, squared columns of the German pavilion’s facade appears to be a pile of…
Peter Hujar’s Still Life in Motion
There is a photograph installed near the end of Peter Hujar: Rialto at New York’s Ukrainian Museum that still holds my attention. It is…
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi
Palestinian-American artist and writer Fargo Nissim Tbakhi speaks with Lauren Wetmore about the political implication of form through two texts: Tbakhi’s own piece “Notes…
Reviewing the Reviews: The 2024 Whitney Biennial
As the longest-running institutional survey of contemporary American art, the Whitney Biennial never fails to create “discourse.” Each iteration makes a claim about the…
Paul Chan’s “Breathers” Turns Away
Paul Chan’s exhibition Breathers, now at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis after traveling from Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, plays with ideas of rest,…
Goodbye to Berlin
We’re learning to live with somebody’s depression, And I don’t want to live with somebody’s depression —David Bowie, “Fantastic Voyage” When I arrived in…
Romantic and Brawling: On Four Chicago Artists
Chicago has never really recovered from Imagism. That local explosion—whose blast radius stretched from roughly the late 1940s through the mid-1970s—gave the city’s art…
An Inflection Point in Art Publishing
Earlier this year, the Momus editorial team gathered for a talk at Plural Art Fair in Montreal. It marked the first time Sky Goodden,…
The Possessions of Paul Pfeiffer
When Paul Pfeiffer was ten years old, he dreamt that he was possessed by the devil. He had just moved from the tropical suburbs…
Pacita Abad Sees the Soul of an Artifact
Pacita Abad, the Filipina artist who roamed the world like a traveling bard, was twenty-four when she left home in 1970. By the time…
Paper Abstractions: Virginia Jaramillo’s Social Theory
Perhaps more than any other recent survey of abstract art, Virginia Jaramillo: Principle of Equivalence reframes what abstract art is and can do, politically…
Elvia Wilk
Launching Season 7, Elvia Wilk, an essayist, critic, and novelist, talks to Sky Goodden about the decision to quit writing—if only to be able…
Exposing the Contradictions: Jewish Artists Dismantling Germany’s Nationalist Narrative
Late last year, the artist Adam Broomberg again found himself punished for speaking out in support of Palestinian liberation. Karlsruhe University of Arts and…
There is the Rising: Shelley Niro’s Reckoning Retrospective
When it comes to critical analysis of an Indigenous artist’s output, there is a tendency to circumscribe. We want to capture and we want…
Radical Looking: Newly Seeing Art With My Baby
When our son was nine and a half weeks old and the only place we had managed to take him was the pediatrician’s office,…