The Totemic Quotidian in Roula Partheniou
At a time when contemporary art production is dominated by forces outside its control, pulling and pushing against commercial and cultural contexts; when media…
Can a Lobby Be Subversive? Jenny Holzer’s Comcast Capitulation
At 60 stories and 1,121 feet, the new Comcast Technology Center is the tallest building in Philadelphia, a glaringly optimistic slice of the city’s…
Free Your Mind, or Else: “Acid Communism” and Contemporary Art’s Futurism
Along with the blog posts, articles, reviews, and interviews collected in K-Punk, last year’s voluminous anthology of writings by the late British cultural theorist…
“I’m Staying Away From Trump as Subject Matter”: Howardena Pindell On Refusal and Evolution
The American artist Howardena Pindell arrived in London for her first solo show in the UK just as the 45th US President landed for…
The Faces That You Meet: Huma Bhabha’s Close Encounters
The works of Huma Bhabha affect a strange pareidolia: they lure, and then repel, dissipating the familiarity they promise. The Karachi-born artist mines the…
From a Cabin in the Woods: Dieter Roelstraete’s “HUTOPIA” and the Shelters of Thought
I harbor fantasies of retreating for stretches of time to a simple cabin in the countryside. My place, spare but tasteful, would feature a…
“Where Does Art Get To Live?”: A Conversation Between Anique Jordan and Michèle Pearson Clarke
On a perfect spring day in late May, I found myself huddled in a crowded gallery for an artist talk, my head leaning forward,…
Episode 10: “What Makes Great Art?” with Dushko Petrovich
In our 10th episode, we continue our season-long exploration of the question, “What makes great art,” speaking to essential voices of our time…
Grafting the Baroque: The Scaled-Up Frames of David Armstrong Six
“Everything is composed of small particles of itself and they are flying around in concentric circles and arcs and segments and innumerable other geometrical…
“This Reductive Brave New World”: Andrea Dworkin’s Painful Relevance
When I was an undergraduate in the early 2000s, Andrea Dworkin’s “anti-sex” writing was anathema to the prevailing discourse of feminism. The cultural moment…
One Hundred Years of Ambivalence: The Many Legacies of the Bauhaus
It’s been a hundred years of bent chrome furniture, and Germany is taking stock. On the centennial of the Bauhaus art school, new permanent…
Invisible Labor and Black Burnout
One might think that the recent swell of interest in black art would have eased some of the burdens faced by those who have…
The Erotics of Liberty: Dorothy Iannone’s Cultivated Bohemia
Whatever else they do in this world or the next, gods take up space. Consider Dorothy Iannone’s recent exhibition Lady Liberty Meets Her Match…
Looking Out from Looking In: Geneviève Cadieux Shifts From the Polemic to the Poetic
Milling through the Vancouver Art Gallery earlier this spring, I stopped before a towering diptych that paired a cartoon prince and a back-turned nude….
From Dust to Light: On Photography’s Material Traces
On the occasion of the opening of a Handful of Dust, at the Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver, visiting curator David Campany shared an…
The Legacy of Mary Sully: Early Indigenous Feminism, and the “American Indian Abstract”
Few people have seen the work of 20th-century Indigenous artist Mary Sully. Despite her belonging to a prominent Indigenous family (one of her drawings…