Dumb Material and Animate Belief: Sadie Benning Plays (with) God
Occasionally, a show hits the sweet spot so squarely, that critical faculties seem to evaporate on the tip of one’s tongue. In the case…
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Interview: Paul Petro on Becoming the Legacy-Building, “Bent Identity Politics” Gallerist of Toronto
The spiritual iconographies of Paul Petro’s roster are many. Robert Flack’s seven chakras series from the 1990s; Stephen Andrews’s heaven painting, and The Apostles;…
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Who Was Edmund Alleyn? Rediscovering a Mercurial and Untimely Talent
Staging a major retrospective of Edmund Alleyn as a flagship summer show is a bold move on the part of the Musée d’art contemporain…
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The Renewed Focus and Acrid Targeting of Rachel Harrison at MoMA and Greene Naftali
Rachel Harrison’s acidic colors, faux-finish surfaces, and otherwise unseemly media screech like saboteurs of good taste. Unlike a certain nascent presidential candidate, however, they…
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Manifesta 11: What Artists and Curators Do for Money
It is a very small, and no doubt unintentional victory for the curatorial concept of Manifesta 11: What People Do for Money-Some Joint Ventures…
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Wresting the Work of Straub and Huillet from the Annals of Academia and Art History
How much homework should we expect to slog through, en route to art? One could surmise “A lot,” according to Jean Marie Straub and…
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“If You Are Black, You Really Are Coming from Behind”: Orders of Visibility in Kerry James Marshall’s “Mastry”
In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. described the collective imagination of black people in America in terms of freedom dreams, and these dreams…
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From a Safe Distance: Guy Maddin Stills His Lens with Collage
Guy Maddin’s latest exhibition finds the artist in a splendid mood, if preoccupied by the subtle, inescapable persistence of his loneliness. Maddin and his…
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Battle Hymn of the Republic: The Measure of Kehinde Wiley in the American South
Though history is said to have been written by the victors, one might be forgiven for casting doubt on this particular adage in Richmond,…
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“Out There in the Many Miles of Bad Lands”: Georgia O’Keeffe in Her Own Words
“It takes a kind of nerve … and a lot of hard, hard work.” So said Georgia O’Keeffe at the age of 90 when…
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