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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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REDCAT’s Rediscovery of the Iconic Feminist Art Program
The Feminist Art Program (1970–1975): Cycles of Collectivity, which recently closed at REDCAT (an art center run by CalArts), could easily have been called Cycles…
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A Feeling Between the Lines: The Anxious Influence of Agnes Martin’s “Writings”
The painter Agnes Martin contemplated language with a great deal of skepticism. Though she produced an impressive body of written work, mostly compiled and…
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