Invasion from Mars: On the Charged Personae of Shelly Mars
Shelly Mars has always been interested in what we should not talk about, and as a result, she has for the past forty years…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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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