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…
Read MoreMomus
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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,…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More