Articles
Book Review: Heartfelt Moments Portrait of an Artist by Hugo Huerta Marin
Portrait of an Artist By Hugo Huerta Marin 424 pages Prestel What exactly is a portrait? In art, “portrait” is generally understood to mean a visual likeness or representation. One could argue that a photographic portrait captures this visual likeness more closely...
Book Review: Criminal Culture Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li
Portrait of a Thief By Grace D. Li 369 pages Tiny Reparations Books The thorny issues of restitution and museums’ complicity in retaining looted artwork do not tend to make for light summer reading. But a breezy new novel turns these issues into the basis of a...
Book Review: Burden of Dreams Poetic Practical: The Unrealized Work of Chris Burden
Poetic Practical: The Unrealized Work of Chris Burden Contributors: Donatien Grau, Yayoi Shionoiri, Sydney Stutterheim, Andie Trainer 284 pages Gagosian It’s impossible to think of the Los Angeles art scene without considering Chris Burden, an incisive social...
Book Review: Ballerina Looks Back in Style Serenade: A Balanchine Story by Toni Bentley
Serenade: A Balanchine Story By Toni Bentley 320 Pages Pantheon As a thin, athletic girl with a springy jump and “not-so-great feet,” Toni Bentley was 11 when she entered the School of American Ballet; she was invited into the New York City Ballet company by George...
POEMS "shift work" by Evan Evans; "Enduring Romance" by John Tottenham
shift work twin heads pillow moments away only seats left in the front the forgiving distortion the forgetting of plot so grateful that the light should bow to take the shape of your mouth a movie where she’s so tired from watching him sleep all day —Evan Evans...
COMICS William Blake
FORT WORTH, TEXAS: Hector A. Ramirez SENSE AND NONSENSE
I was thoroughly bewildered when I first saw Hector A. Ramirez’ work as a member of his MFA committee at Texas Christian University in 2017. He handed me Carpet Shoes, a worn pair of men’s brown leather shoes with rectangles of yellowish carpet glued to their soles...
CHICAGO: Paola Cabal THE WORK OF ATTENTION
It is 3:02 p.m. on February 26, and we are looking intently at the north wall of Paola Cabal’s studio while the Midwestern afternoon light streams in through her unobstructed west windows. Cabal is rapidly leafing through a Benjamin Moore paint-chip book, holding the...
KANSAS CITY, MO: Linda Lighton PSYCHO CERAMICS
With their blend of surreal retro glamor, sociopolitical and personal commentary, Linda Lighton’s ceramic sculptures command a double take. This veteran artist can make clay do just about anything, and her art has unabashed palpable appeal. But Lighton is also...
RICHMOND, VA: Diego Sanchez VISUAL INFORMATION
“One of the things I teach my kids is to be playful in their approach,” says painter and teacher Diego Sanchez. This freedom to experiment takes the pressure off and opens up the work in unexpected directions. It’s an attitude that has served Sanchez well in his own...
LINCOLN, NE: Santiago Cal POLITICS ON PAPER
Santiago Cal is a humble man with a demeanor that challenges traditional Western conceptions of artistic genius. His subtlety and humility are visible in his works, which are usually small or medium-sized carvings of fragile children. His visual narratives don’t hit...
Poems "Silicon Valley" by Rhiannon McGavin; "Vanity in Vain" by John Tottenham
Silicon Valley A cloud is the earth displaced for tracks of cable underground, underwater A stream is the friction between content and a beckoning hand To kindle is to adjust the climate dial in a server farm An antenna is the arc of pesticide as it is sprayed...
COMICS Where the Wild Beasts Are
From Mortar To Metaverse CONTEMPORARY COMMERCE
Eth, bit, sol, meta, block chain, bored apes, crypto punks, kitty litter squad, non-fungible, minting, mining, tokenizing, gas fee, hot wallet, cold wallet, generative NFT, destructive NFT, candy machines, early adopters—yes this is English—just not the English of our...
Pioneering Petra Cortright NFTs Are a No-Brainer
Petra Cortright’s URL, www.petracortright.com, could be considered a work of net art. Practitioners of net art (beginning in the mid-1990s) often used the internet as their medium, sometimes populating their pages with images and data from other websites. Cortright’s...
Nancy Baker Cahill Challenges the Limits of Perception Seeing the World Anew
In 2017, my friend—artist/curator Nancy Baker Cahill—invited me to see the art she was creating using virtual reality technology. Until that point, I knew Nancy to make ambitious drawings and otherworldly videos depicting abject, flesh-like topologies; works...
A Conversation with Casey Kauffmann Hot Girl Sh*t
Casey Kauffmann is a hoarder of cyber content. Her image archive is a black hole of digital debris, infinitely consuming, tearing apart, and spitting out images—a spaghettification of visual culture. Kauffmann is known for her digital collages that populate her...
Tabita Rezaire and the Materiality of The Digital COMPLEX INTERACTION
The digital is an arbitrary category. In everyday speech, it is sometimes used as an opposition to the material: a digital copy, artwork or exhibition versus a material one. The digital is presented as something existing outside of the material realm and the history...
It’s All About Meme
A meme is unit of cultural information, such as an idea or belief, transmitted from one person to another. The word is an alteration of the Greek mimeme, meaning something that is imitated, not duplicated. The difference is important, as each iteration of a meme...
Poems "Kiefer Lights a Big Cigar" by Klipschutz; "The Poet’s Garden" by John Tottenham
Kiefer Lights a Big Cigar & waves the heavy machinery into place He rearranges the rubble speaking whichever language suits the occasion He & Tony saunter through a tunnel in the South of France “It’s my gesture” is what he says about his art His use of...