Just last summer and fall, Firelei Báez brought a touch of joy to Harlem, along with a sense of her past. Even with five paintings, at the Schomburg Center of the New York Public Library, one might not have seen them as an immersive installation rather than a fiery...
A single black scrawl—Young—hovers over painting after painting. It may cover the side of a building or a truck—and indeed the artist hung his work on the outside of abandoned buildings, as an uneasy compromise between an exhibition and graffiti. It may float just out...
Greg Lindquist takes his brush to the largest coal electric plants in the United States with his “Ashes to Ashes” series of paintings. They are not, it appears, generating much in the way of energy. The structures look toxic and empty, their surroundings overrun by...
Who knew that Nude Descending a Staircase landed flat on her back? Who knew, too, that an artist who did so much to bring Cubism to America ended up a purveyor of something between porn and schlock? At least it felt that way at his death in 1968, when others...
Even in December, the trees on Delancey Street have a coppery glow. It is not the glow of fall foliage, not on a Lower East Side thoroughfare better known for traffic than for signs of life. At least one gallery has bricked up its glass façade to keep out the sights...
Could that structure perched uneasily on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art be from the set of a horror movie, or is it a metaphor for the psychodrama of American art? The horror! The horror!If it looks familiar, that’s because its outlines entered the popular...
Janet Biggs will go a long way to find herself. Her four-channel video unfolds only a continent away, but do not be fooled: with Can’t Find My Way Home (all works 2015), the real journey has still to begin.Her principal actor, dressed in a bright orange hazards suit,...
For more than 10 years, starting in 1998, Zoe Leonard photographed the ravages of urban life. From New York to Eastern Europe, Africa, Cuba and Mexico, she found shuttered storefronts and fallen marquees, makeshift signs and dated logos, obsolete computers and manual...
Kianja Strobert makes abstract painting the old-fashioned way, with surfaces to die for. Her powdery blacks recall the days when artists ground their own colors—and her gold when nothing else would do. Pigment presses to the edge and then some, as an extension of her...
Jeff Koons consumes five floors for the Whitney’s last show on Madison Avenue, and no wonder. Surely the artist who installed a giant floral poodle twice in Rockefeller Center can fill every nook and cranny. No one else takes such pains to rub in the obvious, to...
With her “Untitled Film Stills,” Cindy Sherman played with the idea of the Hollywood sex symbol; she disappeared into one role after another, showing how art and film noir convention could collude to create sex appeal from the trappings of innocence and repression—and...
Someone keeps making an appearance in Eugene J. Martin’s work, and I have no idea who, but I still recognize an old friend. He might be just passing through, with not much in the way of legs on those big orange feet supporting a boxy red body. He might be the...
“Abstraction talks her head off. She has a lot to say.” You might not hear her right away, but Jennifer Wynne Reeves does. “I tune out or listen,” she adds, in the penciled text within a painting, “rattled by her noisy silence.” She is also silently talking back. She...
In the city of the dubious “angel” we all embrace our icons, whether dead or alive, real or imagined. And if not all the time, then certainly when they deliver to us a newly birthed, risky body of work. Ed Moses has done just that with “New Works: The Crackle...
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