In the late ‘70s, I would carry the Sony Portapak for my artist stepmother, Rabyn Blake, across muddy fields in Southern France as she filmed a shepherdess whose name sounded like “leg of lamb” in French, or shot shimmering vistas of Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire. (She had maneuvered my father into taking his sabbatical in Aix-en-Provence, I now believe, so that she could bathe in that light...
Anwar Congo is a stone-cold killer.He is also a petty gangster, a wealthy if somewhat eccentric paterfamilias, something of a dandy (never wear white to an interrogation or a political execution), a local celebrity with connections to an abysmally corrupt government, and an aspiring star in his own fantastic, even operatic film. For him, that imagined role of a lifetime is itself embedded in...
Laurie Anderson fairly disappeared in the gaping vastness of the darkened Park Avenue Armory. Standing, violin in hand, next to a Lincoln Memorial–sized plaster sculpture of an armchair, she told the story of Mohammed el Gharani.El Gharani—or rather his shimmering likeness, beamed live from West Africa for seven hours on each of three consecutive days in October—gazed over the thousand or so...
Editor's note:This piece about the current crop of art shows in Paris was submitted to us days before the latest round of carnage in the City of Light. The recent attacks certainly overshadow the offerings at any of these exhibitions, but as you'll see below, some of the materials on display directly address the social and political questions highlighted by the conflict with global terror. Our...
Perhaps the best example of the depth and breadth of Sandow Birk’s artistic oeuvre, along with its powerful social/political implications, is his recently completed “American Qur’an,” nine years in the making. Birk conceived of this series during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, when he was devouring the news each day, often hearing demeaning stories about Islam from politicians and...
Long-fascinated formally by shape, chromatic modulation, and their definition of a place and its contours, Mary Weatherford’s work has evolved into an abstract geography of incident—a geography that continues to become more expansive in every sense. The title of her...
When one enters the massive gallery at California African American Museum occupied by “Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch,” it’s easy to be seduced by the cacophony of bold color, textures and geometric patterns. Power symbols appear and disappear like a nickelodeon on...
In his new collection of powerful figurative images and mysterious abstract photographs, Brendan Lott proves he is both “Looking In and Looking Out.” The exhibition is curated across two rooms at Walter Maciel, allowing viewers to move between intriguing and intimate...
It has been a while since David Rubin ended his long and distinguished career as an institutional curator, but he continues to write and curate—and continues to produce art as well. Rubin had put aside his youthful artmaking once his curatorial direction took over,...
Curated by former MOCA LA Chief Curator Helen Molesworth, “Ruth Asawa: All is Possible” at David Zwirner, New York expands our understanding of this remarkable artist by presenting a selection of lesser-known pieces together with her iconic sculptures. Asawa’s...