Before I interview Mr. Chow, he sets my copy of his book on fire. After smashing large Sharpies onto a blank page of the book in a riot of color (“green always goes well with red”), he pours flammable paint thinner on the page and calls for his “darlings” to bring him...
David Hammons, an infamously reclusive yet pervasive figure, is undoubtedly a pioneer and solidified staple of the art world. His thought-provoking work permeates the visual language of contemporary art making. From his Duchampian repurposing of found objects, to his...
America Martin, the young Colombian-American artist known for her bold use of color and line in primitive, abstracted images of humans, is gaining recognition with growing momentum. With commanding forms that call to mind Picasso’s portraits and Basquiat’s energetic...
Lorenzo Marini’s engagement with the letters of the modern Latin alphabet hovers between that of a graphic designer, that of a painter, that of a linguist, and that of a poet. In each of his paintings and sculptures Marini rhapsodizes on the visual, verbal, and (to a...
The Seattle-born painter, sculptor and graphic designer Cleon Peterson has created a true battlefield experience with his new exhibit “Blood & Soil,” satirically making use of the 19th-century German slogan that expressed an idealization of racial identity and...
What are the contours of gender? Is there a range of conditions that determine gender along a curve or spectrum we can visualize or somehow represent, measure or analyze? Is there a focal point we can identify that will turn it in one direction or another? Most of us...
There’s a picture that photographer Virginia Liberatore took of painter Jean-Michel Basquiat and Madonna in 1983. The two stars, who were dating at the time, had arrived at a party in full regalia—fedoras, big watches, leather jackets. In the image, Madonna resembles...
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 Untitled painting of a skull looks like a prison that can barely contain all the rage, anger and fierce memories that drive a person. Painted in graffiti style, it is young and barely controlled. You wonder how it is ever going to get...
The relevancy of “Complejo de Cristo y Vampiros,” Carlos Ramirez’s first solo show at New Image Art, couldn’t be timelier given our new president’s executive orders on immigration. The American-born, Chicano artist and member of the artistic duo, The Date Farmers,...
Native New Yorker Beth Rudin DeWoody may be one of the most energetic collectors in the world, with a collection that includes about 10,000 works, mostly of 20th and 21st century art. Collecting since the 1970s, Rudin DeWoody consistently makes ARTNews’ Top 200...
After a week that seemed to confirm everyone’s worst expectations for the planet, our dubious species, and its cratering political structures (to say nothing of crumbling infrastructure), it seemed almost miraculous to close on a note that, if it didn’t exactly...
Not all films about artists and the art world are silly, but most of them are. To paraphrase a Mark Twain quote, “There are lies, damned lies, and films about artists and the art world.” (Twain linked “statistics” with lies and damned lies.) From such films as the...
Last year I was invited to view a controversial painting that the owner claimed to be a genuine Rothko he bought at a small LA auction many years ago. The painting was not officially included in the Rothko catalogue raisonné despite the fact that the owner discovered...
The Broad Is Here Inaugural Show is a Highlights Survey Here comes The Broad! The striking white cube with diagonal perforations holding the contemporary art collection of Eli and Edythe Broad finally opened to the public on Sept. 20—after a delay of nearly a year due...
There was astonishing buzz around Philippe Quesne’s La Mélancolie des Dragons at REDCAT last Wednesday night; and as a sucker for avant-garde theatre, I simply had to be there, heat or no heat. I felt cooler just looking at the stage set, which resembled a forest...
There are many versions of “space” in the art world, from the high gloss of a pristine museum exhibition to the cozy confines of a pop-up gallery hosted in a rented living room. Somewhere in between, catering to the general public but sustained by the upper echelon of...
The auction market, and in particular the salerooms of the two major auction houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, have long been a proving ground for the marketplace maturity of every kind of specialty commodity, including fine art. Auction houses have aggressively...
Offering a more complete picture of the artist than the one beloved in popular imagination, “Keith Haring: The Political Line,” at the de Young in San Francisco illuminates a more radical and shamanistic side that seems to be fuel and lifeblood for the playful and...
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