Frank Stella
DUELLING REVIEWS: MARY CORSE
THE DIGITAL Frank Stella: A Story of Reinvention
Have you ever started a journey, traveling a great distance through countless notable destinations, only to decide one day to completely reverse course? This column started out as many do, a haphazard scroll through Instagram looking at art, upcoming exhibitions,...
Dyani White Hawk Various Small Fires
A celebrated episode of the groundbreaking Native television series Reservation Dogs takes a harrowing look at life inside an Indian boarding school, where strict Catholic nuns do their best to indoctrinate Native children into Western culture by punishing them...
Remarks on Color: Weird-Ass White October's Hue
Weird-Ass White has a secret death wish, a deep and unwavering desire to fall headlong into the arms of night with its ever-widening black mouth swallowing her alive, but being the good girl that she is, she never lets on. Instead, the world at large swallows her...
Soft Machinery and Melting Monuments: Getting A Handle on Claes Oldenburg
My early impressions of Claes Oldenburg and his work were shaped largely by mass media. I tended to think of his work in association with Pop artists like Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Rosenquist—though also artists like Allan Kaprow and to a lesser extent, George...
Edwin Vasquez at MOAH
The sky is the source of light in Nature and it governs everything. —John Constable In the sky we had rediscovered the moving principle of any work of art: the light, and the motion of color. —Sonia Delaunay Edwin Vasquez captures the colors of light in the night sky....
Leigh Salgado’s Thrills & Frills
A pair of pastel-hued bikini underpants are draped across the wall. Riddled with tiny holes, the thong-thin back resembles the mesh of fishnet hose. A large lavender moth orchid hovers over the genital area, recalling the poetic similarities between labia and the...
Ralph Allen Massey
Greyhounds sprint in front of Frank Stella paintings; songbirds perch before Rothkos; a metallurgist pours glowing popcorn from a giant crucible: These are just a few goings-on in "All of the Above," Ralph Allen Massey's entertaining painting show at bG Gallery....
Duke Gallery at Azusa Pacific University: : Dion Johnson
Dion Johnson's abstract paintings inhabit hairline margins between technologic and handmade. The ten examples in "Feel the Sky," Johnson's decadal retrospective at Azusa Pacific University, chart his pictorial evolution while affirming his enduring interests. From...
Women of Abstract Expressionism
Abstract Expressionist painting remains one of the most pivotal and enigmatic art movements of the 20th century. Its continued influence on current abstract painting can be seen in the work of the best practitioners such as Albert Oehlen, Yayoi Kusama and Frank...
Othello/Kleberg
“Knock-Kneed and Bow-Legged,” on view at Oakland’s Johansson Projects, stakes out territory in a harsh but brilliant realm where contradiction is the order of the day, and logical assumptions must be checked at the door. The works of painter Matt Kleberg imply a...
Stella Still Intriguing
Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture. —Donald Judd, Specific Objects 1965 When Donald Judd spoke of work that is a hybrid of painting and sculpture, one of the artists he was undoubtedly referring to was Frank...
PRIVATE EYE
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...
The Transcendental Minimalist: Agnes Martin
So I’m at brunch at Figaro (on Vermont) with two of my best (and one of my oldest) friends from out-of-town; and we’re actually sitting outside on the hottest day of the year (I’m imagining the wait-staff making bets on my imminent demise). There’s a very...
The Thing
The “death of painting” is frequently traced to the work and writing of Donald Judd. In 1965's “Specific Objects,” the same essay in which Judd outlined painting’s limitations—above all, its inherent illusionism—he even more forcefully predicted the death of...
Frank Stella: A Retrospective @Whitney Museum of American Art/New York City
To find a curatorial through-line for the wildly varied career of Frank Stella must be an enormous challenge. Hanging opposite the elevators on the new Whitney’s fifth floor, as a kind of preamble to “Frank Stella: A Retrospective,” are Pratfall (1974), a precise...
Cornelia Schulz
Last fall Patricia Sweetow relocated to Oakland’s vibrant Uptown district, where Spun Smoke, her new venue, combines fine art with high-end, high-fire ceramics and a few skeins of her very own hand-spun, hand-dyed wool. Spun Smoke recently presented work by...
Editor’s Letter
Dear Readers Our paint-themed issue just makes me want to paint. I figure that’s a good thing. As a former serious painter, I get wistful for the days when I was alone in the studio for hours with pigment, medium and turpentine—especially when I see a good painting...
