On the June weekend that “Philip Guston Now” was scheduled to open at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, thousands of people were in the streets protesting the killing of George Floyd. The words BLACK LIVES MATTER had been boldly painted onto 16th Street, one block from the White House where a nasty, racist president sat fuming. Keep Reading
Game Changer
For Esmaa Mohamoud, growing up as the only girl between two older brothers and two younger ones, an engagement with sports was inevitable. A self-described tomboy, she played sports like a boy, wore a jersey, was a Raptors fan who admired Vince Carter and wanted some of his magic for her own. Keep Reading
Rosie Lee Tompkins and the Ordinary Sublime
It’s difficult now to fully imagine what it was like to see Rosie Lee Tompkins’s quilts for the first time—not on a museum’s clean white walls but draped over a card table in a flea market or spread out on a couch in a living room. Though far less exotic, I imagine it must have been a little like hearing Robert Johnson on a Mississippi street corner or in a juke joint in the 1930s: you would be startled, and even baffled, by the sudden and unexpected presence of something profound. Keep Reading
The Irrepressible Art of Tschabalala Self
Tschabalala Self is very clear, very focused, very persistent. She says, when queried in the interview that follows, “My work is all about figuration. It’s all about people, lives, lived experiences.” She says, “The main subject of my work is the Black woman, and I care for Black women and I also care about the reputations of Black women as they exist in the real world and also in the collective imagination.” Keep Reading
The significant retrospective of the work of Donald Judd at the MoMA comes at a tragic and dire time. This was our first museum experience where we were aware of COVID and our last museum visit because of COVID. In the moment we found the extreme absence of excess in Judd’s work oddly soothing. Keep Reading
Kim Ondaatje and the House on Piccadilly Street
Inspired by her rambling Victorian home in London, Ontario, Kim Ondaatje’s serigraph series “The House on Piccadilly Street” embodies both the serenity and the malaise of being homebound. Keep Reading
by Chimwemwe Undi
I am new to all this taking— A novice haver, a modern girl, new to hunger’s tacky finger None of this I even want, Keep Reading
“Àbadakone / Continuous Fire” is a follow-up to the National Gallery’s 2013 global Indigenous art exhibition “Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art” (“lighting a fire”). Keep Reading
The artist Samuel Fosso’s book of photographs, SIXSIXSIX, is physically dense. That is the first apparent thing before you pick it up and flip through. In fact, its very physicality might deter you from lifting it to parse through like any average photo book. Keep Reading
“What Makes Life Worth Living”
The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda extolled the beauty and necessity of lemons in “Ode to a Lemon,” one of his most beautiful poems. He palpates the lemon in ways similar to what Joani Tremblay attempts in her recent work.Her paintings, brimming over with dollops of pure colour, are bewitching cornucopias of real and imagined places. Keep Reading
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