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
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 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
Reading Let us Now Praise Famous Men together, again
“If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement…. A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point.” Keep Reading
Luanne Martineau’s The Knitter Woman
Luanne Martineau created The Knitter Woman in the winter of 2019 in response to an invitation by the Art Gallery of Alberta (AGA). With a curatorial premise that asked artists to “envision and create a ‘nest’ to cope with the end of the world, however it may come about,” the group exhibition was conceived in “response to our current tumultuous and polarized world where we see the rise of Nationalism, the clashing of belief systems, environmental destruction and the fight to mitigate climate change.” Keep Reading
Four Exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art
It’s true there are no visitors, but the art is still there, and I wonder if the unobserved world of the museum is changed by the absence of its requisite viewers. Keep Reading
The Drawings of Irma Blank
Irma Blank, in her ninth decade of life, what she calls her “second life,” achieves a suspension by means of her drawing that may be “writing.” She says on this point that what she is doing is writing, not words that make writing what it essentially is but the gesture. Keep Reading
Stephanie Comilang’s Honing Device
It is possible to imagine a time, maybe not so long ago, when the year 2020 sounded futuristic. There’s something about the repetition of digits that really stakes a claim in the temporal registry. Keep Reading
Art in a Time of Climate Crisis
Nothing makes an artist feel as ineffectual as the looming climate catastrophe. Its existential pragmatism makes short shrift of poetics to focus on questions like: Who is financing the art and where does their money come from? How much waste is produced from the invitations, posters and flyers? What is the environmental impact of the all show accoutrement—the temporary walls, the climate-controlled rooms—of which the artwork itself is just the tiniest element? Keep Reading
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