January 12, 2017 by Donald Hunt

Funk music has been identified as being a particular expression of music that allows the artist to confront daily events which may have been grueling or challenging. With 2016 hopefully a distant memory to the audience, Lettuce “put the stank on” the TLA crowd–transporting them to an alternative universe where the music is groovy and fear is non-existent.

January 11, 2017 by Matthew Rose

Danielle Voirin’s hair cut

Voirin, who has long photographed herself and her body, presents herself in a quiet fit of honesty. She is any woman becoming something else, someone else. It is hard not to study the process and invade her privacy. It is an intimate and public act, but a gratuitous one. It is however, an available, accessible one.

January 8, 2017 by Justin O. Walker

The master’s tools – Kerry James Marshall at the Met Breuer

From the walls of color in his series that continue throughout the Breuer, to his earlier work, the oversized snapshots, the smaller pieces that take on death, black identity in America, and his deep, painfully humorous comics, Marshall is an artist who has worked and played his way into the all-important arts conversation.

January 7, 2017 by Roberta

Elizabeth Murray and Carmen Herrera films at NY Film Forum

The double bill at the Film Forum will take you 90 minutes. It’s a must-see 90-minutes. The documentaries on Elizabeth Murray, (“Everybody Knows…Elizabeth Murray” by Kristi Zea) and Carmen Herrera (“The 100 Year Show” by Alison Klayman) immerse you in the biographies and studio practices of two great artists who had spark and ideas, worked hard, never gave up, and are examples to us all.

December 31, 2016 by Andrea Kirsh

Forging Mexican Modernism – Paint the Revolution at the PMA

The exhibition clearly demonstrates that the widely-known work of Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros, Tamayo, and, in recent decades, Frida Kahlo, is but a small spectrum of a much broader artistic scene. It brings up topics such as the tension between work intended for private viewing versus the obviously propagandistic intent of work meant to be seen in public–both murals and inexpensive prints; the Mexican response to European modernism; European, Soviet, and U.S. responses to Mexican art; the tension between a cosmopolitan artistic language which reflects international ideas about modernity versus a local style that draws upon indigenous art, and with that, the ongoing attention in Mexican art to the spectrum of racial difference.

December 30, 2016 by Matthew Rose

A year in the country – Jamie Newton’s natural constructions

This past year, Jamie Newton has been making ephemeral sculptures, captured solely in photographs which are then uploaded to his Instagram account, concretewheels. His project is a year-long visual poetic diary of constructions created from nature’s golden crumbs.

December 27, 2016 by Neil Marcello

Monumental abstraction – Paul Fabozzi at Seraphin Gallery

Fabozzi’s paintings pulsate with visual energy. He has selected a series of monuments, seeking to connect the viewer to the role and function of each one. From the British Museum in London, to the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, each edifice’s original three dimensional representation seems to have dissolved into a complex pattern and two dimensional spatial play of geometric shapes, hard-edged lines, and layers of color on the canvas.

December 19, 2016 by Martha Kearns

First of her genre – Paula Modersohn-Becker

Why don’t we know about Paula Modersohn-Becker? The book reveals she showed her work but a few times while she was alive, she died young at age 31, and the modernist style and nudes, made in the last year of her life, 1906, were a shock when discovered. No one quite knew what to make of her work. “Greatness” an early critic said; in the same decade of 1910s another said “odd.” This book is the first in English to give a definitive account of her life, exhibition and critical history, and art historical assessment.