Artblog | Andrea Kirsh

March 6, 2017 by Andrea Kirsh

Yayoi Kusama’s mind-bending mirrors at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

The Hirshhorn exhibition, curated by Mika Yoshitake, is serious and respectful of the artist, even if it overemphasizes the more spectacular work, and it accommodates an intimidating number of visitors with well thought-out and executed logistics. It offers those unfamiliar with Kusama an introduction to her world, and will undoubtedly leave everyone wanting more.

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 13, 2016 by Andrea Kirsh

Holiday books 2016 – part two

This publication is the result of one of those relatively rare but exciting discoveries in the depths of a large museum’s store rooms–an album of drawings by one of the great illustrators and print designers, Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). Moreover, it likely corresponds to the original drawings for one of his announced, but never-printed, best-selling books of illustrations. It was billed as Master Iitsu’s Chicken-Rib Picture Book; Iitsu was one of Hokusai’s more than thirty aliases, and the term “chicken-rib” refers to a Chinese literary term for something trivial but worthwhile–like the bits of chicken left on the rib bones.

December 4, 2016 by Andrea Kirsh

Holiday Books 2016 – Part One

This stunning, indeed mind-boggling, monograph is the ultimate resource on the art of Paul Laffoley, whose works function as charts and diagrams of the Boston artist’s highly individual understanding of the physical, psychic, and spiritual world. They could be illustrations to a cosmology textbook written by a multi-authored committee which included Plato, Dante Alighieri, Giordano Bruno, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, P.D. Ouspensky, H.P. Lovecraft, and the physicist who named “black holes,” John Wheeler.

October 13, 2016 by Andrea Kirsh

Chicago Shine – The Freedom Principle at the ICA

Over the past couple of decades, almost all American art museums have claimed a mission to reach out to “underserved communities,” yet none of them have acknowledged that these communities have their own well-developed aesthetics of art and material culture. They differ from the mainstream, and the institutions have not been willing to embrace aesthetic values beyond their own. The first part of “The Freedom Principle” is remarkable for doing just that: exhibiting art–and music–that was selected by a group of artists largely excluded from the mainstream of their period, who developed a different set of aesthetic aspirations and standards.

October 1, 2016 by Andrea Kirsh

A Woman’s Work is Never Done – “Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art” at the Queens Museum

Mierle Laderman Ukeles is a visionary whose work over the past 45 years has enlarged both the form and content of the art of our time. While revered among artists interested in feminism, performance art, social practice, and institutional critique, and a significant influence on two younger generations of artists, many of whom may not recognize her name, her work has not achieved the broad renown it deserves until now.

September 24, 2016 by Andrea Kirsh

Between Text and Textile – Ann Hamilton’s “habitus”

Hamilton always invokes more than one sense with her work; here it is the sight of the swirling fabric, the oddly musical sound of the pulley mechanisms, and the touch of the pulleys–which visitors are encouraged to operate–as well as the physical sense of wind on the body from both the swirling fabric and the river breezes.

August 7, 2016 by Andrea Kirsh

Contrarian, Utopian, Polymath – László Moholy-Nagy at the Guggenheim