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An Atmospheric River of Wonder in Laurie Anderson’s The Weather

December 16, 2021 By Nancy Kay Turner 2 Comments

at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (through 31 July 2022) 
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

            “What are the days for? To put between the endless nights. What are the nights for? To slip through time into another world.”  –Laurie Anderson

            “Stories are our weather”  –Laurie Anderson

Laurie Anderson is a Renaissance polymath whose staggering breadth of knowledge, insatiable curiosity, technical virtuosity and conceptual rigor form the basis for her superb exhibit at The Hirshhorn. Simply titled (though not so simple) The Weather, it is billed as an immersive multimedia experimental exhibit, but really it is an otherworldly investigation into what it means to be a human in this twenty-first century. Intensely personal as well as political, it is a revelation, encompassing eerie video projections, kinetic talking sculpture, operatic oil paintings, invented conceptual violins, complex installations, multiple soundscapes, and everywhere words static and moving painted on floors and walls surrounding the viewer. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Simphiwe Ndzube’s Like the Snake that Fed the Chameleon

March 9, 2021 By Nancy Kay Turner Leave a Comment

at Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles (through 20 March 2021)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a Cheshire cat.
–Julian Huxley

I will eat the last signs of my weakness
Remove the scars of old childhood wars
and dare to enter the forest whistling
like a snake that had fed the chameleon
–“Solstice,” Audre Lorde

Simphiwe Ndzube’s engaging exhibit, entitled Like the Snake that Fed the Chameleon at Nicodim Gallery, is a visual and aural treat composed of paintings, sculptures and two installations, all bathed in a soundscape created by the artist in collaboration with Thabo K. Makgolo and Zambini Makwetha. A master storyteller, Nzdube creates an existential, otherworldly space where the ordinary becomes extraordinary. The work defies easy explanations, as mystery is piled on top of enigma. Each painting or sculpture shares a homemade, do-it-yourself aesthetic, with all seams made visible, as though haphazardly sewn, stitched, stapled, glued and pinned together in a hurry. All collaged elements are intentionally separate and noticeable, like a homey piecework crazy quilt. Ndzube juggles fact and fiction, the real and the imagined, with a skill and dexterity of a trained magician while employing inventive improvisation like a superb jazz musician. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

The Shaman’s Bride Lifts Her Veil In Lezley Saar’s A Conjuring of Conjurors

February 12, 2020 By Nancy Kay Turner Leave a Comment

at Walter Maciel Gallery, Los Angeles (through 22 February)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

 

Born under a bad sign

Been down since I began to crawl

If it wasn’t for bad luck

You know, I wouldn’t have no luck at all


In the magical exhibition, A Conjuring of Conjurors, artist Lezley Saar herself becomes the master shaman as she explores the role of mysticism, spiritualism and religious rituals in the human quest for safety, survival and certainty. Known for her earlier works that examine those who dwell in the interstices of identity, Saar here creates fantastically invented narratives of soothsayers and seers who use amulets, bones and tinctures to fix what is broken, find what is lost, or cure all manner of maladies.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet The Sun Again

December 2, 2019 By Nancy Kay Turner 1 Comment

at The Broad, Los Angeles (through February 16)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

“Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.” —Edward Said

“To stay alive you must slay silence” –Simin Behbahani

Shirin Neshat’s dense and nearly overwhelming exhibition I Will Greet The Sun Again interrogates the very nature of reality, myth, perception and memory with her piercing portraits of women whose face, hands and feet are covered with intricate, decorative Farsi text; her haunting videos reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s mysterious starkness, and her later portraits, which compile faces of the exiled.  Neshat’s compelling photographs (black and white) and mystical films (black and white as well as color) examine cultural norms surrounding the wearing of the veil, as seen through both the Western and Islamic gaze along with the cultural dislocation suffered by individuals in diaspora. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Resilience: Philip Guston In 1971

October 9, 2019 By Nancy Kay Turner Leave a Comment

at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles (through January 5, 2020)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

…there’s no success like failure and failure’s no success at all
Bob Dylan
The painter’s first duty is to be free
Philip Guston

In 1970, New York City was the undisputed center of the art world and 57th street in midtown Manhattan was the epicenter of New York’s art world with its plethora of blue chip galleries. Art and theater critics reigned supreme – they could and would ruin careers with a gleeful flourish of their poison pens. When Philip Guston, acclaimed Abstract-Expressionist, showed his new large-scale paintings at Marlborough in October, 1970, he was roundly excoriated for his switch from abstract art to figuration. Not only was the work (horrors!) figurative, it was rudely cartoonish and crudely drawn. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Narrative Painting In Los Angeles

August 6, 2019 By Nancy Kay Turner Leave a Comment

at Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica (through August 31)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

The streets were dark with something more than night.
–Raymond Chandler

We tell stories in order to live.
–Joan Didion

The City of Stars, sometimes known as “LaLaLand” — our often misunderstood Los Angeles — has always had a dark side. Too often it’s a place where dreams come to die. On the bright side, it is a place of endless sunlight and personal reinvention.  Here, reality and fiction, truth and lies intertwine as everyone waits for The Big One to rearrange the furniture. Home to the literary work of Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, and Nathaniel West, it is a tantalizing contradiction of place. Narrative Painting In Los Angeles brings together thirteen figurative painters who interrogate the history of art, the nature of identity, sexual politics and social justice through the lens of Southern California with enormous skill and elan. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, The Line

Squeak Carnwath: How the Mind Works

June 4, 2019 By Nancy Kay Turner 1 Comment

at Frederick R. Weisman Museum, Pepperdine University
Rewiewed by Nancy Kay Turner

The idiosyncratic, stream-of-consciousness, large-scale oil paintings by the Bay Area painter Squeak Carnwath are personal ruminations on everything from politics to urban anxieties and parental concerns (“PAReNTS BEWARE homework is BAD”) [sic], to name just a few of the issues that rise to the surface, unbidden like half heard conversations or bad dreams. Though the exhibition at The Frederick R. Weissman Museum on the splendid Pepperdine Campus is entitled How the Mind Works, it really could be called Notes To Self.  

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Braithwaite

April 19, 2019 By Nancy Kay Turner Leave a Comment

at the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles (through September 1)
Reviewed by Nancy K. Turner

If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can transform one million realities
–Maya Angelou

Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Braithwaite, is an intimate in scale, personal in scope, potent exhibit. It documents through photographs, ephemera, and fashion, Kwame Braithwaite, his wife Sikolo, his brother Elombe Brath and their circle of musician and artist friends as they built a movement based on the philosophy of cultural empowerment, dignity and affirmation originally espoused by Marcus Garvey. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Image, The Line

Annie Leibovitz, The Early Years: 1970-1983

March 15, 2019 By Nancy Kay Turner Leave a Comment

Archive Project No. 1
at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles (through April 14)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware
           –-Lyrics: Stephen Sills/Buffalo Springfield
              “For What It’s Worth”

Annie Leibovitz has combed through her enormous archive of negatives to personally curate and print these 4,000 (yes, that’s right) mostly black and white photographs for this poignant and profound exhibition at Hauser & Wirth. The exhibition chronicles the turbulent late sixties, the “me decade” of the seventies and the beginning of the prosperous early eighties. Printed in various sizes with some as small as 3”x5” straight from a contact sheet to later work that is printed much larger with an irregular black border (that echoed both Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon, two photographers that she admired), they are push pinned to a hemp wall in a precise grid in a sometimes curiously casual looking installation meant to evoke a kind of walk-in scrap book. These pictures are truly an amazing visual history of the way we were, while clearly indicating where we were headed. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Image, The Line

La Raza And The Onetime Voice Of Chicano Activism

February 7, 2019 By Nancy Kay Turner 1 Comment

at the Autry Museum, Los Angeles (through February 10)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

You know something is happening but you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?
–Bob Dylan, “Ballad Of A Thin Man”

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
–George Santayana

The sixties was a tumultuous decade, filled with assassinations, race, student and antiwar riots. This traumatic and dangerous time, when the social fabric was being torn apart, also gave birth to many civil rights movements for marginalized people such as women, gay/lesbian/transgender and people of color. This exhibition at The Autry Museum focuses on the Chicano movement specifically and on La Raza, a newspaper/zine that was crucial to exposing, through text and image, the Chicano movements struggle for social justice from 1967-77. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Image, The Line

Southern Discomfort: The Photographs of Sally Mann

December 21, 2018 By Nancy Kay Turner Leave a Comment

Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings
at Getty Center, Los Angeles (through February 10, 2019)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

Abide with me! Fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens: Lord, with me abide!  –Hymn

Sally Mann’s haunting black and white photographs are a hymn to the South she loves so ferociously, with all its troubled, tangled, twisted history filled with bitter defeats. The charismatic photographs of her children, of her own black nanny Virginia, who also cared for her children, and of the Civil War battlefields are poignant, bittersweet narratives examining the complexities of race, place, family and faded memory. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, Image, The Line

The Riveting Rauschenberg: The ¼ Mile

December 10, 2018 By Nancy Kay Turner Leave a Comment

at LACMA (through June 9, 2019)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner       

“Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction”
–Pablo Picasso

 “There is no reason not to consider the world as one gigantic painting”
–Robert Rauschenberg

Run, don’t walk to see the revelatory exhibition entitled Rauschenberg: The ¼ Mile, at LACMA. The large-scale, enormously ambitious work shown here (together for the first time) as one long piece was done over seventeen years and is a joyful trip through Rauschenberg’s absolutely pristine craftsmanship, complex imagery and his many cultural touchstones. These works were started in 1981 when there was a Rauschenberg retrospective in Europe and clearly the artist is ruminating on his previous bodies of work such as his iconoclastic “Combines” from the fifties and sixties and his “Spreads” series from 1975-83. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future

November 20, 2018 By Nancy Kay Turner 1 Comment

at The Guggenheim Museum, NYC (through April 23, 2019)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

The Hilma af Klint retrospective, currently at The Guggenheim Museum, is a game changer. This astonishing exhibition alters the way one must view the trajectory of abstract painting (almost always male dominated) in the early twentieth century. The mystery of how a classically trained female painter in Sweden at the turn of the century moved confidently away from realism to large-scale abstraction before any other painters did (and kept it secret) is a fascinating tale. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Willard Hill: Untitled Works From 2016-2018

October 11, 2018 By Nancy Kay Turner Leave a Comment

at The Good Luck Gallery, Los Angeles (through October 14)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

“Imagination is greater than knowledge.” –Albert Einstein
“Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.” –Frank Zappa

Willard Hill exhibits his exuberant mixed- media (mostly painted masking taped figures and animals) sculptures at The Good Luck Gallery. Hill was a sixty-two year old cook and avid fisherman who suddenly started making his objects as a way to rehabilitate himself after a hospital stay. He just grabbed whatever materials were around, such as masking tape, garbage bags and toothpicks. That was twenty years ago. Then two years ago, the 82 year-old Hill had his first solo art show at The Good Luck Gallery. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s The Chiefest Of Ten Thousand

October 10, 2018 By Nancy Kay Turner Leave a Comment

at the new Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles (through November 3)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner                                     

   My beloved is white and ruddy, the chiefest among ten thousand.
—King James James Bible

Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s exhibit, entitled The Chiefest of Ten Thousand, at the sparkling new Nino Mier Gallery is as complex and open to interpretation as the Bible passage that the title comes from. Dupuy-Spencer (who is half Jewish and half Catholic) explores the mysteriousness of religion, friendship, love and sex in her large-scale paintings. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Rick Bartow: Things You Know But Cannot Explain

August 10, 2018 By Nancy Kay Turner Leave a Comment

at The Autry Museum, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

“For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face…” — I Corinthians
“In today’s world, love, art and magic are greatly needed” — Fritz Scholder

Things You Know But Cannot Explain is the poetic title of the exquisite Rick Bartow retrospective at The Autry Museum. A heady brew of neo-expressionist drawing, painting and sculpture with lashings of Bacon, Basquiat, Kitaj, Scholder and even Nathan Olivera, this is a show not to be missed. Beautifully installed, with small videos strategically placed around with the artist candidly talking of his life in illuminating ways that enhance the viewer’s understanding of his work. No art jargon here. Just plainspoken words by the artist himself, who had struggled with alcoholism, PTSD and, towards the end of his life, two strokes (from which he would recover). It seems, upon further examination, that the title of the exhibit is more specific than poetic. After his strokes, Bartow knew “things” that he could not explain. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Iranian Art, Past and Present: In The Field Of Empty Days

June 6, 2018 By Nancy Kay Turner 1 Comment

at Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

“Lovers find secret places inside this violent world where they make transactions with beauty.”
–Rumi, 13thcentury Persian Poet

The poetically entitled In The Field of Empty Days: The Intersection of Past and Present in Iranian Art is a dense yet sprawling exhibit that features compelling images from artists whom we may not have seen before. A hallmark of these modern and contemporary Iranian artists is their ingenious blending of images related to myth, history, social disruption, political upheaval and religious restriction in their work. They, like so many contemporary artists, are mining the past for re-presentation in the present. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, The Line

The Triplets of Belleville Cine-Concert

May 1, 2018 By Nancy Kay Turner Leave a Comment

at The Barclay Theater, Irvine
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

The Triplets of Belleville (2003), a French-Canadian, wildly inventive and idiosyncratic animated film with no dialogue (just sound effects and simulated speech) has an exuberant original Oscar-winning soundtrack (more on that later). The plot is ostensibly about a boy, a dog, a grandmother and a bicycle, but it is really about the passing of time, aging, resilience and persistence. At the same time, it hints at a social critique of America while clearly a love letter to early Disney animation as well as a paean to those kitschy American gangster movies from the 1930’s. Add in a love affair with Hollywood’s movie musicals and you begin to sense the complexity here, as all this is served up with a dash of whimsy and with a deeply sardonic Gallic sense of humor. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

The Cross-Bordered DeLIMITations Bridges An Era’s Divide

March 25, 2018 By Nancy Kay Turner Leave a Comment

at Museo De La Artes, Guadalajara, Mexico
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

“Delimitation means the act or process of fixing limits or boundaries of territorial constituencies in a country or province having a legislative body”

A timely and compelling installation at Museo De La Artes, Guadalajara, Mexico, entitled DeLIMITations by Mexican artist Marcus Ramirez ERRE and American artist David Taylor, examines and documents through stills, a documentary film, large-scale graphics, a solid-steel obelisk and historical research presented as wall text, the original border between the United States and Mexico as determined by the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1821. Their historical, political and cultural piece sets about to establish a border that was never physically marked by placing 47 steel obelisks along the 2400 mile border that never was. The treaty was rescinded 27 years later, after the Mexican-American War of 1846-8, when Mexico ceded 55% of its land to the United States in a land grab disguised as a war. Ulysses S. Grant was then a young lieutenant who fought in the war, and later admitted (and is quoted here in the exhibition) “I do not think there was ever a more wicked war…I thought so at the time…only I had not the moral courage to resign.” [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, Artist, The Line

Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1975

November 1, 2017 By Nancy Kay Turner 1 Comment

at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

The body never lies
–Martha Graham
Art is a lie; it is an interpretation of reality…
–Veronica Vera
Your body is a battleground
–Barbara Kruger

Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1975, as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time at The Hammer, brings together artists (some known to us, some unknown) from fifteen countries, including the United States. Their work was experimental: much of it was photo-based documentation of public or private performances or actions/rituals that often feature the female body (frequently nude) and the face. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Art, The Line

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The Line

An interview with Alison Saar, at Riot Material magazine.

An Interview with Alison Saar

By Ricky Amadour As an indefatigable voice for women of color and the greater human spirit, Alison Saar recomposes fractured histories into multivalent sculptures. Saar curated SeenUNseen, a group exhibition at L.A. Louver Gallery, with a focus on spirit portraiture. Throughout human existence there has been a predilection to the allure of the unseen. Hidden […]

William S. Burroughs on a bed, smoking a cigarette.

“The Opposite of Literature:” Mary McCarthy’s Feb. ’63 Review of Naked Lunch

From the inaugural print edition of The New York Review of Books In remembrance of Jason Epstein, originator and co-founder of NYRB RIP 1928-2022 by Mary McCarthy Naked Lunch  by William S. Burroughs Grove Press, 304pp., $14.49 “You can cut into The Naked Lunch at any intersection point,” says Burroughs, suiting the action to the […]

Remembered and Remade: James Castle’s Conjurings of Mind

James Castle at David Zwirner, NYC (through 12 February 2022) by Andrew Martin James Castle: Memory Palace John Beardsley Yale University Press, 280pp., $65.00 NYR Every James Castle picture seems to contain a secret. Approaching one of his works for the first time, you peer into pockets of shadow and smudge, examining the depopulated landscapes […]

Vulgar Genres: Gay Pornographic Writing and Contemporary Fiction

Vulgar Genres: Gay Pornographic Writing and Contemporary Fiction

An excerpt from a new book which examines gay pornographic writing, showing how literary fiction was both informed by pornography and amounts to a commentary on the genre’s relation to queer male erotic life. —The University of Chicago Press Vulgar Genres: Gay Pornographic Writing and Contemporary Fiction by Steven Ruszczycky University of Chicago Press, 216pp., $30.00 In the United […]

Hilary Brace, Drawings and Tapestries, is reviewed at Riot Material magazine.

Darkness Made Visible in Hilary Brace’s Drawings and Tapestries

at Craig Krull Gallery, Bergamot Station (through 19 February 2022) Reviewed by Eve Wood The intricacies and inherent beauty of the natural world are rarely celebrated these days, and when artists do turn their attention to the surrounding landscape, the resulting images are usually ones of devastation and chaos — charting the movement of fires, […]

The Tragedy of Macbeth 

A film written and directed by Joel Coen Reviewed by James Shapiro NYR Those who have long followed the Coen brothers and their cinematic universe of criminals, nihilists, and overreachers may see in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021) a long-deferred reckoning with Shakespeare, who has been there before them. We don’t typically think of Shakespeare […]

John Divola, From Dogs Chasing My Car In The Desert,1996-98,

Illuminating Images: Liquid Light and Golden Hour and the Affective Force of Non-Didactic Art

at the Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles (through 5 February 2022) Reviewed by Johanna Drucker What is the difference between a wall label and a work of art? The unrelenting didacticism that prevails in current gallery and museum exhibits of contemporary art makes it seem that many curators and artists cannot answer that question. […]

The Occult Works of Ray Robinson, with an essay by Christopher Ian Lutz, is at Riot Material Magazine.

The Brush as Luminous Torch: Ray Robinson’s Blazing Portals Into the Divine Feminine

The Third Door:Occult Works of Ray Robinson, at the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magic (through 15 January) by Christopher Ian Lutz Burn the Sun The persecution of the witch is a war of the hours. The Inquisition that charged women with witchcraft was not just about controlling women’s bodies – it was a crusade to extinguish […]

An Interview with Artist Gala Porras-Kim is at Riot Material Magazine.

An Interview with Artist Gala Porras-Kim

by Ricky Amadour . Interdisciplinary artist Gala Porras-Kim frames her research to highlight and question the current institutional practices of conservation, acquisition, and deaccession. Acting as an investigator of cultural artifacts that correspond to institutional collections, Porras-Kim deep dives into the expansive histories, stories, and functions of those objects. The artist’s first solo exhibition in […]

Seizing the Snowmelt: Industrial Agriculture is Draining Our State Dry

by Mark Arax The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California by Mark Arax Knopf, 576pp., $25.00 MITTR The wind finally blew the other way last night and kicked out the smoke from the burning Sierra. Down here in the flatland of California, we used to regard the granite mountain as a place apart, our […]

The Great Flood of 1862

The Looming Catastrophe Few in California Are Aware Of (or in Want to Address)

An excerpt from Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent it, by Tom Philpott. THE FLOOD NEXT TIME In November 1860, a young scientist from upstate New York named William Brewer disembarked in San Francisco after a long journey that took him from New York City through Panama and then […]

Precontact California Indians: Their Life Prior to Genocide

An excerpt from the first chapter of An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, by Benjamin Madley. CALIFORNIA INDIANS BEFORE 1846 Within a few days, eleven little babies of this mission, one after the other, took their flight to heaven. -Fray Junipero Serra, 1774 We were always trembling with fear of […]

Laurie Anderson's "The Weather," is reviewed at Riot Material magazine.

An Atmospheric River of Wonder in Laurie Anderson’s The Weather

at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (through 31 July 2022)  Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner             “What are the days for? To put between the endless nights. What are the nights for? To slip through time into another world.”  –Laurie Anderson             “Stories are our weather”  –Laurie Anderson Laurie Anderson is a Renaissance polymath whose […]

Maria Lassnig Augenglaeser - Autoportraets (1965)

Maria Lassnig: The Paris Years, 1960–68

at Petzel Gallery, New York City Reviewed by James Quandt Maria Lassnig: Film Works edited by Eszter Kondor, Michael Loebenstein, Peter Pakesch, and Hans Werner Poschauko FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen, 189 pp., $35.00 NYRB Many female artists — most recently Carmen Herrera, Faith Ringgold, and Lorraine O’Grady — have had to wait a lifetime to be accorded the recognition […]

Marcellina Akpojotor’s Sublime Matriarchy

Daughters of Esan at Rele Gallery, Los Angeles (through 4 December 2021) Reviewed by Eve Wood Marcellina Akpojotor’s second solo exhibition, Daughters of Esan, continues her exploration into notions of personal intimacy, drawing on her own relationships with her family and the tremendously powerful and transformational possibilities of education and love. Inspired by her great-grandmother’s […]

An interview with Rachael Tarravechia, at Riot Material

Fear and Self-Loathing in Rachael Tarravechia’s Wish You Were Here

at Launch F18, NYC (through 4 December 2021) by Danielle Dewar The horror genre is rooted in a desire for catharsis by means of dispelling fears and anxieties that live deep within a subconscious mind. Since we often crave a controlled release of such emotions, the use of the macabre within an artist’s practice allows […]

Umar Rashid, aka Frohawk Two Feathers, exhibition review of En Garde/On God is at Riot Material magazine

Histories Disembowled in Umar Rashid’s En Garde/On God

at Blum and Poe, Los Angeles (through 18 December 2021) Reviewed by Ellen C. Caldwell In En Garde/On God, Blum & Poe showcases the work of artist Umar Rashid (also known by the pen name Frohawk Two Feathers). Featuring thirteen large paintings and one sculpture in Rashid’s hallmark style, the exhibition highlights works that are bold […]

A Grid Gone Wholly Off in My Monticello

Reviewed by Bridgett M. Davis My Monticello By Jocelyn Nicole Johnson Henry Holt & Company, 210 pp., $13.49 NYT In the essay “The Site of Memory,” Toni Morrison described the crafting of her fictional worlds as a quest to access the interior lives of her ancestors. “It’s a kind of literary archeology,” she explained. “On the […]

The Web of Mind Throughout Our Earth

Reviewed by Zoë Schlanger Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake Random House, 352 pp., $28.00; $15.48 NYRB Imagine that you are afloat on your back in the sea. You have some sense of its vast, unknowable depths—worlds of life are surely darting about beneath […]

Drugs Amongst Other Adult Liberties

Reviewed by Mike Jay Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear by Dr. Carl L. Hart Penguin Press, 290 pp., $16.94 NYRB The modern meaning of “drugs” is of surprisingly recent origin. Until the twentieth century, the word referred to all medications (as it still does in “drugstore”); it was only […]

Rashid Johnson, Anxious Red Painting August 20th. At Riot Material

Break//Breathe: Broken Men That Glitter

by Allyn Aglaïa Aumand On the coherence of fracture an essay in fragments on fragments * I had a lover once, who self described as a volcano, but fully encased. Make space to let it out sometimes, I told him. That’s why I wanted to see you today, he said.

Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption

An excerpt from a new book W. W. Norton calls “a radically inclusive, intersectional, and transnational approach to the fight for women’s rights.”  Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption by Rafia Zakaria W. W. Norton, 256pp., $23.95 There is an important distinction between what Nancy Fraser calls “affirmative change” and actual transformational change. The former is […]

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