In and out of the photographs, Nona Faustine’s work is about living: Black life, Black nurture, and the restoration of self and legacy that motherhood bestows. Motherhood is not a universal experience. Of all obstacles to raising black and mixed race children in America, the inescapable jurisdiction that Black life […]
When prolific photographers turn to words, a particular alchemy is released. Visual tendencies have been flexing, so the expressive spaces balancing on words can unleash a surge of consciousness that visual language can picture, but not always re-create. Is it immediacy that makes writing feel so close to thought, or […]
In Barbara Hammer’s first film, Schizy, 1968, a split lens is used to present a double image from multiple points of view. Destabilizing vantage points are common occurrences in Hammer’s films. Wonderfully difficult to describe, Hammer’s films do share this common trait: onscreen and offscreen it’s Hammer’s own physicality that […]
Shortly before Leon Mostovoy tagged along with a friend to the Market Place Cinema, the site was placed on the National Registry of Historic Places. A curious fact, since it closed in 2013, and is scheduled to be torn down. Since its opening as Grauman’s Imperial Theatre on December 22, 1912, […]
To experience the everyday as a stream of insatiable curiosities is the sort of feeling adults are supposed to outgrow, but some of us don’t know how to do that. Or we simply refuse it, because a world governed by the imagination is preferable to exterior social systems we didn’t […]
David Armstrong passed away on the morning of Oct. 26, 2014. I was waiting to board a ferry on Fire Island when I received the news from Justin. Looking around the Pines, I imagined Armstrong initiating a conversation with people waiting for the ferry, and composing something dignified and subversive with […]
If an artist’s work is dependent on popular media, at which point does media outpace the artist’s production? It is easy for Richard Prince to state that Tumblr was “invented for someone like [himself],” except that Tumblr is not really an invention but another reincarnation of existing human methods of […]
Exactly four years ago, I noticed some small prints at a salon on the Upper East Side, the last place I expected to encounter art so critically charged. Two weeks later, I showed up at the salon for the artist’s talk. After hearing Wanda Ewing’s presentation, I introduced myself and […]
Written and performed by Sacha Yanow, Silent Film was first seen at Danspace in New York City on December 6, 2013. Right from the start, this piece guided the audience on a brief tour of sexualized tropes in cinema, mixing well-known films with buried facts—all in just under twenty minutes. […]
Last Monday evening, Dec 9, 2013, friends old and new gathered at The Bureau of General Services Queer Division (BGSQD) for The Queen of Hearts, an exhibition of photographs by Quito Ziegler. Everybody knew each other, so it didn’t feel like a gallery but someone’s living room. Another transient space […]
Beguiled is how I felt that first afternoon I spent with Touch Parade in 2012, at the Sculpture Center in New York. It is a priceless opportunity that living in New York affords: to see a work inhabit different spaces at different times. How an artist adapts an installation to […]
How is the body ever not politic? Especially when black youth in hoodies are deemed threats, and women are viewed as commodities of availability…how, in this social climate is the body not politic? Aura Rosenberg and I began a conversation about her work in March of this year, during her I […]
The Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan’s West 23rd Street has been home to celebrity residents: from Mark Twain to Edie Sedgwick, from Simone de Beauvoir to Storme DeLarverie. Among such iconic residents is the notable Portuguese photographer Rita Barros, who has lived in the same room at the Chelsea Hotel since […]
Kate Conroy is a New York artist who you might meet and immediately like, but not quite expect the compound hilarity Conroy can draw out of an audience. For the last two years, Conroy has been developing The Giles Findings: A Natural Herstory of Lesbeings, a conceptual project connecting lesbeing […]
Albert J. Winn and Richard Sawdon Smith are two living photographers whose works are centered around the complexities of sexual identity for HIV-positive gay men. Based in different countries—Winn in Los Angeles; Sawdon Smith in London—the photographers have collaborated on projects that bring their separate practices and approaches into a […]
The Radical Camera show at the Jewish Museum presents a selection of photographs by women that dispell the purpose that Kodak adverts of the time suggested women used cameras for: gender-appropriate domestic portraits of family, documentation of male activity, flowers. The silent movement of women with cameras surveying the streets […]
When Genesis Breyer P-Orridge speaks, it is always from the subjective plural. There never was much room for singularity in the GBP universe: their first collaborations were musical (bands); communistic art experiments; and the development of pandrogeny. But after Breyer P-Orridge’s late wife Lady Jaye “dropped her body”, the preferred […]
Catholic churches funding large scale art projects, from the Renaissance to Matisse, is part of Western art history’s dominant discourse. In New York, the cathedral of St. John The Divine made a bold statement by hosting Diamanda Galas’s Plague Mass in 1991, a work that critiques the body of the Roman […]
Lehmann Maupin’s Chrystie Street gallery opened the 2011 fall season with Mickalene Thomas’ second solo show, More Than Everything, which was on view until October 29th. Thomas has been hyper-prolific, creating works in critical engagement with inquiries into gender, race, class and sexuality. More Than Everything introduced a schematic freshness […]
Preparations for his exhibition at The Asia Society in New York were well underway when Ai Weiwei was detained earlier this year at Beijing Airport on April 3, 2011. En route to Hong Kong, he was detained for nearly three months before his release on June 22. Other artists critical […]
If conscience is a placid lake, and our subconscious a network of rivers beneath rivers, adrift in these deep waters is probably a fierce psychological need for the presence of water to be comforting. Roni Horn has worked with water as a subject, in capacities of solace and sorrow but […]
Lilac leather and horsehair, plumes, coiled aluminum, pheasant feathers and resin vulture skulls—none of these are the typical materials of a functional wardrobe. But Alexander McQueen never settled for typical. Savage Beauty currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art examines the contributions of McQueen’s audacity and incessant purveyorship of the […]
Outside NY’s Whitney Museum and San Francisco’s Museum of Art, Lynn Hershman Leeson asked men and women on the street the following question: “Can anyone name three women artists?” It’s difficult to gauge who is more disappointed: the filmmaker asking the question or each of the individuals, stumped. Two people […]
Nevada Rose is the first book of its kind: a comprehensive survey of all Nevada’s legal brothels, sprawled throughout quaint desert towns. Photographer Marc McAndrews spent six years traveling between New York and Nevada, shooting 4×5 film with a tripod, documenting the environments of brothel life (sex workers, bedrooms, gyms, […]
Currently living in Uganda, Tadej Žnidarčič is a photographer originally from Ljubljana, Slovenia. A contributing photographer for Redux Pictures, Žnidarčič’s photographs have appeared in magazines, newspapers and various publications in the USA, UK, Italy, Germany, France, Holland, Nigeria and Slovenia. An exhibition of Žnidarčič’s most recent project Being Gay in […]
This year, from March to September, London’s National Portrait Gallery is presenting a set of twelve self-portraits by Sarah Lucas. From the NPG permanent collection, this series of photographs was created between 1990 and 1998. Lucas is an adventurous British artist who sculpts, photographs and arranges objects with a soulful […]
Mention camp aesthetics in any discussion about art and inevitably, the conversation bifurcates faster than one can say “Vite! Vite!” at a Parisian fashion show. Earlier this month, Invisible Exports opened Notes On Notes on “Camp“, an exhibition examining a fraction of camp’s contemporary aesthetic through the Sontag essay that […]
Only The Lonely is the first major museum exhibition of photography, film and video by Nakadate. Now at MoMA’s PS1, the show premieres her recent photographs, 365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears, a series in which the artist documented herself before, during and after a performance of daily weeping. Nakadate’s […]
Kim Jong-il had just celebrated his birthday when I picked up the program for disOriented. With the time change and all that, his birthday was really the day before, although I saw this play on the actual date of his birthday. The morning after the play, I skimmed Reuters RSS […]
Although director C. Scott Willis has framed a document of two artist parents who watched the professional reputation of their daughter “eclipse their own”, it was difficult to view The Woodmans as a portrait of Francesca Woodman. Can a cinematic portrait really be made from slices of friendships, acquaintances and […]
What could have ended a 21 year blacklisting of LGBTQA art in a major museum context has become the target for a fundamentalist attack on basic civil rights and freedom of expression. On December 1st, 2010, G. Wayne Clough, the Smithsonian Secretary, ordered David Wojnarowicz’s Fire In My Belly video […]
While preparing for her seventh group show in 2010, Wanda Ewing was kind enough to make time for conversation with me. Exploring contemporary culture through personal narrative, Ewing recontextualizes images from popular culture, addressing issues of race, beauty standards, sexuality and identity. What I found captivating about Ewing’s depictions of […]
Two months after Robert Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989, Washington D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery of Art cancelled a solo show of his photographs featuring nude men and homosexual language. Considered scandalous by several members of Congress, threats ensued. Fear of losing future federal grants caused the private gallery to cancel the show. […]
Ana Mendieta’s story is one in which her tragically short life is constantly revisited through works created during a prolific 13 year career. Frankly, her work isn’t resurrected enough, although Galerie Lelong has shown Mendieta’s work twice in the last two years. When liberated from temporary burials of acid-free storage, […]
Crystal Gregory loves the materiality of pattern. Gregory chooses materials that physically or emotionally construct domesticity, while highlighting the acts of aggression within its construction. “Lace is my most valuable inspiration. The language of lace is complicated and delicate: pattern, fragility, negative space, gender, class, non-functional, decorative. Its ability to […]
Opening the Fall 2010 season with a dynamic group show, titled Mine, Invisible Exports features video and photographic works by three distinct artists for whom the physical body is canvas: Hannah Wilke, Jana Leo and Bob Flannagan. The pieces in this show were created during periods when producing work was […]
Extremity was inaugurated as a currency of female beauty so long ago, constantly stirring dialogues of body modification. Although a natural body might be momentarily celebrated in a “Real Women Have Curves” campaign, beauty standards cling to extremes: from an eighteen inch waist and altered feet to today’s disproportionately augmented […]
The background is dark, gritty and in constant shift. But the portraits gaze back in warmth and openness. Despite the disorienting sense of urgency we glimpse of their lives, the resilient, street-tough gazes trust the photographer. That would be Jo Ann Santangelo, who, for the past year, has been documenting […]
