What is art? And what is art’s purpose? Are these questions that can even be asked, much less answered? Well, yes, if you exempt the last 100 years or so. Those objects and paintings that today we call “art” indeed had some very specific purpose within a particular culture at a particular point […]
Heidi Nickisher
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Narrating the visceral object
As the winter winds are set to billow across Lake Ontario, a wind of a different sort has already blown into Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery. It came in the form of a new director, Louis Grachos, who arrived this past January. Grachos has introduced several new initiatives calculated to reinvigorate the gallery, including a refocused […]
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Collecting the marks of the modern
There aren’t too many terms that have the ability to disquiet the bourgeois while enlivening the avant-garde, but “modern” or “modernism” can do just that. To be a modern painter can imply both a commitment to formal innovation and a challenge to the status quo. In this way, modernism in art can range from […]
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Time to grow up: RoCo comes of age
<pIn 1977 a new cultural institution, the Pyramid Arts Center, opened in Rochester. After 27 years, seven locations, and a name change to Rochester Contemporary (RoCo), its mission remains basically unchanged: to encourage the redefinition of contemporary art in Upstate New York. As the arts center prepared for its big re-opening on Friday, October […]
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A room of her own
We are quite often interested in artists who have exceptional lives. And if those lives involve scandal, intrigue, or illness, we become fascinated. This fascination manifests itself not only in the biographical, but in the work itself. We want to see the life illustrated in the work of these artists — Vincent Van Gogh […]
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How art talks to itself
In one form or another, the biennial Rochester-Finger Lakes exhibition has been a showcase for Western and Central New York artists for over 100 years. And this year is no exception, as the exhibition celebrates its 59th anniversary. Of course, what exactly the exhibition showcases has often been a source of controversy. And in […]
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A Texan in Corning
As a material for sculpture, glass is more durable than either granite or steel. And in the hands of Robert Willson, hot molten glass — “rich and utterly sensuous,” as described by the artist — is richly and utterly transformed into solid, evocative, and bold forms. Willson, born in West Texas in 1912, graduated from […]
