Six varied
artists, one excellent show
Art
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Willie Cole mines iron
In between college graduations and festival openings, make time to see the work of Willie Cole at the JohnsonMuseum on the Cornell University campus. The exhibition is a thoughtful presentation of works of art by an African-American artist who turns ordinary domestic objects into powerful evocations of West African art, history, and mythology. The iron, […]
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Kneadful things
There is something about photography that allows the viewer to associate it with what it represents. There is a kind of transparency that allows the belief that somehow the photographic image is unmediated. It’s as if when we look at a photograph, we are in the presence of the thing itself. Of course, we all […]
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Pictures of a thousand words
French writer Anatole France was asked by someone admiring his library if he had read all the books in his collection. France responded by saying, “Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sèvres china every day?” Literary critic Walter Benjamin subsequently used the quote in “Unpacking My Library,” an essay in which […]
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The extremes of “extreme”
Claire Schneider, curator of the Extreme Abstraction exhibition at the Albright-KnoxArtGallery in Buffalo, recently pointed out that the word “extreme” may be the word of our time. For example, reality TV shows like Fear Factor show “ordinary” people jumping from tall buildings, laying among snakes, and/or eating all sorts of strange things all in the […]
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The garden inside the house
It’s a striking image — large, glossy, vibrantly colored. A young girl stands in the lush greenery of a tropical forest; her black skin contrasted against the extreme whiteness of her dress. Punctuating the green is a purple-y pink phallic flower just to the right of the girl’s shoulder, and in her right hand she […]
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A ghost in the tower
From 1977 to 1980 Mark Klett led a team of photographers in a project that rephotographed landscapes originally captured by 19th-century photographers such as William Henry Jackson and Timothy O’Sullivan. The work of the 19th-century photographers was a major representation of America’s push westward: the taking of lands and other notions of “progress.” Rephotographing the […]
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Curating curators
Every summer, when most New Yorkers are out and about, galleries in New York City either close or put up group shows culled from their collections. These shows are usually mildly interesting in that they show a variety of work reflecting the galleries’ specific interests and tastes. But the downside is that these shows generally […]
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The exquisite corpse drinks the new wine
In 1924 Andre Breton, the “father” of Surrealism, defined the new movement as something “[d]ictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason [and] exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” For the Surrealists, truth was not the thing that was in front of us but was hidden and buried from view. […]
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Let’s shed some light on the matter
The current exhibition at SUNY Brockport’s Tower Fine Arts Gallery, Illuminating Developments: Images, Objects, and the Use of Light, features the work of seven artists who rely on light as a physical part of the existence of their art. Light, of course — its presence or absence — has played a significant role in both […]
