Bea Huff Hunter

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  print March 2019

  Becky Suss

  In recent years, Becky Suss has painted the domestic spaces and personal effects of her late relatives from memory, guesswork, and fantasy, meditating on the mind’s revisionist tendencies while crafting pictorial elegies to familial and cultural histories. For her new series of interiors and object studies, Suss turned her psychological gaze to the material legacy of the celebrated American modernist artist, architect, and designer Wharton Esherick (1887–1970). During a residency at the Wharton Esherick Museum in Chester County, near Philadelphia, she rendered his historic home and studio from

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  picks December 18, 2018

  “Lip-Sync Parade”

  In this multigenerational exhibition curated by Doah Lee, five interdisciplinary artists uncover, celebrate, and question LGBTQ histories and aesthetics while wrestling with their own connections to and alienation from queer history. Gabriel Martinez’s Perpetual Care, 2016, displays heart-wrenching, humorous, and sometimes racially discriminatory personal advertisements—notably, I DON’T WANT TO GROW OLD ALONE, DO YOU? and HOT WHITE BUNS—that the artist unearthed in the William Way LGBT Community Center’s John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives in Philadelphia, the city’s central resource for local queer

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  picks December 05, 2018

  Suzanne Bocanegra

  Suzanne Bocanegra confronts the cultural cliché of women’s vulnerability and distress—unresolved and raw, brought to light again by the #MeToo movement—which is still central to entertainment and artistic production. The exhibition’s title, “Poorly Watched Girls,” and the title of La Fille (all works cited, 2018), an installation of handmade costumes and scenography, were drawn from the eighteenth-century classical ballet La Fille mal gardée, more commonly translated as “The Wayward Daughter.”

  Valley is an eight-channel video projection in which eight “strong women artists” (Bocanegra’s words)

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  print December 2018

  Kate Bright

  The title of Kate Bright’s exhibition, “Soft Estate,” referred to the fertile swaths of land that run parallel to railroads and highways in the UK, where Bright photographed the flourishing nonnative flora that are, in her words, “escapees from the domesticated environment.” Painted from composites of these photographs, Bright’s sensuous—and deeply ethical—canvases extend her two-decade occupation with the landscape as both urgent environmental concern and contested artistic genre.   

  In Holloway, 2017, which is named after a major London thoroughfare, massive mustard yellow, flame red,

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  picks October 04, 2018

  Leroy Johnson

  Dogs have played a supporting role in human culture since prehistory, serving as partners and protectors at home, work, and war; the unwitting subjects of medical and psychological abuse; and proxies onto whom we project human emotion and behavior. Explicitly drawing on a range of sources—Greek mythology, pop lyrics, biblical descriptions of Armageddon—eighty-one-year-old artist and activist Leroy Johnson focuses on canines in his densely worked and reworked charcoal and mixed-media drawings on view in “Dogs/Walls/Dark Energy.”  

  Five large-scale works on canvas depict the animals

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  print October 2018

  Suki Seokyeong Kang

  For her first solo exhibition in a US museum, Seoul-based artist Suki Seokyeong Kang debuted a project centered on historical Korean conceptions of the grid as a spatial and social structuring device. In the traditional Chunaengjeon (Dance of the Spring Oriole) choreography, for example, the borders of the hwamunseok reed mat, with its crosshatched warp and weft, constrain the movements of a solo dancer; in the classical musical notation system jeongganbo, instructions for motion, vocals, and timing are marked inside a grid. In a 2016 conversation with Lili Nishiyama for ArtAsiaPacific, Kang

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  print September 2018

  Joy Feasley and Paul Swenbeck

  Philadelphia-based artists Joy Feasley and Paul Swenbeck have been collaborating for thirty-five years alongside their work as museum preparators and as a painter and a sculptor, respectively. Titled after the mysterious lights and colors we see when we close our eyes—and inspired by a dream of Feasley’s—the exhibition “Out, Out, Phosphene Candle” continues their sustained exploration of the diverse scientific and mystic methods humans use to grapple with the unseen. Here, the duo’s works are placed in conversation with loaned works by other artists as well as their own selections from the John

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  picks August 07, 2018

  Chris Corales

  In his 2001 book Papier Machine, Jacques Derrida charts a cultural hierarchy of paper’s many purposes, from “priceless archive, the body of an irreplaceable copy, a letter or painting . . . as support or backing for printing” to, finally, the “throwaway object, the abjection of litter.” Chris Corales’s magpie practice restoratively collages found paper, cardboard, and related detritus into spare, abstract, yet allusive compositions that both reflect and transcend such teleological categories.

  Many of the modestly sized works in this concise memorial exhibition, “A Passer-By in His Own Moment,”