print September 2022

Gerda Wegener

An aura of sapphic resplendence inspirited a soigné Tudor Revival mansion on Long Island’s Gold Coast on the occasion of “Fashioning Desire,” the first substantial presentation of art by Gerda Wegener (1886–1940) in the United States. The show featured upward of sixty paintings, drawings, advertisements, and illustrations, the lion’s share of which limned lissome women. The works were installed throughout the residence, displayed in grand hallways and sumptuous boudoirs, or placed so that they coyly peeked out of stately powder rooms. Spanning Wegener’s career, these sybaritic images—in which

interviews June 21, 2022

Karla Knight

Over the past four decades, artist-conlanger Karla Knight has doggedly worked in an extraterrestrial idiom, cultivating an otherworldly iconography and an invented language so potent she dreams in it. Arriving on the heels of “Navigator,” her survey at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, “Road Trip,” on view from May 20 to July 1 at Andrew Edlin Gallery in New York, features recent drawings, paintings, and tapestries that hover between spaceship blueprint, geometric abstraction, and impenetrable abecedary. Below, Knight addresses her diverse influences, her relationship with paranormality and

print April 2022

Gala Porras-Kim

At the historic site of Teotihuacán, twenty-five miles northeast of Mexico City, two greenstone monoliths were dislodged from the caliginous interior of the Pyramid of the Sun as if they were bad teeth. Unearthed during an excavation that occurred between 2008 and 2011, the smooth colossi ended up being featured in a presentation of new archaeological findings from the ancient Mesoamerican city. When artist Gala Porras-Kim encountered the show in its 2018 iteration at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Bogotá-born Angeleno questioned the decision to displace the hidden megaliths, whose

Detail from Carmen Winant’s Instructional Photography (SPBH, 2021).

books March 11, 2022

Direct Action

INSTRUCTIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY: LEARNING HOW TO LIVE NOW, BY CARMEN WINANT. London: SPBH Editions, 2021. 119 pages.

“LET ME PAUSE HERE to say that ‘instructional photographs’ is a term that I have made up; there is no preexisting dedicated category for this kind of picture,” writes artist Carmen Winant in her slim, pocketable book Instructional Photography: Learning How to Live Now. On the opposite page, a woman gingerly pulls hardened plaster from her face; culled from a photographic “how-to” on mask-making, the black-and-white image has been shorn of captions and context, extricated from the words

print December 2021

Shigeko Kubota

After studying sculpture at the Tokyo University of Education, Shigeko Kubota (1937–2015) relocated to New York in 1964 and quickly established herself within the city’s Fluxus community as a facilitator of events, a maker of objects, and a performance artist in her own right. Yet the groundbreaking 1969 exhibition “TV as a Creative Medium,” staged at New York’s Howard Wise Gallery (the artist reviewed the show for the Japanese art magazine Bijutsu Techo), and the invention of the Sony Porta-Pak (an affordable compact video camera with instant playback) irrevocably changed the way she would

picks October 20, 2021

Barbara Hammer

This presentation of Barbara Hammer’s work and archive, “Tell me there is a lesbian forever…,” begins in 1968, when the experimental cineast discovered 8-mm film. A few years later, she discovered women: A handwritten note on display here reads “COMING OUT”. Lovemaking was intertwined with artmaking, and Hammer’s partners appear in many of her photographs and films from the 1970s. Combining still and moving images, the film Double Strength, 1978, charts the arc of Hammer’s romance with aerialist Terry Sendgraff. At its exuberant heights, the two naked women soar on trapezes while the pair, in

print October 2021

“Creating Community: Cinque Gallery Artists”

This past summer, the Art Students League of New York held the first historic exhibition dedicated to Cinque Gallery, an artist-led nonprofit that operated between 1969 and 2004. The brainchild of Romare Bearden, Ernest Crichlow, and Norman Lewis, Cinque was founded to exhibit and promote the work of marginalized, primarily Black artists, while also serving as a training ground for young arts administrators of color. Cinque was to some extent an outgrowth of the Spiral group, which met regularly from 1963 to 1965 to debate the role of Black artists in the struggle for civil rights. The gallery

picks July 09, 2021

Jon Pylypchuk

While grappling with grief after the death of a close friend, Jon Pylypchuk cast a number of bronze “ghosts,” which are currently haunting Petzel’s soigné townhouse space on the Upper East Side for the Winnipeg-born, Los Angeles–based artist’s solo exhibition “What have we missed.” Pylypchuk, a multidisciplinary bricoleur who is known for crafting pitiable creatures from poor materials such as mangy fake fur, bits of plywood, and copious amounts of hot glue, first explored metal casting in 2008. Made in 2020 and 2021, the pedestal- and wall-mounted sculptures on view, largely untitled, are cast

print May 2021

Jeanne Reynal

In 1958, Clement Greenberg penned a short essay that posited aesthetic parallels between Byzantine art and modernism. Despite their differences, he said, these movements were united by an emphatic pictorialism, their transcendent qualities tied up with a shared repudiation of illusionism. In this text, the critic cited the work of certain painters, such as Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko, as examples. “This new kind of modernist picture,” Greenberg wrote, “like the Byzantine gold and glass mosaic, comes forward to fill the space between itself and the spectator with its radiance.”

picks April 23, 2021

Carrie Moyer

During Net art’s heyday, Dyke Action Machine!, a lesbian interventionist public-art project cofounded by graphic designer and painter Carrie Moyer and photographer Sue Schaffner, released an interactive Web-based work titled Gynadome, 2001. Riffing on the 1970s womyn’s land movement popular among lesbian separatists, Gynadome imagined a post-digital world where “women are Women, the men have been put out to pasture, and computers are just Big Paperweights.”

“Analog Time,” an exhibition of colorful, biomorphic acrylic paintings and collages Moyer made over the past year, likewise plays with the

picks September 28, 2020

Toyin Ojih Odutola

Nigerian American artist Toyin Ojih Odutola is a master of the epic narrative. Her breakout 2017 solo show at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art chronicled a marriage between two men from fictitious aristocratic families in Nigeria. And her debut exhibition in the United Kingdom, currently on view at London’s Barbican Centre, spins a yarn about a Nigerian autocracy run by female warriors who oppress male workers—a tale that spans forty sequential drawings and took the artist more than eight months to formulate prior to execution.

In Ojih Odutola’s presentation here, the artist explores

picks April 25, 2020

Nate Lewis

Over the nine years that he spent working as a critical care nurse, Nate Lewis grew intimately familiar with medical imaging via X-rays, ultrasounds, electrocardiograms, and other diagnostic tools. He watched bodies externalize their internal forms and rhythms, demanding they be seen, scrutinized, and cared for—with the caveat that clarity was a possibility but never a promise. It is a preoccupation with these vital images that inspired and informed Lewis’s turn to artmaking. “Latent Tapestries,” his first solo show in New York City, opened at Fridman Gallery in March but has since migrated

Cassie Packard