Hannah Stamler

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  picks July 16, 2018

  Chaim Soutine

  At the entrance to “Flesh,” a survey of Chaim Soutine’s meat still lifes, we are greeted by an oil on canvas of a dead rayfish (Still Life with Rayfish, ca. 1924), inspired by a Chardin painting. The titular creature hangs flag-like, facing the viewer with empty eyes and a wide-open mouth that wavers between song and scream—an ecstatic martyr for the dinner table.

  Like all of the paintings in this show, Rayfish reminds us that the pleasure of consumption relies on the pain and sacrifice of others—an understanding that should prompt us to give meals the solemnity of ritual they deserve. This is

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  print Summer 2018

  Deana Lawson

  In her highly acclaimed 2007 book Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, Saidiya Hartman observes that the black diaspora has, out of necessity, mythologized a shared past: a Mother Africa. When one’s ancestors, as well as the stories they carried, have been violently effaced, speculation and lore are all that remain. “Slavery,” she writes, “made your mother into a myth, banished your father’s name, exiled your siblings to the far corners of the earth.”

  For her first solo show at Sikkema Jenkins, Deana Lawson exhibited two landscapes and eight portraits that explore what a

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  picks January 19, 2018

  “Josef Albers in Mexico”

  Josef Albers’s series “Homage to the Square,” 1950–76, oil paintings of the titular form in three or four colors on Masonite, are icons of modern art—printed in textbooks, on posters, and, in the 1980s, on US postage stamps. We are familiar with these works. We have memorized their contours. We have learned the principles of color theory and geometry they make manifest. And yet, what remains exceptional about them is precisely what we cannot immediately perceive—the infinity of reactions their disarmingly simple designs cause. What will lingering in front of an Homage piece make us see, and how

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  print January 2018

  “Making/Breaking the Binary: Women, Art, and Technology (1968–1985)”

  Spanning from the year of the groundbreaking “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the dawn of the personal-computing era, “Making/Breaking the Binary: Women, Art & Technology” at the University of the Arts’ Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery presented pieces by twenty-two female artists and composers who were inspired by modern media. A prominent figure featured was Beryl Korot, who is known for her work in both video and weaving. She has linked the latter practice to computing by describing the loom as a proto-computer, in that it follows

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  interviews September 26, 2017

  Julia Weist and Nestor Siré

  Julia Weist is a New York–based artist and 2016–17 Queens Museum/Jerome Foundation Fellow. For her fellowship exhibition, on view at the museum through February 18, 2018, Weist traveled to Cuba and collaborated with Cuban artist Nestor Siré on a project exploring El Paquete Semanal (The Weekly Package), a hard drive loaded with a mix of media, including films, TV shows, games, and software. For most Cubans, the internet is only accessible via Wi-Fi hot spots, and content is censored by the government. The Paquete, circulated and sold extralegally each week, serves as a replacement for in-home

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  picks July 14, 2017

  “alt-facts”

  Ceci n’est pas une pipe. Celebrating an image’s fictitious nature may have been cool nearly a century ago, but is it ethically imperative in 2017, the heyday of spin and “alternative facts.” In this exhibition—a summer group show done right—work by seven individual artists and four artist duos, centered on Kellyanne Conway’s noxious phraseology, demonstrates the continuing social and political worth of artistic sleight of hand.

  Matt Johnson’s Untitled (Amazon Box), 2016, is an exacting replica of a crumpled delivery carton, made from carved and painted wood. The sculpture enshrines the debris

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  picks May 12, 2017

  Nancy Spero

  This exhibition presents Nancy Spero’s contribution to the Fifty-Second Venice Biennale for the first time in the United States. For her large-scale sculpture Maypole: Take No Prisoners, 2007, the late artist transformed a maypole—that folksy emblem of rebirth and community—into a monument to violence, national culpability, and complicity. Ribbons in cheery reds flow from a central beam strung not with flowers but with aluminum tragedy masks that wear contorted, aggrieved expressions. Some have mouths agape in Munchian howls; others spew gore that darts from their jaws like sharpened daggers.

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  picks April 21, 2017

  Sara Cwynar

  In Sara Cwynar’s pigment print Tracy (Grid 1) (all works 2017), the artist’s titular friend reclines in an outfit of pale, foamy pink against a studio backdrop of multicolored squares. The bright, syrupy composition seduces from a distance, but up close you can see its flaws: the rips in the backdrop fabric, the chips in Tracy’s nail polish, the web of wrinkles in her shirt, and the hollow, far-off look in her eyes, more dead than dreamlike.

  The piece is one of many standouts in “Rose Gold,” Cwynar’s meditation on color. Throughout a small selection of photographs and one film of the same title,

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  picks April 07, 2017

  Allan McCollum

  I was midway through a Google image search when I descended into the subway. My cell-phone service flickered out before the results could fully load, leaving the screen crowded with uneven rectangles of gray, tan, and black. When the pictures materialized a few moments later, I felt disappointed. In their chrysalis state, they were full of possibility. Now, they were dead ends.

  I was reminded of this experience later in the day while visiting Allan McCollum’s “Lost Objects.” Throughout his decades-long career, McCollum has created hundreds of plaster casts in the shape of framed artworks with

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  picks February 10, 2017

  Peter Campus

  The photograph Earthrise, taken from NASA’s Apollo 8 space shuttle in 1968, captured the Earth as seen from the distance of the moon. Half engulfed in shadow, our home planet looks radiant and fragile—a kaleidoscopic cobalt-blue-and-misty-white shard floating in a vast and unbroken pitch-black sky.

  The picture’s capacity to transmit the beauty and vulnerability of Earth is credited with helping to launch the environmental movement of the 1970s. But today, decades after Earthrise and the advent of satellite imagery, we’ve grown accustomed to such all-encompassing aerial views of the planet and,

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  picks January 13, 2017

  Miguel Ángel Cárdenas

  A glass case full of household sprays and soaps—like a shaken-up medicine cabinet—opens Miguel Ángel Cárdenas’s first solo show in the United States. The assemblage, Nog schlechts enkele dagen (1) (Only a Few Days [1]), 1963, is a fickle and incomplete time capsule of the year it was created. The clutter seems arbitrary and provides little insight into the Colombian-Dutch artist’s life.

  Cárdenas excelled at creating suggestive, elusive arrangements of everyday items. He explored the sensuality of the zipper—that teasing metal barrier between dress and undress—years before Andy Warhol’s infamous

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  picks December 09, 2016

  James Crosby

  Canvas masks with square polycarbonate welding lens eyes and two tubes, each dangling like strange appendages, line one wall of the gallery. The masks, together titled the Garrett Morgan safety hood allowing the wearer to breathe in a hostile environment (all works 2015), are replicas of air-filtration hoods––originally conceived to protect firefighters from smoke––created by African American inventor Garrett Morgan. Here, James Crosby reinterprets them as defenses against both atmospheric and social threats. A large black-and-white photograph of a figure donning the hood highlights its capacity