Ian Bourland

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  print November 2022

  “The Double: Identity and Difference in Art Since 1900”

  In 1919, Sigmund Freud theorized the concept of the uncanny—the making strange of the familiar by the addition of the unfamiliar. He speculated about the various doublings or mirrorings of the self that occur in the psyche and opened the door to a great range of narrative possibilities.

  Art is, from a certain vantage, a proliferation of duplications, emendations, and appropriations, but much of that depends on the goals—and, of course, the cunning—of the creator. Such notions were at the heart of “The Double: Identity and Difference in Art Since 1900” at the recently reopened East Building of

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  slant July 27, 2022

  26 Planned Parenthoods

  IN 2015, there were twenty-six Planned Parenthoods in Ohio, and Jared Thorne photographed each one. Over dozens of weekends, the artist drove to every corner of the state, setting up a large-format camera and using 4x5 chromogenic film to create his spare, desaturated images. Many were made on Sunday mornings, the only time that anti-choice protesters would leave the site, presumably to attend church services.

  Without context, it’s difficult to know what one is seeing, which is the point: Planned Parenthood buildings are not designed to stand out, to make themselves a target. You’ve surely walked

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  print April 2022

  GOOD HOUSEKEEPING

  IN THE SPRING OF 2020, much of America succumbed to the lures of a rural life, one far from the madding crowds, one better suited to sheltering in place. Maybe you know someone who finally delivered on that promise to move to the Hudson Valley for good. While the then-widespread speculation about the decline of urban life seems to have been overblown, we are now in the midst of a so-called Great Resignation, in which the distraction and self-degradation of “hustle culture” may be yielding to slower forms of labor and community. Far from unprecedented, the present shift echoes the countercultures

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  print December 2021

  Faith Ringgold

  The past several years have brought a succession of major exhibitions by Black artists who came to prominence in the late 1960s and whom the institutional art world has finally begun to properly recognize. Like many of her peers, Faith Ringgold, raised during the Harlem Renaissance, was denied fine-arts training and initially found her footing as a public-school educator. Yet she continued painting all the same, producing figurative works—with faces contoured in sinuous blues, a recurring motif throughout her career—that suggested the uneasy dualities between our inner and outer selves. As the

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  interviews April 17, 2021

  Dawoud Bey

  Over the past forty-five years, Dawoud Bey has critically reimagined photography’s social and political potential, whether through his collaborative portraits of under- and misrepresented communities or through his more recent explorations of the landscapes of northern Ohio, a terminus of the Underground Railroad. April offers three occasions to see Bey’s work: a new book, Street Portraits (Mack), which gathers portraits of African Americans made between 1988 and 1991; the Okwui Enwezor–conceived “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America” at the New Museum in New York, which includes

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  picks June 05, 2020

  Ming Smith

  In 1976, Ming Smith composed a multimedia print called America Seen Through Stars and Stripes, New York City, New York Painted, as part of an ongoing series in which the photographer overlaid her signature multiple exposures with streaks of paint. The crimson and white here amplify the cascading American flags that enmesh a black figure who, in turn, gazes coolly outward from behind mirrored shades. By adding layers of exposure and pigment, Smith took what might have been a lyrical scene in the vein of Helen Levitt and infused it with the turbulence of an era in which questions of race and

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  interviews October 10, 2019

  Maren Hassinger

  Maren Hassinger very nearly became a dancer. As it happened, two fortuitous turns in her education in the 1970s led her to create sculptures hewn of fibrous metal and knotted detritus. From her early work in Los Angeles—including the 1979 installation of twelve wire rope “trees” near the Mulholland Drive exit ramp—to her recent “mandala” of repurposed pages from the New York Times, questions of ecological and spiritual consciousness have long underscored Hassinger’s practice. She is known for works in a range of media as well as for her collaborative bent. Following last year’s retrospective at

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  picks April 04, 2019

  Harald Sohlberg

  When pressed to come up with an iconic Norwegian Expressionist, one usually arrives at Edvard Munch, he of The Scream. But there is a strong case to be made that the painter laureate of the north is Munch’s contemporary Harald Sohlberg. This densely hung exhibition is his first retrospective in England and concisely runs from Sohlberg’s early experiments with Symbolism to his sui generis depictions of the hibernal Nordic landscape, all shimmering with quiet energy.

  As curator Kathleen Soriano notes, Sohlberg argued that he developed his oeuvre independent of external influence. “Painting Norway”

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  print November 2018

  David Goldblatt and Peter Magubane

  This was long slated to be David Goldblatt’s year: He was the subject of a career-defining retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in the spring and of a biographical documentary at the Durban International Film Festival in South Africa in July, and he featured in the inaugural group show of the A4 Arts Foundation near Cape Town in September. The anticipation surrounding these appearances gained new poignancy this past June, when the South African photographer died at the age of eighty-seven. While “On Common Ground: David Goldblatt and Peter Magubane,” was a fitting tribute, it also marked

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  picks October 08, 2018

  John Chiara

  John Chiara is mainly known as a West Coast photographer. His pictures of California elaborate a tradition nearly as old as photography itself, taking in the state’s sublime expanses of earth and concrete. They carefully balance rich detail with compositional ambiguity, imbuing the more epic aspects of the landscape genre with a sense of poetic restraint.

  In this show, Chiara trains his eye on the streets of Manhattan, revealing hidden surfaces that might otherwise escape notice amid the hustle of daily life. Like many of his nineteenth-century forebears, he is a polymath—the artist designed a

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  interviews October 02, 2018

  Zina Saro-Wiwa

  Over the past decade, the Brooklyn-based artist, filmmaker, and curator Zina Saro-Wiwa has developed a multiplatform career. Since 2014, she has led the contemporary art gallery Boys’ Quarters Project Space in downtown Port Harcourt, Nigeria. “The Turquoise Meat Inside,” her first solo gallery show in London, features recent and ongoing video works and photographs set in the oil-producing Niger Delta. The exhibition is on view at Tiwani Contemporary until October 27, 2018.

  I’VE ALWAYS BEEN INTERESTED in using food as a way to explore the self. Globally, not much is known about African food

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  picks April 30, 2018

  Fazal Sheikh

  For nearly thirty years, photographer Fazal Sheikh has traveled a world linked by the flows of the Indian Ocean, documenting displaced people. While some of these places—Kenya and Pakistan—connect to Sheikh’s own family history, his sitters are those fleeing crises in neighboring states. This exhibition, titled “Common Ground,” draws many of such projects together to create a dark, if vital, atlas of the shifting borderlands that characterize the present.

  Many critics, including Okwui Enwezor and Teju Cole, have cautioned that portraits of vulnerable populations or of postcolonies in peril amount