print April 2023

Andrea Fraser

The remarkable accomplishment of Andrea Fraser’s genre-defying career has been to meld the disparate domains of feminist performance and institutional critique, a maneuver assisted by the invention of fictional female characters, among them a museum docent, a news reporter, an artist, and a matron. In many of Fraser’s narratives, these personae, uncomplicated and guileless at first, grow increasingly complex as they deliver streams of facts and historical data that are the substance of the artist’s investigations. They might be earnest or comedic, polite or raunchy, but the discourses they

print February 2023

Gladys Nilsson

To my mind, Gladys Nilsson is the reigning queen of weird-ass figuration and has been for more than fifty years. She was a founding member of the Hairy Who, a group of six Chicago artists who showed together in the mid- to late 1960s and borrowed equally from high modernism and the sordid ranks of populist art to create irreverent images and objects. Their work seemed designed to challenge the tyranny of good taste and decorum, especially as defined by their contemporaries in New York and across Europe.

While many of her colleagues borrowed significantly from straight porn, underground comics,

print January 2023

“Painting in New York: 1971–83”

From the perspective of many luminaries in the art-critical establishment of yore, the pluralistic 1970s was the decade that went wrong. The messy dismantling of modernism then taking place was tantamount to patricide and shattered the idea of cohesive movements in art. Many lamented the seeming lack of direction, noting the death of painting as another grim marker of decline. Calvin Tomkins went so far as to declare that no major artists emerged in America during those so-called deplorable years. Robert Motherwell proclaimed his fellow Abstract Expressionists the last artists to make substantial

print December 2022

John Baldessari

Breakthrough works from the mid-1960s by John Baldessari (1931–2020) owe their success to gestures of removal that paradoxically allowed the West Coast Conceptualist to make his mark. He curtailed his vision, his judgment, and his hand by turning the production of his paintings over to “professional artists.” And when he began in the ’70s to source materials from the film industry for his art, Baldessari made strategic excisions that became even more acute, adopting an approach that might be summed up as “The less said, the better.” Movie stills, publicity photographs, posters, and lobby cards,

print November 2022

“New York: 1962–1964”

The Jewish Museum’s boisterous exhibition “New York: 1962–1964” is stuffed full of energy, focusing on a three-year period in New York City when sundry creative realms coalesced in a delirious apogee of full-blown American vanguardism. In addition to the “new art” of the era on display here, there is an abundance of contextualizing material drawn from advertising, media, music, dance, film, magazines, fashion, poetry, and interior design, ostensibly documenting a so-called common cultural pulse that fomented in Gotham and spread across the land.

The presentation’s time frame, aligned with the

print October 2022

Geles Cabrera

Geles Cabrera, now ninety-seven years old, was the focus of a 2018 exhibition at the Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City titled “Mexico’s First Female Sculptor,” in recognition of her trailblazing determination to enter a discipline almost exclusively practiced by men. Following her art-school training in Mexico City and Havana, she emerged in the early 1950s and was associated with the Generación de la Ruptura (Breakaway Generation), a group of artists who distanced themselves from the nationalistic and political motifs of the Mexican muralists in pursuit of abstraction.

Cabrera embodied

print September 2022

Robert Rauschenberg

Just when you think you’ve fully parsed the historical significance of Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), more is revealed. Kudos to New York’s Rauschenberg Foundation for collaborating with three exhibition spaces—Gladstone and Mnuchin Galleries in Manhattan, and Thaddaeus Ropac in Salzburg, Austria—to open the vaults on the artist’s practice with a concentration of rarely shown works made between the 1970s and the 1990s, following his momentous move in 1970 from New York to Captiva Island, right off Florida’s Gulf Coast.

The trove situates us at an important dividing line in his career. Rauschenberg’s

print Summer 2022

Barbara T. Smith

In 1971, when she was a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine, Barbara T. Smith created Holy Squash Ceremony, a durational performance for the campus art gallery that extended to an adjacent fountain pool. The inspiration for the piece was a dinner party she had recently hosted, conceived as a way to bring together her new art friends and older acquaintances she had known during her previous life as a 1950s housewife. On the menu for her special evening was a dish she made from the flesh of a large Hubbard squash, which she served in its hollowed-out husk. She felt that the

print May 2022

Michelle Stuart

When Michelle Stuart inaugurated her studio practice in the late 1960s, feminism and art had barely discovered one another. An expanding interest in ecosystems was just beginning to take root in Conceptualism, and the nascent Land art movement was being served up with extra helpings of machismo. Many artists engaged in forms of “field work.” Among them was Stuart, who never fully identified as a maker of feminist art, reluctantly staked her claim as an environmental artist, and avoided presenting her work as being solely systems oriented—indeed, she consistently operated somewhere in between.

print April 2022

Abraham Palatnik

Abraham Palatnik (1928–2020) seems to have always been ahead of the curve. His studies as an engineer in Tel Aviv during the mid-1940s would have put him in touch with nascent cybernetics and systems theories that later figured into the design and production of his kinetic sculptures. On another front, his art-school training as a painter would have introduced him to the cultural avant-garde and factored into his later receptivity to Constructivism and Concrete art—hot topics among the artists of midcentury Brazil, where he was born and eventually returned, in 1947, from Israel. Rio de Janeiro

print March 2022

Helen Pashgian

One of the members of the California Light and Space movement that emerged in the 1960s, Helen Pashgian made her mark with translucent abstract sculptures crafted from pigmented acrylic resins—forms so seemingly perfect that they tested the limits of retinal vision. She and her cohorts, including Peter Alexander, Robert Irwin, John McCracken, and DeWain Valentine, were keen to explore the plethora of new industrial materials ushered into commercial applications after World War II and, notably, were pioneers with polyester resin after it appeared on the market in 1966. In those days, their approach

print February 2022

Dorothea Rockburne

Interrogating those intersections where the body, the object, and the space that contains them meet, Dorothea Rockburne has long sought to assert the singularity of her art. Early on, her fascination with mathematical theory, topological models, and systems of proportion became a springboard for thought and form. For decades, the artist has tested and torqued her materials with an alchemist’s zeal while also incorporating movement as an important expressive element of her production process. She contributed significantly to the flow of Minimal and post-Minimal art—and she was able to hold her

Jan Avgikos