interviews March 28, 2014

Judy Chicago

Judy Chicago is an artist, author, and educator whose long career has focused on women’s experiences and feminist critique. She speaks here about her upcoming exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, “Chicago in L.A.: Judy Chicago’s Early Work 1963-74,” on view from April 4 to September 28, 2014, and her concurrent shows throughout the United States—including those at Mana Contemporary, Jersey City; the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State University, University Park, Pennsylvania; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; the Schlesinger Library at Harvard, Cambridge; and the New Mexico

picks March 13, 2014

Kiki Smith

“Wonder,” the title of Kiki Smith’s latest New York exhibition, suitably describes both the excitement in first encountering Smith’s garden of earthly delights and an astonished curiosity at their craft-intensive processes. Smith’s output has always been an ascension up the ladder of her own cosmology, and this show evinces how singular her references are.

This new body of work, four years in the making, once again employs her alphabet of female nudes, plants, and animals. However, these motifs are emboldened by their rendering in a rich catholicity of mediums, which in this display count cast

picks January 27, 2014

Kelly Nipper

In a carnivalesque hollow of mysterious props, just keep to your right after the stack of oversize weaving shuttles; we’re not in Germany anymore. Instead, the legendary wood known as the “Black Forest” is diffused across Kelly Nipper’s installation as a concept useful for its ability to generate myth wherever it touches.

Along with influences such as the movement notation systems developed by the Hungarian choreographer Rudolf Laban, Nipper’s latest work declares an evident interest in craft and vernacular art, best displayed in both Red and White, Soft White, Off White, Pure White, Textured

picks October 15, 2013

William Kentridge

‘Tis the season for William Kentridge, whose newest work makes for an expansive show in a diverse array of mediums including kinetic sculpture, a beguiling addition to the artist’s catholic output. These eight contraptions, some incorporating the familiar motif of megaphones, are planted around the first room and rigged to sing African children’s songs. One, Untitled (Singer Choir/Chorus), 2013, is a table of Singer sewing machines, which when cranked give the impression of a factory of voices serenading you. Surrounding the sculptures are eleven large collaged drawings of stately trees indigenous

picks September 16, 2013

Bjorn Copeland

Concurrent with his noise electronics band Black Dice, Bjorn Copeland has spent the past two decades reconfiguring the everyday commercial feed into postproduct and postmusical assemblages with printmaking, collage, and sculpture. Copeland’s third solo exhibition at this gallery opens not with a bang but with a bucket, white plastic to be precise, stuffed with cemented model airplane wings. The piece, crookedly titled Ground Potential (all works 2013), is a wry opening note for the seventeen works on view; a collection strongest in sculptures that are judiciously composed and surprisingly

picks June 22, 2013

Silke Otto-Knapp

For her second solo show at the gallery, Vienna-based artist Silke Otto-Knapp presents a highly individualized body of new work that features a wall of etchings and her signature watercolor-on-canvas paintings. The works pivot between daydream-like images and a detached nostalgic charm reminiscent of Edward Gorey’s drawings. Here, though, the delicate washes of color and purposefully vague subject matter seduce the viewer into wandering through the various flights of fantasy put on display.

The centerpiece of the exhibition’s first room is “Three Seascapes,” 2013, forty-two unique etchings that

picks May 15, 2013

Wolfgang Tillmans

In Wolfgang Tillmans’s latest exhibition of casual snapshots, abstractions, and framed and unframed photographs—many from his recent “Neue Welt” exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zurich—he suggests that a single image always contains multitudes. Jeddah mall I, 2012, evinces this idea in a wonderfully literal way. The ink-jet print depicts a woman shrouded in a black burqa riding an escalator in a Saudi Arabian shopping mall. The gleaming mirror finish of the escalator sends reflections skittering around the surrounding store windows and fixtures while her opaque figure cuts the only interruption in

picks April 01, 2013

Faith Ringgold

Following the first comprehensive survey of Faith Ringgold’s paintings from the 1960s at the Neuberger Museum of Art in 2010, this exhibition of her early works includes selections from the series “American People,” 1962–67, and “Black Light,” 1967–69, as well as six examples of her famed story quilt paintings. The Lover’s Trilogy: #2 Sleeping, 1986, an example of the latter, depicts a couple sleeping with a blanket running across their bodies, embellished with the story of their dysfunctional yet loving relationship, while the colors and shapes of fabric surrounding the figures speak to their

Paige K. Bradley