Author: aryanahmad313@gmail.com

What should surely go down as one of literature’s great descriptions of a major urban area is unexpectedly tucked away in a recent My Art Guide booklet. Brett W. Schultz, cofounder and director of one of Mexico City’s prime art fairs, Feria Material, writes of the beloved metropolis, “It’s thirsty, it’s shaking, it’s honking, it’s dusty, it’s calling your mother terrible things, it’s bursting at the seams, and it’s one of the most vibrant, thriving, and life-affirming cities I’ve ever known.” Also known as CDMX (an abbreviation of its official name, Ciudad de México), the city has a metro area…

Deborah Kass, left to right, “Making Men 4” (1992) and “Puff Piece” (1992) Deborah Kass created the Art History Paintings out of frustration at not seeing herself in the halls of museums even as she fell in love with the work of the artists themselves. That contradictory dynamic of attraction and repulsion is what gives these paintings their power, as her biting critiques are tempered by her humor, and her formalist sensibility marries disparate parts to create searing attacks on the history of exclusion. There’s a curious image of a headless, chestless, and armless Lucy van Pelt from the popular Peanuts comic strip that…

The Corning Museum of Glass selected New Zealand-based artist Te Rongo Kirkwood as the winner of the 38th Rakow Commission. Kirkwood is known for her vibrant and evocative works of kiln-formed glass that explore themes of her Māori, English, and Scottish heritage and identity. The commissioned installation, The Seer, the Seen, the Seeing, is comprised of three main elements: a kākahu (cloak), made of kiln-formed glass and woven fibers; a puru hau (sacred ritual vessel) in blown glass; and a film. The cloak and vessel are key components of a filmed ceremony centering Kirkwood and her father, set against the backdrop of their ancestral lands…

I have this vague, flickering memory of neon orange billowing impossibly through threadbare trees like the penumbric trails of large, unseasonal fireflies. I would’ve been seven years old when the late Christo and Jeanne-Claude installed “The Gates” — 7,503 16-foot gates adorned with fabric flowing along 23 miles of walkways — for 16 days in Central Park in 2005. Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Gates and Unrealized Projects for New York City, a pay-what-you-wish exhibition at the Shed, memorializes the temporary project — 26 years in the making — on its 20th anniversary. It consists of preparatory drawings and collages, video interviews projected on the…

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. — At the center of Daisy Patton’s Before These Witnesses hangs a double swing festooned with fabric flowers. Fashioned from a decrepit sofa the artist found on Craigslist, it frames vintage wedding photos of an anonymous Venezuelan couple that the artist has enlarged, printed on canvas, and embellished with bold acrylic paints. The result is “Untitled (Color Fade Wedding Couple with Purple Background and Green Vines)” (2024), an enchanted assemblage which projects both joy and grief. Visitors to the exhibition — which focuses on the theme of weddings — will feel its emotional impact as they enter the…

So you think you know Mucha? Printmaking? The ravenous classism of the art world? This month, our editors and contributors invite you to question what you think you know. Senior Editor Hakim Bishara takes a look at the first English-language translation of a book of photos by Chilean photographer Sergio Larrain with text by poet Pablo Neruda, while Associate Editor Lisa Yin Zhang reads critic Lucy Lippard’s collection of experimental fiction. Read on for more recommendations, including Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian on Tamara Lanier’s moving memoir chronicling her fight to reclaim daguerreotypes of her enslaved ancestors from Harvard University and The…

An ongoing exhibition at the College of William and Mary’s Muscarelle Museum of Art in Williamsburg, Virginia, brings seven of Michelangelo’s few surviving sketches to light in the United States for the first time. Through May 28, Michelangelo: The Genesis of the Sistine, organized by Special Exhibition Curator Adriano Marinazzo, incorporates 38 objects in total, including 25 of the Renaissance master’s drawings and ideations for the Sistine Chapel along with etchings, lithographs, and other artifacts related to the monumental undertaking at the Vatican. The exhibition spans five galleries — three of which have been painted a soft shade of blue to…

After weeks of rallies against expected layoffs at the Brooklyn Museum and even a special oversight hearing at City Hall, District Council 37, one of the unions representing employees, said in a statement that leadership will offer some buyouts to impacted workers. In an email press release today, March 10, a week before the staff cuts were set to go into effect, DC 37 said the museum agreed to voluntary separation packages and retirement incentives — alternatives the union has long been advocating for. It’s unclear how many workers will be eligible, or whether layoffs will be avoided entirely. “The outcome of these negotiations…

Deborah Kass, “Subject Matters” (1989–90) (photo Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic) From reinventing abstraction to recreating Barbie for new generations, we’re looking at a wide range of art this week. Make sure to catch Norman Bluhm’s unorthodox abstracts and the Museum of Arts and Design’s dizzying display of Barbie’s history before they end this weekend. After that, revisit art history’s past with a survey of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s legendary project “The Gates” and Deborah Kass’s feminist pastiches. Manuel Herreros de Lemos and Mateo Manaure Arilla’s poignant 1982 documentary “Trans” and its accompany exhibition at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art rounds…

Days after penning a letter demanding the deinstallation of a “blasphemous” exhibition at the National Gallery–Alexandros Soutsos Museum in Athens, Greece, far-right Parliament Member Nikolaos Papadopoulos vandalized several of the artworks at the museum late Monday morning, March 10. Papadopoulos was temporarily detained and questioned after attacked four works from Greek artist Christophoros Katsadiotis’s in the group exhibition The Allure of the Bizarre, a show taking inspiration from Francisco Goya’s Los Caprichos (1797–98) etchings to present oddities, hybridizations, and the grotesque thematic to Greek art. “We unequivocally condemn all acts of vandalism and violence, and any attempts at censorship that threaten the freedom of artistic expression enshrined…