SNAPshot visits several of France’s premier art institutions that have been recently retrofitted or are about to be renovated. In these precarious times, a trip abroad feels like a veritable escape. So when a window opened that allowed US citizens to go to France, toward the end of summer, I jumped at the opportunity to […]
During the summer months, a visit from Catherine Howe is always welcome. Her arms are usually folded around a gift bouquet of rare beauty, harvested feet away from her bucolic studio. These plucked and carefully selected arrangements curve and swirl in organic arabesques, explode into fireworks, sputter and unfurl, dance and tremble. The trumpet shapes […]
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s current retrospective, Alice Neel: People Come First, opened on March 22—just a few months after New York City began distributing vaccines, and still months before most COVID-19 restrictions were lifted. After over a year of social distancing, quarantines, and mask mandates, the opening of the show, which largely featured portraits, […]
This spring and summer, New York City’s art scene clearly began to recover its energy—and audiences—after a full year of Covid-19 shutdowns and restrictions. The situation may not be back to “normal,” but each gallery and museum I visited managed to project some credible version of normalcy. Artists helped provide art audiences with some hopeful […]
I was fortunate to visit Judy Pfaff in her studio recently to discuss her exhibition, ar.chae.ol.o.gy, which is currently on view at the Pamela Salisbury Gallery in Hudson, New York, through July 25. The exhibition features an elaborate installation spanning three floors of the gallery’s historic “Carriage House,” as well as an alcove featuring […]
Displayed in Robert Smithson’s current exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery is the artist’s unrealized Forking Island (1971), rendered in paint on a mirror. With its searching projections reaching outward from a central point, the island looks less like a landmass and more like a network, its form presenting a problem to the hypothetical cartographer. We […]
We are now witnessing the highest levels of displacement on record. An unprecedented 70.8 million people around the world have been forced from home. Among them are 25.9 million refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18. — The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, “Figures at a Glance,” June 18, 2019 This […]
Visiting the Whitechapel Gallery after lockdown was the first time, to my knowledge, that I had my temperature read in public. I can tell you that I saw Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium on Sunday, July 26 at 4:30, because I had to book in advance and I still have the confirmation email. […]
As New York City galleries and museums begin to reopen this fall, masks and social distancing are mandatory. Some proprietors have implemented added precautions, asking to take visitors’ temperatures as they enter the gallery, or requesting names and phone numbers for possible contact tracing in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. Some of the larger […]
In a time long ago, before photography, and certainly before the internet or widespread world travel, words were the primary conduit to experiencing an artwork from afar. Words aspired to, in the best of circumstances, convey the essence and the sensation of being in the presence of an artwork to readers who might never see […]