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, […]

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 Pfaff’s […]

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. […]

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 […]

If history is written by the victors, then Bristol is yet to declare a winner. In fact, it’s precisely this one-sided view of history that is on trial throughout Europe and the US. The port city in Southwest England was built on the transatlantic slave trade, and sustained by the beneficence of Edward Colston of […]

To confront the new reality of social distancing under COVID-19, galleries are engaging in a virtual arms race. Whether experimenting with virtual and augmented reality, or building more basic digital platforms to keep connected with clients, dealers and auction houses are fast-tracking their digital strategies. On a superficial level, these efforts appear to be paying […]

Over the past several weeks Londoners have been living in a time warp. On Friday, March 12, I visited White Cube Bermondsey where, as my phone convulsed with push notifications and emails of museum closures in the United States, a gloved gallery attendant stood by the entrance to open the door for me. As each […]