There’s nothing like backlash to propel a dissed art movement back into the mainstream, and Abstract Expressionism is no exception. In today’s post-Feminist environment, it’s a perfect model: Art by white men to promote an inner being. Art sprung from spiritual—not political—impulses. Art celebrating the individual—not where he came from. Art that is, above all, large. This week an exhibition aimed at correcting that … Read the full Story >>
Saturday, May 16-Sunday, May 17, 11am-6pm: Open Studios by Upstate Art Weekend There is a visceral magic that emanates from an artist’s workspace. The Raw smell of turpentine, the chaotic piles of raw materials, and the quiet weight of ideas still evolving on the easel , the plinth, the monitor often combine with workplace energy to cast a spell. Above: Jim Holl and … Read the full Story >>
It is no exaggeration—and worth repeating—that Mike Kelley (1954-2012) was one of the most influential artists of the past half century. Scan his CV and you will find that he has had a solo exhibition ever year since 1981—most recently the major retrospective that originated at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum in 2012; morphed larger to MoMA PS1 in 2013; then went to both locations of … Read the full Story >>
DART launches the New Year with a celebration of sketchbook art and artists. Jonathan Twingley, whose sketchbook habit was explored during the 2015 Summer Invitational, emailed to tell about a recent project for Amtrak that originated in his sketchbooks. This is what he wrote: We seem to be in the midst of some kind of Global Sketchbook Craze. Everybody from stay-at-home-dads in Des … Read the full Story >>
Every year around now, since 1995, The Cooper Union School of Art presents an exhibition on Art of the Book. The course, designed by Professor Margaret Morton, allows students to immerse themselves in this thorny question: what is an “artists book”? Luckily for the artists, there’s an infinite number of answers. This year’s iteration of the show, which I’ve been following for at … Read the full Story >>
The New-York Historical Society, New York’s first museum, presents an exhibition that explores the civil rights movement through one of the most emotionally compelling forms of visual expression—the children’s picture book. Picture the Dream: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement through Children’s Books, opening April 1, highlights some of the most consequential moments in American history that continue to impact the … Read the full Story >>
Ralph Steadman, artist and proponent of Gonzo Journalism and its inventor, Hunter S. Thompson, has spent a lifetime loudly informing the world that it is rotten to the core. This Orwellian British artist, who has been visually skewering the bad guys since his schooldays, has collected six decades worth of images that celebrate the grit and glory of a world continually going mad, in … Read the full Story >>
Would you rather work for Netflix or Days Inn? Before you decide, you'll need some recently reported details. It was big news earlier this month when The Verge and other websites noted that the producers of Netflix's dating/reality show "Love is Blind" offered photographer Megan Saul a gig as the show's wedding photographer. Her compensation: worldwide exposure, which is another way of saying, no … Read the full Story >>
Saturday, May 1-Sunday, May 3: Pictoplasma Berlin 2025 Online This just in from the organizers: Live broadcast of all conference talks, including theentire animation selection here: home.pictoplasma.com! Simply sign up, lean back and tune in LIVE May 1 – 3, daily from 12:45 – 20:30 (CEST) for all of 2025's greatness to be delivered to you in real-time – and subsequent as 24h VoD offering, in … Read the full Story >>
Continuing: Working Knowledge | Shared Imaginings, New Futures at Bronx Museum Through stories, movement, food, music, and collaborations with The Bronx Museum community, Working Knowledge presents work by artists who value and examine the concept that creativity is a force for social change. The exhibition invites visitors to engage, explore, and contribute their knowledge and experiences through interactive elements that shape their artistic … Read the full Story >>
Saturday, October 11: Monet and Venice at Brooklyn Museum During his 10-week visit to Venice in 1908, Claude Monet captured the city’s ethereal cityscape in close to 40 shimmering canvases, creating works unlike anything produced by the centuries of artists who painted the city before him. Upon arriving in this place of magical light, Monet remarked that Venice was “too beautiful to be … Read the full Story >>
Milton Glaser (1929-2020), grandee of them all in art and design, is the subject of a new volume in Moleskin Books’ Inspiration and Process in Design series. In his introduction to Milton Glaser | Inspiration and Process in Design, Steven Heller recounts the designer’s reply to the question of being an enormous, and longtime influence, on other designers. Glaser replied, “I’ve always seen … Read the full Story >>
Peter Kuper, award-winning illustrator, comics artist and co-founder of World War 3 Illustrated, will launch his long awaited book Insectopolis: A Natural History, at the opening of an exhibition of the original work at Society of Illustrators this week. Peter is a long-time contributor to DART, going back to his first stay in Mexico, in 2006, when he fell in love with Monarch … Read the full Story >>
Lucas Samaras, a multi-disciplinary artist known for the strange and often violent transformations he made to ordinary objects in his sculptures, and in the self-portraits that dominate his output, emerged in the 1960s with confrontational installations and performances. One of the most experimental artist of his generation, Samaras can be described as an avant-gardist and theoretician who embraced Dada, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism in his work. … Read the full Story >>
Neo-futurism, the Metaverse, space exploration—combined with a yearning for closer connections with Earth’s natural bounty—are currently prompting renewed interest in the design trends of the 1960s. The rush to exploration and innovation that came with the Space Age gave the Swinging ‘60s an aura of freedom that filtered into every facet of life—especially art, design and fashion. Op Art escaed from galleries and classrooms … Read the full Story >>
While the work of Austrian sculptor Oliver Laric seems so of the moment as to dismiss any connection with appropriation, his practice is rooted in works as old as time. Essentially, Laric deals with versions, spurred in part by the tradition, during antiquity, of producing multiple iterations of master works. Laric inhabits a universe of multiple realities, the lack of distinction between an original … Read the full Story >>
Desiccated goat, rat, and turkey; steel, rope, carpet, peach basket, wood, tire scraps, plastic toys, shoes, motor-oil bottle, wire fencing, chains, ironing board, farm and construction tools, wire, paintbrushes, enamel, spray paint, and Splash Zone compound. While this list could understandably be mistaken for items encountered by John McPhee on one of his epic road trips, they are, in fact, the materials … Read the full Story >>
The first Earth Day was celebrated in NYCs Union Square Park on April 22, 1970. Fifth Avenue was closed to traffic between Central Park and Union Square as some 100,000 people gathered to participate in an ecological carnival designed to raise awareness about environmental issues. Air and water pollution, largely from leaded gas and industrial contaminants, were the main concerns about the deteriorating environment … Read the full Story >>
On election day, November 2018, millions of New York City voters showed up at the polls only to be confronted with an almost-three-foot-long, two-sided ballot with print so small it strained the eyes. To cast their vote, they had to fill it out front and back, tear it in half along a perforated line, and then carefully feed both pages into a scanner. The … Read the full Story >>
Called by historian and photo critic A.D. Coleman, "a true photographer's photographer, and one of the most seriously under-recognized senior figures in U.S. photography," the 82 year old master photographer and legendary teacher of photography, Harold Feinstein, is finally celebrating the publication of his first black and white monograph, Harold Feinstein: A Retrospective (Nazraeli 2012). To mark the occasion, Feinstein will share … Read the full Story >>
