Developing More than Nostalgia: “Analog Culture” and “Survivor’s Remorse” at Harvard Art Museums
The Harvard Art Museums and curator Jennifer Quick have pulled off a minor miracle with “Analog Culture,” an understated, poetic show of heart through a lens of craftsmanship, careful discipline, and the wavering line between producer and artist. It’s rare to find a show that is at once pointedly educational, culturally searing, historically significant, and […]
Divinity Affirmations – Light, Luminescence, and Liminal Spaces with Tom Bacher
Tom Bacher’s Per-40ming Trans-4-ming Phos-4-s-cent Paintings, which is showing at the Weston Art Gallery until June 10, 2018, displays a continuation of Bacher’s hyperrealist quotidian aesthetic re: luminescent paintings that find subjects in object studies, portraiture, and documentation processes. As the two-channel corridor video “Painting with Light” (2018) by YellowHaus Productions elucidates, Bacher’s exhibition […]
Ragnar Kjartansson’s “The Visitors” (2012) at Cincinnati Art Museum
Contemporary art has a number of interpretive frameworks, attempts to historicize the present moment that both distinguish it from what came before and draw genealogical lines from established art historical concepts. One branch of this diverse range of concepts is the return to romanticism in what some critics have referred to as New Sincerity, Post-postmodernism, […]
“Twisted/Patrick Dougherty Entwined at the Taft,” Taft Museum of Art
Something odd happened on the front lawn of The Taft Museum of Art. The world-renowned sculptor Patrick Dougherty, with the help of 150 volunteers, twisted and turned six tons of willow-tree saplings into Far Flung,a sprawling sculpture that visitors are encouraged to touch, walk through, or even sit a spell in. In keeping with The […]
Skin Trade: “Cagnacci: Painting Beauty and Death,” Cincinnati Art Museum, March 23-July 22, 2018
You can be forgiven if you’d never heard of Guido Cagnacci before going to see the tiny but brilliant exhibit of three of his works at the Cincinnati Art Museum. You won’t find him in your Janson, or, for that matter, in many more weighty volumes devoted to Italian painters of the 17th century. […]
Kinship Threads: Matt and Paul Coors at the Clay Street Press Gallery
Matt and Paul Coors founded the Publico Gallery in Over-the-Rhine in 2003 and ran the operation until it closed in 2008. Ten years later, the Coors brothers are displaying their own works at the Clay Street Press Gallery, just a few steps from their former space. The show highlights the artists’ shared commitment to conceptual […]
“Louis Comfort Tiffany: Treasures from the Driehaus Collection,” Taft Museum of Art, through May 27, 2018.
Fashion is a fickle lover, and it jilted Louis Comfort Tiffany at the end of his career in the 1930s. He had been the American exemplar of Art Nouveau, or “new art,” which emerged in Europe in the 1890s after a century of revivals. But “new” eventually grows old, and by 1910 its curvilinear and sinuous lines […]
Eastside Processional: "Not to Scale" at the Carnegie
From March 2 through April 29, 2018, the Carnegie in Covington, Kentucky is spotlighting an emphatically local meditation on matters of national concern. The museum’s Hutson Gallery features the work of Anissa R. Lewis, Mary Clare Rietz, and a host of citizen-artists from Covington’s Eastside neighborhood, all of them proclaiming the dignity of the community […]
An Interrogation of Abstract Markings: Hans Hartung’s Recent Survey at Perrotin, New York
Perrotin’s opening exhibition in New York for 2018, Hans Hartung: A Constant Storm. Works from 1922 to 1989, featured a retrospective assessment of one of the pioneers of Lyrical Abstraction in Europe, including over 60 major works. This exhibition—which was on view from January 12 until February 18—marked the most extensive presentation of the artist’s […]
Stephen Towns Quilts at The Baltimore Museum of Ar
Two of the Stephen Towns’ gorgeous quilt pieces hang in an abbreviated hallway of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Rumination and Reckoning, the Baltimore artist’s debut solo museum show, is an intimate collection of his quilts from a recent, breakthrough body of fabric works, including a few new, unseen pieces. Two of these new works […]