Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / For over twenty years, Matthew Miller rendered arduously meticulous yet mysteriously otherworldly portraits, mainly of himself as subject and almost always against a maximally opaque black background betraying no brushstrokes, evidently free of human imperfection.
Search Results for "label/Studio Museum"
LA PST Report: Toward better social behavior
Contributed by Peter Plagens / The first edition of the Getty-sponsored “Pacific Standard Time” slate of exhibitions in 2011 was subtitled simply “Art in L.A., 1945 – 1980,” and it aimed to elucidate Southern California’s contribution to American postwar modern art. In 2017, the second iteration was called “LA/LA,” indicating the city’s Latin American art and artists. This time around PST has declared a more specific theme, “Art and Science Collide,” reminiscent of one of those noble Rose Parade rubrics…
Jo Baer: Space, position, and light
Contributed by David Carrier / Five smallish early Jo Baer paintings are on display in one white- walled gallery at DIA Beacon in her exhibition there since 2022. The show is both tantalizing and exasperating. In the 1970s, Baer became famous as a minimalist painter. Then she left New York, published a manifesto in 1983 proclaiming “I am no longer an abstract artist,” and changed her style completely.
Trade secrets: How much should a painter reveal?
Contributed by Bonnie Morano / I consider myself an open book. The secret ingredient to my zesty salad dressing is cumin. Avoiding parking tickets in NYC involves a finely worded note on the windshield. But ask me how I get my oil paint to stay so shiny when dry, I hesitate….In this social media age of oversharing, does the aura of the heroic painter today rest on magic and mystery or up front transparency?
Lisa Hoke’s unconfined vision
Restricted to her studio during lockdown and cut off from large spaces in which to create site-specific work, Lisa Hoke felt the need to fashion pieces that were more portable and more presumptively permanent. What resulted is a scintillating revelation.
Finding Esphyr Slobdokina
Contributed by Peter Plagens / When the annual The Armory Show art fair — which takes place on the piers on the Hudson River in […]
Vija Celmins: To fix the image in memory
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / Anyone walking out of the Vija Celmins retrospective that opened last week at SFMoMA thinking how good she is at […]
Catalogue essay: Paul Pieroni on Peter Halley’s 1980s painting
The aim of this text, which was originally published as “Facts are Useless in Emergencies” in Peter Halley: Paintings of the 1980s The Catalogue Raisonne, […]
Carter Ratcliff: Art in the age of Trump
Contributed by Carter Ratcliff / Let�s begin with a painting�not sure it�s a work of art�that could have been painted only now, during Trump�s presidency. This […]
President’s portrait
From the label text at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC: American artist Gilbert Stuart was commissioned to paint this portrait after the success […]
Interview: Daniel Kingery in Hunt’s Point
Contributed by Rob Kaiser-Schatzlein / The four paintings I looked at in Daniel Kingery‘s Bronx studio are all medium-sized, human scale. Paint application strategies vary […]
Report: “Command-Z” at Improvised Showboat
Improvised Showboat, a curatorial project developed by artists Zachary Keeting and Lauren Britton, mounted its seventh one-night show this past weekend in my new […]
Who is Kay Sage?
Contributed by Sharon Butler / A few years ago I was at the Mattatuck Museum checking out the Connecticut Biennial, and I ran across a […]
The New Casualists
Contributed by Sharon Butler / The pioneers of abstraction — the Cubists, the Abstract Expressionists, the Minimalists — emerged from firm and identifiable aesthetic roots […]
Jerry Saltz’s burden
James Panero and me discussing social networking media face-to-face over pizza and beer at an exhibition at STOREFRONT in Bushwick. Photo courtesy Jason Andrew. In […]
Helen Frankenthaler: More profound than lyric
After seeing the exhibition at Gagosian, I’ve become a huge Helen Frankenthaler fan. Curated by John Elderfield, Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture […]










































