Sue Havens’ history – her searching and sometimes painful life experiences and her adventurousness in the studio – are distinctly encoded, like a unique double helix of molecular structure, in the complex work she has produced this past year.
Museum Exhibitions
Cézanne’s pursuit
If there’s one word that sums up Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), the subject of this massive MoMA exhibition, it’s “struggle.”
Reflections through repetition: Rashid Johnson presents Antoine’s Organ
Contributed by Anne MacLeod / I first encountered the installation Antoine’s Organ by Rashid Johnson in 2019 by accident, as it sat serenely inside the ornate and spacious entryway of the Gropius Bau in Berlin. At the tail-end of an exhausting work trip, I was taken aback by the compelling […]
Salman Toor: There’s a boy I know
By Laurie Fendrich / Critics have been lavish in their praise of the Brown, queer-themed figurative paintings by the Pakistani-born Brooklyn artist Salman Toor, currently on view in the Whitney Museum’s first-floor lobby gallery (free of charge to the public). And rightly so. Toor’s pictures touch the heart, and his […]
Josephine Halvorson’s communion with nature
Contributed by Kari Adelaide Razdow / Now on view as part of the deCordova Museum’s “Visionary New England” exhibition, Josephine Halvorson’s lyrical yet meticulous oil paintings employ no masquerade of myth. Rather, they are documentations of nature that meld history, self, and place. Her intense practice centers on painting chosen […]
The stories we choose to tell: “Fall Reveal” at MoMA
Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / The Museum of Modern Art’s “Fall Reveal” marks the second phase of the museum’s re-telling of the story of Modern Art (the first phase opened in October, 2019), and there are big changes. First, with its $450 million expansion adding 47,000 feet of exhibition space, […]
Vida Americana: A grand hemispheric embrace
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The Trump administration has tried to physically cordon off Mexico from the United States, and presumably would just as soon exclude the country from America’s cultural orbit as well. From that perspective, the Whitney’s judiciously conceived exhibition “Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art” is […]
Allison Schulnik’s glamour magic and illusion
Contributed by Kari Adelaide Razdow / Moths are weird and macabre. Allison Schulnik, in her animated short MOTH in “Suffering From Realness” at Mass MoCA, fully captures their gothic elegance. The moths rhythmically fan eyespots and morph into something new and magical every few seconds, conjuring a resonant line from Mary Oliver’s poem, Sleeping in the Forest: “By […]
Hans Haacke’s ethical snark
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / If mid-century art lovers had thought Robert Rauschenberg’s cheeky erasure of Willem de Kooning’s drawing in 1953 was irreverent, they might have revised their definition of the term twenty years later, when Hans Haacke tendered them detailed questionnaires about their backgrounds and attitudes as they […]
Roadtrip: The Clark, MASS MoCA, Bascom Lodge in Western Massachusetts
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Several weeks ago I returned to Mount Greylock, the highest peak in Massachusetts, where I was an artist-in-residence at Bascom Lodge, the inn at the top of the mountain, in summer 2014. Peter Dudek, a NYC-based sculptor who teaches at Hunter and SVA, has been […]
