We aren’t able to sleep. Or maybe worse, we are. The panic comes and goes, and then it stays. As presidential orders are meted out at a dizzying pace by the American kyriarchy, art criticism can start to feel frivolous. Perhaps it is frivolous. There are protests to organize, senators to call, tweets to be […]
George Dureau took photographs of amours and amputees. He took photographs of athletes and artists and the anonymous. Mostly, he took photographs of nude black men. He posed them gently into sturdy postures so that their bodies echoed the images of classic Greek deities. He called these people family. Now, Aperture has bound up a […]
Last year, when the Contemporary Art Center refurbished its lobby, it seemed to also be changing its identity. Vanished was the vision the center’s architect, the late Zaha Hadid, had realized: minimalist abstraction was traded for comfy chaos. Now, members of the city’s creative class could bond over the mana of overpriced cortados and the […]
A quick cyber-jaunt reveals surprisingly little about photographer Paul Kohl, but the internet did offer one interesting morsel, stored within the digitized archive of the Crimson. A 1974 review by Susan Cooke included a couple sentences about Kohl, whose work had been featured in a group installation of artists decidedly unburdened by the parameters of […]
Because we are so exposed to and distracted by images in our lives, we become desensitized to one of photography’s chief purposes: to observe. Jochen Lempert’s photography, now on display at the Cincinnati Art Museum in Field Guide: Photographs by Jochen Lempert, presents a captivating retrospective of the artist and biologist’s art, and one that, […]
A photograph of a black man’s flaccid, uncircumcised penis exposed through a three-piece suit may best represent the themes of sexuality, race, class and style that pervades his work. The photograph, titled “Man in Polyester Suit,” possesses a startling clarity and crispness that makes it seem somehow commercial, a glossy advertisement for the turbulent restraint […]
“See how willingly Nature poses herself upon photographers’ plates. No earthly chemicals are so sensitive as those of the human soul.” — John Muir Elena Dorfman spent two years photographing the Los Angeles River for her series Sublime: The L.A. River, now being exhibited in the Weston Gallery. The river, paved in 1938 after a […]
According to the forward to his monumental book series The North American Indians, Edward S. Curtis is a man “whose pictures are pictures, not merely photographs.” One wonders now what is meant by that statement, written in 1907 by President Theodore Roosevelt. But if you spend enough time in the Taft Museum of Art’s new […]
“Arrange whatever pieces come your way.” — Virginia Woolf You enter the room through a ruche curtain, a membrane partitioning a world from our own. Only two colors exist in the palette of the capacity—varying shades of red and white—and you are immersed in the sweet fragrance of rose petals. These are the first impressions […]
Perhaps the first stanza of the 113th chorus in Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues (1959)—his both critically praised and abhorred epic poem of scat-sung, jazz-imbued stanzas—might serve well as a preface to Bernard Plossu’s photographs of Mexico: Yet everything is perfect, Because it is empty, Because it is perfect with emptiness, Because it’s […]
The art of photography changed forever in 1975, the year that William Jenkins curated “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” at the International Museum of Photography in New York. The exhibit brought together eight artists who challenged the meaning of landscape photography priorly defined by the architects of photography as an art form—lensmen like […]
One feels the unlocking of something amidst Barbara Ahlbrand’s paintings. Energy, chaos, tranquility. The atmosphere in the gallery at the Clifton Cultural Arts Center, where a new retrospective of her work titled Encompass: encircle: embrace is being displayed, is simultaneously serene and chaotic. The textures Ahlbrand achieves fuse childish pandemonium with a mature grasp of […]
What is a landscape? What exactly constitutes its borders and ambiguities? “Now Here: Theoretical Landscapes,” a new exhibit at The Carnegie in Covington, explores this complicated question, displaying a cornucopia of artworks by twenty-one regional artists who, through varied media, attempt to redefine the landscape genre. It becomes immediately evident upon entering the gallery that […]
