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Masculinity, Identity and My Grandfather’s Rough Hands
I was at the opening for George Kokines: Layers Revealed at the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago three weeks ago. While I do some consulting for the museum, the fact is that I had absolutely nothing...
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Sculptor Ruth Asawa Wires the World
Her friend and mentor R. Buckminster Fuller called her “the most gifted, productive and originally inspired artist that I have ever known personally.” In San Francisco, she’s considered a city...
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Black Power Art Raises a Fist at the Brooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum is taking the current, horrific state of American identity politics very seriously, and I am here for it. Over the last couple of years, the museum has showcased work by “Black...
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Meet the Brains Behind ‘The Female Role Model Project’
What’s a female role model? If a theater artist and a scientist, say, aimed both to ask and answer this question, surely they’d want creative elements within their research as well as scientific ones....
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Impressionist Berthe Morisot Finally Gets Her Day
Painter Berthe Morisot (1841-95) was just as intrepid an artist as the other rebels who formed the once-derided, now-lauded Impressionist movement. But, in contrast to the reputation and name...
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Jack Whitten’s Sculptures Are a Revelation
Jack Whitten made rich, captivating sculptures for more than half a century, but we’re only seeing them now. He only showed any of them a couple of times, well off the art world’s beaten path, in a...
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LIC Artists Pledge to Resist Amazon Art Washing
Robert Moses would absolutely have bulldozed an entire thriving neighborhood, displacing and thus destroying the local communities. He would have gotten a particular thrill if those erstwhile...
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Our Tech-Artist Future May Look Like Justin Stewart
Tech startup founder, fashion model and conceptual artist Justin Stewart has lived a lot of lives, and he’s only 28. His story fascinates me because I think it’s the future of the...
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Now On Deck: The Jackie Robinson Museum
The newly sworn-in group of galvanized women and men of the 116th Congress brings the promise of vital new leadership in Washington, DC. Many of these freshman representatives are people of color,...
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25 Change-Making Artists You Should Track During 2019
A new year has begun on the Gregorian calendar, and we are all in it together. In my professional networks, it seems that the social impact of artists will be more imperative in 2019 than in recent...
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Bringing Home the World: The Daguerreotypes of Girault de Prangey
There really is something new under the sun. It’s on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 12 in “Monumental Journey: The Daguerreotypes of Girault de Prangey.” Why is a show of 120...
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Five Reasons We Should Pay Attention to Egypt
President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt is a big fan of Russian President Vladimir Putin. I know because I was living in Cairo in 2015 when the city rolled out its red carpet treatment for Putin’s...
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Learning and Unlearning from the Bauhaus
Under the heading of “what’s old is new again,” the 100-year-old Bauhaus, a radical experiment in art, architecture and design education, is once again having a Moment. To mark the centenary,...
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Will Chicago’s New Mayor Support the City’s Artists?
Apr. 1 is April Fool’s Day and on that day, the Mayor of Chicago will still be Rahm Emanuel. In May 2011, I confess that I rather liked candidate Emanuel, with his ballet background, his Obama...
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Nari Ward Uses Found Materials to Ground His Work in Community
A large eye — unfocused and soft, jaunty in another circumstance, but here with an opaque expression that could signal fear or resignation or resistance — peers out through an opening in the structure,...
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Sackler, Altria, MacArthur: Ethical Quicksand in Big Philanthropy
Nonprofit knickers are twisting everywhere these days. Let’s start with the Sackler family. Just in case you were in an opioid-induced coma over the last few months, the Sackler family owns Purdue...
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At Driehaus Museum, Yinka Shonibare Fabricates Post-Colonial Identity
“A Tale of Today: Yinka Shonibare CBE” at Chicago’s Driehaus Museum until Sept. 29, is more an intervention than an installation. With an insouciant flair, the British-Nigerian artist’s mannequins...
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Two Cities Getting Arts and Culture Right: Kansas City
Last month, the third season of Queer Eye premiered on Netflix. I confess I binged all eight episodes, mostly because the season was shot for five months in and around Kansas City, a city bridging two...
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Gainsborough Family Album: A New Look at an Old Master
It’s not often a university art museum corrals more than 40 drawings and oil paintings by a certified Old Master. “Gainsborough’s Family Album,” at the Princeton University Art Museum, is not just a...
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All the Good News I Could Find
Everything is terrible. Like, significantly worse than even my goth-girl self could imagine. The list of things that terrify, disgust or annoy me is seemingly endless: Donald Trump, Brexit, Sri Lanka,...
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