Andrea Kirsh takes a trip to Chicago and shares her experience of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s recent Howardena Pindell retrospective. Across an impressive range of media and techniques, Pindell’s work tackles race, labor and the technologies that bind. This long-overdue exhibition, which was on view at the MCA from February 24 through May 20, will travel to the Virginia Museum of Fine Art later this year before showing at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum in early 2019.
Read MoreMandy Palasik visits Spanish-born architect and industrial designer Patricia Urquiola’s first solo exhibition stateside, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through March 18th. “Patricia Urquiola: Between Craft and Industry” celebrates Urquiola’s innovative use of familiar forms and traditional techniques to activate both mind and body.
Read MoreImani Roach ponders “Went Looking for Beauty: Refashioning Self,” an exhibition of photographs by Deborah Willis currently at the African American Museum in Philadelphia. On view through April 29th 2018, this partial retrospective shows thematic highlights from Willis’s decades-long journey documenting the richness of black aesthetic and cultural practices, and demonstrates her continuing evolution as an artist.
Read MoreSometimes a show can be too big. Andrea talks about the new, 277+-work exhibition combining outsider and mainstream art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and says it includes many gems that are wonderful to see, but that the show breaks no new ground and winds up overwhelming even the hard-bitten art lover. She provides a few tips on what’s not to be missed.
Read MoreLeah Gallant, Artblog’s 2017 New Art Writing Challenge winner, is back, and this time she’s visiting the Penn Museum’s Asia collections. Here she ponders the Dowager Empress, a Qing Dynasty Chinese quartz crystal sphere of largely unknown origins and history. Gallant slows down to uncover the source of its continued allure, even in our digital age.
Read More
