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 MoreAndrea writes about the pioneering light artist, Thomas Wilfred, whose use of electricity and projected light in the early 20th Century was an influence on artists of later eras, including James Turrell. Wilfred’s works were on view recently at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in a show (closed Jan. 7) organized by Yale University Art Gallery. The works are difficult to conserve and that may explain why the artist fell out of circulation, as his works sat in storage waiting for tune-ups or fixes. The Museum of Modern Art owns one of Wilfred’s seminal works and Andrea thinks MoMA should bring the piece back for a new audience.
Read MoreNew Artblog contributor, Naveena Vijayan, speaks with the newly-appointed executive director of The Delaware Contemporary, Joseph Gonzales. Gonzales aims to make the museum a gathering space for the public, even while maintaining its reputation as a happening spot for contemporary art.
Read MoreThe Fabric Workshop and Museum, founded in 1977 by arts visionary Marion “Kippy” Boulton Stroud, is celebrating its 40th birthday with a major retrospective exhibit. Process and Practice: 40 Years of Experimentation hilights archived ephemera from the institution’s famed artist-in-residence program that has been preserved for decades in “artist boxes.” Artblog’s Imani Roach spoke with Susan Lubowsky Talbott, the Museum’s Executive Director, about exhibiting “failures,” engaging the public, and her legacy. What was the most surprising thing she discovered in those artist boxes? Listen to find out. Imani interviewed Susan at the Fabric Workshop and Museum on January 9th, 2018; the podcast is 30 minutes long.
Read MoreEvan gives props to the famous New York portraitist, Chuck Close, for being a virtuoso of photo techniques (everything from daguerrotypes to large-format Polaroids). But in a show of 90 prints, all very well executed, some of the works — and especially the celebrity photographs — fail to ignite empathy or excitement, he says. NOTE: This post was written prior to the sexual harassment charges against Close were made public. The article is about the artist’s photographs and does not deal with his behavior towards women.
Read MoreAndrea Kirsh runs down to Richmond to check out the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and touch base with its Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Art and Education, Michael Taylor. We at Artblog remember Michael fondly when he was Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the PMA! It looks as if he’s brought some of his Philly love to the VMFA with acquisitions of works by Tristin Lowe and Daniel Heyman! Andrea reports.
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