O bitter is the knowledge that one draws from the voyage! The monotonous and tiny world, today, Yesterday, tomorrow, always, shows us our reflections, An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom! —Charles Baudelaire, Le Voyage (1861)[1] Despite the seemingly endless portrayal in the media of increased violence around the world, statistical analysis suggests that, as a species, humans have become less violent.[2] I wonder,[…..]

Radcliffe Bailey’s current exhibition at Contemporary Art Center New Orleans rewards multiple visits. Comprising seven large-scale works by the Atlanta-based artist, the exhibition gathers an intensely personal constellation of imagery that has continued to distinguish Bailey as a contemporary artist of significant aesthetic and critical power. Bailey’s emphasis on the rich symbolic context of the liminal, or the in-between, provides support for his expansive definition[…..]

From our partners at Art Practical, today we bring you a review of Trevor Paglen’s current exhibition at Altman Siegel Gallery in San Francisco. Author John Zarobell writes, “[The work] represents both a bit of art-historical posturing and an active response to government surveillance that allows viewers to imagine an alternative to our current condition. Perhaps a gallery is as good a place as any to[…..]

Jim Roche’s life is such a good yarn, there is a danger of it overshadowing his work. Before Roche was out of graduate school at the University of Dallas, he was one of the first artists ever to exhibit ceramics at the Whitney; in 1987 he was the record holder for the La Carrera Mexican 1,000cc Motorcycle Road Race; he won an NEA fellowship in[…..]

Shotgun Reviews are an open forum where we invite the international art community to contribute timely, short-format responses to an exhibition or event. If you are interested in submitting a Shotgun Review, please click this link for more information. In this Shotgun Review, Forrest McGarvey reviews Tomokazu Matsuyama’s Come with Me at Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco. In Come With Me, Japanese American artist Tomokazu[…..]

Today from our friends at REORIENT, we bring you an excerpt from Nicola Baird’s review of Islamic Art Now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Baird notes that “the dialogue surrounding the validity of the term ‘Islamic’ as a meaningful art-historical classification continues to attract attention. Indeed, what is Islamic art, and is such a term appropriate?” This article was originally published on February[…..]

Photographs have many potential uses. They can serve as objective documents of history, standing in for memory, ideas, and sensory representations, but they also have the capacity to manifest images of fictional narratives that are markedly creative. Nando Alvarez-Perez’s photographs, often produced in a series, mirror the many capacities of the photograph, capturing an array of past and future meanings, motifs, styles, and contexts. At[…..]