Three powerful women dressed in patterned sundresses, jewelry, and club-ready makeup are seated on a jumble of printed fabrics, fake flowers, and gold spray-painted fruit. Their pose is a familiar one, mimicking Edouard Manet’s scandalous—at the time—Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe (1862-3), except in this one all posers are clothed, female, black, and staring at me as though they were sussing me up—trying to discern my[…..]
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, M. Rebekah Otto reviews The Guantanamo Bay Museum of Art and History at the Worth Ryder Art Gallery. The Guantanamo Bay Museum of Art and History posits that the[…..]
French video artist Camille Henrot creates parallels between the mythical and the contemporary. In her first solo exhibition in the United States at the New Orleans Museum of Art, she investigates the legendary city of Ys in France and the vanishing coastal area of southern Louisiana that is occupied by the ancestral Houma Indians. Coastal erosion, in real and mythical tales, is at the heart[…..]
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, Bansie Vasvani reviews Barbad Golshiri’s Curriculum Mortis at Thomas Erben Gallery in New York City. The question of martyrdom pervades Barbad Golshiri’s sculptural installation of tombstones in[…..]
From our friends at KQED, today we bring you a review of Work in Progress: Approaching Utopia at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Author Sarah Hotchkiss notes, “…the exhibition makes an irrefutable argument for the importance of art as a tool of social change. The artists’ models, socially engaged artwork, and narrative experiments approach utopia, question it, and allow viewers to process the larger issues behind collective[…..]
Robert Heinecken is an artist who is hard to pin down. A photographer who rarely used a camera, he founded UCLA’s photography department in 1964. Skeptical of the documentarian role of photography, he mined images from mass media, prefiguring the appropriation strategies of Pictures Generation artists like Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine by at least a decade. Despite this, he was never able to achieve[…..]
The title of this year’s Venice Biennale, Il Palazzo Enciclopedico (The Encyclopedic Palace), illuminates the event’s political ideology via its philosophical and curatorial conceits. The main exhibition centers on a utopian fantasy of comprehensive knowledge, aspiring to a completist vision of human achievement with the caveat of inevitable failure built in. Though self-reflective in that sense, this theme does not acknowledge the long shadow of[…..]
