Tag: Grace Hartigan

Museum Exhibitions

Miró’s far-reaching tutelage

Contributed by David Carrier / “Miró and the United States,” now up at The Phillips Collection, offers a useful take on an important, much-discussed issue: the origins of Abstract Expressionism. Joan Miró (1893–1983) taught many Americans how to make a successful abstract painting. Between the First and Second World Wars, when American artists were finding themselves, Miró’s work was a welcome and beneficial influence. The Cubist paintings of Braque and Picasso and Matisse’s works from the early twentieth-century may have been greater. But, like Kandinsky, Miró provided…

Museum Exhibitions

Amy Sherald’s American dreams

Contributed by Margaret McCann /Amy Sherald’s paintings of mostly ordinary and upright African Americans, in “American Sublime” at the Whitney Museum, transcend portraiture, vaulting to socio-political metaphor. Their evocative titles – drawn from Emily Dickinson, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and other cultural figures – suggest an array of personalities or experiences. But the exhibition title, from Elizabeth Alexander’s poem of the same title, unsettles our understanding of what both figures and viewers behold.

Ideas & Influences

Artist’s Notebook: Jim Condron

In addition to his regular practice of solitary drawing, painting, and sculpture, Jim Condron is working on a project that involves an array of other artists, writers, and thinkers. The pieces produced are on display in “Collected Things,” a solo exhibition at Art Cake, through June 17. On the occasion of this charming and poignant show, _Two Coats of Paint_ invited Condron to share some of the artists, objects, and ideas that inform his work. Here’s his list.