Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / The revised exhibition, at the Museum of fine Arts in Boston, with 73 paintings and 23 drawings, is a team effort mounted by the museum’s two curators, two guest curators, various museum staff and educators, the critic Homi Bhabha, and a trauma counselor who crafted a statement about “emotional preparedness” for the show. It begins: “The content of this exhibition is challenging. The Museum offers these words in a spirit of care and invitation.” Midway through the exhibition, visitors who find the material too disturbing can leave through a special exit before they encounter particularly vivid Klan imagery.
Tag: Philip Guston
Guston: Laugh out loud?
On Spring Break this week, I’ve been invited down to DC for a day or two where, besides staying in a swanky Jetson-style hotel, I’m looking forward to visiting a few galleries at Logan Circle and stopping by the National Gallery of Art to see the permanent Mel Bochner installation […]
Andy Piedilato in Bushwick
Settling in to Bushwick yesterday, I stopped by English Kills to see Andy Piedilato’s paintings. The most obvious thing to report is that the paintings are really, really big (144″ x 138″). Let’s face it, you have to admire an emerging artist who works at this kind of ambitious scale […]
Neo-Maternalism: Contemporary artists’ approach to motherhood
The December/January issue of The Brooklyn Rail is online, so go check out my article about contemporary artists’ approach to motherhood. I mean, come on, isn’t the entire messy process of creation, birth, and childrearing the ultimate unexplored content for conceptually-rooted art practice? “Ever since the Abstract Expressionists held forth […]
Guston’s paint still looks wet
At MoMA, installed in the teeming atrium space, I was happy to see seven of Philip Guston’s cartoon paintings from the sixties and seventies. I agree with Village Voice critic RC Baker that the paintings look startlingly fresh. “Guston (1913�1980) began his career in the ’30s, with stolid scenes of […]
Philip Guston’s stories
The Morgan Library & Museum presents the first major survey of Guston’s drawings in 20 years. Organized by the KunstMuseum Bonn, and the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung Munich, in cooperation with the artist�s estate, the show examines the importance of drawing throughout key periods of Guston�s career, from the mid-1940s to […]