An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Friday, January 9, 2026
Contributed by Margaret McCann / Ben Shahn’s lifelong advocacy against poverty, racism, and fascism is showcased in his solo exhibition “Ben Shahn and Nonconformity,” now up at the Jewish Museum. With engaging documentation, an array of global topics are addressed in printmaking, photography, commercial art, and calligraphy – and some excellent paintings.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / “Paul Feeley: The Shape of Things” is Garth Greenan Gallery’s fourth solo exhibition for the painter, who died in 1966. But it is the first to ask – and answer – what happened when Feeley, known for re-introducing geometry to post-war abstraction, grew tired of his signature style. This show at last gives proper attention to Feeley’s drive to move beyond the flatness of the canvases he had been producing for years.
Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / I saw my favorite piece of Cady Noland ephemera before I ever saw one of her sculptures. On Instagram, a gallery posted a photo of a tee-shirt. It’s well loved and sun-faded, advertising the opening of Noland’s solo show at American Fine Arts on Wooster Street. The date of the opening is September 11, 2001. Opening the same day, across Canal Street on Broadway, was a show by Gelatin (Gelitin since 2005) at Leo Koenig’s gallery. The year before, the group had gone up to the 91st floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center and hung out a window. Josh Harris, founding Silicon Alley millionaire/internet pioneer/legendary liar, took photos from a helicopter. The Gelatin show was sparsely attended. I don’t know if anyone made it to Cady’s.
We’re up in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. The floor of Dudek’s studio is covered wall-to-wall with objects. One can ascertain individual sculptures, or perhaps parts of sculptures that might become sculptures one day. I ask if this is how it always is.
Contributed by David Carrier / What is the present state of painting? For as long as I have been writing art criticism, that question has been much discussed. Some critics have said painting was dead, perhaps to be replaced by Minimalist or conceptual art. Others have argued that because painting is an inherently bourgeois art form, it can continue only as long as it is politically tinged. The Milwaukee Art Museum’s show “50 Paintings” takes an essentially empirical approach to the question. Co-curators Margaret Andera and Michelle Grabner gathered mostly mid-sized recent paintings by artists well-known in the New York art world and demonstrated how varied and how good painting is today. There are abstractions by Peter Halley and Mary Heilmann, a landscape by April Gornik, and figurative paintings by Cecily Brown and Nicole Eisenman. It’s natural for a visiting critic to pick favorites. Mindful of the unhappy fate of Paris, whose judgment about which goddess was most beautiful triggered the Trojan War, I dare to name mine.
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
