Tag: Whitney Museum

Artist's Notebook

Plagens: Ralph Meeker, or why I like James Brooks as much as de Kooning

Peter Plagens has been a prominent voice in American art criticism for decades, providing trustworthy and eloquent guidance to the enigmatic and sometimes bewildering world of contemporary art. Plagens is also a practicing painter, which affords him special insight into art practices and sets him apart from other critics. He is drawn to undervalued work and has repeatedly demonstrated the rewards of looking carefully at what the klieg lights have ultimately passed over. On the occasion of Peter’s retirement as art critic for the Wall Street Journal, we are republishing this essay, which originally appeared in Art News in 2010. The piece starts with a look at Ralph Meeker, a half-forgotten movie actor, and opens into something larger: memory, family, and a life of paying attention to the things other people walk past. A pleasure to read, it’s the work of a critic who trusts his own eyes and his own words.  –Sharon Butler

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Group Shows

American Abstract Artists in the 1930s

Contributed by Jacob Cartwright / In 1957, Clement Greenberg penned the essay “The Late Thirties in New York,” reflecting on years that were formative for both him and American art. He noted that during that decade “the big event, as I saw it, was the annual show of the American Abstract Artists group.” The artists who formed American Abstract Artists (AAA) first began meeting in 1936, in response to curators like MoMA director Alfred Barr, whose formulation of abstract art didn’t extend beyond the European continent. By 1937, AAA had begun organizing the regular New York City group shows that so impressed Greenberg.

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Biennial

Doomscrolling 3-D + IRL: The 2026 Whitney Biennial

Contributed by Sharon Butler / The Whitney Biennial 2026 has a knack for knocking the human project, wistfully and ruefully examining the past, and planting dread about the future. Curators Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer, with Beatriz Cifuentes and Carina Martinez, made 300 studio visits, ultimately winnowing the roster down to 56 artists, duos, and collectives. The curators’ definition of what is “American” is expansive; the artists’ birthplaces span the globe, and many have settled in the US after fleeing wars and other forms of political turmoil….

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Obituary

Obituary: John Adams Griefen

John Adams Griefen (b. Worcester, MA, 1942; d. Bergerac, France 2025) was an American artist and early Color Field painter who made important contributions to abstract art in the United States and in Europe. In his successful career as a painter he had seventeen solo exhibitions in New York City, the first at age 27. Foremost, Griefen is known for the essence of color in his paintings, and for many years, he made large, often monumental, acrylic paintings on canvas. 

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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.

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Museum Exhibitions

By Laurie Fendrich / Critics have been lavish in their praise of the Brown, queer-themed figurative paintings by the Pakistani-born Brooklyn artist Salman Toor, currently […]

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