News & Opinion - Art in America

(Event Ticker Requires JavaScript and Flash) Download the latest Flash player

Pistoletto Is Our Mirror

"Arte Povera is the base of all the work that I do," says Michelangelo Pistoletto, which may surprise some admirers of his highly varied works. "We didn't want to just produce objects: we wanted to produce change." A new exhibition of Pistoletto's "Mirror Paintings," on view at Luhring Augustine in New York [through Apr. 28], shows the 78-year-old artist continuing his eternal quest to find meaning within a mirrored reality of contemporary society.
Read More

At Gladstone, Ugo Rondinone Celebrates Solitary People

by Aimee Walleston 3/28/12

"I'm an artist first—but I like to have other people's art around me," says New York-based Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone. He's organized a group exhibition, "The Spirit Level," on view through Apr. 21 at both of Gladstone Gallery's Chelsea locations. The show, which features 19 artists, makes dramatic pairings of artists who have worked in different time periods and mediums but share a similar purview. "They are more isolated than socially engaged, as artists," says Rondinone. "Their work would exist without the public—it's not the public that completes the work."
Read More

The Hunter-Gatherer: Henry Taylor as Sculptor

by Aimee Walleston 3/22/12

"You don't want to be like Michael Jordan when he left basketball to play baseball-but you do have to keep pushing forward," says California painter Henry Taylor of his recent foray into sculpture and installation. Taylor, who turns 54 this year, is best known for portraits in acrylic of the family, friends, strangers and heroes of music and sport who cross his amiable path. His lush, imperfect surfaces complement and humanize his subjects—each piece is hyperbolized with rich color, intuitive gestural brushwork and subtle pop sabotage, including modified brand logos.
Read More

Carroll Dunham Opens Windows for New Talent

by Aimee Walleston 3/12/12

For painter (and alum, class of 1967) Carroll Dunham, Phillips Academy Andover's production of all-star artists, among them Frank Stella, Peter Halley and Carl Andre, is not merely written in the stars. Generations of accomplished artists might remember the school's Addison Gallery of American Art, which was the first American museum to show Josef Albers and boasts a permanent collection of important works by American artists ranging from Sargent and Whistler to Pollock. In recent years, the museum and has hosted exhibitions by Kara Walker, Alex Katz and William Wegman—to name a few.
Read More

Josephine Meckseper Drills to New York's Dark Center

by Aimee Walleston 3/5/12

This spring, Josephine Meckseper brings the pernicious quest for black gold to New Yorkers' backyard. "Manhattan Oil Project," the artist's first foray into monumental public sculpture, opens Mar. 5 at The Last Lot, a project space at 46th Street and 8th Avenue administered by Art Production Fund. The kinetic sculpture consists of two life-size steel oil pumpjacks, modeled after mid-20th-century rigs the artist found in Texas.

"Last fall, I made a trip to Texas to look at how oil pumpjacks were still being used," Meckseper told A.i.A. on the evening before the concrete foundations for the sculptures would be poured. "A lot of the jacks are not being used now, so what I saw in Texas was almost more of a cemetery for oil pumpjacks-like a science fiction monument to the past."
Read More