Art in America - Most Recent Features

Minnie Evans

By Anne Doran — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Minnie Evans (1892-1987), a proudly self-taught black artist from North Carolina, made her first two drawings in 1935, compelled to do so by a voice in a dream. She created no more pictures for five years, then took up making art again, never stopping until a few years before her death. She is best known for stylized, mandalalike compositions composed of intertwined figural and floral designs, but she also produced surreal landscapes, interiors and biblical scenes.

Raphael Zarka

By Charlotte Bonham-Carter — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0100

In Raphaël Zarka’s recent exhibition at Bischoff/Weiss, the French artist (b. 1977) continued his interrogation of the dynamics of structures and shapes in an 11-minute video titled Gibellina Vecchia (2010), which was shot on 16mm film and transferred to HD. The piece revolves around the eponymous village in the Sicilian hills that was destroyed by an earthquake in 1968, and later rebuilt as Gibellina Nuova, about 12 miles away. In 1980, Alberto Burri was commissioned by the mayor of the city to construct a sprawling concrete monument among the ruins of the village.

33 Fragments Of Russian Performance

By Gay Morris — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0100

An intriguing exhibition of Russian performance was one of the central elements of Performa 11. The show, titled "33 Fragments of Russian Performance" and organized with Garage center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow, was exactly that: documentary shards (photos and videos primarily) of several dozen works that hinted at what has been happening in Russia since the 1970s.

Dafna Shalom

By Regine Basha — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Like many regional art scenes, Israel’s is tightly knit and has its own set of internal references. Artists from the region bear the responsibility of not only unpacking weighty issues but also rendering them communicable to a wider audience. Of late, we’ve seen many Israeli video artists move out of the country (often to Berlin or New York) to pursue this practice, launching successful international careers. In Dafna Shalom’s case, returning to Israel after living in New York for nearly two decades has possibly inspired her to create her best work yet.

Robert Heinecken

By Stephen Maine — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0100

More than a decade before Douglas Crimp's 1977 "Pictures" identified the appropriationist strategies of a generation, Robert Heinecken (1931- 2006) set aside his camera and turned to preexisting media imagery, particularly "the influx of printed promotional material," as he put it in a 1968 statement.

Vincent Vulsma

By Daniela Salvioni — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0100

A Baule mask from Ivory Coast/Guinea; African-inspired walnut stools by Charles and Ray Eames displayed with a set of wooden stools, ca. 1930s, from the Congo; a series of black and white Jacquard textiles that reproduce patterns of Kuba textiles, also from the Congo: these are the objects that constituted Vincent Vulsma’s exhibition at Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam. Walking a fine line, the emerging Dutch artist skirted some ethical conundrums close to home while tenaciously focusing on the broader institutional reception, display and cultural recycling by the West of sub-Saharan African esthetics and art objects.

Sergej Jensen

By Mark Prince — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Paintings may be pictures, but they are always objects. The blatant materiality of Sergej Jensen’s canvases made them seem part of the interior architecture of Neu’s gallery. Jensen has consistently had an ambivalent relation to the spaces in which he shows his work. Previously at Neu, he arranged mats on the floor that resembled his patchwork paintings, converting the gallery into a pseudo-living room, the paintings into decor that satirized the convention of a “high-art painting” show.

Josephine Halvorson

By Nancy Princenthal — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

In Josephine Halvorson's resolutely airless and mute new paintings, everything happens right on the surface. Like classic trompe d'oeil masters, Halvorson comes in close to objects whose raised features or appended materials seem to extend beyond the picture plane: a few square feet of pressed tin, its cream-colored paint chipped; a gray-painted wooden door, a crossbeam protruding at the top; a sheet of corrugated cardboard to which a piece of brown paper has been taped.

Sonya Clark

By A.M. Weaver — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

References to hair existed everywhere in this recent exhibition by Sonya Clark. As you walked into the spacious first floor gallery you were flanked, on the right, by a monumental portrait of Madam C.J. Walker composed of black pocket combs and, on the left, by a Victorian chair embellished with long braids made of black cotton thread that hang from the back and bottom. For those of you who don’t know of Walker, she is the black demigod of hair care.

Mark Cooper

By Ann Wilson Lloyd — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

In his recent show “More is More,” multimedium artist Mark Cooper crammed over 2,200 individual works, made between 2005 and 2011, into Samsøn’s long, narrow gallery. As a professor at Boston College and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Cooper has long been an influential presence in this city. He’s best known for his biomorphic fiberglass sculptures—large, crude, colorful—several of which were displayed on walls or the floor, or hung from the ceiling. He is also a skilled ceramist, photographer and painter.

Bill Scott

By Franklin Einspruch — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Bill Scott’s paintings have an atmosphere of ease, but consideration and reconsideration of beautiful form churn within them. Two or Three Nudes in a Landscape (2010) summarizes Scott’s endeavor, its delightful title alluding to an image that somehow is richly descriptive while in fact depicting nothing. Maybe a white-over-blue passage turns into a patch of sky, and the lollipop shapes become trees, but that’s as specific as it gets. The rest of the painting consists of colors that you would use to paint figures in a landscape if you adored Matisse.

Jennie C. Jones and Joe Winter

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Jennie C. Jones's exhibition "Absorb/Diffuse" was disconcerting in its quiet and stark emptiness. A series titled "Acoustic Paintings" (all 2011) was paired with an approximately 7-minute sound score called From The Low (2011), consisting of three movements: Low, Pulse and Rest. Rest, a period of complete silence, was running when I walked in, so I had to wait a minute or two until I heard anything.

Jessica Dickinson

By Faye Hirsch — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Jessica Dickinson works on small groups of paintings over a very long time—as much as a year. Each is inspired by some chance observation or physical phenomenon, which, while it constitutes her starting point, will disappear as an image over the course of the painting’s fabrication. The delicacy, even the loss, of the inspiring phenomenon is at odds with the almost overwhelming materiality of the finished work, which recalls Jay DeFeo’s The Rose in its accreted weight.

Joe Sola

By Brian Boucher — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

John Baldessari, coming down the mountain, bearing two stone tablets. Detailed Vietnam War scenes, lovingly painted on toenails. The chief executive, presenting a business card: “President. United States of America. Washington, D.C.” Such are the droll scenes in the faux-naïf paintings and drawings of Los Angeles artist Joe Sola, as seen in his recent show “The Senior Discount,” which also included a short video (all works 2010 or ’11).

Anton Kannemeyer

By Faye Hirsch — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

When, in 1992, Anton Kannemeyer and Conrad Botes began publishing Bitterkomix—the underground comic books written mainly in their native language, Afrikaans—they had a clear target for their biting satire, for apartheid had not yet entirely fallen in South Africa. Bitterkomix was a huge hit—revelatory, even liberating for many young South Africans. Then rainbow democracy was born, and truth and reconciliation warily accomplished; Kannemeyer moved into murkier struggles, and, eventually, from books to walls.

Gillian Jagger

By Edward M. Gómez — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

The British artist Gillian Jagger (b. 1930) has long lived and worked in the Hudson Valley, where she keeps a studio in the cavernous spaces of a former dairy barn in Ulster County. Retired since 2007 from Pratt Institute, Jagger taught sculpture for many years, emphasizing the personal, expressive, sometimes psychological aspects of art rather than its function as a mode of theoretical discourse. In recent years she has become best known for large-scale sculptures incorporating sections of fallen trees she finds on the land.

Harmony Hammond

By Jan Ernst Adlmann — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

It’s been said “there are no secrets except the secrets that keep themselves.” Among the many observations that one could float about Harmony Hammond’s recent paintings is that they convey the feeling of such secrets. One came away from this tour-de-force exhibition at once marveling at the sheer elegance of these highly original conceptions and feeling emotionally encumbered by the heavy enigma that they emanate.

Sally Finch

By Sue Taylor — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Sally Finch presented the 23 abstract drawings and paintings (2009-11) in her exhibition “Weather Studies” just as seasonal rains began to fall in the Northwest. But according to the titles of these works (from 7 to 24 inches square), the weather in question raged elsewhere—in Africa, India, Greenland, Japan. Decades of precipitation and changing temperatures in Calcutta or Sendai took visual form in hand-drawn grids as Finch transcribed monthly averages in tiny, penciled numerals and dots of acrylic paint. In Weather Study 2, Sudan, variegated horizontal bands of green, blue, purple or yellow dots suggest periodic monsoons or drought.

Graham Nickson

By Mary Proenza — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

As a 26-year-old Rome Prize recipient in 1972, Graham Nickson was already so convinced of painting’s transcendent power that he began testing his own painterly mettle with a hazardous subject: sunsets. If to the art world painting itself was marginal, sunset pictures were the epitome of trite irrelevance. For nearly 40 years since then, as the skies and landscapes in “Paths of the Sun” make clear, the New York-based British artist has stepped ever farther out on this limb, returning with increasingly eloquent work. The show juxtaposed 12 early small oils (1972-73) with 29 watercolors and three large canvases, all made from 1999 to 2011.

John Outterbridge

By Annie Buckley — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100

John Outterbridge’s recent exhibition “The Rag Factory” was a poetic treatment of relevant social issues, such as the stark division between haves and have-nots, and reflected the resilience and fragility of the human spirit. Curated by Kris Kuramitsu, it represented Outterbridge’s first solo show in Los Angeles since his 1996 exhibition at the Watts Towers Arts Center (where the artist served as director from 1975 to 1992). Born in Greenville, N.C., in 1933, Outterbridge arrived in L.A. in 1963, two years before the Watts riots. In the early ’60s, he began constructing assemblages using found objects and castoffs. The following decade—long before relational esthetics was popularized—he started merging art and activism with a focus on advocacy for African-Americans. The result has been a body of work marked by material innovation and empathic intelligence.