Helena Metaferia Takes Back the Museum

NEWARK — Helina Metaferia’s deep engagement with pan-African and African-American aesthetics, as well as the visual language of protest, reverberates throughout her solo exhibition When Civilizations Heal. The culmination of the Ethiopian-American artist’s...

A Moving Encounter With the Art of Bernard Williams

CHICAGO — Nearly every summer in Chicago and its surrounding suburbs, some genuinely dumb public art is trotted out for the entertainment of visitors and residents alike. Sometimes it’s life-size fiberglass cows, other times giant butterflies. The most dreadful ones...

José María Velasco Lovingly Captured a Changing Mexico

LONDON — The National Gallery hasn’t loudly trumpeted its decade-long strategy to introduce British audiences to art beyond Europe. Instead, it diligently rectifies this art-historical narrow-mindedness by covering major overlooked bases, such as with recent...

The Visual Language of the Nuclear Age

On August 6, 1945, the United States detonated an atomic bomb on the populous city of Hiroshima, Japan, killing a quarter of a million people. Eighty years — almost to the day — since the devastation wreaked by that first nuclear weapon, Fallout: Atoms for War &...

For EJ Hill, Art Is an Act of Faith

There’s something about seeing a neon sign in daylight: The usual associations with seedy nightlife or unbridled consumerism are swept away by an otherworldly glow of light upon light. It can feel almost religious in the right context. That glow illuminates parts of...

Who Are Museums Really For? And Can We Change Our Minds?

The cinematic journey in Binnigula’sa’ (Ancient Zapotec People) (2024) begins in the Mexican countryside. Modern civilization — signified by concrete, metal, and powerlines — peeks through the green landscape to reveal a more rigid world of roads,...

Take a Trip Down the Catwalk With Andy Warhol 

Andy Warhol, “Male Bust” (c. 1957), ink on Strathmore paper (all photos Julie Schneider/Hyperallergic) Before Campbell’s soup cans, Brillo boxes, and famous faces became hallmarks of Andy Warhol’s culture-defining pop art, the artist worked as a department-store...

Jillian Conrad Redefines the Limits of Drawing 

HOUSTON — To say that I’m drawn to Jillian Conrad’s art might sound like an all-too-easy pun in a review of a show that explores drawing, but the sentiment holds. Since the early aughts, I’ve been following the psychic line of her practice. Conrad’s work marks the...

Hande Sever Tells a Story of War and Art 

LOS ANGELES — “The art department is one excellent example of how the arts of peace become the arts of war,” says the narrator of a United States Army film production over documentary footage of male figures drawing before it cuts to a clip of an animated cartoon...

How the Moomins Showed Us a More Compassionate World 

You could’ve fried an egg on the sweltering sidewalk I trekked across last Friday to get to the Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) — which is, happily, a city-mandated cooling center. Lately, the Central Branch’s resplendent Art Deco facade has been illuminated after dark...

The Berlin Biennale’s Complicit Silence

BERLIN — The Berlin Biennale had not even opened its doors to the public when criticism started rolling in. In May, curator Zasha Colah told an interviewer, “There is no censorship, I would say, in Germany.” In reality, there is ample documentation of the German...

Ruth Asawa Proved That Mothering Is Inherently Artistic

In 2008, I gave birth at home, in the bed I still sleep in today, to my second child; and instead of marveling at their vernix-covered scalp and the fact of their being born in the caul during a full moon, I had an extended anxiety attack, convinced I wasn’t a...