By MARTHA SCHWENDENER
for New York Times
What would the proverbial alien, beamed into the Grey Art Gallery for a viewing of “Downtown Pix: Mining the Fales Archives, 1961-1991,” discern about New York toward the end of the last millennium? Maybe this: That it was very gritty, very gay and very Caucasian. Organized by Philip Gefter, a [...]
The Municipal Art Society, a nonprofit membership organization founded in 1893, is perhaps best known for its successful fight to save Grand Central Terminal — aided by the star power of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis — and for helping to scuttle Mortimer B. Zuckerman’s Columbus Circle towers by illustrating the mile-long shadow they would have cast [...]
Under a skylight in her tin-ceilinged loft near Union Square in Manhattan, the abstract painter Carmen Herrera, 94, nursed a flute of Champagne last week, sitting regally in the wheelchair she resents. After six decades of very private painting, Ms. Herrera sold her first artwork five years ago, at 89. Now, at a small ceremony [...]
Gabriel Orozco’s 1993 solo debut at the Museum of Modern Art was a barely there, very un-MoMA affair of a few photographs, a ball of clay, a hammock and some fresh fruit. His one-man show at Marian Goodman the next year was sparser still, with four plastic Dannon yogurt lids nailed to the walls of [...]
There’s a small, inspired exhibition cocooned inside “30 Seconds Off an Inch,” an exhibition of 60 disparate artworks by 42 artists at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Similarly, its catalog essay, while convoluted and sometimes sophomoric, takes a refreshingly visual, even formal approach to art that is usually admired exclusively for its political and social [...]
The 2010 edition of the Whitney Biennial — that giant survey of American art on the Upper East Side of Manhattan — will not only try to chronicle current goings-on in contemporary art, but it will also reflect the world at large. Thus, in these recessionary times, the show will be smaller than it has [...]
Whether the lashed back of an enslaved person, the charred remains of a lynching victim or a terrified marcher fleeing a fire hose, shocking images of degradation seem to dominate the visual history of the African-American experience. Amid so much hardship, one might wonder what, if anything, to say about the nature of black beauty [...]
Amira Edan, the director of Iraq’s National Museum, says that soon she will no longer have to worry so much that the famous institution remains closed to the public for fear of violence.
People will just be able to Google it. “It’s really wonderful,” she said Tuesday.
Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, had just made [...]
