Appropriation and Representation
By Essay Issue 97
IN FALL OF 2016 I RETURNED TO THE CLASSROOM, filling in for a friend who was on sabbatical. The course was a seminar for art students, one that I had taught many times before I retired. My friend had used Chaim Potok’s My Name Is Asher Lev as one of the texts, just as I…
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Secret Identities, Shifting Shapes:
The Graphic Novels of Gene Luen Yang
By Essay Issue 95
ONE OF THE THREE NARRATIVES woven through American Born Chinese, Gene Luen Yang’s debut graphic novel, opens with Danny, a blond, blue-eyed teen who seems to be on the cusp of moving forward in his relationship with his longtime crush. The also blonde, blue-eyed girl is blushing just when Danny’s mom calls from the other…
Read MoreCindy Jackson’s Bevy of Boisterous Bodies
By Essay Issue 92
CONTEMPORARY FIGURATIVE ART may owe more to the golden age of comic books than many art watchers are prepared to admit. Beyond the ironic appropriation of comics by late art-world A-lister Roy Lichtenstein or au courant nihilistic punkster Raymond Pettibon, illustrated narrative has a much longer pedigree. Earlier in the twentieth century, the angular and…
Read MoreStill Mending: South Africa between the Shadow and the Light
By Essay Issue 92
NEXT TO THE ENTRANCE to the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg, South Africa, where the chief justices meet to uphold what has been called the “most progressive” of constitutions, stands a bronze sculpture by Dumile Feni, a South African of Xhosa descent. It is based on a smaller clay work made in 1987, at the height…
Read MoreGathering the Light: Sean Scully’s Montserrat Chapel
By Essay Issue 91
THE FIRST TIME SEAN SCULLY told me about his commission for a chapel on the grounds of the Benedictine monastery of Montserrat, in Spain, it was in a restaurant in Chelsea, in New York City, in November of 2010. Digging into his side pocket, he found a pen and started drawing on the paper tablecloth: the…
Read MorePresence in a Space: The Flickering Contradictions of Martin Puryear
By Essay Issue 91
IN 1997, THE ST. JAMES GUIDE TO BLACK ARTISTS called sculptor Martin Puryear a quiet revolutionary engrossed in the business of eroding art-world oppositions. “I would describe my usual working process as a kind of distillation—trying to make coherence out of things that can seem contradictory,” he says. “But coherence is not the same as resolution.…
Read MoreThe Empty Bed: Tracey Emin and the Persistent Self
By Essay Issue 90
THIS ALL HAPPENED IN 1998. A youngish woman, an artist, was at home in her council flat in the Waterloo neighborhood of central London. Council flats, you should know, are basically a British version of public housing. The woman’s name was Tracey Emin. She was having a lousy week. A relationship had gone sour. More…
Read MoreEcstatic Dislocation: The Art of Sedrick Huckaby
By Essay Issue 90
IN 2016, SAINT PATRICK’S DAY falls on a Thursday, bringing with it an early weekend. In the aftermath of apocalyptic north-central Texas thunderstorms, a sultry heat settles on the quiet residential street in Fort Worth where artist Sedrick Huckaby is hard at work preparing for his next exhibition. Huckaby is a painter, sculptor, and printmaker…
Read MoreSystem and Chaos: The Art of Linnéa Spransy
By Essay Issue 89
I am interested in limits, specifically, in their ability to generate surprise, even freedom. —Linnéa Spransy The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings. —Wendell Berry THE CANVASAS IN LINNÉA SPRANSY’S studio explode with images rich and strange: ribbons and lobes reproducing like bacteria in…
Read MoreThe Mosque Outside the Mosque: Aerosol Arabic and the One Experience
By Essay Issue 89
The Performance MOHAMMED ALI, a.k.a. Aerosol Arabic, emerges from the darkness onto center stage for his 2014 TED talk at the Vatican (available for streaming at aerosolarabic.com). A burly man, he moves gracefully. He apologizes for the way he’s dressed—not in the snappy outfit of a celebrity lecturer, but in jeans, sneakers, open shirt, and…
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