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Mirrormind: Lia Chavez and the Artistic Process

By Katie Kresser Essay

Neither the action nor the actors can be anticipated…. They begin as an unknown adventure in an unknown space.          —Mark Rothko, 1947 OUR ENCOUNTER with reality is endlessly generative. Both Subject and Object, the contemplative and the contemplated, are replete with a beautiful, orderly complexity. The authentic artwork—glittering, effulgent with metaphysical…

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Far as the Curse is Found: The Art of Scott Kolbo

By Cameron J. Anderson Essay

The prophet is a realist of distances, and it is this kind of realism that you find in the best modern instances of the grotesque.                             —Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners SOME MONTHS AGO, while traveling, I walked full-force into the sloping ceiling of the unfamiliar guest room where I was staying. The blow to…

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Hanging Gardens: The Drawings of Gala Bent

By Hannah Faith Notess Essay

GALA BENT WAS ONCE a landscape painter who lived in Indiana, born and raised in the Midwest. Her paintings, acrylic on paper, featured dark, heavy, and flat horizontal spaces. But she used to dream about mountains. That is, until she found herself surrounded by them. When she and her husband, fellow artist Zack Bent, moved…

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Ecologies of Knowing

By Mark Sprinkle Essay

Ecologies of Knowing: What Natalie Settles Learned in the Lab   IN 2011, NATALIE SETTLES sat down for coffee and a conversation with Stephen Tonsor, head of an evolutionary plant genetics lab at the University of Pittsburgh. Settles had recently moved to Pittsburgh after a decade in Madison, Wisconsin, where she had been fascinated with and…

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Learning to Live on the Spiral Jetty

By Jeffrey L. Kosky Essay

IN JULY OF 2014 I went to find Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in the Utah desert, about two hours by car from Salt Lake City. Massive, remote, and seemingly useless, Spiral Jetty has the feel of a lost work—one so far out of sight as to be out of mind:  most of us don’t even…

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The Visual Jewishness of Mark Podwal

By Menachem Wecker Visual Art

“For me, drawing is a form of prayer. Drawing and painting are how I express my Jewishness. I never took an art lesson, and I’m totally self-taught. I believe I’ve been blessed. And somehow a path that was not leading to my becoming an artist led me to where I was not planning on going.”

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Noah Buchanan and the Renewal of Mystery

By Gordon Fuglie Essay

IT WAS THE FIRST FULL DAY of the fall semester at the New York Academy of Art, and California artist Noah Buchanan was riding the Number 2 subway to lower Manhattan’s Tribeca district where he would disembark five blocks south of the school. The Brazilian beat of Paul Simon’s Rhythm of the Saints thrummed on…

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Karen Laub-Novak: A Catholic Expressionist in the Era of Vatican II

By Gordon Fuglie Essay

IN COLD WAR-ERA AMERICA, one of the more remarkable cultural developments was the efflorescence of visual arts programs in colleges and universities. This unprecedented expansion from 1945 to 1990 was launched even as most Americans remained indifferent, skeptical, or hostile to the rise of modern art. The upsurge in academic art programs attracted artistically inclined…

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