A Sky filled with Shooting Stars

No one walking along West 53rd Street on the way to MoMA this summer can miss Mickalene Thomas’s remarkable installation Le déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires in the window of The Modern restaurant. What may come as a surprise to many MoMA visitors though, are the direct links that exist between her installation [...]

I really don’t think I have ever met a more inspiring artist than Marina Abramović. She is only a few years older than me and I have followed her work like an awe-struck younger brother since I first became aware of her  work in the late 1970s. At every point in her career, from her [...]

Many readers of A Sky filled with Shooting Stars will know that Kiki Smith is an artist for whom I have enormous regard. Back in 2006 I named her Whitney retrospective “A Gathering” as ARTINFO’s joint-best New York museum show of the year (tying it with Sean Scully at the Met) and a few months [...]

When I predicted the top museum shows of 2009 for ARTINFO back in January, I remember being particularly excited about this one, Alias Man Ray: The Art of ReInvention that opens at the Jewish Museum on Sunday (and runs through next March). Now that I have had a chance to preview the show, I am [...]

One of the more important things that museum exhibitions can do is show us things we haven’t seen before. If that causes us to realize that we’d made assumptions that were ill-founded, then all the better. One New York institution that has an excellent track record in this regard is Asia Society, with shows like [...]

 
 
 
I know it’s beyond a joke now, but having experienced “Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective” at the Met yesterday I now formally reinstate it as New York’s museum show of 2009. I admit I was thrilled by the Guggenheim’s “The Third Mind”, and because I enjoyed such a breadth of the work that it included, [...]

 
I knew that declaring my exhibition of the year as early as February would come back and bite me in the ass. It is only the fact that the twin shows, “Claes Oldenburg: Early Sculpture, Drawings, and Happenings Films” and “Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen: The Music Room” are so much smaller than “The [...]

 
For a long time I have had a real enthusiasm for April Gornik’s painting, and not only because she was the subject of the very first interview that Barbara MacAdam asked me to do for ARTINFO in 2005. There is an unwritten rule over at ARTINFO that artists don’t get interviewed more than once, and [...]

 
 
Anyone who knows the what’s what in performance art acknowledges Tehching Hsieh as one of the great defining artists of the discipline. Having arrived here as an illegal immigrant from Taiwan in 1974, he made a series of five quite unbelievable year-long performances between 1978 and 1986, at least four of which were almost incomprehensibly difficult. [...]

 
 
When I looked forward at the beginning of the year to “The Generational: Younger than Jesus”, the New Museum’s first edition of its international triennial, I said I was hoping for “some spectacularly hit-and-miss controversy”. Now that I’ve seen the show I can confirm that the work it includes ranges from the not-quite-sublime to the utterly-ridiculous. Perhaps that’s [...]