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 [...]

This Wednesday, March 3, sees the opening of the twelfth edition of the Armory Show, the biggest yet, with almost 300 galleries exhibiting. Of course the Armory Show’s arrival in New York City each spring is not simply about one of the world’s most important art fairs. There is the palpable sense of the art [...]

Had I not stumbled upon performance art in the early 1970s, it is very possible that I would have dedicated my artistic efforts to abstract painting after the particular example of my compatriot Richard Smith (born 1931). When I was a young British art student there were very few artists for whom I had more [...]

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 [...]

Thomas Allen has been a favorite photographer of mine since I first saw his work at the Foley Gallery in 2004. He describes his work quite simply: “I work with vintage paperbacks, mainly 1950s pulp novels. I cut them with an Exacto knife and make pop-up books. Then I light them for very dramatic effect [...]

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’ve known Yigal Ozeri for something like four years now, and written about his work for ARTINFO on several occasions. He is a genuinely larger than life character, and one of the most voluble, most likeable characters on the New York art scene. Born in Israel in 1958, Mr Ozeri has been working here for [...]

One of the hottest tickets at this summer’s Venice Biennale is for the British Pavilion, where 1999’s Turner Prize winner Steve McQueen’s film Giardini is showing. Giardini is a remarkable alternative view of Venice, featuring the municipal gardens where many of the Bienniale’s pavilions stand, but filmed in February long after the circus has left [...]