David Ebony and ARTbooks

James Castle’s Silent Universe

Interview with John Beardsley by David Ebony Today, James Castle (1899-1977) is renowned for the richly nuanced surface textures of his gray-scale drawings, his moody and mystical views of the environs of his home in rural Idaho, and the eccentric renderings and paper constructions of figures and animals that captured

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Changeability for Survival: Sanford Biggers’s Codeswitch

Interview with the artist by David Ebony Sanford Biggers is a multifaceted, multi-talented artist with a singular, global vision. A major touring museum solo of works by the Los Angeles-born (1970), New York-based artist, Codeswitch features some sixty large-scale “quilt paintings,” as well as a number of relief constructions, and videos. Scheduled to

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Viva Mexico! Artist Visionaries and Rabble-rousers: Los tres grandes and Their Impact on America

Interview with Whitney Museum of American Art curator Barbara Haskell by David Ebony    The Whitney Museum of American Art’s groundbreaking and visually sumptuous survey, Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925-1945, arrived during a contentious time in the U.S. It opened on February 17, 2020, a charged political moment

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Patterns of Promiscuity: The Pattern and Decoration Movement in American Art of the 1970s and ’80s

Interview with curator and author Anna Katz by David Ebony Pattern & Decoration (P&D) was an intense, but short-lived avant-garde art movement spanning the early 1970s, through the mid-1980s. It evolved from a coterie of young New York artists, but quickly took hold throughout the country, and also gained attention

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A Day at the Beach and Some Other Interesting Times at the 2019 Venice Biennale

By David Ebony  I. La Biennale di Venezia #58  The 2019 Venice Biennale, on view through November 24, has the head-scratching, ironic title “May You Live in Interesting Times.” The exhibition’s American-born, London-based curator Ralph Rugoff, director of the Hayward Gallery since 2006, says that the phrase has been invoked

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The Artist at Home with Her Art: Ruth Asawa

Interview with Tamara H. Schenkenberg by David Ebony   Japanese-American artist Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) is a unique figure in contemporary art. Her abstract sculptures, created with a novel, looped wire technique that resembles basket-weaving, are often misunderstood. For some, they embody the clash between craft and “fine art,” remaining uncertain as

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Destabilizing the Image: An Andy Warhol Retrospective

Interview with Donna De Salvo by David Ebony New art’s never new when it’s done. . . It’s not new art. You don’t know it’s new. You don’t know what it is. It doesn’t become new until about ten years later, because then it looks new. — Andy Warhol, The

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In Your Digital Dreams: Art in the Age of the Internet

Interview with Jeffrey De Blois By David Ebony One of my first internet projects was to write a monthly column for a website called Art Icons, beginning in the early 1990s. An experimental site, short-lived, and now defunct, Art Icons was perhaps one of the first web venues devoted exclusively

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Long Distance Affair: Latin American Artists in the “City of Light”

Interview with author Michele Greet By David Ebony At the turn of the twentieth century, Paris was electric in many ways. Electric street lights replaced gas lamps, and the hyper-energized “City of Light” was the indisputable center of the international art world. Throughout the first decades of the new century,

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Illuminating the Void: Gordon Matta-Clark’s Urban Interventions

Interview with Bronx Museum curator Antonio Sergio Bessa By David Ebony In recent years, I have been periodically spending time away from the city, in a rural area in upstate New York. It’s a pleasure to be closer to nature after many years as a city dweller. Gardening is a

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