Interview with curators Stephanie D’Alessandro and Luis Pérez-Oramas by David Ebony The paintings of Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973)—simply known as Tarsila—and the theory of Anthropophagy, or the philosophy of “cultural cannibalism,” introduced in 1928 by Tarsila’s first husband, Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954), were for me a
Since taking up photography in the mid-1960s, Robert Adams (b. 1937) has quietly become one of the most influential visual chroniclers of the evolving American landscape. Before turning full-time to photography in the 1970s, Adams was a literature professor, and in a recently published collection of inspiring essays, he reminds
Antonio Sergio Bessa– In his foreword to the 2007 Whitney catalogue, museum director Adam Weinberg wrote with great insight that Gordon Matta-Clark’s work “resisted commodification and the museum context.” I would add that to counter the tendency to commodify, the experiential element in presenting his work is of utmost importance.
From our colleagues at The Metropolitan Museum of Art comes an interview between Rachel High, Publishing and Marketing Assistant in the Met’s editorial department, and Kelly Baum, curator of an exhibition on the art and history of delirium from 1950 to 1980, which is on view at the Met Breuer
Happy Halloween! Here’s an illustrated excerpt from the new book, The Ivory Mirror by Stephen Perkinson, which accompanies an outstanding exhibition at the Bowdoin College Art Museum. Memento Mori… …literally translated as “remember [that you are] to die,” a set of words, a picture, or an object that functioned as a
James A. W. Heffernan— Fifteen months ago, the Salzburg Festival first staged an opera that has just opened at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York: Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel. Based on Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film of that title, the opera tells the story of a lavish dinner party
The exhibition “Gauguin: Artist as Alchemist,” which was on view this summer at the Art Institute of Chicago, was called “exhaustive and exhilarating” in the Wall Street Journal and a “resounding, rollickingly diverse exhibition” in the New York Times. It wowed visitors with an unprecedented exploration of Gauguin’s works in various
John Gribbin— Who was the first person to realise that gravity is a universal force possessed by every object in the Universe, which attracts every other object? Isaac Newton, right? Wrong! Newton got the idea, and other insights which fed into his theory of gravity, from Robert Hooke, a seventeenth-century polymath
During the second half of the nineteenth century, a remarkable number and variety of women artists were drawn to Paris. Featuring thirty-seven women from eleven different countries, a new, beautiful, and important illustrated book, Women Artists in Paris, 1850-1900, explores the strength of their creative achievements, and pays tribute to these pioneers
John Gribbin— The Universe began. The origin of everything we see about us – stars, planets, galaxies, people – can be traced back to a definite moment in time, 13.8 billion years ago. The ‘ultimate’ question that baffled philosophers, theologians and scientists for millennia has been answered in our lifetime.