In her painting United States of Attica (1972), the artist Faith Ringgold presents the familiar American map in a new light. It is darkened and covered with a jumble of texts that give it a confused appearance – a confusion heightened by the solid blocks of red and green supported by black lines, reminiscent of the Pan-African...
What does the word ‘Dhaka’ evoke for you? Dhaka is a city of hustle and bustle with a lot of soul. The density of the city generates an energy of togetherness that is addictive, which is probably why we get so many repeat visitors to Dhaka Art Summit [DAS]. What is your first memory of...
In the lush hills of Malibu, California, green from a fresh bout of winter rain, a rail-thin man had just wet himself. It was January 2016 and the character, illustrated by artist Julien Ceccaldi, stood grinning at the entrance to Paramount Ranch – a Western saloon town movie set – as he peed his pants...
As soon as you step foot in the gallery, you’re transported back in time, back to the Postwar period in the Paris neighborhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, surrounded by the era’s best artists. Nicolas De Staël, Jean Dubuffet, Victor Brauner, and Jean Fautrier can all be found at Applicat-Prazan. It’s a two-part time capsule, with one outpost on Rue de Seine and, since...
In 2022, OpenAI – one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence research laboratories – released the text generator ChatGPT and the image generator DALL-E 2. While both programs represent monumental leaps in natural language processing and image generation, they’ve also been met with apprehension. Some critics have eulogized the college essay, while others have even...
Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois Chicago will host “Reckless Rolodex,” a group exhibition from Jan. 13 until March 18 that celebrates the influence of the Chicago-based performance artist Lawrence Steger. Steger, who was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1961 and died in Chicago in 1999, will be honored by the work of...
What obligation does a portrait photographer have to their subject? Is it their duty to cast that person in the best light, or the most revealing light? As chief curator at the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography, I have worked with the images of fashion and portrait photographer Richard Avedon on a handful...
1 January 2023 marked the centenary of the birth of Ousmane Sembène, the Senegalese novelist and filmmaker hailed as the “father of African cinema”. Over the course of five decades Sembène published 10 books and directed 12 films across three distinct periods. He has been celebrated for his beautifully crafted political works, which range in...
Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, recently dismissed Erika López Prater, an adjunct faculty member, for showing two historical Islamic paintings of the Prophet Muhammad in her global survey of art history. Following complaints from some Muslim students, university administrators described such images as disrespectful and Islamophobic. While many Muslims today believe it is inappropriate...
Nina Childress sits down with Thomas Chatterton Williams to discuss painting, punk, and the politics of bad taste. The French-American artist Nina Childress has built a decades-spanning career around the indefatigable interrogation of ‘bad’ art and taste. Shaped by the rebellious spirit of punk rock, her approach has always been heterodox and fluid. Since the...
