Author Archive

A dual-venue, five-decade retrospective in San Francisco affirms the social and artistic prescience of Suzanne Lacy, whose pioneering feminist
performances and long-term collaborative projects have melded empathy and defiance.

Gretchen Bender’s work from the 1980s, anticipating the numbing and subtly indoctrinating effect of today’s high-speed moving-image milieu, emphasized the need to see through media ploys and maintain a personal criticality.

With various shows currently marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, an analysis of Holland Cotter’s June 1994 A.i.A. article “Art after Stonewall,” which featured numerous artists’ reflections, reveals both continuity and startling change in the gay community at two twenty-five-year intervals.

Venerated African American assemblage artist Betye Saar, now ninety-three, discusses the psychology, as well as the cultural politics, of using “poor” flea market materials, including racially derogatory objects and pictures.

Responding to the psychedelia and social turmoil of the early 1970s, Belgium’s Sophie Podolski—herself gifted, schizophrenic, and suicidal produced a memorable burst of hybrid “graphic poetry” before her death at age twenty-one.

The photographs of Graciela Iturbide, especially when viewed through the lens of Octavio Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude, convey the artist’s quasi-mystical identification with the physical environs and folk traditions of her native Mexico.

In films, animations, and videos often tinged with futuristic menace, Pedro Neves Marques, a Portuguese artist based in New York, explores subjects like the strained relationships of biological researchers with one another and the natural world.

Raphael Rubinstein on Pete Gershon’s Collision: The Contemporary Art Scene in Houston, 1972–1985; plus related titles in brief.

Sue Taylor on Maggie Taft and Robert Cozzolino, eds., Art in Chicago: A History from the Fire to Now; plus related titles in brief.

Robert Motherwell’s daughter Lise recalls the simple delights of girlhood summers in Provincetown with her sister, father, and generous-spirited stepmother, Helen Frankenthaler.