Who was here first—Nancy Spero, or Hernán Cortés? It may be too much to call Spero (or anyone) a “universal” artist but her work certainly speaks to the weird postcolonial hybrids that survive as culture in the twenty-first century. Especially in this retrospective at the Museo Tamayo, a Brutalist building...
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As of this writing in mid-November, “American MONUMENT” by lauren woods has been “paused” (not withdrawn) by the artist. It is a gesture meant to protest the firing of Kimberli Meyer, director of the University Art Museum at California State University in Long Beach and an instrumental collaborator in woods’s...
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Ask Cincinnati native Tony Tasset for a sculpture and you’ll get anything from a giant eyeball to a depressed Paul Bunyan to a steel-and-resin rainbow. Invited to the inaugural FRONT International Triennial in Cleveland, Ohio, he made Judy’s Hand Pavilion (2018), a mammoth silver-colored fiberglass hand modeled on that of...
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In the back of Ballroom Marfa plays Emilija Škarnulyte’s video Sirenomelia (2018)—a short apocalyptic trilogy that explores the ruins of some of our species’ most advanced achievements in physics. A camera drifts, disembodied, through the Super-Kamiokande neutrino observatory in Japan. Pieces of CERN’s giant supercollider in Switzerland peel apart as...
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Like a thesis hidden in a footnote, a small projection in one corner of an exhibition of junkyard complexity shows a loop from John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), starring John Wayne and James Stewart. In the scene, Stewart’s character, a lawyer in the frontier town of...
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On September 19, 2017, Mexico City was hit by one of the most destructive earthquakes in the country’s history. Gallery Weekend Mexico City was originally scheduled to open September 21, by which time everyone who could was out in the streets clearing rubble and handing out food and water. The...
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