Arlene Shechet: Skirts

By David Rhodes

APRIL 2020 | ArtSeen

With an intense emphasis on color, the multi-tiered, often column-like structures achieve a fresh synthesis of painting and sculpture. This is more than it may at first seem: Shechet has long been interested in ideas from the West and the East—both Freudian psychoanalysis and Buddhist teaching—a practice that allows for the invention she excels at to encompass non-formal factors, or rather to integrate idea, desire, and process.

How to Live a Best Life, With Melisa Tien

By Matthew Paul Olmos

MAR 2020 | Theater

The term “living your best life” is an identity concept which seems rampant on social media—this idea that whatever we might be doing with ourselves, living one’s “best life” is completely in our own hands; it is a readily available utopia should we choose to live it. For Tien, this play came from the process of seeing this concept of a “best life” against the backdrop of the “real racial and economic divides” which were being heavily reported in the media while she was writing.

Jennifer Bolande: The Composition of Decomposition

By Sahar Khraibani

APRIL 2020 | ArtSeen

Now more than ever, we are faced with news that rapidly turns into history, having to instantly make sense of and adapt to the current state with which we are presented. Bolande’s decades-long practice probes this process as we experience the proliferation of online news outlets.

Ja’Tovia Gary: flesh that needs to be loved

By Taylor Bradley

MAR 2020 | ArtSeen

Gary razes derivative historical narratives and turns archival rubble into a question of who stands witness to the chaos of the present and where we begin to process the past.