Alice Neel: People Come First

By Ann C. Collins

MAY 2021 | ArtSeen

Curators Randall Griffey and Kelly Baum gather more than 100 of the artist’s paintings, watercolors and drawings in Alice Neel: People Come First, a retrospective of the 60 years Neel spent transposing New York and its citizens into work that bears witness to the struggles of everyday life in the city as much as it dignifies the individual.

Public Images

By Bartolomeo Sala

JUNE 2020 | ArtSeen

Public Images, a virtual exhibition now on view on the website of New York gallery Carriage Trade, a space that often interrogates big social and political issues, bursts precisely this “frictionless” conception of city-dwelling, exposing it as the ultimate illusion.

A Year With Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary

By George Grella

APRIL 2021 | Music

And this is where A Year With Swollen Appendices is most insightful. The Appendices are informative, short essays through which Eno presents his thinking and values. The diary part of the book, for the most part, is informative in a different way.

Kent Monkman: mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People)

By Ann C. Collins

FEB 2020 | ArtSeen

It may be that history, as Winston Churchill said, is written by the victors, but a deep satisfaction can be had for those who redraft it. Cree artist Kent Monkman does just that for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s inaugural Great Hall Commission. Monkman reverses the European gaze, presenting Indigenous people as heroes who welcome and rescue invading newcomers.