Rachel Wolf: My My My Tintals and Fishscales

By Andrew Paul Woolbright

JULY/AUG 2023 | ArtSeen

While the archival impulse deals with the canon of majoritarian culture on its own terms and with its own language, provisional sculpture provides a visual alterity of the marginal that has always run parallel to it—a vibrant language of ordering and piecing together what has been broken.

Beverly Fishman: Something For the Pain

By Jason Stopa

MAY 2023 | ArtSeen

Beverly Fishman likes the look of Finish. No, not like Larry Bell and Helen Pashgian, artists associated with the Finish Fetish scene in LA in the 1960s. Though she may start from the same materialist impulse, she occupies her own territory. For starters those artists used glass, resin, enamel, and aluminum to make abstract paintings and sculptures in an effort to address the new materiality surrounding everything from car culture to consumer culture at large.

Is our obsession with money a curse to humanity?

By Phyllis Hollis

JUNE 2023 | Critics Page

After spending decades in institutional financial services as a successful top sales producer, and then in the position of CEO of an institutional broker-dealer, I became less interested in “material things” and more interested in everything else—primarily the visual arts. I decided to explore this impulse.

from Take What You Need

By Idra Novey

MARCH 2023 | Fiction

Deep in the mountains of Pennsylvania, a sixty-six year old woman named Jean welds scrap metal into massive sculptures. These works, which she dubs her “Manglements,” assert themselves into the foreground of the story with the same haunting force of Louise Bourgeois’s works—which makes sense given that Bourgeois is Jean’s greatest influence and the central source of reflection on the artistic impulse in Idra Novey’s superb new novel, Take What You Need. Amid the sawdust and machine oil, there’s a whiff of distrust. The novel deeply examines the intersection of art and trust, which is a central, if quiet, conversation often overlooked in the sensationalist depictions of art monsters in contemporary fiction. Novey relates an outsider artist’s life, and her step-daughter’s reckoning with that life, with resonance and connection to the broader world beyond the workshop.