Tragic Strip

By Tom Motley

MAY 2019 | Fiction

Tom Motley is a cartoonist, illustrator, and educator. His publications include Tragic Strip (a monthly strip in the Brooklyn Rail), The Golden Ass, The One Marvelous Thing, and contributions to the indie anthology Cartozia Tales. He teaches cartooning at the School of Visual Arts and illustration at Pratt.

Milling Stone

By Mira Dayal

JUNE 2020 | Critics Page

The way a review’s argument takes shape is not dissimilar to the way an artwork’s premise comes about. Selected from the lot of pebbles-cum-premises, the rock is given some time in the tumbler, from which it emerges smooth, clear, yet with enough of an edge to feel distinctive.

The Pursuit of Aesthetics: Artwork Created During Quarantine

By William Corwin

JUL-AUG 2020 | ArtSeen

This certainly seems like a time for image and text: straightforward and direct gestures for marshalling ideas, crowds, and righteous fury. So one has to stop and collect a reeling brain, full of protest acronyms and painful or ghastly YouTube footage, in order to focus on the premise of an exhibition that emphasizes, as its title suggests, “The Pursuit of Aesthetics.”

Resilience: Philip Guston in 1971

By Patrick J. Reed

DEC 19-JAN 20 | ArtSeen

In the case of Resilience, the forces responsible for its production are entirely predictable: his estate in all its authority. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the exhibition is exactly what one might expect. The work is masterful. The catalogue is handsome. The curatorial premise—to showcase the artworks Guston made in the year following the Marlborough-Gerson controversy while in residence at the American Academy in Rome (and shortly thereafter), and thereby reinforce his mythos as a phoenix for the modern painter—is compelling.