On a sunny spring day I drove through the Catskill Mountains to visit my friend Uman at her South Pearl Street studio in downtown Albany. Her eight thousand square foot studio building was filled with paintings, drawings, painted objects, mannequins, fabrics, boxes of oil sticks, brushes and paint, and new glass sculptures that had just arrived in crates from San Francisco. Several workers were busy in the woodshop staining and making frames for new paintings. Her friend and studio manager, Joey Perez, helped with myriad details.

Tom was one of the first postwar artists to question the heritage, hubris, and clichéd bloat of Abstract Expressionism. His intelligence transformed art as a political act; the creation of exquisite canvases that would fit in humble homes and not necessarily be destined for corporations or institutions

This past year I have had the opportunity to live with a small landscape painting—Earthen Spirits, circa 1880s, by Ralph Albert Blakelock (1847 – 1919). It is 11” x 17”, mostly umber, sienna, and Naples yellow oil paint, with a thick, scarred surface.

The most important thing is to keep guns out of art schools.

Chris Martin is the author of American Music (Copper Canyon, 2007) and Becoming Weather (Coffee House Press, 2011). A third collection, The Falling Down Dance, will arrive courtesy of Coffee House next fall. He is an editor at Futurepoem books and lives in Minneapolis.

While preparing for her solo exhibition of new paintings at Edward Thorp Gallery, which will be on view until June 2nd, Katherine Bradford took time to welcome painters Peter Acheson and Chris Martin to her Williamsburg studio to talk about her life and work.

The Brooklyn Rail’s Chris Martin went to visit Bill Jensen in the Williamsburg studio complex he shares with the painter Margrit Lewczuk, their son Russell, and their dog Lucy. Two old manufacturing buildings are joined in a small courtyard with a big fig tree. The place feels like an old Italian villa in the middle of Brooklyn. Jensen has a major show of new paintings opening at Cheim & Read Gallery on February 15.

The Brooklyn Rail visited James Siena at his compact Canal Street studio on a rainy October morning. The two-room space felt like some archetypal medieval workshop.

I first met Al Held as an undergraduate at Yale. I remember seeing him with a group of graduate students playing cards in the Art and Architecture building.

The Brooklyn Rail talked recently with Catherine de Zegher, the Director of The Drawing Center, and Hendel Teicher, curator and art historian, about their show, 3 x Abstraction: New Methods of Drawing.

Painting and Buddhism are old friends.

Throughout his impressive forty-year career, Richard Tuttle has pursued an artistic practice that is not easily categorized, incorporating drawing, painting, and sculpture into an idiosyncratic, intensely personal hybrid.

The Brooklyn Rail met with Thomas Nozkowski at his house in High Falls, New York on a clear November day. We sat in the dining room as the afternoon sunlight filtered through the trees outside and set warm gray shadows flickering on the window shades

The Brooklyn Rail visited Fred Tomaselli’s studio in the heart of Williamsburg on a cold November afternoon. Up one flight of stairs off Driggs Avenue, the studio is modest and efficient, like a serious medieval workshop. Three new paintings lined one wall.

The Brooklyn Rail visited Bruce Pearson at his Williamsburg, Brooklyn studio on a rainy evening in early May. The studio is compact and efficient. 

I remember driving on the New Jersey Turnpike arguing with Phong Bui about who made the first abstract painting. I said that Kandinsky had gradually camouflaged his imagery and made abstractions by 1911. Phong said Kupka made completely abstract paintings in 1909 and that

The Brooklyn Rail visited Brice Marden’s studio on a sunny June morning. The brand new concrete and steel building rises right on the West Side Highway, and from the tenth floor studio we looked out in three directions across the sparkling Hudson River, and all the way downtown to the empty World Trade Center skyline.

Born in 1903, Alfred Jensen belongs to the heroic generation of Barnett Newman (1905 - 1970), Jackson Pollock (1912 - 1956), Mark Rothko (1903 - 1970), Myron Stout (1908 - 1986), and Forrest Bess (1911 - 1977). Jensen is one of the greatest abstract painters of his or any other generation.

James Siena’s exhibit at Gorney Bravin + Lee is his third one-person show in New York City. He is showing 12 small paintings made over the last two years, and a large group of intimate drawings in the back room. This is a tremendous show.

Richard Gorcoff has been creating intricately typed art works on paper for thirty years. He has invented a distinct language of numbers, letters, punctuation, figures and complex designs created entirely out of typewriter symbols.

It’s all over the place, struggles for survival, struggles for dominance. It’s a power game, not just evil itself, it’s about control, irrationality, anxiety, and so on. In a hierarchy, or some form of governing body, it’s about how to maintain control over their far-flung interests, the prevailing power and who would have the most at stake in what’s going on.