Public art, said Dennis Oppenheim in the late 1990s, “may be a domain that looks good simply because everything else looks so bad.

After September 11, images of the Twin Towers began to appear everywhere. Not just on television or in newspapers, as one might expect, but in previously overlooked places, noticed for the first time in the aftermath of the catastrophe: painted as part of a logo on a commercial van, for example, or in a cityscape mural on a restaurant wall.

The difficulties of El Museo del Barrio’s mission are reflected in the conflicting statements and provocative questions raised by The (S) Files/The Selected Files, the museum’s first attempt at a biennial of contemporary art.

Rosana Castrillo Diaz’s two contributions to this group exhibition use the base concept of drawing—pencil marks on a flat surface—but they’re scarcely visible. In fact, I didn’t even notice them in my first few circles around the gallery.

Sandwiched between last summer’s Open House: Working in Brooklyn at the Brooklyn Museum and P.S.1’s upcoming Greater New York 2005, the Queens International 2004, the second of a recently inaugurated biennial surveying work by artists living and working in the borough, will have most likely been overlooked by both audiences and critics.

The art of design often takes a back seat to explorations of art and architecture, fashion, or music.

The concept of “white” has many meanings: purity, virginity, and innocence. It refers to issues of race, of right and wrong, of life and death.

In her recent series, Thiebauds, Sharon Core stages and photographs tableaus of cakes, pies, soup, and sandwiches that duplicate Wayne Thiebaud’s still-life paintings from the early 1960s.