The Project of Independence

By Maddie Klett

APRIL 2022 | ArtSeen

The history of how the region has been portrayed at MoMA explains why and how The Project of Independence looks the way it does: transnational, organized by both in-house curators and external experts, and featuring a mix of national and individual imaginings of post-independence design. Each of these seems like a decision by MoMA leadership to create a foil to the museum’s orientalist past.

Jeff Wall with Barry Schwabsky

FEB 2022 | Art

Since the late 1970s, Jeff Wall has become renowned for his staged photographs—sometimes fantastical, sometimes so factually convincing as to be what he’s called “near documentary.” He currently has two exhibitions on view, one of them being a survey—his largest US show since his 2007 MoMA survey—at Glenstone Museum, in Potomac, MD; the other at Gagosian in Beverly Hills. Having written an essay for the catalogue of the show at Glenstone, I realized I’d ended up with more questions than I started with, so I asked a few of them in a Zoom conversation with the artist ahead of his show in California.

Elaine Reichek: Material Girl

By Norman L Kleeblatt

APRIL 2022 | ArtSeen

Elaine Reichek scavenges among sources from literature, history, mythology, and art, fabricating images and texts she transforms into textiles. Trained as a painter by avant-garde, intellectually rigorous icons, notably Ad Reinhardt, her career has been defined by her strategic use of the textile medium—a feminist, postmodern strategy.

Adam Pendleton: Who is Queen?

By Folasade Ologundudu

FEB 2022 | ArtSeen

Stand still and direct your gaze three stories up into the MoMA’s Marron Family Atrium and prepare to be arrested by the motif of black-and-white in Adam Pendleton’s Who is Queen? The work, monumental in scale, with its three soaring scaffold sculptures, taking up the height of the 60-foot atrium, is his most “autobiographical” to date and considers history not as fixed or static, but rather continuous, alive, and ever-evolving in real time.