Deana Lawson

By Zoë Hopkins

JUNE 2022 | ArtSeen

There’s a way things seem to glow in Deana Lawson’s most recent solo exhibition at MoMA PS1. Crystals and gems tucked away in gallery corners glint with a quiet allure. Frames made from mirrors catch the light and refract it into glowing portals, enshrining Lawson’s photographs and holding us in rapt attention.

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.

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.