“I find inspiration in the space between simplicity and complexity, which NIAD artists often teeter. For cats & dogs, I’ve selected a group of 13 works that feel like investigations, confrontations, or observations having to do with popular imagery (i.e. animals (cats, dogs, birds), other people, furniture, etc.). The presented subjects become of equal interest to the audience, as the artists’ hyper-focuses become one with our own. Appearingly naïve forms become enthralling windows into the minds of these exceedingly talented artists with disabilities.” View the exhibition.

While amassing his own collection, the music producer became a crucial connector, and an important advocate for artists of color. Read the article here.

The nightingale which from the top of it’s branch, looks down into the river thinks it’s fallen in. It’s perched at the top of an oak-tree, and yet is scared its going to drown. -Cyrano De Bergerac Tree-shadows in river mists Die like smoke. High in the air on real branches Doves Lament. Traveller, how often has this faded land Watched you fade, How poignant your abandoned hopes High in tress! -Paul Verlaine View the exhibition.

“The Picassos and van Goghs will still be there, but the 40,000 square feet of additional space will allow MoMA to focus new attention on works by women, Latinos, Asians, African-Americans and other overlooked artists like Shigeru Onishi, a Japanese experimental photographer, or Hervé Télémaque, a Haitian-born painter who is now 81. With the doors closed from June 15 to Oct. 21, the museum will give up summer tourism revenue in the interest of creating a new MoMA that will abandon the discipline-based display system it has used for eight decades. Three floors of exhibition space will retain a spine Read More …

“After the celebratory title image on Dorrie Reid’s gorgeous quilt, the exhibition begins with the image of a great turtle shell–protecting and enclosing the soft, vulnerable (unseen) animal body inside. Jeremy Burleson’s fantastical turtle is a grid erupting with flame. The rest of the images in the exhibition break through the rigidity of the grid/shell and allow us to see the intimacy of the soft, squishy pliable body hidden within. Moving through the exhibition, geometry becomes organic as life courses through these objects. We see animals literal and figurative, always emphasizing physicality, gravity, and embodiment until the show itself dissolves away in the sticky Read More …

Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday Today’s show: “Marlon Mullen: 2017 – 2018” is on view at JTT in New York through Sunday, February 17. The solo exhibition is Berkeley, California–based artist’s third with the gallery. View it here.

…(D)igital technology didn’t really take off until the fountain pen had already begin its decline, and the ballpoint its rise. The ballpoint became popular at roughly the same time as mainframe computers. Articles about the decline of handwriting date back toat least the 1960s—long after the typewriter, but a full decade before the rise of the home computer. Read the rest.

“It was a true joy exploring all the art here at NIAD. I tried to select works that reverberated with color, whose lines and shapes transported me; pieces I kept thinking about, wanting to look at closer, to absorb their fullness.” View the exhibition.

Alex Bolen, the chief executive of Oscar de la Renta, planned to have his new store in Paris open around this week, just in time for the couture shows. He planned to have a presence in the city even if he didn’t have a show. He had it all figured out. Then, last summer, in the middle of renovations, Mr. Bolen got a call from his architect, Nathalie Ryan. “‘We made a discovery,’” he remembered her saying. On the other end of the phone, Mr. Bolen cringed. The last time he received a call like that about a store, their Read More …

“As the technological world closes in, many humans find themselves pulled toward the natural world. The ways these artists depict creatures, both real and imaginary, reveals the deep and innate catharsis of humans’ relationships with animals. This work is a spectrum of mediums and styles, ranging from realistic renderings to dreamlike suggestions and abstract simplicity. Much in the same way, nature has a tendency to unfold with the same ecstatic complexity.” View it here.

“A Long Island City development project’s scaffolding has slowly crept into the skyspace of James Turrell’s New York installation, “Meeting” (1980–86) at MoMA PS1. Excising an aperture from the museum’s ceiling, the Light and Space pioneer’s project is framed by undulating LEDs that focus viewers on the atmosphere’s shifting color palette from dawn to dusk. It’s likely that the visionary artist’s goal was to have museumgoers meditate on the sky’s aesthetic qualities, and not the Queens’ neighborhood’s shifting skyline. But thanks to the borough’s rapid gentrification, Turrell must confront new and unforeseen challenges that threaten his work’s purity. Such intrusions weren’t likely Read More …

“As a psychologist who has dealt with overthinking on both a personal and professional level, I can definitively confirm: it sucks. It steals time and energy, and rarely produces anything worthwhile. And by exhausting you in the process, it makes you more susceptible to its close relatives, anxiety and depression While rumination isn’t its own diagnosis, it is unique in that it can be a symptom of both depression and anxiety. The depressed person dwells on losses and missteps from the past, while the anxious ruminator drowns in a sea of “what if” questions, forever envisioning the negative outcome. Whether Read More …

“Why are garden-variety art aficionados allowed to cry in front of a Mark Rothko painting without being judged while rich people are mocked for their teary embrace of a Hirst? Why is the myth of the reclusive art genius so alluring? Why do we presumptively devalue wealthy people’s experience of art, and is it fair?…” Read the rest here.

“Color is heavy. Color lacks fear. Color reveals and color hides. Truth can be found through color.  I have no expertise in color theory. Yet color dominates my life. I use my instincts with color. Color uses its instincts with me. Colors say to me “Hey! Put me there, put me here, use more of me!” I am a servant of color. But I don’t know how color works. I only know when it feels right. Color floors me every day. I am heavy when I am using color. I chose the works in this exhibition for their fearless use Read More …

“This show explores the use of artistic license when using color to express moods and experiences of the Natural World.” View it.

“Searching through the immense NIAD catalogue my affinity was primarily with works somehow (for me at least) engaged in depicting or organizing the natural world. Representing, or at times only referencing, animal or plant forms but utilizing pattern, repetition, space, and color to create visual density. This certainly parallels the fundamental efforts of my own work and works which I find the most arresting and engaging.” View it!

At The Cantor Center. Well worth your time… “Amongst the first generation in his native Ivory Coast to be formally taught how to write, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré was inspired to translate the Bété oral language into written form. This artist, poet, researcher, and inventor created an original pictographic alphabet as a way to borrow from, yet subvert, the medium of his French colonizers. From the 1970s until his death in 2014, he also created hundreds of brightly colored postcard-size illustrations that incorporate African writing systems, popular culture, scientific theories, and tongue-in-cheek humor. Courtesy of the Cantor Arts Center. Details.

“Saying Celmins is best known for photorealistic paintings and drawings of natural environments and phenomena is like saying Cézanne is best known for paintings and drawings of apples and mountains. For these two artists, meaning rests not in the subject matter, but in looking and seeing…. Read the rest of the piece here.

“After almost a half-century of fighting the art establishment for recognition, Robert Cenedella finally had his day in court on Monday, December 17. Appearing before Judge John G. Koeltl of New York’s Southern District, the outsider artist’s lawyers argued that his $100 million lawsuit against New York’s top museums should continue to trial so that litigators might uncover a potential conspiracy linking those cultural institutions to the art market’s top five galleries in a pay-to-play scheme…. Read more about this weird lawsuit that was just thrown out of court.

“In a double rainbow, the colors on the secondary bow appear in reverse. (From “Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences,” by Philip Fisher Never mind that this fact has been observed by human eyes, my own included, from time immemorial; I was somehow completely unaware of it before reading Philip Fisher’s treatise on the moral, aesthetic, and intellectual importance of wonder. Part of his book is about the pleasure of learning things—“fear made the gods, but philosophy begins in wonder,” he writes—and, as the title promises, you really do learn a lot about rainbows. At one point, Read More …