3+ day, 15+ hour ago   (664+ words) Adrián Villar Rojas: First Gods, Lost Animals The Brooklyn Rail The nature of Villar Rojas’s engagement with Lascaux and Chauvet—not merely as static monuments to prehistoric creativity, but as energetically charged sites from where meaning can continually emerge—makes…...

3+ day, 15+ hour ago   (55+ words) The vocabulary reflexively applied to Ana Mendieta’s work, especially her land-based body imprints, brims with a romance of primordial forces: ritual, spiritual, numinous. The Cuban American artist called it “magic,” a word that feels at odds with the logic of…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (1797+ words) Portrait of Emily Rauh Pulitzer, pencil on paper by Phong H. Bui. Emily Rauh Pulitzer: It’s the library of collectors—not of an institution—because there are great strengths and weaknesses. It goes back to books that Joe—Joseph Pulitzer Jr....

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (708+ words) Historicism’s Modernity: Modernism is History The Brooklyn Rail Among the shibboleths of the orthodox narrative touted by MoMA and American art history textbooks for much of the twentieth century, none has proved more stubborn than this: that modernism and historicism…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (989+ words) Portrait of Malcolm Peacock, pencil on paper by Phong H. Bui. Malcolm Peacock: I think that what I’ve become interested in—and in fact what I was already interested in prior to making Five—is the situation the work is traveling…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (542+ words) The Brooklyn Rail On a corner that formerly housed a gas station in the gentrifying neighborhood of Clinton Hill, a clean white box with massive windows and orange entry points, 272 Greene Avenue, designed by Inès Lamunière of Switzerland and architect…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (179+ words) Willem de Kooning, Untitled (Reclining Figure), ca. 1945. Oil and charcoal on Masonite, 15 × 19 ⅞ inches. © 2026 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy the Collection of Gene and Sueyun Locks. After immigrating as a stowaway from the Netherlands…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (1568+ words) The Brooklyn Rail Contemplating painting should be work. The monks of the Convent of San Marco in Florence spent a sizeable portion of their mature lives sitting in their cells staring at Fra Angelico’s frescoes, praying for the salvation of…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (1039+ words) The Brooklyn Rail With the recent return to figuration and ascendance of portraiture in contemporary painting, historical reference has returned as a viable method to convey authenticity and engage with tradition in an unironic manner.Now, artists wade through six…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (871+ words) Cecilia Vicuña, Sam Frésquez, Lola Ayisha Ogbara: Spatial Poems The Brooklyn Rail Installation view: Spatial Poems, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, 2026–27. Courtesy MASS MoCA. Spatial Poems set a big agenda for itself with an “aim to disrupt the art world’s…...