#body-in-art

#body-in-art

The deeper I go, the more feminist I become! Yet my experience of academic philosophy has largely disclosed the opposite: a discipline that solemnly declares its devotion to openness proves curiously unsettled by me as a woman.

I create sculptural hairstyles using my natural hair as a material. I add some extensions, and shape it with thread and wire. A sculpture can take me from 30 minutes to more than six hours.

"Most people don't stop to observe the crews' work or the infrastructure they uncover," Tentler-Krylov said. "But these unseen things keep the city going."

The series centres a community whose visibility has too often been shaped by external gaze rather than self-definition. A 'dyke' is not a singular thing. The community isn't narrow, unified, or clean. It is not only cis lesbians for example. It includes trans masc men, trans femme women, nonbinary people, and bisexuals.

It was the first time I felt genuinely unsafe here, she says. Alongside a growing fear, childhood memories resurfaced—the internal and external racism and the exhaustion of never quite fitting in. I moved to Australia when I was seven and didn't speak English—it was a tough time for me, she admits. And then there was one particular recurring thought. There were many times when I'd wake up as a teenager and think to myself: Wouldn't life be easier if I were white?

Kamrooz Aram is everywhere this year, from Mumbai Art Week to the Whitney Biennial, and critic Aruna D'Souza is grateful. She pens a beautiful meditation on his work, reading his abstract paintings as not simply a denunciation of Western modernism nor a reassertion of Islamic visual motifs, but something else entirely - something gestural, exuberant, riotous, and incomparably his own.

"These works are an exploration of the human body's elasticity and capacity to metamorphose. Informed by my own experience of pregnancy and the birth of my first child last year, these paintings are a meditation on physiological transformation and the body's underlying animalistic and mammalian nature."

The body becomes a site of transformation. Uniquely crafted pieces engage with the wearer, blurring the line between material, form, and presence. Each one-off creation and streetwear capsule emerges from a conscious, boundary-free creative process, drawing inspiration from visual arts, theatre, music, dance, and the surrounding world.

Finally, all the consciousness I had left was in the center of my head. It was like a little light, and finally it went click. . . . And what I saw with this was my body lashed to the wall, about ten feet away.

These water-women are beings of transformation, embodying sensuality, cosmic energy, and the transmission of matrilineal knowledge.

Pratt Shows is an annual series of public exhibitions and presentations by the Institute's graduating class, representing years of research, exploration, and creative inquiry.

The Lower East Side institution's OMA-designed, $82 million expansion debuted this week to mixed reviews, reflecting a range of opinions on its new look and functionality.

"We Need to Talk About the Massively Hung Zombie," read a headline in Vulture.

Since she graduated in the late 1980s, amid the Aids crisis, Opie has made portraits of her community, friends and family, adopting unflinching realism, saturated colours, and dramatic tonal contrasts from the 16th-century portrait painters. Many of Opie's most famous portraits included in her new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery use these devices deliberately, a declaration that these people deserve, as the title of the show underlines, to be seen.

The organicity of the human body we're born inside of is encoded in us. This concept of our organic nature as the source of elemental knowledge, at once direct and mysterious, permeates the textural abstractions exhibited in her survey Magdalena Abakanowicz: The Thread of Existence at Musée Bourdelle.

In 2024, art collector Christian Levett opened Europe's first museum dedicated to women artists in a little town in the south of France. But for those of us who can't make the trip to the Femmes Artistes du Musée de Mougins (Female Artists of the Mougins Museum, or FAMM), the American Federation of the Arts (AFA) has arranged the next best thing: a blockbuster touring exhibition about women artists of the Abstract Expressionist movement, featuring some of the highlights of the FAMM collection.

If you want to paint, put your clothes back on! That was how Carolee Schneemann summarised the critical response to her 1975 performance piece Interior Scroll, which she had performed nude standing on a gallery table. After making a series of life model poses, she removed a scroll from her vagina and began to read her manifesto. In doing so, Schneemann asked an important question: What does it mean for a female artist to be both the artist and the life model?

Last summer, I did face painting at a block party in my Brooklyn neighborhood. In the sweltering August humidity, I rendered pink butterflies and Spiderman webs on tiny, sticky faces; unsurprisingly, my designs didn't last very long in the bouncy castle. Except for the glitter. For weeks, I found it in my hair, on my cats, in my sink, and in random corners of the house, migrating to and fro like dandelion fuzz.