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fromArtforum
2 days agoSchlock Jock: Joshua Citarella at the Whitney Biennial
Doomscroll podcast's live tapings at the Whitney reflect changing museum priorities and the evolving relationship between art and digital discourse.
"It's an amalgamation of the Chicago neighborhood aesthetic with a Bulls fan, quite literally. It's kind of on the nose, but that's how I juxtapose the elements of my work, with the structure of a home and then a figure who is around or in the home."
All but one of the song titles on Body Sound, the debut album from experimental string trio Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart, line up nicely-a few words, usually two, usually nouns, separated by a vertical line. The straight line in the middle means different things in different disciplines. In computing, it's called a 'pipe' and serves as a conduit. In poetry, it denotes a pause or break. In music, it marks the beginning and end of measures.
"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."
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.
The new New Museum is many things: contemporary, perhaps, but also a science, history, anthropology, and many other museums in one. It echoes the desire of its patron class to own the world and its affiliated courtier class to deliver it to them on a silver platter, or encased in perforated metal, in this case.
On Franklin Street in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, one non-commercial gallery fosters 'a small, stubbornly human space for friction.' Friction—the ubiquitous buzzword that captures the simultaneous delight and discomfort of doing things the slow way—is at the heart of artists Pap Souleye Fall and Char Jeré's current show at Subtitled NYC. It also reflects the overall spirit of this little exhibition space and of a burgeoning movement to reject our culture of optimization in favor of a bumpier, more intimate, less alienating experience.
What began as a passion for collecting became a responsibility. She not only believes in the artistic genius of women, but she wants society in general to hold men and women artists in equal esteem-and to place the same monetary value on their work.
Raw Material: The Art and Life of Susan Kleckner, on view at Haverford College's Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery through April 5, 2026, is the first comprehensive retrospective of the pioneering feminist artist, filmmaker, photographer, and performance artist. Bringing together nearly 100 works, many never before publicly exhibited, the exhibition seeks to reposition Kleckner as a foundational figure in feminist, queer, and activist art histories.
In 2024, I made a vow to never base my art criticism on wall labels. My decision came after reading reactions to that year's Whitney Biennial. "If every label in 'Even Better Than the Real Thing,' the 81st installment of the Whitney Biennial, were peeled off the walls and tossed into the Hudson, what would happen?" asked Jackson Arn in the New Yorker. (He went on to suggest that the overall show would have been much better.)
The path to the first New York solo show for Elda Cerrato (1930-2023), now on view at Galerie Lelong, was a long and winding one. Born in Italy to Jewish parents, Cerrato was a child when her family fled fascism in Europe for South America. Authoritarianism continued to shape her life in adulthood, as Cerrato and her husband and son were forced to leave Argentina to escape persecution at the hands of the country's military junta in 1973.
Sprouting from the roof of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, artist Rose B. Simpson's newly installed bronze sculpture "Behold" has its gaze fixed on the cityscape before it. The Tewa of Khaʼpʼoe Ówîngeh artist, herself a mother, crafted a tender portrait of an interconnected parent and child that "asks us to be human with each other, to change our narrative through wonder, witness and a foundation in the soft warmth of our humanity," she said in a statement.
Brooklyn Museum Fills Its Top Contemporary Curator Spot Robert Wiesenberger was named senior curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, a post that has been vacant since the departure of Eugenie Tsai in 2023. He comes from the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he was curator of contemporary projects, and was previously a curatorial fellow at the Harvard Art Museums.
Kathleen Goncharov, a longtime curator who served as the United States Commissioner for the 50th Venice Biennale, has died at the age of 73. The news of her passing was announced by a group of friends and her partner, poet and artist Charles Doria. She died of natural causes in her Boca Raton home on New Year's Eve. Goncharov is remembered as a doting friend, a champion of artists, and a gifted and intuitive curator.