#jack-whitten

#jack-whitten

When I started, there was no art coverage in the news magazines and there was no regular coverage, even in Time ... Contemporary art, particularly, was considered a ridiculous and foolish aberration. It didn't have anything to do with art, according to a lot of people.

I wanted to be a great artist, not in the slang use of 'great,' but fantastic—reaching the soul of other people. This ambition drove Pat Steir throughout her life.

The 2026 Whitney Biennial opened at the beginning of the month, providing a snapshot of current trends and curatorial interests in the art world.

Thaddeus Mosley carved wooden sculptures out of logs he salvaged from the Pennsylvania forest, transforming them into art during his spare time, driven by passion.

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.

Drawing from disparate influences including Constantin Brancusi, Isamu Noguchi, and African sculpture, Mosley turned out "sculptural improvisations," as he called them, for over seventy years before finally achieving broad acclaim in the last decade of his life.

Driskell started collecting in 1955 after taking a position as an art professor at Talladega College. As he explained in a 2017 lecture at the Whitney Museum of American Art, he put aside a small budget for art each year from his beginning salary of $3,000.

While taking a break from her musical career, Tifrere founded the nonprofit organisations ArtLeadHER and Art Genesis in 2016. ArtLeadHER provides visual-arts education and exhibition opportunities to women and teenage girls, while Art Genesis helps organise shows for emerging and underrepresented artists.

An exhibition of Wifredo Lam is about as safe a bet as the Museum of Modern Art can place and still plausibly say that it's a bet on expanding the canon. The Cuban artist is one of the most famous painters of the 20th century, featured in almost every single key show about Surrealism. MoMA acquired his famous painting The Jungle in 1946, a few years after he made it.

Although this truism is typically offered as a negative, it can also be read as a positive that provides comfort and stability amid new environments. In I Bring Home with Me, Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo recreates his Accra studio in an architectural reproduction within Roberts Projects ' Los Angeles gallery. Boafo is known for his stylized portraiture of Black people, whose skin the artist renders in swirling gestures made with his fingers.

Walking through Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imaginationat the Museum of Modern Art, I noticed that the exhibition didn't have definite sections or texts, and the wall labels abstained from naming the nationalities of the photographers. It was an invigorating experience to be in a show that eschews geographic boundaries set up by Western nations, as well as rejects a cause-and-effect narrative that centers Western colonialism as a framework for understanding African aesthetic production.

I work outside, carving and shaping the stone. Outside my house, I have a table, an extension cord, and tools. It's very cold and I have to wear all my winter clothes. When it's too cold, I do the filing and finishing work inside after I shape it outside. I listen to all kinds of music. I listen to Eminem all the time; his albums are all my favorites. For drawings, I work at Kinngait Studios or at home on my kitchen table.

Mornings are best for concentrated work. In the winter, I turn on the heat at 8am and get started around 10am. Summer, I start around 9am. I have two areas in the studio for projects. The large, heavy wood sculptures are carved in the front section of the studio, closest to the roll-up wide door. Smaller sculptures are placed on a hydraulic workbench. Before I start, I focus, connect with the Source, and ask for guidance.

When I walked in, I just teared up. I've received so many texts and DMs that said, "Do you know you're plastered all over Paris?" To me, this is just the beginning. I come from a long line of incredible matriarchs who always fought to do the right thing. My mother worked and struggled, so I know what it takes to get things done.