The notion of “star quality” would seem an anathema to those ensconced in the world of contemporary dance. It nods to the vacuous ethos of Hollywood’s commercial celebrity-dom; it is created, fictionalized, valorized and vulgarized by the variegated tentacles of a capital-intensive media, it simplifies complex artists into a superficial, je-ne-sais-quoi dazzle, often privileging appearance […]

The Finnish artist Saara Ekström is known for her unprejudiced material use. Ekström uses mainly organic materials that are rich in controversial meanings and symbolics. Her works often deal with the dualistic, major themes of life: death, birth, growth and withering, beauty and disgust. She has worked with pig meat, fruit, living birds, oysters, milk, […]

Nicola López’ artist statement begins, “The landscape that we live in has become saturated with signs of the easy mobility, speed, constant communication, imposition of structure, insistence on growth and glorification of technology that have come to be so characteristic of our society today.” Her work, a melding of printmaking, drawing and sculptural form, deftly […]

Milton Fletcher: Brett, what do you do at P.S.1? Brett Littman: As Deputy Director of P.S.1, I am responsible for overseeing the museum’s day-to-day operations which include: the finance department, education and public programs, development, human resources, visitor services, acting as executive producer of “Warm Up” (our summer concert series), consulting on www.wps1.org activities and […]

More than a decade ago, Julia Kristeva, a Bulgarian-French post-structural theorist, published Strangers to Ourselves, a study seeking to understand the concept of the stranger not just as an outsider, but as a foreigner within each of us. Today, in 2007, the quest to understand the complexities of one’s identity still lies at the heart […]

MoveOpolis dancers frequently look and gesture upward as if paying homage to an unnamed deity. This icon emerged in an astonishing winter program at Dance Theater Workshop in which Richard Move’s earlier works are revisioned through the eye of a virtuoso collaboration, Towards the Delights of the Exquisite Corpse. The transformation breaks new ground for […]

Karen Kilimnik’s works flirt with different historical styles through loosely daubed paint and suggestive props—yet the rococo-tinged notion of charm found a fresh incarnation in her recent exhibition at the 303 Gallery in Chelsea. The Bluebird in the Folly, one of two installations that punctuated the gathering of intimately scaled paintings and drawings, is a […]

I am in love with the swamp. The city is so different, that it is a challenge to reconcile that they might inhabit the same reality. In drawing, I try to take people to a place where they never go—or hardly ever get to go. But then it seems this is the purpose of a […]

“Fun” is the “therapeutic reward of art” that Yayoi Kusama has finally reaped, according to one critic. In this sense, the trajectory of Kusama’s oeuvre echoes that of Niki de Saint Phalle. Childhood suffering and/or illness as well as art as therapy remain essential elements of both artists’ deft mythmaking, while their passage from aggression […]

Critics writing about the work of Shirana Shahbazi often insist on interpreting it through the lens of her diasporic identity. Shahbazi was born in Tehran, studied photography in Dortmund and lives in Zurich, while the subjects of her photographic series stem from locations as diverse as Iran, China, USA, Mexico, Lebanon, Zimbabwe, Switzerland, Germany and […]