I've always been fascinated by how dreams and their repressions shape personal and social crises. My installation, photography and sculptural work is inspired by mythological narratives, present day imperialism, queer politics, lyric poetry and erased moments in South Asian history. Taking these stories and integrating them with my own mythic imagery, the hybrid world of […]

Helen Brough is a British painter, drawer, sculptor and installation artist whose work transforms light and its transparencies into ebullient abstractions, as well as sharp social commentaries. In May 2006, she installed Emulated Flora at 70 Washington Street, Dumbo, Brooklyn. Jane and David Walentas commissioned the work through the Triangle Arts Association, an organization that […]

Born January 23rd, 1956 in Brooklyn, New York, American-Italian Sante D’Orazio has captured the imagination of wide-ranging audiences. Glamorous fashion photographer and pioneer icon-maker, D’Orazio’s work is often listed as art, but why? “Photographs,” which ran at the independent art space Kunsthauswien in Vienna, highlighted what it called “a retrospective of the superstar” by exhibiting […]

Born Leah Borliawsky in the Ukraine in 1899, Nevelson emigrated with her family from the Ukraine to a Rockland, Maine, at the age of six. On being the only Jewish immigrants in their Maine town, Nevelson once said, “They needed immigrants like I need ten holes in my head.” Her father worked in the lumber […]

In an age of increasingly paperless information, the loss of the central role of bound and unbound text has potent implications. Books have tangible, physical properties that trace time and histories through the turning of each page. Information can be transparent and alert us to a particular culture and time, or else it is opaque, […]

I grew up on a ranch in a remote part of eastern Montana, the youngest of four children. The Great Outdoors was my backyard—the area where Lewis and Clark crossed the Musselshell River over a hundred years ago, and where, like these explorers, I found myself collecting everything I found interesting in that great open […]

With his hand nailed to the cross and a halo surrounding his thorn-crowned head, the man Saint Francis embraces in Father William Hart McNichol’s St. Francis ‘Neath the Bitter Tree, is surely Jesus. Yet Kaposi’s sarcoma spots, indicating AIDS, cover this crucified man, and a plaque nailed to the cross identifies him not as Jesus […]

Imagine what a Natural History Museum in the distant future might look like. It is likely that this museum would describe an evolution of the world that is presently so greatly influenced by man. It might portray the effects of climate change on all life on this planet as our transformation of nature works as […]

I began to do my own work at the age of 34 after a long apprenticeship to two of the greatest theatrical visionaries of the 20th century, John Vaccaro and Jack Smith. I named myself Penny Arcade coming down from LSD at 17 in order to amuse Jaimie Andrews, a 27-year-old gay man whose drawing […]

Four years ago I started making prints in response to the murder of a transgendered woman, Gwen Arajo, as well as the murders of other transgenders historically. At the time, I was thinking a lot about body fragmentation—the way gender and sex are constructed, and how body parts and certain behaviors can “give away” transgenders, […]