#printmaking-as-political-critique

#printmaking-as-political-critique

Drivers were delivering packages in deadly heat with no air conditioning; part-time employees, the majority of UPS' workforce, have been unable to receive benefits. Wages aren't rising at the same rate as the cost of living.

Pictoplasma is the world's leading conference on contemporary character-driven creativity, focusing on storytelling and how characters shape emotion, identity, and meaning.

Bondi's official DOJ portrait was reportedly spotted in the trash mere minutes after Donald Trump gave her the boot. Just straight to the bin, like last week's takeout and this week's credibility.

"We're constantly striving to strike a balance between work that respects academic rules of composition, established visual codes and good readability, with something more spontaneous, adventurous, playful, even naive."

"The catalogue raisonné is incredibly meaningful to me. It's a nice reminder of the many things I've done, and seeing the documentation of decades of work allows for reflection and new insights."

Gay dance clubs, besides offering sweaty, blissful spaces to let loose, served as safe havens during the darkest days of the crisis. Places where the LGBTQ community gathered for emotional support, to share vital information, and to raise money for AIDS groups like ACT UP, GMHC, and amfAR.

Frida Kahlo, during her 1933 trip to New York, created a colorful haven in her hotel room by covering the walls with prints by José Guadalupe Posada, which depicted sensational news and political imagery.

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.

I think that the most important feature of theater is the act itself. It's not actually what is said or what is done. It's not the plot or the storyline. It's the act of gathering human beings in space and time together to experience something.

"In a time of unprecedented division, escalating conflict, and economic turmoil, President Trump focused on what truly mattered: remodeling the Lincoln bathroom in the White House," reads a bronze plaque affixed to the work.

The Outsider Art Fair has enriched New York City's art world since its inception in 1993, presenting eclectic and idiosyncratic artists who challenge traditional fine art hierarchies.

On a cool winter night in Los Angeles, dozens gathered to protest the Trump administration's attacks on the arts and the recent federal immigration raids in southern California. But these protestors didn't carry signs or chant in front of a government building they recited poems such as Antifa Tea Party and Love in Times of Fascism. They performed anti-fascist improv to a small but lively crowd at The Glendale Room, a library-themed theater, as part of the monthly show Unquiet: A Night of Creative Resistance.

The Venice Biennale's complicity with the attempted destruction of Palestinian life must end. No artist or cultural worker should be asked to share a platform with this genocidal state.

"There's a tension in the design of the book that I was exploring, between making it feel super contemporary and colorful, and leaning into more traditional aesthetics of archives and historical content. I wanted to honor both," says Michele. "Copyright law can also be kind of intimidating, so I wanted to use the design of the book to make the content more approachable and engaging."

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 we found was that errata sheets were not only spaces for corrections but also sites of humor, legal maneuvering, and reinterpretation. With this exhibition, we wanted to share ways in which even small corrections can reshape meaning and authority.

Going out and demonstrating is really important. But if you don't feel comfortable demonstrating, you can volunteer for organizations, you can donate to organizations, you can sign petitions, you can call your senator. There's no excuse not to be involved on some level.

The reason why useful art will change the world is that art, as we have come to know it since the 18th century, is the subject of 'neoliberal occupation', government regulation and commercial sponsorship. It has become useless, but not because the aesthetic exists in a Kantian separate world, but because, like everything else, including ourselves, it has become part of the neoliberal circulation of commodities, instrumentalised by the creative industries.

As if demolishing the East Wing, gutting arts agencies, and slapping his name and face on several federal buildings weren't enough, the US president now wants to do away with a DC building known as the "Sistine Chapel of New Deal art." This week, we reported on a burgeoning campaign to save the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, which houses murals by Ben Shahn, Philip Guston, Seymour Fogel, and other major American artists. We will continue to follow this story.

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.)