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fromArtforum
1 day 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.
Founded in 2014 as a tongue-in-cheek alternative to the esteemed Whitney Biennial, the Every Woman Biennial has evolved into an intergenerational showcase that mixes emerging talent with established feminist art stars while maintaining the scrappy, activist energy that inspired it in the first place.
This depicts Guernica after the battle. The figures are no longer fighting. They're in a giant pile. They're exhausted and there's a sunrise on a new day behind them. The title of the work is A Whole New World (for Who?). It's asking what's going to happen after the conflicts that we have. Who's going to be taken into that new world?
In honor of the 100th anniversary of the painter and multimedia artist's birth, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation is presenting a one-time award of $100,000 to four artists. Senga Nengudi won the Rauschenberg Centennial Award for visual art, David Thomson for performance, Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun for photography, and Patricia Spears Jones for writing.
San Jose is hosting Invisible Skies, a free flash art event set for January 31, 2026, at City Hall on East Santa Clara Street in Downtown San Jose. Umbrella distribution starts at 5:30 PM, with the main activity kicking off at 6:30 PM once the sky darkens. This gathering will turn the plaza into a canvas for communal creativity, open to all ages and designed to last about two hours.
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.
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.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. For more than 50 years, the French artist Sophie Calle has worked in the space between facts and their retelling, demonstrating how the narratives we share about ourselves are always partial, constructed. Working across photography, text, film and installation, she reveals how fantasy and projection intervene in our best attempts to see and be seen.
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.)
In the language of climate, water is dialectical: It is overabundance and scarcity; needed as well as dreaded. Psychologically, it can represent the unconscious, the maternal, the prelapsarian. Artist Deborah Jack disrupts any viewer's impulse to find recreational soothing in the ocean's tidal landscape, as she openly critiques the legitimacy of cartography, empire, and ecological adaptation. Jack's six-channel video installation "a sea desalts, creeping in the collapse... in the expanse...a rhizome looks for reason... whispers an elegy instead"
Happy New Year! Our first book reviews of 2026 are here, beginning with critic Bridget Quinn. There's a special place in hell for Pablo Picasso, but you probably already knew that. Because the conversation tends to stop there, what you may not have known are the names of some of the women whose artistic legacies have long been overshadowed by his: Fernande Olivier, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, and Jacqueline Roque.
Regina Silveira has spent the better part of three decades considering the relationship between media and meaning, particularly as it relates to Latin America. First presented in 1997, "To Be Continued..." features 100 black-and-white reproductions of photos, newspaper clippings, propaganda, advertisements, and more. Silveira nests each image into an oversized puzzle piece, which cuts off faces and scenes to leave fragments of pop culture icons, flora and fauna, and even the occasional mugshot spliced next to one another.
This sprawling installation (or in the New York gallery's parlance, "spatial collage") had transformed the Wooster Street space into a warren of rooms and hallways that resembled a series of stage or film sets, including a "clandestine drug lab," a Chinatown basement store, and a pirate radio station. I gingerly navigated through half-destroyed walls and over uneven floors strewn with detritus, escaping with vivid memories of one of the strangest contemporary art experiences to be had in those years.
Combining a variety of fabrics, buttons, shells, and beads, Stephen Towns' mixed-media textile pieces draw on the rich heritage of quilts made especially by Black women in the American South. Tableaux reminiscent of family portraits and vacation snapshots lend themselves to an exploration of the power of pleasure and community during an era when the South was still racially segregated.