Page 38 - Rt Critic News Today

What a season for seeing contemporary ceramics in New York. Works by Eiji Uematsu, Edmund de Waal, and Ken Price are all being displayed simultaneously, while Grounded in Clay at the Metropolitan Museum celebrates the history and practice of Pueblo pottery from its origins to the present day. And at Salon 94, Myrtle Williams’s first solo show in New York has immediately added her to this list of masters of the medium.

On weekends, a law student in Panama has fun and makes extra money by singing at private parties with a band called Los Salvajes del Ritmo. This arrangement comes to a stop when one of his professors witnesses one of his performances and reports him to the school’s dean, who insists that he must choose between music and law school.

Justin Torres features none of the materials that usually occupy a political novel. There are no riot scenes, no courtroom confrontations. Rather, the primary drama is intimate: the hushed conversations between two men in a hospice.

Daniel Richter came of age in Hamburg in the 1980s, when that city’s punk and squatter scenes provided DIY spaces for artists and proposed positive alternatives to the time’s go-go 1980s mercantilism.

This year, the Supreme Court will announce yet another decision regarding the Second Amendment, likely continuing a right-wing crusade toward a perilous legal regime. This crusade’s agenda, cloaked in references to the country’s “history and tradition,” involves determining the constitutionality of firearm regulations based on whether a contemporary gun law can be justified by the existence of historical analogs.

A dance to which the page was integral—fittingly for the linguistically inclined Rainer, who has penned a number of essays on her choreographies—Parts of Some Sextets was not only scored via a chart, but also timed to a book: Performers were cued by an audio tape of Rainer reading excerpts from the diary of William Bentley (1759–1819), a Salem minister who fastidiously recorded notable local events (an eclipse, a death, the arrival of an elephant).

Harry Smith lives on as a spirit through his yearly film showings at Anthology Film Archive. As hierophant, he reminded his devotees there were alternative paths outside the prevailing critical discourse, the museums, and the commercial art world.

Once in a blue moon, an exhibition as enthralling as Manet/Degas comes along. You wonder why it’s never been done before. Currently, more than 160 paintings, pastels, drawings, and prints by these two Parisians are on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

An old wooden cabinet is illuminated on the inside by a single bare bulb. The door tilts open. The light is warm. A dark cushion rests at the base. The texture of the object corresponds with its age and sets up a particular channel of domesticity to view the many small paintings that hang upon it, both inside and outside. It’s not comfortable, but it calls for the nearness of intimacy, and up close its strangeness is only amplified. The paintings depict heads, and the heads share the ripple...

In her new memoir, While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence, Meg Kissinger delves into her charmingly rambunctious family’s seldom acknowledged struggles with mental illness. Set against the backdrop of Chicago’s North Shore suburbia in the 1960s and ’70s, during a time before many people had a working knowledge of mental illness, Kissinger invites us into the family home.