Page 137 - Usic News Today

The Brooklyn Rail is a journal committed to providing an independent forum for visual arts, culture, and politics throughout New York City and beyond.

Lubaina Himid is a painter who uses the canvas to experiment not only with the language of traditional art history, but also to engage with the social sphere. Many of her works exist, as Himid has noted, in “the moment between a question and an answer,” and in those interstices, audiences are invited to enter her exhibitions as worlds of their own making.

Entering Lucy Mackenzie’s exhibition at Nancy Hoffman, simply (and aptly) titled “Still, the viewer espies a channel of postcard-sized still lifes lining the gallery walls. If one is not familiar with Mackenzie’s work, they might be forgiven for mistaking her paintings for photographs.

Furniture is a loud presence in Fine Gråbøl’s debut novel, What Kingdom. For the unnamed narrator, furnishings witness and respond to her: “I’m especially absorbed by the chairs; the way they receive me and others in the room, the light on them in the mornings.”

I was riding up the elevator in the Whitney Museum’s Marcel Breuer building in the spring of 1977, “minding my own business” as it were, and unaware of a forthcoming shock, when the large elevator doors opened. I was stunned and thrown backwards by a John Cage-type experience of nothing. At first, I timidly stood still, but then with the danger of a closing elevator door, I stepped out onto the fourth floor of the museum where I encountered Scrim veil—Black rectangle—Nat...

Susan Rothenberg talks with Michael Auping about her studio on 112 Greene street.

I remember on several occasions, either when you came over for a studio visit, or when you were in attendance at an exhibition of mine, you told me, “I hate you,” which was your manner of delivering a compliment. I knew what you really meant was that you saw something recognizably good in the work, and that you found it to be particularly challenging.

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Those of a certain age will recall having spent hours reading to smaller people, with a mixture of boredom, fascination, and amusement, the illustrated stories of Beatrix Potter (1866–1943). But for the children listening and looking, the impact of these beast fables—about the doings of Peter Rabbit, Jeremy Fisher, and Benjamin Bunny, among others—will likely have been more profound than any reading that came later, especially if accompanied by the stories of Potter’s English...

“All American abduction stories are alike,” declares Aura, formerly a professor of Latin American literature and now one of the dozens of people abducted⎯ snatched, caged, shipped away⎯ over the course of this novel (for lack of a better word), in which every brief chapter features a miniature tragedy of separation, violent and heartbreaking, and yet each also offers some kind of talking cure, some gab-fest, though rarely face to face, rather via phone or chatbot, and in th...