While traveling in Iran, the American painter Laurie Blum set out to create her own unique Persian paintings drawing inspiration from the natural landscape. Hafez, which literally translates to "one who memorizes the Koran," was the pen name for Iran’s 14th century poet, Mohammad Shirazi. His mystical verses were loved as much for their unfailing […]

With a mixture of denial and acceptance, discomfort and support, Chinese society is recognizing that homosexuality exists. A notable change occurred during the late 1990s and early 2000s, when sodomy was decriminalized in 1997 and the new Chinese Classification and Diagnostic Criteria of Mental Disorders removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses on April […]

Painter and printmaker Gary Stephan and the filmmaker and painter Cheryl Donegan have known each other for over 20 years, since she was a student at RISD and he was showing at Mary Boone Gallery. They met at Stephan’s studio recently to discuss his new sculptures, the reasonable limits of interpretation, and his continued attempts […]

Currently showing at Galeria Janet Kurnatowski, a new-ish space in Greenpoint, is a modest but extremely compelling show curated by Scott Malbaurn. Art on the Line features five artists each working with aspects of a pedigreed artistic element that, despite its illustrious past, came to last century’s finish line hobbling. Art on the Line Shane […]

There’s only a very short curatorial introduction to the exhibition at the Arsenale in Venice for the 51st edition of the Biennale. Rosa Martinez quotes Beckett only to defy him: while he spoke of an art that was "weary of puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little […]

At the Yuzi Paradise Sculpture Park in Guilin, sculpture interacts with a unique mountainous environment: huge granite marble structures project from the plain to create imposing peaks standing straight up like dense, massive sculptures. It’s a fantasy landscape of peculiar peaks. The mountains are partially covered with vegetation that thrives amid the gorges of the […]

The Croatian conceptualist Andreja Kuluncic wants to help her fellow Eastern Europeans crack the New York art world’s oldest codes. Whom to meet? Where to show? Kuluncic has spent her residence at Art In General, the non-profit gallery, assembling a manua about how to build the art world social capital necessary for success–a how-to guide […]

Anna VanMatre, whose work was recently displayed at the Berliner Kunst Project in Berlin and the Broadway Gallery in New York, explores the natural, elemental dramas of the world, portending something potent, and undeniable. In great gray graphite swirls and clouds, VanMatre depicts scenes as oppressive and evocative as a rain-weary morning in fall, at […]

The lights in the two rooms are off. Light filters in from the main gallery and music can be detected in the background, but that doesn?t lessen the feeling that I?ve entered another world?a laboratory of light, video, mechanical objects, and assemblage. In the (Well-Lit) Laboratory of Life, Death, and Dreams: SARCOPHAGUS, Ghanaian Style, or […]

The Taiwan pavilion–actually called a Museum–is a few steps from St. Mark’s Place on the waterfront. An enormous sign declares "The Specter of Freedom," and when you slip inside the building and up the cool marble steps into a large dark chamber to see Chung-li Kao’s animations of a saintly man gazing at a crucifix-cum-fighter […]