The Manchester International Festival – a biennial incubator of international art and cultural projects – is in full swing, offering a diverse spread of exhibitions and events across the city. The festivities kicked off earlier in July with Yoko Ono's mass ring-a-thon, Bells for Peace. The artist's message was clear as, via video link, she...

Leonardo Drew (b. 1961) considers himself an elder statesman of the art world. In his first exhibition, at age 13, he showed a larger than life painting of Captain America. His natural talent for draftsmanship earned him early opportunities to work at prestigious comic book publishers like Marvel and DC Comics, but Drew was after something more...

Fans hoping to catch a glimpse of Yoko Ono at the June 19 opening of her project Add Color (Refugee Boat) at the 2019 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's River to River Festival were bound to be disappointed to find that the artist was not present. On the flip side, the work itself evokes precisely the vibes that shot the legendary experimental...

A small sign outside Nancy Spero: Paper Mirror at MoMA PS1 says 'this exhibition may not be suitable for all audiences.' Fair enough, since the show contains some abstract, impressionistic depictions of Vietnam War atrocities and some garden-variety nudity. But when you think of the importance of her work in this moment, the sign also feels like a...

Since it was begun in 2000, Unlimited, which is offered only at the fair in Basel, has proved to be a particularly popular draw. Most people attending the fair–there were 95,000 last year–are expected to visit the section, not only for the sheer wow factor of the works, but also for the relevance of its offerings.'I often tell people that...

Art Basel 2019 opens to the public on Thursday, June 13, with two preview days, on June 11 and 12. Some 290 galleries from 34 countries will show work at the Swiss fair, which runs through June 16.

As the realities of a global climate emergency begin to sink in, the well-heeled visitors to this year's Art Basel fair can expect to see work that reflects the concerns of the world outside–at least to a certain extent. 'Studies show that the wealthier you are, the bigger your carbon footprint, so it's great that we are now seeing this addressed...

Zilia Sánchez recently remarked that 'although the ocean is not in my work, it is in my soul, in my feelings.' This was fitting for the occasion of her first retrospective in the continental United States, which draws together seven decades of work in a presentation at once sweeping and concise.

In Sarah Cain's exhibition The Sun Will Not Wait, hypnotic candy-colored abstractions appeared in multiple guises. Thirteen mostly large-scale paintings on canvas featuring gestural marks, geometric shapes, and various objects—beads, photographs, small trinkets—hung on the walls.

In 1975, a beautiful, naked 36-year-old woman stood in front of 300 people and extracted a scroll from her vagina. She read it aloud slowly, unfurling it into a long, thin tendril of paper. The text was a critical diatribe by film critic Annette Michaelson, denouncing the artist's own work for being too messy, feminine, and a "diaristic...

My introduction to the work of Carolee Schneemann was an ironic rehash of her iconic 1975 work Interior Scroll. It came in a Ms. Lower East Side contest in the early nineties, an era in which I was immersed in Judson Church performance culture, as Carolee had been thirty years prior, when she marshalled 'raw fish, chickens, sausages, wet paint,...

Pioneering American artist, feminist, and filmmaker Carolee Schneemann, known for her multidisciplinary practice that spans more than six decades, has died. She was seventy-nine years old.

As we rewrite art history to recognize the contribution and impact of women from around the world, pointed attention has been dedicated to several bodies of work that reveal, beyond their formal singularity, radical modes of expression. One such artist is Etel Adnan, the 94-year-old Lebanese multimedia artist, writer, poet, and intellectual, whose...

It is a well-trodden argument to say that Ana Mendieta's work is about the body, yet her solo exhibition at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane, Connecting to the Earth, only once depicted the artist herself. For the most part, what one actually observed were the elements of landscape—mud, ice, fire and water—stamped with Mendieta's...

CAPE TOWN — Late last year, the artist Alfredo Jaar displayed a series of photographs and piercing neon works addressing the shared trauma and healing of Robben Island's political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela, after Apartheid. It was in the midst of this exhibition, titled Men Who Cannot Cry, at Goodman Gallery in Cape Town, that I sat...

Who was here first—Nancy Spero, or Hernán Cortés? It may be too much to call Spero (or anyone) a 'universal' artist but her work certainly speaks to the weird postcolonial hybrids that survive as culture in the twenty-first century.

February in LA has long been a permanent fixture in the calendars of the world's elite, who use awards season as a welcome excuse to escape the dreary drizzle in Europe and the biting cold on the East Coast. But now there's a new reason to be in Tinseltown this month: the launch of the first ever Frieze Los Angeles.

Hélio Oiticica (1937 – 1980) is a now integral part of the New York art scene, in large measure thanks to his 2017 retrospective at the Whitney, To Organize Delirium, which provided New Yorkers with an opportunity to experience him in full.

Not all of the work at FIAC, the Foire Internationale d'Art Contemporain (International Contemporary Art Fair), is in frames or on pedestals. Parades for FIAC, a performance festival now in its third year (although performances have been part of the fair for a decade now), is staging 17 productions, with a special emphasis this time on dance and...

The billboards going up around the country this week will have a familiar message for this midterm election: Vote. But featuring images of protests and reminders of the 2016 election, produced by some of the country's best-known artists, the billboards—one for each of the 50 states—will look nothing like your average political...

The Contour of Feeling knows where Van Rydingsvard’s strengths are, focusing mostly on her articulation of torment and violence. This can make PODERWAĆ seem like a blip, but maybe it signifies a shift in the artist’s tone. After so many years plumbing the well of anguish, maybe it’s time for something lighter?

There’s something curiously familiar about visiting Etel Adnan’s apartment in Paris. Not that I’ve ever been there before. But in recent years it has become a sort of cult destination for art-world figures, mentioned and mythologised by the various curators and critics who go to meet her, as well as depicted in film-portraits of the artist. Her...

It is 1961. Despite recent efforts undertaken by the CIA at the Bay of Pigs, Fidel Castro has been in power for two years, and Ana Mendieta and her older sister Raquelin are separated from their parents and flown from Cuba to the United States as part of Operation Peter Pan.

Initially, the title of this exhibition, TORN, is hard to pin on the work of Ursula von Rydingsvard; if anything, her sculpture is stoic, monolithic, and at times intimidating. There never seems an opportunity to rip anything apart. Still, the works in this exhibition seem to have been chosen for their distinctness from one another rather than...