After decades of being overlooked, it's fair to say that 73-year-old American artist McArthur Binion is having a moment. With a spate of recent exhibitions, notably his inclusion in the 2017 Venice Biennale Viva Arte Viva and a 2018 solo exhibition at the Cranbrook Art Museum in Detroit, this past month the artist has also celebrated the opening...
McArthur Binion had been creating art almost completely under the radar for four decades, handling his own occasional sales and raising two children in Chicago on a teaching salary. Now, Mr. Binion has been fully embraced by the mainstream art world — at the age of 72. His dealer is a prominent Chelsea gallery. Museums and international...
Three decades after Andy Warhol's death, he remains one of America's most provocative artists. His influence on popular culture is so pervasive that each emerging art movement after him has had to grapple with Warhol's focus on surface perfections and his singular celebrity. Despite their complicated feelings, many contemporary artists say they...
Femininity, race, sexuality, art history, identity and power. These are the themes explored in New York-based artist Mickalene Thomas' new exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts.
Today, Expo Chicago returns to its home on the Navy Pier overlooking Lake Michigan. This is the sixth edition of the city's annual art fair and exhibition platform, which is the biggest of its kind in the Midwest. The center of the fair lies in the convention center, where 135 galleries, non-profit organizations, and arts publications from 25...
The tendency of Pop artists to collect objects makes perfect sense: their practice is rooted in absorbing and remixing the available culture. At Kavi Gupta gallery, a retrospective pairs Roger Brown: Estate Paintings, a selection of paintings and sculptures by the seminal Imagist artist, with Collecting came quite natural for me, a series of...
Ah, the romance of the desert! A place of fierce natural beauty and beguiling spiritual wonder! A rejuvenating refuge from the crushing pressures of modern urban life! Desert X, the ambitious exhibition of new site-specific art installations scattered around the Coachella Valley, is successful partly because the 16 participating artists mostly...
From September 22 through 25, the fifth edition of the EXPO CHICAGO art fair will take place at Chicago’s Navy Pier. The fair will present an array of national and international galleries, alongside specially organized exhibition projects such as IN/SITU and EXPO VIDEO. Flash Art spoke with EXPO’s director of programming, Stephanie...
Last November, Mickalene Thomas was named a 2015 USA Francie Bishop Good & David Horvitz Fellow, one of 37 artists across nine disciplines to receive a $50,000 unrestricted award to expand and facilitate their practice. Thomas joined a list and network of lauded names that include visual artists like Theaster Gates and Mark Bradford, but also...
At Kavi Gupta’s Elizabeth Street location, Tony Tasset has wallpapered the large warehouse space with 66 arrow paintings. The paintings, which feature pairs of arrows (one pointing up, the other pointing down), create a multicolored mosaic of seemingly endless permutations, each complicating the expanded illusion of flatness and depth.
Mickalene Thomas started out as an abstract painter, inspired by Australian Aboriginal art and late-nineteenth-century French Pointillism. She had always incorporated found materials into her work, but when she got to graduate school she began to make representational paintings using glitter—flashy animal personifications with punning titles...
Most people spend their daily lives in one place, maybe two—artist Mickalene Thomas splits her time among four. But between her studio, her partner Racquel’s Chelsea apartment, a country house in Connecticut, and her own Brooklyn brownstone, it’s that last residence that Thomas calls home. “It’s our sanctuary,”...
Anyone that thinks artists are immune to either a gentle boost or a subtle snub from the art establishment is fooling themselves. Context and circumstance can be artists' foes as easily as their friends, and no one knows that more than McArthur Binion.