I met Anton van Dalen more than 30 years ago and first reviewed him in Artforum (December 1988), when he had a retrospective survey, The Memory Cabinet: Paintings, Drawings, Objects 1950–1988, at Exit Art.That memorable exhibition included a childhood notebook on pigeons, which has been a lifelong interest. In 1995, I included his work in a group...

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.

The central gallery of this witty three-work, three-artist exhibition reassembles Vincent Fecteau's first solo show, in 1995, at the late San Francisco gallery Kiki. 'Ben' took its name from Michael Jackson's 1972 homage to his pet rat, and features well-worn shoeboxes cut with mouse-sized holes. Toilet paper roll tunnels connect some of these...

Pink text snaked in tight, meandering rows across human figures in the fifty-one recent paintings on paper in Betty Tompkins's second solo exhibition at P.P.O.W. One piece read, I WAS HUNTING FOR A JOB AND HE WAS HUNTING FOR ME. Another: SHUT UP SLUT! And another: I VEHEMENTLY DENY THESE ALLEGATIONS.

Judith Linhares, who was born in Los Angeles, has cited two of her early inspirations — the upbeat, self-contained cartoon worlds of Walt Disney, and meeting the artists Wallace Berman and Bruce Conner as a teenager.In the late 1950s, she moved to the Bay Area, where she studied art and lived for two decades. She began teaching and became...

Given the Trump administration’s explicit distaste for gay rights, artists have a mandate to remind the nation exactly why social progress matters.It’s therefore no surprise that there is a renewed interest in queer art with the Whitney Museum of American Art’s first major retrospective of David Wojnarowicz, a spitfire artist who confronted the...

I haven’t seen anyone capture our current state of disconnect better than Josh Kline does in Evidence, a show of work by seven artists, himself included, that he curated for Metro Pictures. In the front room, Oto Gillen’s handsome photographs of ominous Wall Street skyscrapers and Allyson Vieira’s apocalyptically cheery wall-mounted arrows made of...

With the election of Donald Trump, a powerful unravelling began - not just of the morals and ethics of the US government but of the tightly laced silence around sexual assault. For American textile artist Erin M. Riley, the election cycle was 'a bizarre turning point,' sparking conversations with her mother and sisters about horrific encounters...

Known for a series of giant genitalia 'fuck paintings' (inspired by her husband's porno mags), the 72-year-old painter was once blacklisted and disregarded by radical feminists for her frank depiction of sexuality. As her new women words project - people send in words they use to describe women - makes its way across Europe, ELLE chats to the...

This Summer in Los Angeles, a hairy, phallic-looking screw painted by Judith Bernstein extended across 180 feet of the exterior of Venus galleryin Boyle Heights. This month at MoMA PS1 in Queens, men and women stripped down to their underwear and rubbed each other with raw fish in a video by Carolee Schneemann. And in London, pink double-headed...

A lasting impression one got from the exhibition After Darkness: Southeast Asian Art in the Wake of History at the Asia Society Museum in New York was the sense of art's power to propel. Walking a tight rope between personal aesthetics and the repressive sociopolitical conditions of their countries, seven artists and a collaborative...

In 2015, the Venice Biennale with Okwui Enwezor as curator sometimes felt more like a political manifesto, with readings from Marx's Das Kapital and work that touched on climate change, colonialism and the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean. The curator of this year's Biennale, Christine Macel, had a different vision: to put artists and artistic...

The 57th Venice Biennale, International Art Exhibition, titled VIVA ARTE VIVA and curated by Christine Macel, is fast-approaching. The 2017 edition will be open to the public from 13 May to 26 November at the Giardini and Arsenale venues, following a sequence of preview days. Unfolding over the course of nine chapters or families of artists, VIVA...

Carolee Schneemann is known for her daring, unapologetically feminist actions. Her work has asserted the female body as a site of history, politics, and mythology through unforgettable performance and video. She has read from a scroll while pulling it from her vagina, (Interior Scroll, 1975), rolled around ecstatically with raw meat (Meat Joy,...

Over the last two decades, Dinh Q. Lê, one of Vietnam’s most distinguished living artists, has drawn attention to the mutability of human memory and the misrepresented narratives of Southeast Asian history. Lê’s multidisciplinary practice is an embodiment of his effort to come to terms with the difficult memory of fleeing the Khmer...

Betty Tompkins is no stranger to controversy. The 70-year-old artist started making her Fuck Paintings—large-scale photorealistic renderings of vaginal penetration—in 1969. The grayscale works' source material was outlawed pornographic images. Earning dismissal from gallerists, the ire of the anti-pornography feminist wing, denial of...

Nearly two decades after the artist’s death, The Bronx Museum of the Arts has mounted painter Martin Wong’s first in-depth retrospective. The show is titled Human Instamatic, as Wong called himself during a stint hawking portraits in Humboldt County, north of San Francisco where he grew up and where, having returned home to his parents’ care, he...

Human Instamatic, the first museum retrospective of Martin Wong’s work since his death in 1999, is an insightful celebration of one of New York’s most underappreciated painters. Deftly curated and accompanied by an excellent catalogue, the Bronx Museum’s exhibition is an indelible contribution to the artist’s legacy and reputation. The show, which...

Vietnam’s blossoming contemporary art scene is held in check through a complex set of bureaucratic hurdles coupled with hit-and-miss government censorship and lack of critical infrastructure funding, at a time when it should be enriching, not sabotaging this shining asset.The roots of this inertia and entanglement are based in military...