His arrogance was unmistakable. For one thing, rejection to him wasn’t a verdict; it was a misjudgment. For another, he saw himself not just as artist, but as muse and engine fueling others’ rise to greatness. But that arrogance doubled as a shield against his fragile humanity.
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June 2025
The visual artist Enrique Garcia talks authorship, the fragmentation of the digital world, and the disruptive spirit of technology.
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Issue 6 (2025)
Oscar yi Hou reconfigures the recognizable. The Brooklyn-based painter, who was born in England to Chinese immigrants, bedecks his portraits with a system of symbols as ostensibly oriental as souvenirs from a Chinatown gift shop.
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November 2024
[Benjamin] Fredrickson’s perspective typically bodes more rectitude than its smutty facade might suggest. He has spent much of his photography career trying to dredge the dark sides of gay sexual culture out from the shadows, as opposed to frolicking at the depths of their great perversity.
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July 2024
Unlike many recent shows, in Tiptoeing Through the Kitchen, no intellectual scaffolding demands dismantling, and it leaves the omnipresence of digital technology out of discussion. Instead, it focuses on intimate personal revelations, but only in bits and pieces—the sort of wounded, whispered half-words that simmer with tension.
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May 2024
The shaven-headed artist, who was born in Chicago in 1977, has spent the last half-decade developing a sculptural form that is starkly singular. From his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, he discusses how he’s bringing it into the future.
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Issue 5 (2024)
Glamor is hard to carry and even harder to sustain. Except for the figures in Danielle Mckinney’s Quiet Storm, now on display at Marianne Boesky Gallery, who make it look so easy, even at the end of the day, when they seem burned out, exhausted—from what nobody knows or cares much about. Perhaps that’s why they also project a peculiar loneliness.
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April 2024
At the heart of Nicole Coson’s terrific New York debut at Silverlens Gallery is the single recurring image of a plastic shipping crate—ubiquitous, unobtrusive, perpetually in transit, everywhere and nowhere. Whether intentionally or not, it evokes the instability and uncertainty facing all immigrants, or anyone who has ever found themselves between worlds, marking time with nothing that wouldn’t fit into a crate.
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April 2024
The 12 drawings on display at Diana reek of testosterone. Here are horned-up men who want nothing but to surrender themselves to each other’s mouths and penises. Yet sex itself isn’t what quickens the pulse of this small but superb show. It’s desire and the desperate need to satisfy it.
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March 2024
The lights were up in the Abrons Arts Center on Grand Street in New York when a climbing series of alternating phrases of bass and tenor notes emerged. Simon Winsé, a virtuoso musician from Burkina Faso, was playing the kora, a centuries-old West African instrument, his thumbs and forefingers plucking the strings while the belly of the instrument lay on the ground between his legs. Thus began Traces—Speech to African Nations.
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October 2022