I am a New York resident who counts myself fortunate to receive AEQAI. Your latest issue is truly amazing in its scope, made even more remarkable when you consider that it is produced entirely gratis. Every artistic organization in America should study AEQAI at this time of massive declines in public support when paid staffs and publications are bottom-line victims.
The Painter’s Table, a blog which covers painting exhibitions nationally, has chosen four of AEQAI ‘s columns in four months: Sheldon Tapley’s review of the Weston Gallery; Cole Carothers’ essay on Gerhard Richter; Alan Pocaro’s review of a painting show at the Phyllis Weston Gallery; and most recently, Kim Krause’s essay on Philip Guston in the current issue.
“One morning, my wife, after the rain, pointed out a spider that was making a marvelous web, so I started doing a number of web pictures with my wife and myself, and a lot of paraphernalia caught in the web. . . . It’s a terrible corny idea, but what can you do? It led to a whole series of paintings with both of us caught in the web. It felt good making a web eleven feet across.
Gordon Smith’s (b. 1952) black-and-white photographs of Kentucky’s coal mining country and its people are disturbing documents of hardscrabble life. His images tell the story of the miners and their families who endure the crushing poverty that forces them to destroy their very environment to survive. A part of the photographic tradition of social commentary, Smith began this powerful series in 1994.
When I talk to people who don’t think they know very much about art, I say, “Just look. What do you see?” If someone can tell you what they physically see, and then stop to think about how it makes them feel—that’s really at the heart of any experience with art regardless of how much art history you know.
The paintings that mark a gradual return to across-the-board contemporary art at Marta Hewett Gallery, where glass objects have held the floor, are themselves almost glass-like. Jason Zickler’s labor-intensive works with their dense layers of clear, cured resin and paint gleam in a celebration of colorfor its own sake but hold in their depths delineations by line as well.
