The Easel

9th June 2020

“So Many Glaring Absences That Were Very Loud to Me”: An Interview with Titus Kaphar

This #blacklivesmatter moment is rippling into art, with Time placing a Kaphar work on its cover. The linked piece is a backgrounder on the rapidly rising Kaphar. On the removal of confederacy statues: “if the conversation is binary then my opinion is to take them down, but I don’t think it has to be binary. If we engage artists on this subject … we would be getting a different set of answers”.

2nd June 2020

Landscapes, languor and limbs: the other side of Dorothea Lange

Can an artist’s best work become a kind of prison? Dorothea Lange’s iconic 1936 image Migrant Mother has pidgeonholed her as a Depression era documentarian. An extensive exploration of her archive shows a far more diverse output. Lange sought ways to “convey intimacy … gestures … subjects resting or sleeping … her own world of small things. A surprisingly contemporary image-maker …”

Peter Alexander, who created ethereal worlds out of resin, dies at 81

Alexander studied architecture but wasn’t convinced. Art proved a better fit and, almost immediately, he began making coloured resin sculptures. These works were small and luminous, perfectly suited to “connecting light and space”. Pristine these works may have been, but Alexander saw little commonality with the austere minimalism then prevailing on the US East Coast. Minimalism, he said, is “a crock”.