The Easel

2nd March 2021

A searing, all-star art show explores Black grief from the civil rights era to now

Sebastian Smee | The Washington Post | 17th February 2021

A group show in New York, curated by the stellar Okwui Enwezor, considers racism in the US. Given the complexity of that issue, there is no single message, political or otherwise. Instead, the show is a meditation on grief in the face of anti-Black violence, an emotion that is private and “profoundly destabilizing”.  “An emblematic show” says the writer, combining “deep cultural tradition with a sense of immediate cultural crisis”.

When a museum feels like home

Peter Schjeldahl | The New Yorker | 8th February 2021

An ode to New York’s Frick Collection and its riches. Frick, “insatiable”, was buying when European aristocrats were skint. He didn’t buy in depth, just “the simply superb—fantastic icing on not much cake”. In just one drawing room “two portraits by Titian, two by Holbein, and a Bellini … a potent El Greco, Holbein’s “Sir Thomas More” and “Thomas Cromwell”. But no nudes – Frick wanted dignity, “laundering the machinations of his avarice”.

Harvest of Nature

Cat Lachowskyj | Lensculture | 18th March 2020

Nettle has called some of her images “visual autobiography”, and you can see why. Layered, collaged images, made before Photoshop, tell stories about “family, motherhood, place”. Her determination to juggle an art career with the roles of wife and mother have given her career a fragmentary character. That has not stopped her “alternative photographic processes” being recognized as expanding photography’s vocabulary, especially its ability to convey mood.

Folk art gets a proper pedestal at the MFA

Murray Whyte | The Boston Globe | 18th February 2021

Folk art is a more polite term than ‘outsider art’ but carries the same message – art that is “less”. A Boston museum is holding a dedicated exhibition, something of a “mea culpa” given its large holdings of these works. The art on show is a “rich terrain”. Some works are not signed, a problem for a market that only imparts value where there is a “brand”. Art outside the mainstream is confusing but “interesting … folk art is real, messy and maddeningly broad.”

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