The Easel

30th August 2022

Keep Looking

Clifford Thompson | Commonweal | 15th August 2022

Shabazz claims that humility is essential for his work. His decades-long subject is the people he encounters on New York’s streets, people who are the “center of the photograph but not of the world in which the picture is taken”. Politics gets scant attention. Mostly, we see past fashions, old makes of cars, or passing acts of tenderness, evidence of people “acting out the story of being themselves”.  Collectively, Shabazz has produced an “archive” of New York’s street culture. Images are here.

23rd August 2022

Michael Heizer’s City, a vast art project in the Nevada desert 50 years in the making, will finally open to the public

Benjamin Sutton | The Art Newspaper | 20th August 2022

The land artist Michael Heizer has completed “City”, his “career-defining” 50-year project in the Nevada desert. It’s a mile and a half long, half a mile wide and consists of carefully smoothed dirt mounds, roads and depressions dotted with concrete structures. Reviewers are bowled over by its scale, variously comparing it to a Mayan site or an “unfinished highway interchange”. One critic calls it a “masterpiece”, adding that “like Mount Rushmore or the Hoover Dam, it is bravado, awesome and nuts.”

8 Questions on the Life + Work of Diego Rivera

Cristina Chan | SFMOMA | 17th July 2022

Rivera developed a modernist eye in Paris. Back in Mexico, though, his public murals were full of figurative imagery that celebrated indigenous culture and the nobility of rural workers. That work made him famous at home. Fame in the US arose from murals that embraced American industrial prowess. These odd juxtapositions might, if it were another artist, lead to accusations of propaganda. Rivera has somehow escaped that fate. He was, one critic writes, “a lighthouse of vitality”.

An American Renaissance: Beaux-Arts architecture in New York City

Gordon Bock | Traditional Building | 12th March 2022

The Gilded Age (1860 to 1920) marked the American ascendancy. New York’s new elite, now wealthier than aristocratic Europe, wanted their houses and buildings to announce that. The resulting style – Beaux Arts – was the French architectural style “on steroids”, a classically inspired “mélange of eclectic forms and ornaments”. By WW1 the mood had changed, leaving New York with an architectural heritage that references an “American renaissance”.

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