I narrowed down the options by choosing the path I felt right. I can’t recall the paths that I didn’t choose.
B.Z. Sacks owned a gallery in the subway arcade at 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue in 1949. It was called the Tribune Subway Gallery. She was twenty-five years old.
To me traditional art materials are burdensome: they point to themselves, or other points in history. I like to use a material that tells a different story and has a different history, often outside of art.
Social media turns works of art into objects of rapid consumption, sometimes supersonic, which I think makes us dangerously insensitive to the enormous amount of work, time, and sacrifice that lies behind each post, each evanescent image.
I like to make art that I do not understand. It shows, unrelentingly, that other worlds are possible.
The world I was familiar with has been drastically altered by the invisible virus, and I have great difficulty navigating this unfamiliar terrain.
In art, I find joy but no peace.
Why does all official portraiture always have to be celebratory—if you consider it as a visual catalog of past officials? Why can’t it also be a critical depiction or interpretation?
Can art change the world? Can it start a revolution, or stop one? If it can’t change the world, can it change an individual?
We care less now about the subjects than the paintings, which reaffirm that the business of commissioned portraiture—historically treated as a second-level endeavor—was capable of producing breathtaking stuff, art of the first rank.
An American expatriate living in Paris during the 1920s, Eugene McCown painted men in various stages of intimacy, though the homoerotic charge of his paintings was never mentioned by critics.
A lot of my work arises out of an accident, or stumbling on some event that spurs me to want to record it.