Peter Frank

Detail from Jirayr Zorthian’s Cortez in Mexico (1936)

Peter Frank Has Left the [Weekly] Building

So many shows, so little time; always the problem in this compact column, but as this one’s my last, which to choose? Nathan Slate Joseph’s exquisite cloisonnes of rust at Sundaram Tagore? H. K. Zamani’s meditations on geodesic tents at Solway Jones? Pat O’Neill’s intoxicating blend of visionary film and......
Jerome Witkin

Figures of Authority: Jean Conner, Jerome Witkin

Jean Conner has long labored in the shadow of famed husband Bruce, but while she’s not the multimedial innovator he is, her intimate voice maintains the same rarefied sensibility. Conner’s crowded but coherent collages, in fact, maintain a tradition of poetic juxtaposition begun by the likes of Hannah Höch and......
Jennifer Steinkamp

The "It" Parade

Two local “It” girls of contemporary art recapitulate the skills, smarts and delights that have kept them in the international limelight for more than a decade. At ACME, Jennifer Steinkamp, ever the projectress, goes back to her columns of gently, nervously quaking flowers for a three-wall video installation, each column......
Enzo Mari

Designer Enzo Mari Turns Useful Into Artful

(Click to enlarge) Enzo Mari, Timor, calendar (1966) “No ideas but in things,” opined American poet William Carlos Williams. “No things but in ideas,” counters Italian designer Enzo Mari — not to deny Williams’ insistence on the poetry of the real but to find poetry behind the real, in the......
Ingibjörg Birgisdóttir

Artists From All Parts on View at "DREAM(land)" and "It's the Money, Stupid!"

Bringing together 12 artists from Reykjavik, Seoul, Tallahassee and other likely places, the “DREAM(land)” show at Jail gallery takes the tip of the escapist-fantasy-in-art iceberg and lets it melt all over your head. Video intermingles with drawing, hangs near sculpture, stands beside collage, each thing proposing a different Wonderland —......
Shana Lutker

The Radiant Mind, the Body Politic

Without compromising his unique vision or distinctive style, Lee Mullican was able to embrace many of the attitudes and tendencies of his time — picking up on abstract expressionism, minimalism and even Pop, or, in the case of his work from the 1970s (the focus of this show at Marc......
Steven Seinberg

Kansas City in L.A.: Four Abstract Painters

Judging by this selection of eight artists at Milo Gallery, everything is up to date in Kansas City — and beyond. Ricky Allman’s digital-architecture-on-acid renditions; Orly Cogan’s luscious figurative embroideries; the limpid paintings Mary Ann Strandell makes of Rococo and Beaux Arts decorative detail; the similarly decorous, doily-embossed paperworks of......
Jim Lutes Hey

Jim Lutes' Visual Rants, Laddie John Dill's Monumental Materialism

Gloriously elaborate and hermetic, Jim Lutes’ invariably small paintings — currently rendered in that most ancient of painting media, egg tempera — are also radiantly, insouciantly gnarly in their cartoonishly but viscerally strange imagery. The denseness and obsessiveness of Lutes’ work skirts surrealism, expressionism and Pop as it sucks up......
Catherine Wagner

Dan Corson and Catherine Wagner's Illuminating Ideas

“Neon in daylight is a great pleasure,” Frank O’Hara wrote (attributing it to his friend Edwin Denby), “as are light bulbs in daylight.” Still and all, the best time to see Dan Corson’s Empyrean Passage is at dusk, when it turns on, and at dawn, just before it turns off......