Peter Frank

Intimate, idiosyncratic art symptomizes its era. Is it sexist, or otherwise presumptuous, to see such art as particularly sensitive to the tribulations of the Zeitgeist when it’s made by women artists? Certainly, the delicate, irresistibly poignant collages and box assemblages of the late Hannelore Baron speak of their times, or......

Glenn Ligon deconstructs the African-American experience through appropriated language — words from elsewhere at once inappropriate for genteel company and appropriate to persistently nagging questions of race. Here Ligon has filled a vast room with a parade of relatively small gold-colored canvases on which is stenciled the same Richard Pryor......

The apparent art explosion at the east end of the county is illuminated by two exhibitions concerned with light. “Ephemeral” deals with light literally, bringing together the radiant work of five artists (one from the Bay Area, two from here, two from Mexico City). Iñaki Bonillas’ fluorescent corridor slyly updates......

André Masson is barely known to most of surrealism’s fans, at least on these shores, even though movement mastermind André Breton considered him the quintessential surrealist artist. Masson had a profound impact on American abstract expressionism — and, most to the point, he sure could conjure up a potent picture......

A utopian vision guided Micol Hebron’s parents into the woods, where they lived for several years in a thatched lean-to. Hebron is still struggling to embrace, reject, grow past and grow into her hippie heritage. The fantasies she has built around the image and concept of the unicorn, for instance,......

Almost-abstract sculptor Barbara Zucker has lost none of her grace, wit or willingness to go over the top in the three decades since she emerged as a notable figure in New York feminist art. Make that four decades: This micro-survey goes back to the point at which Zucker started undermining......

Unlike his compatriot Wassily Kandinsky, Russo-German Blaue Reiter painter Alexei von Jawlensky stayed an expressionist all his life, evolving toward abstraction but never quite letting go of how the real world looked — to him, at any rate. From the first, Jawlensky’s world looked full of color and intense distortion,......

Manuel Ocampo has found his inner Guston in so many glorious and hilarious new paintings and drawings, more comical and finely wrought than ever, less gratuitously gross and overtly in-yo-face political but sharper for their now-subtle (well, subtler) pokes at our intellectual and artistic pretensions. Ocampo attempts a “Kitsch Recovery......

Clay used to be a “craft” material, utilitarian and debased. No longer. “Material Affinities” shows how five radically different artists slip smoothly back and forth between ceramic and other media. In her extravagant use of a vast range of materials, from chrome to latex to neon, New York–based Lynda Benglis......