News

By Taylor Dafoe for Artnet

In the light-filled gymnasium of an old schoolhouse in Hudson, New York, a punching bag adorned with neon beads and tassels hangs near a long-forgotten basketball hoop. A totemic sculpture stands in a carpeted classroom and masks are strung through the woodshop.

This is the studio of Jeffrey Gibson, a Choctaw-Cherokee artist known for his signature hybrid of Native American iconography and materials with late-capitalist aesthetics. It’s Indigenous Futurism, to borrow a label posited by Anishinaabe writer Grace L. Dillon: the regalia of pow-wows meets that of ‘90s rave culture, while quilted tapestries are patterned with Op art.

In recent months 93-year-old artist Betye Saar has been cast in the spotlight, with glowing reviews for major shows at New York City's Museum of Modern Art (October 21, 2019 – January 4, 2020) and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (September 22, 2019 – April 5, 2020.)  Saar's primary art form is assemblage – sculptures made from found items that she pieces together, often addressing spirituality and black oppression – that turn the ordinary into the extraordinary. Correspondent Serna Altschul reports.

By Jason Farago for The New York Times

A French masterpiece has come to New York for the first time ever, and has been greeted with a curious silence.

It’s Jacques-Louis David’s “Bonaparte Crossing the Alps,” from 1801, and you know it even if you’ve never seen it in person, so enduring is its propaganda. To commemorate Napoleon’s victory over Austria at the Battle of Marengo, David painted him charging up a mountain on a piebald steed, right arm pointing skyward, trademark bicorne on his head, cool and cocksure as his horse bucks its front heels. In copies the artist and his studio made afterward Napoleon wears a red cape, but here, in the original, he’s wrapped in a mantle of gold, starchy and solid in the Alpine air.

By Isis Davis-Marks for Artsy

Wangari Mathenge’s paintings often show people caught in a particular moment. Maybe they’re drinking a cup of coffee, like the woman in Coffee At Cassell’s (2019), or gazing wistfully at something beyond the frame, as in The Cacophony of Silence (2019). Some of her figures are based on herself or pictures of family members.

“I’ve heard comments about how empowering and inspiring it is for black people to see themselves reflected this way,” Mathenge said. “However, for me, painting is merely an expression of myself, a form of catharsis. Currently, it takes the form of figurative painting, but if it ever morphed into abstraction, it would still feel the same to me—something of me that I offer to the world unsolicited.”