Collaged scraps of cloth or crumpled paper in Andrews’s portraits were a subversive and insistent means of encompassing his own non-White, non-urban roots.
Debra Brehmer
Debra Brehmer is a writer and art historian who runs a contemporary gallery called Portrait Society in Milwaukee, WI. She is especially interested in how portraits convey meaning.
Posted inArt
Frida Kahlo’s Elegy to Heartache
Despite the fact that most of humanity has shared the devastating emotional turmoil of a breakup, the topic is strangely elusive in the history of art.
Posted inOpinion
My Small Gallery Lost Money at an Art Fair. It Hurt.
When sales are robust, it confirms that producing and selling art is actually a viable activity. When sales falter, our world begins to feel untenable.
Posted inFilm
William Kentridge Sees the Universe in a Pot of Coffee
The artist tells Hyperallergic about how the isolation of COVID-19 led to a streaming series set wholly within the bounds of his studio.
Posted inArt
An Emotional Journey Through Tracey Emin’s Art
Emin accomplishes what any great artist must do — turn the sacrificing of privacy into the spark of human connectivity.
Posted inArt
When Scandinavia Was a Hotbed of Black American Culture
Nordic Utopia? African Americans in the 20th Century zeroes in on a far less charted corner of Black history than that of expats to Paris: the artists who ventured north.
Posted inArt
Petah Coyne’s Maximalist Art Lays Bare Women’s Oppression
Coyne’s work sits between abundance and suffocation, uses seductive materials to serve uncomfortable truths about the barriers that face women.
Posted inArt
The Fury and Failings of a Nicole Eisenman Survey
En masse, Eisenman’s paintings feel weighty and overwrought, as if too many ideas had become tangled and sucked up all the air, like a one-way conversation.
Posted inArt
The Productive Messiness of Expo Chicago 2024
The art felt as if it was trying to find the language to merge emotion with content, to harness the energies of the search within the courage of experimentation.
Posted inArt
A Displaced Artist Finds Freedom in Flight
Petrit Halilaj works from memories of his time in a refugee camp during the Kosovo War, when the sight of birds and thought of migration gave him hope.
Posted inArt
50 Paintings Invites Viewers to Think Like an Artist
With its hands-off approach, the Milwaukee Art Museum’s survey is a reprieve — an intimate place to wallow in mark-making.
Posted inArt
Remedios Varo in a Sphere of Her Own
Varo’s paintings beckon us to plunge into their vaporous worlds while challenging us to decode intricate scenarios.