Tom Prochaska distinguished himself in many mediums: He was a masterful printmaker, an intuitive painter, a builder of papier-mâché figures, a creator of fused glass panels, and graphite-on-paper drawings.
The courtyard of MoMA PS1 in Queens was buzzing during Wednesday night's opening of Greater New York, now in its sixth edition. Our team shares first impressions from the expansive show, which included more than 50 New York City artists at the beginning of their careers.
I see myself first and foremost as a weaver working at the intersection of craft and technology. As an Angeleno, I grew up learning how to weave in the Wixárika tradition of my matriarchal bloodline by watching my mother and my grandmother.
The curators of Greater New York really captured the energy of the city well - not the out-of-towner's New York with its glossy surfaces, brands, and trendy fare, but the gritty New York that's always in the process of formation, that rejects surface in favor of rawness.
Much of Instagram's video content is organized around transformation-the virtual magic of the before-and-after and clips that show cause and effect. A person makes pasta from scratch in 20 seconds via edits that compress time-intensive labor.
The new New Museum is many things: contemporary, perhaps, but also a science, history, anthropology, and many other museums in one. It echoes the desire of its patron class to own the world and its affiliated courtier class to deliver it to them on a silver platter, or encased in perforated metal, in this case.
What began as a passion for collecting became a responsibility. She not only believes in the artistic genius of women, but she wants society in general to hold men and women artists in equal esteem-and to place the same monetary value on their work.
On Franklin Street in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, one non-commercial gallery fosters 'a small, stubbornly human space for friction.' Friction—the ubiquitous buzzword that captures the simultaneous delight and discomfort of doing things the slow way—is at the heart of artists Pap Souleye Fall and Char Jeré's current show at Subtitled NYC. It also reflects the overall spirit of this little exhibition space and of a burgeoning movement to reject our culture of optimization in favor of a bumpier, more intimate, less alienating experience.
I work outside, carving and shaping the stone. Outside my house, I have a table, an extension cord, and tools. It's very cold and I have to wear all my winter clothes. When it's too cold, I do the filing and finishing work inside after I shape it outside. I listen to all kinds of music. I listen to Eminem all the time; his albums are all my favorites. For drawings, I work at Kinngait Studios or at home on my kitchen table.
This sprawling installation (or in the New York gallery's parlance, "spatial collage") had transformed the Wooster Street space into a warren of rooms and hallways that resembled a series of stage or film sets, including a "clandestine drug lab," a Chinatown basement store, and a pirate radio station. I gingerly navigated through half-destroyed walls and over uneven floors strewn with detritus, escaping with vivid memories of one of the strangest contemporary art experiences to be had in those years.
I take no pleasure in saying "I told you so." Really, I don't. But I was hardly shocked by this week's news that Tina Rivers Ryan, who was named editor-in-chief of Artforum in 2024 after the dumpster fire that was the magazine's handling of an open letter in support of Gaza, was stepping down (Daniel Wenger and Rachel Wetzler will step in as co-editors, scrapping the editor-in-chief title altogether).
In 2024, I made a vow to never base my art criticism on wall labels. My decision came after reading reactions to that year's Whitney Biennial. "If every label in 'Even Better Than the Real Thing,' the 81st installment of the Whitney Biennial, were peeled off the walls and tossed into the Hudson, what would happen?" asked Jackson Arn in the New Yorker. (He went on to suggest that the overall show would have been much better.)
Marah Al-Za'anin, an 18-year-old Palestinian artist, has transformed a tent in Gaza City's Al-Rimal neighborhood into a studio. Al-Za'anin can't have been more than 15 or 16 years old when the genocide began, but she continues to pursue her passion for art and uses her brother's phone as a light source while she paints and draws late into the night. (photo by Saeed Jaras/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)
Mornings are best for concentrated work. In the winter, I turn on the heat at 8am and get started around 10am. Summer, I start around 9am. I have two areas in the studio for projects. The large, heavy wood sculptures are carved in the front section of the studio, closest to the roll-up wide door. Smaller sculptures are placed on a hydraulic workbench. Before I start, I focus, connect with the Source, and ask for guidance.
