An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Thursday, July 10, 2025
We’re up in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. The floor of Dudek’s studio is covered wall-to-wall with objects. One can ascertain individual sculptures, or perhaps parts of sculptures that might become sculptures one day. I ask if this is how it always is.
Contributed by David Carrier / Bernice Bing (1936–1998), a gay Chinese American woman, grew up in San Francisco. She had a difficult childhood. Her mother died when she was five and lived in no fewer than 17 predominantly white orphanages. She attended local schools, got her MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute, and actively participated in the local art scene. Her teachers included Richard Diebenkorn as well as celebrated local artists, and Bing exhibited widely in Northern California. Now, thanks to Berry Campbell Gallery, which has provided a magnificent catalogue with a fine essay by John Yau, her work is being brought to New York’s attention.
Contributed by Michael Brennan / As a boy, the sculptor Tony Smith – a canonically important and under-appreciated American sculptor who connects AbEx and Minimalism, equally at home with Pollock and Serra – suffered from tuberculosis so severe that his father built him a small shed in the backyard of their South Orange, New Jersey, home, with fiberglass curtains to minimize dust and a small black stove. Smith lived in the spartan outbuilding for several years. Imaging him there might elicit the melancholy that Van Morrison conveys in his aching ballad “T.B. Sheets.” As an adult, however, Smith noted an upside, at least for an artist: “If one spends a long time in a room with only one object, that object becomes a little god.” I grasped the significance of this observation acutely when I encountered Mark Dagley’s sloop-like sculpture Vāyu-Vāta, which, pointed away from a black radiator and darkly mullioned window, dominates the Abaton Project Room in the Financial District.
In the heart of central New York, nestled among the rolling hills of New Berlin, stands a unique testament to artistic collaboration, friendship, and innovation: The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts. Established in 1997, the Foundation honors the legacy of Sam and Adele Golden, the visionary co-founders of Golden Artist Colors, a company dedicated to producing fine paint for fine art. We invite you to join us there in celebrating the profound impact that art and community have on our lives at the Foundation’s annual art benefit and auction on August 3rd from 4:30 to 8:00 PM. It promises to be our most exciting event yet.
Contributed by Vittorio Colaizzi / The first plate of Barnett Newman?s Notes, a series of etchings from 1968 that are on view at Craig Starr alongside Brice Marden’s “Suicide Notes,” contains an outlandish concentration of marks in the lower left of the central column. With this plate, as with his painting Achilles (1952), it seems as if he was pushing the limit of his own format, to see how much incident he could include without, in Donald Judd?s terminology, ?weakening? the composition.
