political art – Art Spiel

July 21, 2025July 21, 2025, by Anna Shukeylo

Open Books at Mana Contemporary

Installation view. Photo credit Mike O’Shea

There is a hidden gem on view at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City—an art book group show of 15 artists carefully curated by the directors and curators of Monira Foundation and Mana Contemporary. The exhibition unfolds across two rooms. In the first space, the viewer encounters a dimly lit room of suspended tables uniquely designed by Kele McComsey. On each table, there is a carefully curated display of artist books—a rare opportunity to view this uniquely expressive form of art. During the run of the show, the curators periodically shift some books, while others are welcome to be handled. This is an incredible opportunity to see artist books and experience their magic. Blurring the lines between book and sculpture, these magnetic art objects have always been a curatorial challenge. They are meant to be experienced, unlike most other art pieces.

June 24, 2025June 25, 2025, by Emily Wilson

Everyday War at the Asian Museum

In dialogue

Emily Wilson in conversation with Abby Chen curator of contemporary art at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum

Installation view of Yuan Goang-Ming, Everyday War, 2025, at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Photo by Kevin Candland

Yuan Goang-Ming, known as the ‘father of Taiwanese video art,’ chose Abby Chen, the curator of contemporary art at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum to curate his presentation at the 2024 Venice Biennale, Everyday War. In the Palazzo Priccioni, a space that once served as a prison, his videos and installations poetically examined the unease of contemporary life, in works such as Dwelling, which presents an explosion in a living room, and Everyday Maneuver, showing the empty streets of Taipei during an air raid drill.

March 31, 2025March 24, 2025, by Melissa L. Mednicov

Marisol: A Retrospective at the Dallas Museum of Art

A museum with a display of art

AI-generated content may be incorrect. — Installation view of *Marisol: A Retrospective* at the Dallas Museum of Art. Courtesy of the Dallas Museum of Art

Marisol: A Retrospective at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) presents a comprehensive overview of the artist’s career, ranging from works she produced in art school in the fifties to her last works. In doing so, the exhibition centers and decenters Marisol’s status within the Pop art sphere, where she never fully situated herself. Her works are too brutal and too strange (in the best sense of the word) for Pop. She was undoubtedly exhibiting with Pop artists and part of their networks, as her films with Andy Warhol included in the exhibition attest. However, she was somewhere else, too. Her works contain the brute force of politics, history, culture, and climate change, and, in her practice, she engages with how those forces take place primarily upon the bodies of women. The body morphs and sometimes breaks under these forces.

March 11, 2025March 12, 2025, by Riad Miah

Guan-Hong Lu at Nunu Fine Art New York

*The Unbearable Lightness of Being*, 2024 oil on canvas 11 7/8 x 11 7/8 in. Image courtesy of Nunu Fine Art Gallery

Currently on view at Nunu Fine Art’s New York Project Space is View from My Window, a solo exhibition by Taiwanese painter Guan-Hong Lu. The exhibition features over 20 small oil paintings, predominantly 13” x 10” in size, and is housed in the gallery’s lower level—below ground—intensifying the sense of intimacy in both subject matter and conceptual approach. Lu’s subject matter, at first glance, appears as fleeting moments captured in time, but upon closer inspection, they reveal layers of surrealism, irony, and political undertones.

November 22, 2024December 7, 2024, by Melissa Stern

Llyn Foulkes: The Untied State of America

A person with a face cut out of paper Description automatically generated — Pat, 2020. Pigment print, oil, acrylic, red oak, and found objects on wood. 31 3/8 x 25 3/8 x 1 7/8 inches

Llyn Foulkes is a 90-year-old painter, jazz musician, troublemaker and visionary. After making a splash entrée on the American art scene in 1961, he hopscotched around the artworld, changing genres and styles as his restless mind embraced new ideas. He has been “consistently inconsistent” (from his website), wonderful for an artist, but not always strategic for a career. The commercial art world can be somewhat conservative, preferring that an artist find a groove and stick to it. As a result, though brilliant, Foulkes has not yet achieved the wide recognition that he deserves.

October 5, 2024October 7, 2024, by Santiago Zabala

kennardphillipps Greatest Emergency

This is part of a series of articles for the upcoming exhibition, The Greatest Emergency at the Circulo de Bellas Artes of Madrid. The exhibition is based on Santiago Zabala’s book, Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency. In this exhibition, ten contemporary artists rescue us into our greatest emergencies, that is, those we do not confront as we should. Each article in the series will contextualize these artists’ practices and explore how they are linked to Zabala’s aesthetic theory and the exhibition’s themes. The fourth article in this series highlights the work of kennardphillipps.

October 3, 2024September 29, 2024, by Etty Yaniv

Divisions: To Be Human Is To Act Humanely

Featured Project

at Griffiss International Sculpture Park , Rome, NY

Linda Cunningham – Divisions

… hunger and fear can vanquish all human resistance, and all

freedom … Freedom consists in knowing freedom is in danger.

But to know … is to have time to avoid & prevent the moment of

inhumanity … the infinitesimal difference between the human

being and the non-human being …

————–Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity

August 1, 2024August 2, 2024, by A.E. Chapman

UNCOMMITTED at Stand4 Gallery

In Conversation

A. E Chapman with Magdalena Dukiewicz, Bang Geul Han, and Georgia Lale

Install image: (left to right) Bang Geul Han’s, Warp and Weft #02 – Toilet, Warp and Weft #02 – Reading, and Warp and Weft #03 – Sleeping, all from 2022, Georgia Lale’s 404,770 on Inauguration Day, 2021, Stand4 Gallery

UNCOMMITTED at Stand4 focuses on civic literacy, engagement, and social matters which affect and reflect the daily lives of folks within Bay Ridge. This local lens also overlaps with national issues surrounding the 2024 presidential election. In particular, these artists examine concerns related to health care, migration, conflict, tensions between state and federal voting rights, the role of technology, surveillance, and advocacy. Art Spiel invited the curator of the show, A.E. Chapman, to elaborate on these concerns and their relevance within each of their works in the exhibition.

July 22, 2024October 6, 2024, by Santiago Zabala

Josh Kline’s Greatest Emergency

Josh Kline, Unemployment, installation view, 2016

This is part of a series of articles for the upcoming exhibition, The Greatest Emergency at the Circulo de Bellas Artes of Madrid. The exhibition is based on Santiago Zabala’s book, Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency. In this exhibition, ten contemporary artists rescue us into our greatest emergencies, that is, those we do not confront as we should. Each article in the series will contextualize these artists’ practices and explore how they are linked to Zabala’s aesthetic theory and the exhibition’s themes. The second article in this series highlights the work of American artist Josh Kline.

June 1, 2024May 28, 2024, by Saul Ostrow

Jenny Holzer’s Hypocrisy

Opinion

Walls of the Guggenheim Museum bathed in a purple glow. A scrolling LED text installation winds up the ramps of the Guggenheim Museum, displaying texts written and curated by the artist, leading to a blue sky beyond the oculus. — Installation view, Jenny Holzer: L: right Line, May 17-September 29, 2024. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. @2024 Jenny Holzer, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Photo: Filip Wolak

“I want people to concentrate on the content of the writing and not ‘who done it.’ I want the work to be of utility to as many people as possible. And I think if it were attributed to me, it would be easier to toss.”
Quote by Jenny Holzer from Art21

Recently, I wrote an opinion piece on the suspect politics of Maurizio Cattelan’s show at Gagosian Gallery — it questioned why successful artists who make political claims for their work do not use their privilege to engage in direct political commentary and action rather than critique by analogy. I’m not suggesting they need to engage in social practices like Mel Chin or Tania Bruguera; I think artists like Cattelan can be more direct in their criticism or more like Theaster Gates, who acknowledges the contradictions and privilege that comes with his success to the degree that he openly differentiates between museums and institutional exhibits that permit him to experimentation and his gallery exhibits that afford him market engagement. Meanwhile, while those works have an implied politic, he is an activist who focuses on community development, which is realized through his Chicago-based Rebuild Foundation, which is a platform for cultural development and neighborhood transformation. This multifaceted approach enables Gates to navigate and influence both the art world and broader societal issues without collapsing one into the other.