Author: Ann Klefstad

Lynn Geesaman’s photographs always draw one in. And after that, you stand around in the image, thinking, Now what am I doing here? I came here to get something; what was it? The fuzzy, melting landscapes have the memory-dissolving qualities of a late spring day—and, quite honestly, who knows whether that’s good or bad? But…

Scrap yards and paper recycling form Michael Kareken’s usual subjects (though he has other, more conventional ones as well—figures, usually); many of the works in this show depict the Rock-Tenn recycling yard near his studio. Tough-love limnings of crushed heaps evoke the huge stone Aphrodite that stood at the old Getty Museum on the Malibu…

Creativity is a double-edged sword. This was something I first realized after reading a detailed account of the torture regimen used by the Sforzas, a Renaissance-era Milanese family whose fortune had been made in arms sales. They called it “Lent”: forty days of inventive and excruciating pain-inducing practices almost guaranteed to leave the victim alive…

Immigration to the United States is at its highest level since its historic peak in the 1920s; there really are a lot of people roaming the world, either forced by war or economics or driven by curiosity or circumstance. And many of them, artists included, end up here. (Read some of their stories in the…

Fantastical, magical creations are very popular as of late—lots of dragons and magicians and cyber-wonders fill pages and screens—and the art world is stepping into that terrain as well. Does it mean dreams will become reality, or does it mean dreams will keep reality at bay? That’s for the viewer to decide. But these artists’…

Taken up by fans, feminists, malcontents, ideologists, and ax-grinders, Frida Kahlo has become much more than an artist over the last couple of decades. Yet somehow she is also often presented as less than an artist. In conjunction with Walker Art Center’s Kahlo exhibition, Grupo Soap, an alliance of artists who share a Hispanic heritage…