A remarkable moment in Emily Watlington’s profile of Joan Semmel in this issue: it’s 1972, and Semmel has just completed a group of paintings she calls the “Erotic Series,” paintings of men and women who’d agreed to be depicted having sex in her studio. They were not works of pornography but instead an attempt to represent intimacy—still, no dealer would show them. So Semmel took matters into her own hands: she rented a New York storefront, hung her paintings, and sat in her show daily, watching the reactions of people who came in to take a look. In Semmel’s lifetime of defiant moves, this one stands out for me: an artist’s determination to have her work seen, by hook or by crook. “I had something to say,” she tells Watlington.
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There are echoes of Semmel’s story in that of another figure of her generation, Chicago artist Alice Shaddle. As Jeremy Lybarger writes in this issue’s “Spotlight” column, Shaddle struggled, living in the shadow of her art impresario husband—a contemporary critic who characterized her as “one of those riley, resentful ladies”—but was similarly determined, and in 1973 cofounded the feminist art co-op Artemisia Gallery.
Women artists of the past and present are benefiting from rehangs of museums’ permanent collections, a topic that Alex Greenberger explores elsewhere in this issue, with the Museum of Modern Art’s 2019 rehang providing a template. More institutions rotating artworks more frequently—and being more inclusive in the process—is exposing audiences to a more generous art history, one that no longer ignores the contributions of women and artists of color.
Rewritten histories influence art made by younger artists and the kinds of work that is curated into major exhibitions. This spring is a good time for a litmus test: the Whitney Biennial opens in March and the Venice Biennale in April. (Our “Battle Royale” feature pits the two iconic events against each other—and provides a cheeky guide to both.) One of the Whitney Biennial artists, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, is featured in a profile by Maximilíano Durón in this issue’s “New Talent” section, where he describes a work he is making for the Biennial with amber secreted by trees, a material he sees as a healing agent. In a remark that could just as well describe the limited canon the new art history is trying to expand, Aparicio tells Durón: “That’s how memory works, how time works: you forget about it, archives are erased or destroyed.”
FEATURES
Recycled Art
As the planet fills with trash, artists reconsider the ethics of making work from scratch.
by Emily Watlington & Andy Battaglia
Sheida Soleimani
The Iranian American artist talks about how simple gestures inform perceptions. A special pull-out print accompanies the article.
by Tessa Solomon
Painting Pleasure
In her prismatic portraits, Joan Semmel builds feminist worlds.
by Emily Watlington
Perpetual Motion
No longer static monuments to an outdated art history, museums’ permanent collection displays are more dynamic than ever.
by Alex Greenberger
Witnessing Grief
Käthe Kollwitz’s melancholy works, the subject of a MoMA retrospective, capture the sorrow of daily life in wartime.
by Faye Hirsch
Nature Is Mind Made Visible
German exhibitions celebrate Caspar David Friedrich’s 250th birthday and his iconic visions of people confronting nature.
by Kelly Presutti
DEPARTMENTS
Datebook
A highly discerning list of things to experience over the next three months.
by the Editors of A.i.A.
Hard Truths
A gallerist pines for press, and an aspiring curator ponders a “curatorial intensive.”
by Chen & Lampert
Sightlines
Curator Kathleen Ash-Milby tells us what she likes.
by Francesca Aton
Inquiry
A Q&A with Kay WalkingStick about her layered landscape paintings.
by Alex Greenberger
Object Lesson
An annotation of Hayv Kahraman’s Loves Me, Loves Me Not.
by Francesca Aton
Battle Royale
Whitney Biennial vs. Venice Biennale—two banging biennials face off.
by the Editors of A.i.A.
Syllabus
A reading list for a crash course on Indigenous art.
by Christopher Green
Appreciation
A tribute to Pope.L, a trickster-artist who offered lessons as to what was and was not real.
by Christopher Y. Lew
New Talent
Sculptor Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio captures the materiality of disappearance and resistance.
by Maximilíano Durón
Issues & Commentary
Why is Thomas Heatherwick the architect most beloved by billionaires?
by Andrew Russeth
Spotlight
Chicago artist Alice Shaddle was hard to classify—and all the better for it.
by Jeremy Lybarger
Book Review
A reading of Legacy Russell’s Black Meme: The History of the Images that Make Us.
by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei
Cover Artist
Joan Semmel talks about her artwork featured on the front of A.i.A.
REVIEWS
Shanghai
Shanghai Diary
by Emily Watlington
Montreal
“Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia”
by Barry Schwabsky
Miami
“Charles Gaines: 1992–2023”
by Maximilíano Durón
Los Angeles
“Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom”
by Liz Hirsch
Munich
“Meredith Monk. Calling”
by Emily McDermott
Sarasota
“Juana Valdés: Embodied Memories, Ancestral Histories”
by Glenn Adamson
Minneapolis
“Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s”
by Alex Greenberger