It was never easy to take in the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo himself labored beneath the ceiling on scaffolding of his own design, while struggling to reach the figures still taking shape overhead. “Up Close: Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel” in 2017 brought thirty-four photographs to the World Trade Center PATH station—on their way to a second showing at the Garden State Plaza in New Jersey. Maybe, just maybe, it brought with it a closer approach to the art. Still not close enough? Andrew Witkin lines a wall with images, so that there is no craning your head, but also no dispelling the mystery ..read more

“Sex and Death” may sound like a Woody Allen film, with all his surfeit of certainty and irony. But no, it is still life by Rachael Catharine Anderson, not in the least weighed down by either one. All she wants, as a work’s title puts it, is Space for Thought. She finds it, too, but in the space of a painting—a space that grows more shallow and suggestive the more you look. She might have taken the gallery’s own narrow space on Houston Street and compressed it further. It has room all the same for things that refuse to die, at Signs and Symbols through April 13. Anderson has done her level be ..read more

Official notice: you can become an outsider artist without ever venturing outside. Plenty of artists have, but not Anthony Dominguez on the cold streets of New York. Only now is he receiving a less chilly reception not so very far from where he once lived, at Andrew Edlin through April 6. Outsider artists have often been insiders in everything but their art. Many have worked diligently within a community, like the Gee’s Bend quilters, and folk art in portraits has become an emblem of early American art. Yet a step outside the art world was never enough for Dominguez. He took to the streets for ..read more

A chill wind blows through the art of Charisse Pearlina Weston, but a powerful one. All three of this year’s artists in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem feel the chill in their own lives, and all three look for shelter from the storm. Jeffrey Meris goes so far as to include body casts of himself and his mother, because attachments matter, and so does the search for identity. Devin N. Morris paints an ordinary black kid on an ordinary city street, mounted above a chest of drawers. He even mounts a door right on the wall. Welcome home. For all that, they know displacement, even as their ..read more

The Queens Museum will always have its building and its memories—the New York City pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair, with the marvelous scale model of the city inside. Yet it would be only a pale reminder of past glories without art. On a cold winter’s day in midweek, the fair’s Unisphere right out front had no one to appreciate it, and water did not run in the pool beneath. The tennis center from the U.S. Open stood towering and empty just a glance away, and the walk to the subway through Flushing Meadow Park felt lonely and bleak. Grand Central Parkway running past the museum’s entrance see ..read more

Has Marta Minujín gone soft? Don’t count on it, not for an artist who brings a creature to New York so large and colorful that the half-costumed, half-naked regulars in Times Square cannot begin to compete, not even for your selfies. There is no getting around it, although you can comfortably settle in below and look around. You never know what you will see. Entering her eighties, Minujín is still raising her voice—about book burnings, dictatorship, sexual norms, and such lesser details as the pandemic. She means her retrospective at the Jewish Museum as at once a battle cry and a celebration ..read more

Raymond Saunders casts a long shadow. He cannot help it, not in a two-gallery show where the shadows will not stop coming, all but decimating the walls. Its layers keep coming, too, in oil, graphite, enamel, oil pastel, and plenty of pasted paper. Unlike Anthony Dominguez, he is anything but an outsider, except perhaps to New York. Yet he, too, found his art waiting for him on the street. For him, that meant not its hidden corners and subterranean passages, but on boarded-up buildings and in the air. And I bring this together my report on Dominguez as a longer review and my latest upload. For ..read more

SculptureCenter misses the old neighborhood, and it should know. It has made its home in Long Island City long enough to have seen everything change. Founded in 1928, it moved to a dead end just off the main drag in 2001, early enough to have driven change itself. Can it, though, truly miss the days of empty storefronts, abandoned buildings, and nowhere to live or to eat? R. I. P. Germain shares the ambivalence, even as he brings his own graffiti and shuttered gates, as Avangarda. It may have been be a bit corporate for street smarts or an avant-garde, but he and Claudia Pagès in the back room ..read more

Edward Hicks has become an exemplar of American folk art for his visionary landscapes filled with life. His earthy realism is far more sophisticated than his status would suggest. Warm colors and well-rounded figures all but pop out of the canvas, even as faces remain emblematic and the construction in depth more than a little awkward. It is still the country you only wish you knew. Peaceable Kingdom, his most popular painting, embodies that wish, and more than sixty versions survive. Well-dressed Americans, adults and children, share the scene with wide-eyed animals, with equal claims to natu ..read more

“The only body part that does not elicit disgust is tears.” It is a sad and lovely thought. It is also just one line in a not at all mournful video by Mary Helena Clark, at Bridget Donahue through March 23. Lovely or sad, it could even be true, if not for all or for all time. It may leave you wondering whether to turn away in disgust or to cry. Clark sees disgust as a refusal of one’s animal nature, but also its epitome. She tracks the wish to transcend and to embrace the body, human or animal, starting with teeth. She leaves it to others to sort out the contradictions, if they dare. She leave ..read more