Aesthetic Apperceptions

Earlier in the year, I fancied the idea of reviewing the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s (PMA) latest exhibition, “Great and Mighty Things: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection.” Outsider art is the label given to artwork made by artists who aren’t formally trained and whose work isn’t shown in museums or galleries. [...]

“White Petals Surround Your Yellow Heart,” on view until July 28th at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), considers a topic that has often been discussed in our postmodernist, institution-and-society-questioning age: how fashion relates to our narcisstic tendencies as human. But the exhibition itself proves to be incredibly more complex and difficult [...]

Like many of the first cities of the American colonies, Boston is rich with history even as it retains a young, vibrant population by virtue of its reputation as a preeminent college town. This wide range in historical representation extends to its visual arts scene. In three days, I visited three major art institutions in [...]

The title of one of two recently opened exhibitions at the Gershman Y galleries of Philadelphia, “Turkey’s Sephardim: Another Look,” implies that there has been a previous look at this unique ethnic group. And, indeed, this sect of the Jewish population, which possesses a blended heritage hailing from Turkey, Rhodes, Iran, Iberia, Morocco, and other [...]

Step into any art museum in the world and you’ll see that male artists have painted just about everything. Certain subject matter appear more frequently than others, such as Christian imagery or female nudes, but nevertheless it is clear that male artists aren’t fixated on any particular theme. By and large the same cannot be [...]

Pablo Picasso painted Woman Ironing (La repasseuse) at the end of his Blue period, an era brought on by the suicide of his friend, Carlos Casegemas. The nature of the suicide was intensely tragic—Casegemas committed suicide when his lover left him for another man after he discovered that he was sterile and could not produce [...]

When viewers pass through the Baltimore Museum of Art’s (BMA) Modern Art galleries to enter the newly renovated Contemporary Wing, which just opened on November 18 after a year-long closing, it feels as if they have walked into a different museum. This stark architectural change owes partly to the fact that the wing wasn’t originally [...]

Sometimes, art leaves us with incredibly intense emotions. We fall madly in love with one painting, nearly convinced that our true soul mate exists as pigment applied onto canvas. Another painting might provoke the exact opposite reaction: it may make us recoil in disgust, having such a visceral, repulsed reaction that we actually beg to [...]

Contemporary art can often seem cryptic and inaccessible to viewers. Devoid of recognizable figures, it leaves us with random dabs of paint, slashes of lines and absurd juxtapositions, making it appear impossible to even understand how the work speaks to us. And yet, paradoxically, some art actually embraces life and experiences common to all humanity, [...]

Hacked Super Mario Brothers. Pillow-shaped silver balloons. Velvet flowers. Dr. Scholl’s Corns. Cat litter. Urine as paint. Cellophane-wrapped candy. All this, and a dizzying amount more, await visitors to “Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years,” the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s latest blockbuster exhibition which runs until December 31 — an end date which makes it [...]