Art News

For decades, Faith Ringgold has invited the dark shadows of American life onto the nation’s bright face, chronicling its grim histories, untold betrayals, and unsung heroes. The sound-bite description of the artist—Black Power activist, feminist, maker of story quilts—subsumes the complexities of her fulsome vision and personal voice. Her politics, while prophetic, earned her little respect within the mainstream art world or among her peers in the 1960s and ’70s. With more than seventy artworks hung mostly chronologically, the Glenstone Museum’s survey, organized by the Serpentine Gallery in London, elaborates on the context and development of Ringgold’s work across genres (early figuration, political posters, soft sculpture, quilts) and historically bound series, including “American People” (1963–67), “Black Light” (1967–69), and “Feminist Series” (1972). It is the most expansive exhibition of Ringgold’s work to date.

The first galleries introduce “Super Realism,” Ringgold’s signature style of abstracted figuration and sharp graphic and conceptual … Read the rest

Marilyn Minter’s paintings, photographs, and videos often depict the female body in a variety of ways—from up-close views of women’s feet in heels and eyeshadow-covered eyelids to more explicit sexual imagery—to confront beauty standards, desire, and pleasure in her work. They’ve been described as “steamy, soiled, smeared, and sensual,” as Brooke Jaffe notes in a recent interview with Minter for “ARTnews Live,” our ongoing IGTV series featuring interviews with a range of creatives.

“I’m always thinking in terms of: What do we know exists, but you’ve never seen an image of it?” Minter told Jaffe, referring to her depictions of sweat, freckles, and body hair, which are often removed from images that circulate in the media.

“We’re shot through with imperfection,” she continued, adding that we all take “shameful pleasure” in glamour, fashion, and near-impossible beauty standards for women. “I think of it as a giant industry in our … Read the rest

Eli Broad, a collector who dramatically reshaped Los Angeles’s art scene with a museum in his name and large financial contributions to top arts venues, has died at 87. The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, which oversees his collection, announced his death on Friday night.

“Eli saw the arts as a way to strive to build a better world for all,” Joanne Heyler, the founding director of the Broad, the L.A. art museum he opened in 2015, said in a statement. “He was a fiercely committed civic leader, and his tenacity and advocacy for the arts indelibly changed Los Angeles. He will long be remembered for his unmatched generosity in sharing the arts passionately and widely.”

With his wife Edythe, whom he married in 1954, Broad amassed a world-class collection filled with artists ranging from Jeff Koons to Kerry James Marshall. The Broads have ranked on the annual ARTnews Top … Read the rest

Over the course of a career that spanned more than half a century, Emma Amos profoundly shifted the course of art history through her varied experiments combining painting and textiles. These works exploded with color, and they brought forth new mediations on what figurative painting could be, reckoning in the process with issues of race and gender. “I try to make a painting resonate in some kind of way,” Amos said in an oral history with the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in 2011.

The influence of Amos, who died last year at 83, now looms large in the art world, but that wasn’t always the case. She struggled to find gallery representation early on in her career, and for much of her life, she didn’t sell many works. Even fewer of her paintings entered museum collections while she was alive. But Amos was never one to give up easily. … Read the rest