Emily Watlington

New York

Art Critic and Assistant Editor at Art in America

art critic & senior editor @artinamerica; aspiring spargel konigin; she/her

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Articles

Amalia Ulman Describes Leaving an Abusive Art World for Film

2 weeks ago | artnews.com | Emily Watlington

Amalia Ulman broke the internet in 2014when she started an Instagram account for posting images of her beauty routine. There, she thanked followers for supporting her as she underwent plastic surgery and solicited opinions on her hair color and outfits. It was all a performance, soon titled Excellences and Perfections, designed to draw out revealing reactions and highlight the way that social media can frame women as yours to look at.
Bob Flanagan Showed How Sex and Disability Turn the Body Inside Out

2 weeks ago | artnews.com | Emily Watlington

In the mid-1980s, Sheree Rose, a photographer and dominatrix, instructed her partner Bob Flanagan to keep a journal of their sex life for one year. When they were finished fucking, she had him reach over, grab a pen, and write down what happened. She was always giving him prompts, in writing and in bed. With this project—which would soon become a book, titled Fuck Journal—she combined the two.
Avram Finkelstein Changed the World.

3 weeks ago | artnews.com | Emily Watlington

A golem is a figure in Jewish folklore usually made of clay, mud, or dust; a vessel for a word or idea, a metaphor come to life. Golems figure throughout “Something Terrible Has Happened (Corpus Fluxus),” a solo exhibition by artist, writer, and activist Avram Finkelstein at Smack Mellon—shockingly, his first in New York City.
David Altmejd on his Tour-de-Force Surrealist Serpent

1 month ago | artnews.com | Emily Watlington

Though an intricate sprawling feat of both Maximalism and engineering, David Altmejd set out to create his latest tour-de-force sculpture The Serpent (2025) with little planning—opting instead to figure out his work’s meaning and form as he worked, letting his materials guide the way. Many of the best artists work this way: After all, if you already knew what a work was going to be, or could say in a few sentences what it means, why go through the hassle of making it at all?
Climate Change Is Ushering in an “Age of Disability”

1 month ago | artnews.com | Emily Watlington

As I write this, Los Angeles is ablaze and Accra, Ghana, is recovering from a fire; Richmond, Virginia, lost its potable water to a storm just after Asheville, North Carolina, finally got its supply back two months following Hurricane Helene. These climate disasters are having lasting impacts on, among other things, human health, dependent as it is on the health of our environment—the water we drink, the air we breathe.
Joyce Wieland, a Tragicomic Canadian, Offered Cues to Live Larger

1 month ago | artnews.com | Emily Watlington

“I wasn’t going to check my sense of humor, my idea of color, at the door for a bunch of people who lived by theory alone,” Joyce Wieland said in a 1987 documentary of her life, Kay Armitage’s Artist on Fire. “I didn’t want to live in a world that they would create.” So in response to grey gloom, the late artist, born in Toronto in 1930, offered up pastels, instilling in her viewer the sense that one can dissolve, play around, and build again.
Wafaa Bilal Still Has Hope for Humanity

1 month ago | artnews.com | Emily Watlington

I can’t think of a more relevant and necessary exhibition right now than Wafaa Bilal’s survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. It isn’t only that the exhibition is topical—though, sadly, its critiques of Islamophobia and the ways technology sanitizes warfare and distances us from its effects are timely. (Bilal takes on these topics unflinchingly, but we hardly need an art show to remind us of them.) Instead, what stands out is the way his faith in humanity carries on despite it all.
Hauser & Wirth’s Manuela Restaurant Carries on a New York Tradition: “Eat Dinner, Take Meetings and Die.”

2 months ago | artnews.com | Emily Watlington

New York is a pretty sick town. Not in the “bro, that’s sick” way. Morbid, ill, macabre. The sickness has a lot to do with how disastrously emphasized the “New” in “New York” is with each passing generation. Forget what came before you. Just accept that things change. Enjoy the present while it lasts. While eating at the new New York restaurant Manuela in SoHo, I had only one thought: Our present sucks. To be blunt: Manuela is quite nice.
Jana Euler’s Gherkin-Goggled Cover Girl Asks If a Trip to the Spa Can Fill the Void

2 months ago | artnews.com | Emily Watlington

A painting by Jana Euler features on the cover of the Spring 2025 “Wellness” issue of Art in America. Below, see an interpretation of the work, shown here in full. When Jana Euler debuted her 2016 painting Filled (health / beauty enhancer) at Cabinet Gallery in London, it was one of four renderings of “empty” faces, as she called them in a text she wrote for the show.
Anna Odell Was Impregnated in a Psychiatric Ward, Then Made an Unlikely Film About It

2 months ago | artnews.com | Emily Watlington

The Swedish artist and filmmaker Anna Odell spent a lot of time in psychiatric institutions, starting in the ninth grade and lasting up until she had a child—a boy fathered by one of her nurses, a man named Rikard. Odell painstakingly reconstructed her final months in the ward where she had been involuntarily committed in the late ’90s for her new film Rekonstruktion – Pysket (Reconstruction – Psychiatric Ward), 2024.