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

Giulia Crețulescu Makes Synthetic Fabric Sexy

2 weeks ago | artnews.com | Emily Watlington

Fiber art is everywhere these days, in case you haven’t heard. And the trend tends toward work that is clearly labor-intensive and handmade, favoring folk traditions and natural fibers—which is hardly how any of us encounters fibers in the wild. Giulia Crețulescu’s work stands apart for being made of material that’s more familiar: synthetic fabric. She sources it from a Ford automotive factory near her hometown—Craiova, Romania—repurposing the stuff of cheap seats.
Louise Bonnet Wants You to Feel Her Paintings in Your Bones

2 weeks ago | artnews.com | Emily Watlington

In her cartoonish yet sophisticated paintings of people, Louise Bonnet toes lots of lines—between familiarity and misrecognition, seduction and ick. Speaking of toes, she is especially skilled at painting big ones, those underappreciated appendages that allow us to stand upright and thus, according to Georges Bataille, be human.
Marsha P. Johnson’s Activism Lives on in Her Art

2 weeks ago | artnews.com | Emily Watlington

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from Marsha: the Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson, by the artist Tourmaline. It releases out May 20 from Tiny Reparations Marsha remained fiercely committed to making the world better through her activism.
A Giant German Photography Survey Reinvigorates the Medium

3 weeks ago | artnews.com | Emily Watlington

Pictures shot dead-on and then arranged in rows or grids comprise almost every contribution to “Typologien,” a survey of 20th-century German photography at the Fondazione Prada in Milan. No horizon line is even mildly crooked, and all fall where they ought to—in the picture’s bottom third—or else are eliminated by way of a backdrop or an aerial view. That’s not surprising; Germans are famous for their love of rules, plenty of which, when it comes to photography, they invented themselves.
Amalia Ulman Describes Leaving an Abusive Art World for Film

1 month 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

1 month 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.

1 month 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”

2 months 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

2 months 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.