Emily Watlington

2 weeks 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?

2 weeks 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.

2 weeks 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.

3 weeks 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.

1 month 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.