Holland Cotter, The New York Times Journalist Profile

Articles

Jack Whitten's Show Is a Peak MoMA Moment

3 weeks ago | nytimes.com | Holland Cotter

Critic's PickOver nearly six decades, this fantastically inventive artist experimented with paint, turning it into a sculptural medium. Our critic calls his survey "scintillating and sweeping."Jack Whitten, "9.11.01" (2006), a 20-foot-long memorial to the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11, an event that he witnessed firsthand. Credit...
The Frick Collection is Reopening. Here's a Sneak Peek.

1 month ago | nytimes.com | Holland Cotter
What to See in N.Y.C. Galleries in February

2 months ago | nytimes.com | Holland Cotter

This week in Newly Reviewed, Holland Cotter covers two group shows: one devoted to an important gallery from the past, the other focused on language and silence. Through March 22. Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery, Hunter College, 132 East 68th Street, Manhattan; 212-772-4991, huntercollegeart.org. Image D.E.I. didn't exist in the mainstream New York art world a half-dozen decades ago.
At the Met, an Ancient Balm for the Depths of Winter

Dec 26, 2024 | nytimes.com | Holland Cotter

A centuries-old Buddhist model of the universe has new meaning for the shortest of days and longest of worries. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is, in these darkest days of midwinter, one of the city's spiritual hot spots, thanks to the harmonic convergence of two outstanding and very different exhibitions, both closing soon.
Lorraine O'Grady, Artist Who Defied Category, Is Dead at 90

Dec 15, 2024 | nytimes.com | Holland Cotter

For that piece, she constructed a float at the 1983 Afro-American Day Parade in Harlem and hired a crew of performers to ride on it. Each of the performers held an empty gilded picture frame. As the float made its way up Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, the performers descended into the street and invited spectators to pose for portrait photos within the frames - that is, to be turned into art. The piece was a hit.
Best Art of 2024

Dec 12, 2024 | nytimes.com | Holland Cotter

Art-wise, 2024 had an in-between-things vibe. It was a year of big-deal biennials, but the consensus was that none delivered much firepower. There was a lot of talk about money - what sold for what, and to whom - but no radically record-busting news. In general, the institutional art world veered, as it always does, between uplift (some strong museum shows) and cringe (the $6.2 million banana). I'll go mostly with uplift in the (unranked) list of highlights below.
Best Art Books of 2024

Dec 11, 2024 | nytimes.com | Holland Cotter |Jason Farago |Walker Mimms

Say what you will about digital futures, print still rules when it comes to art books. And 2024 has brought us a batch of hold-in-your-hand beauties. They include a souvenir document of a highlight show from this year's Venice Biennale; a jumbo compendium of architectural projects never (often for good reason) realized,a bouquet of tributes to a much-loved gallerist and a book-length exit interview with a veteran art critic: page-turners all.
Something in the Air? Moonwalks and Mandalas in Ralph Lemon's Show

Nov 15, 2024 | nytimes.com | Holland Cotter

For anyone still mired in post-election fatigue, there's a quick picker-upper at MoMA PS1 in Ralph Lemon's body-and-mind-blaster of a performance video called "Rant (redux)." In it, eight stellar dancers leap, dive, writhe and vogue to a high-decibel score by the artist Kevin Beasley, while Lemon himself, the work's choreographer, shout-reads words by Angela Davis and other liberationist thinkers.
Art Show of the Season? It's These Centuries-Old Italian Paintings

Oct 17, 2024 | nytimes.com | Holland Cotter

The magnificent glow-in-the-dark exhibition called "Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a visual event of pure 24-karat beauty and a multileveled scholarly coup. On both counts, we'll be lucky if the season brings us anything like its equal. The exhibition is rare in other ways too. As a major survey of early Italian religious art, it's a kind of show we once saw routinely in our big museums, but now rarely do.
Brooklyn Museum at 200 Celebrates Beauty and Art's Hidden History

Oct 3, 2024 | nytimes.com | Holland Cotter

At 200 years young, the Brooklyn Museum, the second largest art museum in New York City, has begun celebrating the bicentennial of its founding. And it's doing so in characteristic fashion - meaning in ways that make traditionalists crazy. It is emphatically re-emphasizing what it has, basically, long been: an institution with the heart and soul of an alternative space enclosed in the body of a traditional museum. Let me wedge in some history here.

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