Holland Cotter

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.