Max Lakin, Freelance Journalist Profile

Articles

Martin Wong, Medici of the Aerosol Art Set

1 month ago | nytimes.com | Max Lakin

A patron saw the beauty in graffiti when most of the world thought it was mere nuisance. Now the writing (of Lee Quiñones, Rammellzee, Futura and others) is on the museum wall. Martin Wong got in with the graffiti writers in the early 1980s at Pearl Paint, the long-gone Canal Street art supply store, where he had a job in the canvas department.
Judith Bernstein

Mar 1, 2025 | artforum.com | Max Lakin

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Soft and Seditious, Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen Take Manhattan

Jan 9, 2025 | nytimes.com | Max Lakin

Since November, "Architect's Handkerchief" (1999), Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen's 12-foot-tall abstract hankie sprouting from a breast pocket has waved from the street-level plaza of Lever House, at 390 Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. The sculpture's baroque white folds evoke the creamy marble of a Bernini, voluptuous even as its reinforced plastic would be useless to dab an eye. It offers different comfort, a visual rest stop from the rigid geometry unfolding around it.
Mika Horibuchi Made Her Name Repainting the Work of Another Artist: Her Grandmother

Nov 20, 2024 | culturedmag.com | Max Lakin

Mika Horibuchi Made Her Name Repainting the Work of Another Artist: Her Grandmother The Chicago-based artist joins a long lineage of artists who've found creative fulfillment in facsimiles. Photography by Drake Sweeney. “When I was younger, I learned to draw by copying images—essentially without even realizing it,” Mika Horibuchi tells me from her Chicago studio. “That’s a pretty universal starting point.
Two Shows of Art by Brooklyn’s Strivers Include Those a Museum Snubbed - The New York Times

Nov 4, 2024 | nytimes.com | Max Lakin

Two surveys of hometown artists — one at the Brooklyn Museum, another of those it snubbed — serve as a meditation on recognition and rejection.
Max Lakin on JIM JOE

Oct 31, 2024 | artforum.com | Max Lakin

Of all this city’s innumerable oddities, the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection is surely up there. Housed in a small room within the NYPL’s main branch on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, it comprises more than a million unbound printed images—vernacular photographs, magazine clippings, yellowed postcards, diagrams freed from textbooks—sorted into twelve thousand subjects (“Accidents,” “Punishments”), which are more hints than meticulous taxonomies.
David Salle Tries to See if A.I. Can Create Good Paintings. Yes, and No.

Oct 30, 2024 | nytimes.com | Max Lakin

Since the 1980s, the artist David Salle has been developing his liberal use of both pictorial space and source material, drolly collaging images plucked from magazines and art history with a magpie's blithe indifference. His paintings display an icily cerebral, postmodern understanding that images can exist simultaneously across multiple contexts, or none at all. The paintings continue to prove his willingness to leave meaning open-ended, which is a kind of generosity.
David Salle’s Ghost in the A.I. Machine

Oct 29, 2024 | flipboard.com | Max Lakin

Before and After: Two Boring Bi-Fold Closet Doors Get Custom, Colorful Redos For $50When Sarah Blumer was designing their colorful Pittsburgh home, she knew she wanted to lean into color, pattern, and whimsy. One easy way to do that …
The legal battle to protect Germany’s pro-Palestine movement

Jul 23, 2024 | english.alaraby.co.uk | Max Lakin

In recent months, the European Legal Support Center (ELSC), an NGO that provides legal support to pro-Palestine activists across Europe, have celebrated a series of legal victories in Germany. In May, lawyers overturned a Schengen-wide travel ban that Germany had imposed on Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, who was scheduled to appear at Berlin’s Palestine Congress before it was shut down by police.
The legal battle to protect Germany's pro-Palestine movement

Jul 23, 2024 | newarab.com | Max Lakin

In recent months, the European Legal Support Center (ELSC), an NGO that provides legal support to pro-Palestine activists across Europe, have celebrated a series of legal victories in Germany. In May, lawyers overturned a Schengen-wide travel ban that Germany had imposed on Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, who was scheduled to appear at Berlin's Palestine Congress before it was shut down by police.