✦ Artist Profile

The Storm She Made: Julie Mehretu's Thirty Years of Beautiful Evidence

She has spent three decades painting the wreckage of the modern world — displacement maps, demolished blueprints, the geometries of power — in a language so beautiful you might not notice what you're looking at. That is the point. And that is the trap.

Elena Vasquez · May 2026 · 18 min read

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✦ Artist Profile

The Grid and the Ghost: McArthur Binion's Life in Paint

He buried his entire life under a grid and called it abstract painting. He was seventy before most people noticed. The documents — his birth certificate, his marriage license, his children's school records — are underneath everything.

Marcus Bell · May 2026 · 12 min read

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✦ Artist Profile

After the Ghost: Trevor Andrew's Life After GucciGhost

He dressed as a ghost for ten years. Then Gucci called. What happened next — and what it cost — is the most complicated story in street art.

Marcus Bell · May 2026 · 14 min read

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✦ Artist Profile · Tokyo

What Grows Where the Face Should Be

Mariko Enomoto paints portraits where every face is buried under flowers, animals, or impossible arrangements of objects. It sounds like a gimmick. It is not a gimmick.

Elena Vasquez · May 2026 · 13 min read

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✦ Artist Profile

The Inside of Everything

Jadé Fadojutimi paints from the inside out — dense, gestural canvases that feel less like pictures of something and more like records of a mind at full speed.

Elena Vasquez · May 2026 · 12 min read

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✦ Artist Profile · On View Now

The World at a Blur: Gerhard Richter's Landscapes at David Zwirner

Fifty years of landscape painting, and the questions still haven't settled. How one artist used the smear of a brush to ask what reality is.

Claire Voss · May 2026 · 8 min read

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✦ Artist Profile

What a Building Holds

Theaster Gates makes art from the raw material of a neighborhood — its buildings, its music, its forgotten histories. The question his practice asks is what survives, and who decides.

Marcus Bell · May 2026 · 13 min read

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✦ Artist Profile

The Paintings That Were Always Supposed to Be There

Kerry James Marshall has spent forty years insisting that Black figures belong in the Western painting tradition that spent centuries excluding them. The insistence, it turns out, was the work.

Marcus Bell · May 2026 · 14 min read

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✦ Artist Profile

Nothing Wasted, Everything Transformed

El Anatsui makes monuments from bottle caps and wire. The materials are discarded, the scale is overwhelming, and the result looks like something between a tapestry, a map, and a ruin.

Elena Vasquez · May 2026 · 12 min read

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✦ Artist Profile

Data as Material

Refik Anadol feeds data into machines and watches what comes out. The results look like living matter. The question of whether that makes him an artist or an engineer is becoming obsolete.

Priya Kapoor · May 2026 · 11 min read

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✦ Artist Profile · Installation

What the Thread Remembers

Chiharu Shiota has spent thirty years filling rooms with red thread, suspended keys, and the space where a soul used to be. When she was diagnosed with cancer the year Venice came calling, the question her art had always asked became the only one that mattered.

Elena Vasquez · October 2026 · 14 min read

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✦ Artist Profile · Geometric Abstraction

Sixty Years of Paintings Nobody Bought

She spent six decades making paintings that the art world walked past without stopping. When it finally caught up with Carmen Herrera, she was eighty-nine years old — and she hadn't changed a single thing about the work.

Claire Voss · October 2026 · 11 min read

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✦ Artist Profile · Painter

People Who Never Existed

Every figure Lynette Yiadom-Boakye has ever painted is invented. No sitters, no references, no real people — just imagined presences rendered with an urgency that makes them feel more alive than portraits of actual humans.

Elena Vasquez · October 2026 · 13 min read

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✦ Artist Profile · Painter

What the Canvas Was Hiding

Titus Kaphar takes the tools of Old Master painting and uses them against themselves — cutting, folding, nailing, obscuring — to surface the figures that centuries of art history agreed to leave out.

Marcus Bell · October 2026 · 14 min read

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✦ Artist Profile · Abstraction

The Geometry of Collision

Odili Donald Odita builds paintings from wedges of color that press against each other, advance and retreat, refusing to settle into harmony. They look like something between a map and a frequency — and they cover walls like nothing else being made.

Priya Kapoor · October 2026 · 11 min read

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✦ Artist Profile · Painter

The Most Honest Painter in the Room

Henry Taylor paints the people around him — neighbors, friends, strangers, historical figures — with a directness that strips away every layer of art world decorum. The result is some of the most emotionally undefended painting being made today.

Marcus Bell · October 2026 · 12 min read

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✦ Artist Profile · Painter

At the Edge of Legibility

Cecily Brown's paintings hover where figuration dissolves into abstraction — bodies, landscapes, and pure gesture all folding into each other. The closer you look, the less certain you become about what you're seeing. That uncertainty is the point.

Elena Vasquez · October 2026 · 12 min read

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✦ Artist Profile · Drawing

Ten Thousand Marks, One Face

Toyin Ojih Odutola builds portraits from thousands of individual marks — charcoal, pastel, pencil — layered until the surface becomes something between drawing and sculpture. The subjects are invented. The intimacy is not.

Priya Kapoor · October 2026 · 13 min read

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✦ Artist Profile · Conceptual

The Materials of a Life

Rashid Johnson makes art from the materials of Black American life — shea butter, black soap, mirror tile, books — arranged into works that are simultaneously personal archive and historical monument, tender and overwhelming in equal measure.

Marcus Bell · October 2026 · 13 min read

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✦ Artist Profile · Painter

What the Pool Holds

Hurvin Anderson paints swimming pools — the tiled surfaces, the still water, the chlorine light — and makes them carry everything that leisure, exclusion, and longing can hold. They are among the quietest political paintings being made right now.

Claire Voss · October 2026 · 11 min read

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✦ Artist Profile · Painter

Close Enough to See

Jordan Casteel paints the people of Harlem with a closeness that feels like an act of devotion — large canvases, direct gazes, the everyday made monumental. Her portraits insist on the full presence of every person in front of her.

Elena Vasquez · October 2026 · 12 min read

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✦ Artist Profile · Urban Realism

What Neon Knows

Jane Dickson has spent four decades painting New York at its most artificial — Times Square under the old signs, the subway in its grimiest years — in oil on astroturf and linen. The surfaces are strange. The light is exact.

Marcus Bell · Fall 2026 · 13 min read

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✦ Artist Profile · Film & Documentary

Before the Film, the Wall

Charlie Ahearn made the first feature film about hip-hop — Wild Style, 1983 — using the actual artists as themselves. It was not a documentary. It was a fiction that got something true before anyone knew what to call it.

Marcus Bell · Fall 2026 · 12 min read

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✦ Artist Profile · Industrial Sculpture & Painting

The Weight of the Turnpike

Linda Gottesfeld paints on the discarded metal of industrial New Jersey — car body panels, quarter panels pulled from wrecks — finding a formal intelligence in material the world has already finished using.

Elena Vasquez · Fall 2026 · 12 min read

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✦ Artist Profile · Graffiti & Abstract

The Line That Went Everywhere

Futura 2000 painted New York subway cars in the 1970s before graffiti was art, toured with The Clash in 1981, and was the subject of a Bronx Museum retrospective in 2024. The abstract language he developed never changed. It only expanded.

Marcus Bell · Fall 2026 · 16 min read

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✦ Artist Profile · Graffiti & Abstraction

The Grammar of the Mark

Eric Haze built his reputation as a lettering artist — the logos, the record sleeves that shaped how hip-hop looked. Then he spent thirty years making abstract paintings. They are the same practice. The abstraction was always there.

Marcus Bell · Fall 2026 · 12 min read

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✦ Artist Profile · Graffiti Legend

The Whole Car and the Empty Room

Lee Quiñones painted whole subway cars at sixteen and was the protagonist of Wild Style at twenty-one. Forty years later he is still making work on gypsum board and mounted motherboards. The scale changed. The intensity didn't.

Marcus Bell · Fall 2026 · 13 min read

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✦ Artist Profile · Post-Street / Contemporary

The Most Recognized Face Nobody Made Up

KAWS makes art that sells at auction for tens of millions and is the most argued-about figure in contemporary art's ongoing argument about commerce and accessibility. What the argument usually misses is that the paintings are good.

Elena Vasquez · Fall 2026 · 13 min read

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✦ Artist Profile · Illustration & Painting

Happy on Purpose

Jon Burgerman makes work that is consistently, deliberately, and without apology joyful — doodles that became characters that became public murals on every continent. The joy is not decoration. It is the argument.

Priya Kapoor · Fall 2026 · 11 min read

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✦ Artist Profile · Figurative Painting

What the Painting Waits For

Nigel Howlett paints the human figure on large linen with the technical patience of someone who has spent forty years with the old masters. The paintings are large, slow, and extremely sure of themselves.

Claire Voss · Fall 2026 · 12 min read

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✦ Artist Profile · Portraiture

Who Gets to Be a Monument

Kehinde Wiley takes the conventions of European portraiture and places Black subjects into a tradition that spent four centuries excluding them. The result is a renegotiation of who gets to be a monument, conducted entirely through the language of paint.

Elena Vasquez · Fall 2026 · 14 min read

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✦ Artist Profile · British Pop Art

The Figure and the Argument

Allen Jones made some of the most controversial paintings of the 1960s and spent fifty years being argued about in ways that rarely touched the actual quality of the work — the color, the line, the graphic intelligence. The argument is not finished. The paintings are still here.

Claire Voss · Fall 2026 · 12 min read

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✦ Artist Profile · American Figurative

Eighty Years of Looking

Alex Katz has been making the same painting for eighty years — flat, fast, frontal, color reduced to essentials. He is the most influential American painter nobody has fully figured out how to categorize, and he is still working.

Elena Vasquez · Fall 2026 · 14 min read

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✦ Artist Profile · Light & Technology

The Only Medium That Moves

James Clar makes sculptures from light — LEDs, filters, custom electronics — that function as philosophical propositions about perception, time, and the way screens have restructured human attention.

Priya Kapoor · Fall 2026 · 12 min read

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✦ Artist Profile · Video & Performance

What Horror Knows

Jillian McDonald makes video work that uses the conventions of horror and science fiction to ask what our genre entertainments are actually doing to us. The work is funny in the way that horror is funny: you laugh because the alternative is worse.

Priya Kapoor · Fall 2026 · 11 min read

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