Sounding Board, Tschabalala Self’s first foray into performance art at the 2021 Performa Biennial, begins with light and color. The work debuted in October 2021 in the inviting amphitheater at Harlem’s Jackie Robinson Park. There, the work’s stage was collaged with whimsical furniture arrangements that played with foreshortening, oversized drooping flowers, and painted set pieces that recalled the artist’s mixed-media figurative paintings. This move …

“Last Friday at 5 p.m. I joined a small crowd at the intersection of Orchard Street and Rivington on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to see “The Sound of Morning,” a piece by the sculptor and performance artist Kevin Beasley, commissioned by the Performa Biennial. (Though Beasley’s performance is over, it can be viewed at performa2021.org, and the rest of …

Recently, Mickalene Thomas MFA ’02 was featured in a New York Times Magazine profile. You can read the beginning of the profile below or by clicking this link. “In the fall of 2019, I visited Paris twice. In October, I went with my mother, a first and only visit for her. The trip was exhausting; we tried to see every sight, …

With a new gallery show and a museum retrospective in the works, the New York-based abstract painter Stanley Whitney MFA ’72 has fully arrived. It’s been a long time coming. Across canvases large and small ringing the walls of his capacious new studio, Whitney achieved glorious variety in palette, rhythm, juxtaposition and touch. Many of these paintings created over the …

“On the Basis of Art” celebrates the achievements of generations of Yale-trained women artists. The show, postponed for a year due to the pandemic, marks the recent 50th anniversary of coeducation at Yale College and the 150th anniversary of the university’s first women students, who studied at the Yale School of the Fine Arts (now the Yale School of Art) …

Painter Jordan Casteel ’14 M.F.A is one of three Yale affiliates to be awarded a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship, informally known as the “genius grant.” Casteel was recognized for “capturing everyday encounters with people and places in works that invite recognition of our shared humanity.” Her paintings feature the people and environments she encounters on the streets of Harlem, in New York …

The first women to study at Yale weren’t the undergraduates who turned up in the fall of 1969. They arrived a full century earlier as graduate students in the Yale School of Art when it opened in 1869. The Yale University Art Gallery’s exhibition On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women at Yale, on view through January 9, exhibits the …

In October, the Philadelphia Museum of Art presented an exhibition dedicated to the late Yale School of Art Dean Richard Benson, who is most often celebrated as a virtuoso printer and gifted teacher and is perhaps best known for helping produce some of the most significant photography books of the past fifty years.  The World Is Smarter Than You Are is the …

In August 2021, Jennifer Packer MFA ’12 debuted her first West Coast solo exhibition Every Shut Eye Ain’t Sleep, Packer’s debut West Coast solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). The exhibition gathers 25 new and recent works that explore the limits of painting and representation through portraits, still lifes, and charcoal drawings. Packer created most of the …