Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of the visual arts, including painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, and crafts.
Visual Art
The Latest
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The Schmooze Slideshow: Tennis Playing Czars and Chicken Wielding Rabbis in Russia’s Silver Age
When you’ve already had 10 solo exhibits by age 12 and been named the world’s youngest professional artist by the Guinness Book of World Records, where do you go from there? In the case of Stanislav “Stass” Shpanin, a 21-year-old artist from the Former Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan, you just keep painting. Since arriving in…
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The Schmooze Slideshow: Micha Ullman’s Fixed and Fluid Sculptures
‘Chair’ by Micha Ullman, From ‘Under,’ 2011. Courtesy of The Israel Museum. Despite an almost clinical spareness immediately evident at The Israel Museum’s new Micha Ullman exhibition, one quickly comes to appreciate that the works — individually and as a whole — hint at something more than the stark minimalism they first suggest. Chairs appear…
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The Schmooze Slideshow: A Sculptor at Work
Arnold Newman, Chaim Gross with ‘Happy Mother,’ 1942. Courtesy of the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation and the Arnold Newman Archive. During the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair, sculptor Chaim Gross (1904-1991) spent two summer months outdoors, working in front of crowds that totalled some 80,000 people. “I would look them over and if they…
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The Schmooze Q&A: Photographer Maya Barkai’s Walking and Working Worldwide Icons
Photo by Dan Keinan. Courtesy of Maya Barkai. In Downtown Manhattan, an international city where pedestrians clog the sidewalks, photographer Maya Barkai’s “Walking Men” fits right in. At the same time, these 99 life-size representations of “walk” signals from around the globe definitely stand out. “Walking Men 99,” an art installation stretching 500 feet around…
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The Schmooze Slideshow: Brooklyn, the Shtetl
On her website, artist Ali Spechler describes her interest in “the notion of family and how shared experiences, whether positive or negative, breed strength and support.” That may not be the intuitive reaction to most of the works in “Brooklyn Shtetl,” Spechler’s current show at New York’s Hadas Gallery. After all, most of the paintings…
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The Schmooze Slideshow: Nir Hod’s Cigarette-Smoking Child Geniuses
In “Genius,” the current exhibit by Israeli artist Nir Hod at New York’s Paul Kasmin Gallery, pouty, fat-cheeked little boys glare out at the viewer, lit cigarettes dangling insolently from their sausage-like fingers. The series of more than 50 paintings, on view until June 18, is the latest installment in Hod’s growing body of arresting,…
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The Schmooze Jean-Jacques Duval’s Connecticut Synagogue Stained Glass Still Dazzles After 50 Years
Crossposted from Samuel Gruber’s Jewish Art & Monuments In 2009 I wrote an article for Tablet Magazine about Abstract Expressionist artist Adolph Gottlieb’s stained glass windows in the Kingsway Jewish Center in Brooklyn (this article has just been republished, without slide show, in a special Shavuot synagogue issue of The New York Jewish Week). I…
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The Schmooze Fine Arts Students in Haifa Think Outside the Box
From Danielle Itzhaki’s “Haya.” Photo by Danielle Itzhaki. Crossposted from Haaretz So flexible is the graduate program in creative arts at the University of Haifa that its students do not share a background in the same discipline. Sharon Poliakine, who heads the Fine Arts Department, says that nine of the 10 graduates this year previously…
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