This is 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: 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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The Schmooze Women’s Liberation and Helène Aylon’s ‘Word of God’
Performance and installation artist Helène Aylon scrutinizes the entrenched, sometimes invisible, belief systems that shape society. Since the 1970s, she has used her work as a tool for poetic dissent and constructive revisionism. Aylon’s early work contributed to the women’s movement, opposing the unrealistic imagery pedaled by magazines like Playboy. In the 1980s, her focus…
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The Schmooze Slideshow: Departures, Experiments and ‘Degenerate’ Art
Among the Nazis’ persecuted minorities were Jewish and non-Jewish artists, musicians and writers branded “degenerate” by the regime. “Radical Departures: The Modernist Experiment,” an exhibition currently showing at the Leo Baeck Institute/Center for Jewish History in New York, gathers together work by these “degenerate” artists, including Georg Stahl, Samson Schames, David Ludwig Bloch and others….
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