Jan Garden Castro

Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines, created between 1954 and 1964, were revolutionary in the history of art. Leo Steinberg called them a “shift from nature to culture,” and his characterization is still the most successful critical description. Others have discussed the works as collages, grids, “definitive incongruity,” and “relaxed symmetry.” But critics have not fully addressed the degree to which these works freed painting, sculpture, and design from their genre classifications, the degree to...

By JAN CASTRO, JUNE 2016
Duke Riley's "Fly by Night"
Creative Time at Brooklyn Navy Yard
Fly by Night was Creative Time’s salute to art, pigeons, Brooklyn nights, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The free tickets were hard-to-get. The poster for the event displayed Duke Riley’s love of ships, birds, and adult humor: a flying pigeon holds an overly large light as a battle ship shows pigeons at attention on small cannons — with two birds smoking cigarettes. The program notes that pigeon breeds in th...

By JAN GARDEN CASTRO September, 2024
Jeffrey Gibson is the first indigenous artist in charge of creating the 2024 U. S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In addition to being at the center of the art world’s biggest platform, he raised most of the 5.8 million budget in order to invite other indigenous artists to the opening and to the colloquium that takes place in October. His range of materials now includes bronze as he prepares for the Metropolitan Museum Facade commission in fall, 2025. In...

“Who drive Fergus now and pierce woods woven shade.” 1994. Linoprint.
To meet an 80+-year-old artist “doing something I’ve never done before,” I visited Peter Gourfain’s Bedford-Stuyvesant studio in a neighborhood that was low-income when he moved there 30 years ago. The shift to the new style, in which three-dimensional yet abstract heads and hands are collaged together was “sudden and unexpected,” according to the artist.[i]
Black Lives Matter Studies 4, 2, & 3, all ceramic & all 2016
The f...

Pyramid: 3 frames, 2 POV, 2015. 72” x 40” x 22”. Courtesy the artist
String Curve and Pyramid are Hap Tivey’s shifting light sculptures shown recently at the University of Buffalo Art Gallery. Tivey uses Fred Sandback’s minimalism and James Turrell’s light constructions with the main difference that the forms shift in hue, volume, and shape – or appear to. In Tivey’s light art, unlike Turrell’s projections, the light constantly changes as the string, hanging like a line in space, articulates ...

Joan Hall’s layered, monumental sculptures address how the climate crisis affects human bodies and bodies of water. Her processes and forms start with handmade paper and evolve organically. Part of the mystique in Hall’s work stems from the fact that she uses dry pigments and paper to create water-like surfaces. Her conceptual thinking is as complex and layered as her hands-on approach. Though her work aligns cancer with invasive marine toxins and plastic pollution, she approaches such dark s...

As a public artist, Richard Hunt is known as a creator of abstract metal works, each a unique shrine to the human spirit. With over 30 public works in the Chicago area alone, one Hunt aficionado noted, “you kind of bump into them all the time.” In Chicago, Jacob’s Ladder, an indoor commission for the south side’s Carter G. Woodson Public Library, and Freeform (1992), an outdoor commission on a glass wall of the restored State of Illinois office building on LaSalle Street, illustrate Hunt’s ra...

“This looks like art,” a tough-talking policeman pronounced, looking around at the fairyland of wax-bathed figures, birds, chandeliers, scarlet and blue feathers, worldly and otherworldly forms. Petah Coyne’s “White Rain” exhibition had a visceral immediacy not easily communicated in photographs. She draws heavily on art and literature, Catholic legends, and intuition to create her seductive, visionary worlds. “White Rain” was conceived as a female and an American response to the “black rain”...