Horses of a Different Color: Unicorns in Art 

Shinique Smith has been enamored by unicorns her whole life. She keeps a bag of My Little Ponies by her desk for inspiration. “I suppose as an adult I lost the hope of seeing one because some say they only appear to virgins,” she explains. “Now, I feel like they evoke a sparkle of graceful mystery and remind me of my own youthful wishes.”

Smith has put bits of unicorns in three paintings, but recently made her first unicorn sculpture, inspired by “cotton candy, summer playtime, reading fairy tales on my canopy bed kind of feelings.” The piece, called Miracle, is in her current show at David Castillo in Miami.

Smith is one of many artists across the ages fascinated by the wondrous, magical beasts, from the unknown master who created the beloved Unicorn Tapestries, now on view in a special show at the Metropolitan Museum’s medieval branch, the Cloisters, to India’s Tejal Shah, whose humanoid unicorns are in her cutting-edge video installation at Barbara Gross Galerie in Munich; from Jewish silversmiths to Islamic miniaturists to contemporary figures like Saint Clair Cemin, Thomas Woodruff, and more. 

Click here for a roundup of unicorn art from around the world. 

Shinique Smith, Miracle, 2013, clothing, bedding, stuffed toy, ribbon, and rope. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND JAMES COHAN GALLERY.

Somewhere over Gravity’s Rainbow: Drew Heitzler at @mg_chelsea

Word. Yoshitomo Nara
@pacegallery

If a cat had been in the Garden of Eden….Kathy Ruttenberg at #Stux #caturday

The weird world of Mark Greenwold at #speronewestwater

Let It Bleed: The Met’s New Rooftop Painting

After the last two massive, vertiginous installations on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which demanded able bodies and rubber soles, this summer there’s a finally a piece everyone can walk on.

But this one is scarier.

It’s a landscape painted in situ by Imran Qureshi, an artist from Pakistan. Playing off the setting above Central Park, he has rendered bursts of ornamental foliage, exuberant and elegant. They look like enormous details of the gardens in Mughal miniatures, an intricate genre he spent years mastering.

In this garden, though, something terrible has happened.

Switching from the elaborate detail of the Islamic miniature to the ritual dance of modernist action painting, Qureshi has splattered the roof in paint, blood-red like the leaves. It takes a moment to perceive the scope of the tragedy that may have unfolded in such a setting. The piece, the artist says, is a response to violence that has occurred around the world in recent decades. He calls it And How Many Rains Must Fall before the Stains Are Washed Clean.

There is no shortage of war art at the Met, of course. But at a time when the museum has one Civil War show on view and another opening this month, there is a particular sense of trauma and despair in some of its galleries, especially because so many of the 19th-century images echo what we see in the daily news.

It was as a response to bombings in Lahore that Qureshi began using red acrylic paint in his art, creating tragic landscapes that negate the idea of paradise on earth.

While the Met piece was in the works, the Boston bombings occurred. In another symbolic gesture, Qureshi decided not to paint the entire surface.

Read more

Imran Qureshi, And How Many Rains Must Fall before the Stains Are Washed Clean, installation view, 2013, acrylic.

COMMISSIONED BY THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK FOR THE IRIS AND B. GERALD CANTOR ROOF GARDEN.

When in the Kaws of human events….

My interns submitted my name in the raffle to win the Kaws bike helmet I tried on at the New Museum’s Ideas City festival. Just found out I won! 

It begins. Obligatory #artselfie @friezenewyork in Josiah Mcelheny in White Cube

So many animals live and dead in #expo1 @momaps1. Which came first the chicken or this Charles Ray?

Whose Art is Your Dating Profile Picture Anyway?

Is your dating profile art?

A forum just appeared on the Jewish Museum website in response to an emotional controversy over a work by Marc Adelman that played out last summer. The piece, Stelen, features photos of men posing in Berlin’s Holocaust memorial. The artist had downloaded them from profiles on a gay online dating site.

For Adelman, the photos spoke volumes about memory, minorities, and persecution. “The fact that several hundred men (and likely many more) posed for casual, flirtatious snapshots in the Holocaust Memorial cannot be reduced to sheer coincidence,” he writes.

Some of the men saw it otherwise, saying their privacy, and safety, was compromised. When they threatened legal action, the museum took the piece down.

“We say we want artists to be provocative, but as the controversy around Stelen makes clear, there are lines we are not comfortable stepping over,” comments Marvin Heiferman, one of seven contributors to the forum.

Patricia J. Williams, a Columbia law professor, suggested a creative way to approach some of the privacy issues the case raises. She wondered if online profile photos could be considered “one’s ‘own’ artistic rendering”—in other words, subject to copyright legislation.

Read more. 

Marc Adelman, image from the series “Stelen (Columns),” 2007-2011, inkjet print. COURTESY THE ARTIST.