John Anderson

Since 1967, Chuck Close has been painting the portraits of his family, friends, and fellow artists; some of the work measures nearly 10 feet tall. Before 2003, some might have overlooked the fact that Chuck Close is also a printmaker. Typically when painters make a print, their aim is to reproduce the painting. Due to the nature of his disability, prosopagnosia, Chuck Close paints from photographs. As a result, like his paintings, the product of his prints is dictated by the medium or working...

Terrie Sultan is the organizing curator of the Corcoran's current exhibit "Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration," and author of the eponymous catalog. Currently a director of the Parish Art Museum on Eastern Long Island, Sultan originally organized the exhibition while she was director of the Blaffer Gallery, the art museum of the University of Houston. Before that, Terrie Sultan worked at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Shortly after our interview with Chuck Close, Janet Anderson (for ...

[caption id="attachment_44574" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Nam June Paik's "Electronic Superhighway""]
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Given the recent opening of an exhibition of Nam June Paik's work at the National Gallery of Art, as well as the long-term commitment to media art the Smithsonian American Art Museum has made its Watch This! exhibition, I thought now would be a good time to talk with SAAM's senior curator for media arts, John G. Hanhardt, about the Nam June Paik archives. SAAM acquired ...

The Hirshhorn is concluding an exhibition of mid-20th century German artist Blinky Palermo on Sunday. Palermo was an intriguing minimalist who died too young, and who emerged from the same group of Germans instructed by Joseph Beuys that also included Gerhardt Richter, Anselm Kiefer, and Sigmar Polke. In the context of the 1960s and '70s, his work is a rather intriguing collection of minimalist paintings and objects that range small to large, shaped, hung at untraditional levels and angles, e...

In this town, getting a bunch of politicians and Washington insiders to agree on anything presents a challenge—-even when it comes to art. Getting them to be in the art, well, that doesn't seem as difficult.
Tuesday, the National Portrait Gallery unveiled a new addition to its permanent collection, The Network, a recent work by video artist Lincoln Schatz. It’s what’s called a generative video portrait—-a non-looping video controlled by an algorithm—-of 89 Beltway power brokers, from the reco...

A few weeks ago, "Happenings: New York, 1958-1963" opened at one of Pace Gallery's 25th Street locations in lower Manhattan. It's an exhibition of photographs, objects, and film from the various "happenings" created by the art faculty of Rutgers University and artists living in downtown New York during that period: Red Grooms, Lucas Samaras, Jim Dine, Carolee Schneeman, Alan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Patty Mucha, and others. Unquestionably, it was a New York scene.
With one exception. One set ...

"Any show so varied, it is bound to leave a blur," wrote Washington Post critic Paul Richard about "The Washington Show," an exhibit the Corcoran mounted in 1985. The show aspired to establish the importance of Washington artists at the time. "Washington Art Matters," an ongoing exhibition at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, pursues the same mission—-and Richard's assessment applies to this show, too.
Until August 11, the top floor of the American University Museum pr...

The first "Washington Art Matters" exhibit, mounted last summer, was an incomplete thought: a colon, desperate for an exclamation point. Though were several remarkable works in the exhibition at the American University Museum—-a 90-artist show assembled in less than two months by a skeleton crew and a shoe-string budget—something was missing. Perhaps the digital suggestion box offered by the museum helped curators fill in the blanks. "Washington Art Matters II: 1940s to 1980s," which closes t...

This past Friday, Arlington County marked the 30th anniversary of Nancy Holt's Dark Star Park, the first since the artist's death from leukemia in February. There was plenty of pomp, with remarks from Arlington County Board Chairman Jay Fisette and Virginia Congressman Jim Moran, but there was very little circumstance: The sun did not shine; it was too dark to play. While the features of Dark Star Park—spheres, reflecting pools, poles, trees—were visible, there were no shadows from the poles ...

Franz Jantzen doesn’t need to explain what the Library of Congress has lost, now that its consumers no longer have the option of ordering silver gelatin reproductions of images in its collection. He’d rather show you.
He points me toward me a high-resolution digital print of Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother,” one of the most iconic images of the Great Depression. Look at the range of grays, and you can see subtle differences in the textures of the children’s hair and clothes, and in the worri...

In which our art critics highlight a favorite work on view in a local gallery. Click to enlarge!
Cliff Evans' work in "Sites and Stations," currently on view in the University of Maryland's Stamp Gallery, is a bit of a quagmire once you start to break it down. He starts with a Photoshop collage of some like elements: houses under construction, a few cranes, maybe some metered pipes running through the composition. It's a basic beginning that references a history of collage dating back to Hann...

A piece of advice before you step into Curator’s Office to watch Jonathan Monaghan’s new work of digitally animated video art: Suspend your ninja logic.
Fans of Mortal Kombat will remember Sub-Zero as a silent masked combatant who fires ice projectiles from his hands, but in Monaghan’s video, “Sacrifice of the Mushroom Kings,” the ninja assassin has all the gusto of a bored kid at scout camp, seated in the gun turret of a Sherman tank, scrolling through his smart phone.
Elsewhere in the video...

Now that it is winter, and the east coast of the U.S. is likely bracing for another portmanteau of snow, we’ll take a moment to recall the time the Washington Monument was turned into a sundial.
Featured briefly on the CBS Evening News on Monday, February 11, 1974, sculptor Yuri Schwebler, visibly cold, stands by and somewhat awkwardly discuses his motivation to ray lines away from the base of the Washington Monument to transform it into a sun dial. As his response ranges from articulate to s...

“I got to spend a lot of time on roof tops with my dad,” says Heather Krebs. She recalls a postcard from her father, dated 1974, telling her the laser piece they worked on had been turned on. She laughs. “I was five.”
Rockne Krebs, the father of laser art, got rooftop access to some atypical locations for his installations—The Kennedy Center, Lincoln Memorial, parts of Disney Land—and often took his daughter. “It was sort of like having this backstage pass….hanging out in these areas and look...

Since April 7, the Hirshhorn has been hosting “All The Rules Will Change.” It’s the first Robert Irwin survey outside of California since 1977, and as such only features work made between 1958 and 1970—with exceptions to a couple of installations designed for the exhibition.
The title of the exhibition has several reads. One is a tidy summary of Irwin’s process for art-making: transitioning away from painting to the optical and transformative play of his discs, columns, and later scrims. Anot...