Will
Fenstermaker

ARCHIVE:  All Selected 2026 2025 2024 2023 2022 2021 2020 Beyond

2019 & Beyond

Dec 20, 2019Video

In Conversation with Kent Monkman

“I’ve always been drawn to history painting because so many Indigenous experiences were never portrayed.”
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Nov 27, 2019

On Michael Wolf

Wolf’s austere depictions of bleak modernist architecture and urban existence often break down into frank and, at times, jarring moments of intimacy.
Artforum
Oct 31, 2019

On Vik Muniz

What’s lost may be lost, but Muniz imparts some solace: If we can preserve the image, perhaps that is enough.
Artforum
Oct 30, 2019Interview

In Conversation with Arghavan Khosravi

“I’ve appropriated the unreal space of Persian miniature painting, with its traditional figures, gestures and architecture, and used its disproportion and false perspective to intensify the sense of distortion and displacement that I feel navigating the different aspects of my life.”
BOMB
Sep 13, 2019Video

In Conversation with Wangechi Mutu

“Caryatids throughout history have carried these buildings to express the might and the wealth of a particular place. … I wanted to keep the DNA of the woman in an active pose, but I didn’t want her to carry the weight of something or someone else.”
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Aug 02, 2019Panel

On a Critical Insurgency

Notes from a panel responding to the question, “Is there a crisis in the field of art criticism?”
AICA-USA
Jul 13, 2019Video

In Conversation with Oliver Beer

“The museum is like a vast, multichambered instrument just waiting to be played. … Every object brings with it its own history of survival, and those individual stories weave a kind of new narrative together.”
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
May 20, 2019

On Yuji Agematsu

Every day since 1985, Agematsu has walked throughout the boroughs of New York City—and each jaunt has been diligently recorded via notebook entries, drawings and sculptures made from found objects.
Artforum
Apr 30, 2019

On Walid Raad

By implicating actual figures in his conspiracies, fabrications and imagistic war games, Raad extends the complicated relationship that official documents have to truth.
Artforum
Apr 01, 2019Interview

In Conversation with Mira Schor

“If you think about living in a fascist society where public life becomes impossible, and the state begins to make incursions into private life, then you can see human joy as a very radical act. In that sense, that is one of the roles of art.”
The Brooklyn Rail
Mar 13, 2019

On Derrick Adams

Staged in an brownstone on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Adams’s wallpaper interiors propose boldly graphic representations of Black domesticity against the ugly backdrop of contemporary American politics.
Artforum
Feb 04, 2019

On Artificial Intelligence & Art History

A group of artists and technologists trained a neural network to interpret The Met’s online collection, asking: What does the history of art look like?
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Feb 01, 2019

On Max Neumann

Neumann is a literary painter, preoccupied with clarifying the same “secret image of reality” that possesses both the writer and the state collaborator.
The Brooklyn Rail
Nov 29, 2018Catalogue

On Shen Fan

Shen’s canvases, which have drawn comparisons to Abstract Expressionism, were the result of one artist’s struggles—against tradition, against the picture plane, even against himself.
Eli Klein Gallery
Nov 01, 2018Interview

In Conversation with Seth Price

“Lack of resolution is something we grant certain kinds of expression, and once you grant that, a kind of richness can unfold.”
The Brooklyn Rail
Oct 01, 2018Obituary

Remembering Paul Virilio

Virilio taught that meaning is found not where an event occurs or an image appears, but where it originates. With Mark Dery, Sylvère Lotringer, Paul Miller (DJ Spooky), et al.
The Brooklyn Rail
Jul 01, 2018

On Aaron Fowler

Fowler’s maximalist assemblages—meticulous, intricate and complexly layered—are steeped with references and allusions to art history, popular culture and the artist’s own familial and personal experiences.
The Brooklyn Rail
May 23, 2018Interview

On William Wegman

Curator Doug Eklund speaks about how Wegman broke the rules of Conceptual art.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
May 01, 2018

On ‘Art in the Internet Age’

The internet, by definition, is only a set of rules that allows computers to talk to each other—a set of protocols, or maybe by now a byzantine bureaucracy.
The Brooklyn Rail
Apr 10, 2018Interview

On Leon Golub

Curator Kelly Baum speaks about Golub’s prescient critiques of power and toxic masculinity.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Apr 01, 2018

On Nathlie Provosty

As philosophical inquiry, her paintings amount, almost inexplicably, to an object-based phenomenology.
The Brooklyn Rail
Jan 30, 2018

On Mirtha Dermisache

Dermisache’s letter-ish scripts comprise a sort of ur-language, which may, on occasion, vaguely resemble the sleekly linear letters of Arabic or the regimented cursive of South Asian abugidas—but they follow no grammar or syntax.
The Paris Review
Nov 01, 2017Interview

In Conversation with Jimmy Robert

“I’m trying to think of performance as creating a series of images. You could say collage, but I’m thinking also of montage because a succession of images creates a narrative.”
The Brooklyn Rail
Oct 15, 2017

On ‘Distant Star’ Dramatized

Bolaño crafts different kinds of heroes, youthful and vivacious like Rimbaud, who resist becoming monuments by pursuing the intangible, leaving art, like clouds, in their wake.
The Brooklyn Rail
Oct 01, 2017

On Sadie Laska’s ‘Animal Farm’

Artist-curated exhibitions can be untidy and idiosyncratic in ways that museums and the market abhor, and this can make them interesting, disorienting, dissonant—even iconoclastic in the best instances.
The Brooklyn Rail
Sep 01, 2017

On Richard Gerstl

Much has been penned about the 25 volatile years leading to Gerstl’s death in early November 1908, when the young painter hanged and stabbed himself in the heart.
The Brooklyn Rail
Jun 16, 2017Interview

In Conversation with Larry Clark

“When you see work that sells at auctions overnight for millions and millions of dollars, well, that doesn’t particularly help the artist very much. He doesn’t get any money from it.”
Artspace
Jun 01, 2017

On Content Moderators

“Technofeudalism” refers to an economic condition in which the means of production has shifted from ownership of land to intellectual property.
The Brooklyn Rail
Jun 01, 2017

On Louise Lawler

Lawler’s pictures of power at play peeled back the aggrandizing mythologies that had coopted art; she made images utilitarian once again—in a way they maybe haven’t been since icon painting.
The Brooklyn Rail
Spring 2017

On ‘Casting JonBenét’

The unconventional documentary, in calling upon the Ramseys’ neighbors to cut through years of rumors and theorizing, guides us through the hardest questions surrounding JonBenét’s murder.
Degree Critical
Mar 21, 2017Interview

In Conversation with Wolf Lieser

“Every kind of digital file, or any kind of non-material art that can be communicated as digital information, could stand as an idea for our times.”
Artspace
Czech by 25fps
May 05, 2016Interview

In Conversation with Ernst Fischer

“There’s something very originally photographic about the Shroud of Turin and the Veil of Veronica, and the idea of an image that’s holy because it was made without human hands.”
Degree Critical
Apr 30, 2016

On Thomas Ruff

Ruff’s “press++” reconceives the archive as a set of relations, not a record of history.
Momus
Apr 01, 2015

On ‘Zero Tolerance’ & ‘The Left Front ’

Two concurrent exhibitions survey nearly a century of political art that privileges an aesthetics of participation over formalism.
Momus