David Diao uses Barnett Newman as a sounding board to explore his own fascination with the artist and the contradictory legacies of modernism.

The artist, who passed away this year, finally let go of his desire for control and perfection without surrendering his self-imposed restraints.

I can think of few other artists who, through the process of painting, are willing to place their work in jeopardy by denying the viewer a definition or resolution.

As beautifully controlled as his paintings are, they also present a ghastly vision of the world.

In painting, Gandy Brodie could find moments of beauty and defenselessness, as well as the endurance and will to survive, despite a difficult life.

By introducing his motifs into a children’s story, and avoiding any sense of self-importance, Scully reveals another side of himself.

Once Carlos Villa and Leo Valledor recognized that they could never fully assimilate into mainstream America, they set out on their own paths.

Mario Schifano moved nimbly among different modes and never settled into a style, which sets him apart from many of his contemporaries.

By choosing the unforgiving surface of toothed paper and making irrevocable marks, Nutt enters a territory few American artists have dared to go.

Asako Tabata presents a stark, unsettling vision of a society in which women have little chance to achieve autonomy.

While Wu Junyong is deeply connected to his love of Chinese myths, folktales, and language, his subjects underscore his break with the past.

He integrated the language of advertising and journalism into his poetry, and was influenced by the rapid tempo of jazz.

For more than three decades, Lydia Dona has generated enigmatic abstractions that join together legible and indecipherable parts.

In Purell Night & Day, Susan Chen focuses on the ubiquitous hand sanitizer, a reminder of the isolation we experienced during the lockdown.

The elusive connection between what we can and cannot express summarizes Donovan’s unique trajectory in contemporary art.

In her latest exhibition, what struck me immediately about Guérin’s work was that it neither looked like anyone else’s nor immediately disclosed its meaning. 

Appel’s vertical and horizontal formats suggest a narrative that can be read, but what is within their borders resists understanding.

Tom Burckhardt is a conceptual artist who has never defined himself as one because he knows the label is limiting.

Uchiyama’s question was how to capture the collision between nature and the manmade, the changing light and aging ruins she encountered in Sicily

For years, Amico has driven around Los Angeles early in the morning and taken photographs in industrial neighborhoods of walls and surfaces.

What is most satisfying about McNamee-Tweed’s work is that he has not lost his sense of wonderment.

Time passing has never been a subject Jim Dine has avoided; he has long made art about getting old.

What singles out artist Don Voisine is his ability to remain a restless painter, capable of surprising his most ardent fans.

Along with Lois Dodd and Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Jacquette successfully pushed back against Minimalism and Conceptual Art.

Mayhew has not been embraced by the art world because the trajectory he has pursued challenges the categories to which Black artists are consigned.

Sarah Palmer melds a formal device of trompe l’oeil with her content, which largely relates to the objectification of women and how women choose to present or stage themselves.

Through her attention to detail and light, Hannah Lee transforms a banal view into something uncanny.

The slippage between legibility and illegibility in Leah Ke Yi Zheng’s work pushes against the assumption that a painting must acknowledge its surface.

One of the underlying commonalities among the sites Liu has painted is the deleterious consequences of modernization on a traditional society or group.

Thompson wanted to author a world where the struggle between chaos and order, structure and impulse, the rational and irrational is never settled.

An unclassifiable artist and a deep reader, Jen Bervin has expanded the notion of what it is to be a poet in the 21st century.

In contrast to the speed and bravura of gestural abstraction, new.shiver slows time, and invites viewers to ponder how one might shape time passing.

Her work derives its power from the instability of not knowing exactly what ground you’re standing on when looking at it.

By dealing with class in his art, Bollinger touches on the strain infecting the current “us and them” situation in the United States.

Maia Ruth Lee wants viewers to make associations as well as recognize the unstable world in which she and many others live.

The city could use more political public murals like those of the artist known as Rigo 23.

The position Shear has been defining in his work is one that accepts, contemplates, and reimagines the possibilities of abstract painting.

She invites the viewer to contemplate all the ways we mark and live in time, and how much of what we record and keep we will eventually dispose of.

Kimetha Vanderveen's paintings are about the interaction of materiality and light, the bond between the palpable and ephemeral world in which we live.

Once known for his abstracted portraits, the Chicago artist is now exploring new directions.

She has taken clay and used it to recall its ancestral roots in Pueblo culture and address the present history of postcolonial recovery and ongoing trauma.

If Thomas Nast, who is considered the “Father of the American Cartoon,” has an heir, it is Gibson, who goes one step further and elevates caricature and commentary into art.

In Ito’s art we glimpse something we cannot comprehend. A sense of longing and mystery, isolation and solitude fill the paintings.

Jake Berthot’s paintings are haunted by an awareness of mortality and, beyond that, a feeling that no light awaits in the darkness.

Trevor Winkfield’s modestly scaled acrylic paintings abound in puzzling, private symbols.

The paradoxical combination of freedom and entrapment animates Goodman’s composition in her latest body of work.

A deep sense of loss, of being cut off or isolated from communication, runs through Elsa Gramcko’s works, imbuing them with inchoate feelings that precede language.

What distinguishes Ledgerwood’s work from the earlier generation of women artists working in the domain of Pattern and Decoration is its bluntness and humor.

The 1969 exhibition 5 + 1, and now Revisiting 5 + 1, are reminders that the history of Black Art in the United States is diverse rather than monolithic.

In Seongmin Ahn's paintings, it is not our past we are looking at but our possible future.