What Are White People So Afraid Of? Claudia Rankine’s Help

By Alexis Clements

MARCH 2022 | Theater

Alexis Clements reflects on a trio of works by Claudia Rankine—an essay, a book, and a new play starting March 15 at The Shed—dissecting how they circle a question that has caught Rankine’s, and the zeitgeist’s, attention: why is it so hard for white people to confront their whiteness?

Alice Neel: People Come First

By Ann C. Collins

MAY 2021 | ArtSeen

Curators Randall Griffey and Kelly Baum gather more than 100 of the artist’s paintings, watercolors and drawings in Alice Neel: People Come First, a retrospective of the 60 years Neel spent transposing New York and its citizens into work that bears witness to the struggles of everyday life in the city as much as it dignifies the individual.

Faith Ringgold: American People

By Ann C. Collins

MARCH 2022 | ArtSeen

Organized by The New Museum’s artistic director Massimiliano Gioni with curator Gary Carrion-Murayari and curatorial assistant Madeline Weisburg, American People is jam-packed with more than forty years of Faith Ringgold’s most prominent work.

Kent Monkman: mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People)

By Ann C. Collins

FEB 2020 | ArtSeen

It may be that history, as Winston Churchill said, is written by the victors, but a deep satisfaction can be had for those who redraft it. Cree artist Kent Monkman does just that for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s inaugural Great Hall Commission. Monkman reverses the European gaze, presenting Indigenous people as heroes who welcome and rescue invading newcomers.