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.

Hiromi Kawakami’s People From My Neighborhood and Sequoia Nagamatsu's How High We Go in the Dark

By Yvonne C. Garrett

DEC 21-JAN 22 | Books

Each of these books presents a master class in craft while also providing a perfectly honed narrative that draws the reader in and won’t let go.

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.

“They’re Not Normal People”: Azazel Jacobs’s French Exit

By Madeline Whittle

FEB 2021 | Film

An exceptional ensemble cast—including Michelle Pfeiffer and Lucas Hedges—renders the absurd with singular emotional nuance (and comic timing) in Azazel Jacobs’s latest, co-written by and adapted from a novel by Patrick DeWitt.