Art Writer Robin Cembalest
Throughout her career, Robin has covered the people, places and trends shaping the art world. Following is a non-chronological sampling from Robin’s hundreds of publications.
MoMA Makes a Facebook for Abstractionists
A collaboration between MoMA curators and the Columbia Business School depicts early modernism as a vast social network. It's the latest in a long line of charts showing that no ism is an island
An Artist Sews a Sense of Community
Communal crafting and collective action are essential parts of Marie Watt’s art practice.
Voguing Meets Drawing, via Rashaad Newsome
Using the Drawing Center’s gallery space, a tricked-out Xbox Kinect, and the exaggerated rhythmic stylings of expert dancers and musicians, Rashaad Newsome created a template for sculptures like no one’s ever seen. Published in ARTnews, March 2014.
Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Self-Destructing Chocolate Head
Delicious dish on chocolate artworks by Janine Antoni, Dieter Roth, and more
The Other Modernism: Rediscovering Iran’s Avant-Garde
Talking to Melissa Chiu and Fereshteh Daftari about “Iran Modern,” a groundbreaking show at Asia Society. Published in ARTnews, February 2013.
Taking Cat Art Seriously
From a provocative upcoming Metropolitan Museum show to adoption-ready “purr-formers,” the art world is exploring the shock of the mew.
Tobias Schneebaum’s epic adventures
A film by Laurie G and David Shapiro spotlights the gay American Jewish anthropologist and artist who documented his travels in Papua New Guinea and Peru.
The Curator Vanishes: Period Room as Crime Scene
A disappearance, a discovery, and a mystery at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, via Mark Dion
The Art That Made Peru Peru
Three millennia, 350 objects, and one national identity are featured in an ambitious show at Montreal’s Museum of Fine Arts.
Resurrecting Chagall’s Jewish Jesus
Marc Chagall’s Crucifixions are in a startling Jewish Museum show that overturns popular notions of his work.
The Evil-Looking Women Drug Addicts of French Belle Epoque Art
As the morphine craze gripped Paris, a new archetype of angry, scary women emerged in French prints. Collectors loved them.
Girl With A Hoop Earring: Fun With Vermeer
The women in beloved Vermeer paintings have been stripped by Dalí, bedecked in toilet-paper rolls, and reincarnated by Cindy Sherman
The Thing's the Plays: Public Theater's New Shakespeare Machine
Artist Ben Rubin remixes 37 works in a site-specific, L.E.D-lit, linguistic-supercollider sculpture (that’s also a chandelier).
Your Thievin' Art? At Play in the Field of Fair Use
Your mug shot. Your profile picture. Your breakfast table. Is anything safe from appropriation artists?
Birds Do It, Bees Do It: Taking Animals' Art Skills Seriously
Move over, painting chimps. Today's art-making animals are cutting-edge creators who turn up everywhere from the National Zoo to MoMA.
The Mysteriously Tiny Drawings of an 18th-Century Artist, Born Without Hands or Feet
Using an implement he wielded with his stumps, Matthias Buchinger excelled in calligraphy, ornamentation, and micrography, the practice of making patterns with tiny letters. Ricky Jay’s book and a show at the Met explored the art and life of “The Little Man of Nuremberg.”
The Spectre Haunting Eva Hesse's Brooklyn Museum Show
In a Brooklyn Museum exhibition of the artist's early paintings, some aspects of her story were conspicuous by their absence.
The Afterlife of the Conceptual and Minimalist Art of Sol LeWitt
Sol LeWitt’s minimalist installations for synagogues and Jewish institutions have given the late Conceptual artist an afterlife he’d approve of.
A Turner Behind the Scenes
Reality, illusion and the sublime converge in An-My Lê's photo of a Turner painting being restored, recently acquired by the Yale Center for British Art.