The computer (as a graphic tool) is relatively new in the current rush of technology. In America, widespread use of the computer dates approximately from 1955, when a line of commercial units first became available.

In 1963 computers began to develop possibilities for making graphics. An electric microfilm recorder was introduced; it can plot points and draw lines a million times faster than a human draftsman. This machine and the electronic computer which controls it thus make feasible various kinds of graphic movies which heretofore would have been prohibitively intricate, time-consuming and expensive.

The microfilm recorder consists essentially of a display tube and a camera. It understands only simple instructions such as those for advancing the film, displaying a spot or alphabetic character at specified coordinates or drawing a straight line from one point to another. Though this repertoire is simple, the machine can compose complicated pictures—or series of pictures—from a large number of basic elements: it can draw ten thousand to one hundred thousand points, lines or characters per second.

This film-exposing device is therefore fast enough to tum out, in a matte r of seconds , a television-quality image consisting of a fine mosaic of closely spaced spots, or to produce simple line drawings at rates of several frames per second.

As a technically oriented film-artist , I realized the possibilities of the computer as a new graphic tool for film-making in 1964 and began my exploration of this medium. I have since made nine computer-generated films. To produce these films the following procedure was used: an IBM 7094 computer was loaded with a set of sub-routines (instructions) which perform the operations for computizing the movie system called “Beflix” devised by Ken Knowlton of Bell Telephone Laboratories. The movie computer program is then written, in this special language, and put on punched cards; the punched cards are then fed into the computer; the computer tabulates and accepts the instructions on the cards calculating the explicit details of each implied picture of the movie and putting the results of this calculation on tape. To visualize this: imagine a mosaic-like screen with 252 x 184 points of light each point of light can be turned on or off from instructions on the program. Pictures can be thought of as an array of spots of different shades of gray. The computer keeps a complete “map” of the picture as the spots are turned on and off. The programmer instructs the system to “draw” lines, arcs, lettering. He can also invoke operations on entire areas with instructions for copying, shifting, transliterating, zooming, and dissolving and filling areas. The coded tape is then put into another machine that reads the tape and instructs a graphic display device (a Stromberg-Carlson 4020), which is a sophisticated cathode-tube system similar to a TV picture tube. Each point of light turns on/off according to the computerized instructions on the tape. A camera over the tube, also instructed when to take a picture by information from the computer, then records on film that particular movie frame. After much trial and error—during which time the computer informs you that you have not written your instructions properly—you have a black-and-white movie. This is edited in traditional movie techniques, and color is added by a special color-printing process developed by artists Bob Brown and Frank Olvey.

Movie-making was for long the most revolutionary art form of our time. Now television touches the nerve-ends of all the world; the visual revolution sits in just about every living room across America. The image revolution that movies represented has now been overhauled by the television evolution, and is approaching the next visual stage-to computer graphics to computer controls of environment to a new cybernetic “movie art.”

For the artist the new media of movies, TV, computers, cybernetics, are tools that have curved the perspectives of vision, curving both outward and inward. The revolution of ideas and the ecology of the senses began in 1900 (movies were “invented” about the same time as psychoanalysis). Trace the path of ideas of painting over the past sixty years: the breakup of nineteenth-century ideals, step by step; the obj et d’art to nonobjective art; cubism-simultaneous perception; futurism—motion and man machine metaphysics; dadaism-anti-art, pro-life; surrealism—the dream as the center of the mental universe; action painting—synthetic time-motion; happenings—two-dimensional painting comes off the wall; op art-illusion as retinal “reality”; pop art” reality” as reminder of reality; minimal art-illusion of reduction; conceptual art-the elements of illusion.

In other words, we have been moving closer to a “mental” state of art/life. Now we move into the area of computers, an extension of the mind with a tool technically as responsive as ourselves. In the developing mental art/life, to “think” about the work is the process of doing the work.

An abstract notation system for making movies and image storage and retrieval systems opens a door for a kind of mental attitude of movie-making: the artist is no longer restricted to the exact execution of the form; so long as he is clear in his mind as to what he wants, eventually he can realize his movie or work on some computer, somewhere.

What shall this black box, this memory system of the world, this meta-physical printing press do for us? Compare the computer to driving a fast sports car; it is difficult to control; although the irony is that at higher speeds less effort is needed to alter and change directions. However, more skill—a complex man/machine understanding—is required.

The future of computers in art will be fantastic, as amplifiers of human imagination and responses, of kinetic environments programmed to each of our interests; in short, computers will shape the overall ecology of America.

It’s not very far from the Gutenberg press of movable bits of type to the logic “bits” of the computer. No doubt computers will be as common as telephones in our lives; art schools in the near future will teach programming as one of the new psycho-skills of the new technician-artist-citizen.

As with most of his works, a voiceover accompanies the dance. It has a narrative that doubles as prompts for the dancers, but also bleeds into the realm of description. This comes naturally for Núñez, who is visually impaired, though he also includes a separate, live audio description track conceived specifically for blind audiences. For The Square, Núñez, who was born and raised in Costa Rica and is currently a fellow at Princeton University, instructs his dancers to feel the elements, the vibrations of their ancestors, and their third eye. He sounds more like a yoga instructor than a ballet master, encouraging dancers to listen to their bodies rather than dominate them. He wants them to get into a trance.

Núñez says he is unlearning his training in the school of German expressionism as typified by Pina Bausch; in that context, he was taught that to dance is to suffer, an attitude he regards as both Western and ableist. When his dancers generate momentum, they’re instructed to let the energy carry them where it may—a method he describes as decidedly decolonial. Rotations and undulations mark his choreography, dancers revolving around one another as they move, their spines billowing like inchworms. Núñez said his “vortex” method evolved from his trouble judging distances: when everyone rotates around one point, it helps him predict their positions to avoid collisions.

The Square has a score by Alfonso “Poncho” Castro, who uses indigenous Central American instruments like the carraca, basically, a donkey jaw modified by ants; the insects slowly remove the flesh and loosen the teeth. Played with a stick, the carraca produces a sound that Poncho mixes electronically to intone at 432 hertz, “the frequency of the universe,” as Núñez describes it. He presents the frequency as a gift to both the dancers and the audience, saying it “automatically invites people to rest.”

Despite all this, Núñez insists his practice is not one of healing. “I want to nurture and energize my body,” he said, “but I also love this state of feeling the wounds.” He added that, “in marginalized communities, when you are communicating to the world that you are healing, you risk removing the responsibility from all the oppressive structures.” His nuanced approach to the dynamic is a sort of extension of his “vortex” method, with a focus on neither nurturing nor wounds but, rather, both, swirling together. 

In a time when so many artists dabble in video, Nguyen-Chi stands apart for her mastery of cinematic storytelling. Like a true filmmaker, she collaborates with skilled cinematographers and musicians in beautifully shot works built around compelling narrative structures. In Violet Belly, her mother is onscreen telling her story, so it’s understood that she survived, but we’re never told how—just left suspended in blue.

Before studying at Germany’s famed art school Städelschule, Nguyen-Chi, now based in Berlin, worked for a Swiss NGO helping people exposed to Agent Orange. Violet Belly completes a trilogy that deals with Cold War history from her Vietnamese and German perspective. All three personal, poetic videos ensconce viewers in a blue expanse, and she plays with modes of display. When she showed Violet Belly last year in a former refugee center in Amsterdam, now an art space called de Appel, Nguyen-Chi shoved a large, jagged mirror through a slanted projection screen. One evening, a musician performed a live version of the soundtrack on a cello as the projection danced across her instrument. 

This summer, Nguyen-Chi will cover the floor of Norway’s Kunsthall Trondheim with hundreds of ping-pong balls, where she will show two works from the trilogy together for the first time. A mirrored game table will bounce the light from video projectors instead of balls, in reference to Cold War “ping-pong diplomacy.”

Meanwhile, Nguyen-Chi is at work on a new trilogy about three Vietnamese women: her mother (once again) plus an activist and a filmmaker. She said that each of them “embodies some form of resistance, and defines their own freedom despite limitations.” She has borrowed footage left behind by the filmmaker, who documented the Vietnam War, some of it literally drenched in blood. Nguyen-Chi is an artist who handles haunting stories without reducing or sensationalizing them, so it’s hard to imagine such delicate material in better hands. 

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Tsai was in town this past February for the opening of her first solo exhibition in the United States, “A Mirror for the Romantic,” at Tara Downs gallery, where the London-based artist was surrounded by her own painted abstractions. Her work in pencil and oils invites us to wander between marks that boomerang freely across the canvas, with hard-edged lines and brisk smudges wending through eddies of flamboyant color. Her compositions are dense and seemingly limitless in dimension. They sweep you up in their relentless fervor.

Tsai describes herself as a narrator of motions, with a special concern for “the tension of searching back and forth.” This dynamic registers in her gestures’ trajectories, which morph wildly and resolve into harmony. Although her paintings offer no clear stories, they are as eventful as any drama. Word without End I Saw (2022) is a riotous encounter of pastel daubs that flit around a wispy spiral of purple, with exacting curves and ciphers subtly punctuating the chaos. Looking at the verdant First Day of Four Day Interlude (2023) feels like a fit of spring fever.

Tsai, 24, draws influences from lyrical texts of traditional Chinese literature, in particular the classic epic novel Dream of the Red Chamber, written in the 1750s by Cao Xueqin. Growing up in a large family in Taiwan, she was attracted to the book’s story about the rise and decline of a royal family and its evocation of imagery and metaphors to delineate complex interpersonal relationships. Her ongoing fascination with the 120-chapter tale’s “ever-changing process of beauty and ugliness, temperance and obscenity, refinement and vulgarity,” as she put it, materializes in her approach to mark-making. She often begins by piling up paint on the edges of her canvas and then spreading it across the surface, drawing over certain layers, and obfuscating others with gesso. When she describes this process, she uses words like “distort,” “destroy,” and “re-create.”

This method of working laterally stems from Tsai’s training in gongbi, a realist style of traditional Chinese ink painting that she studied in high school. She adapted her skill in executing fine yet fluid brushstrokes in oil paint at the Taipei National University of the Arts, but turned to abstraction at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where she received her MFA in 2022.

She was, and remains, interested in pushing spatial relationships and seeking layered emotional states: just as the diction and rhythm of a pithy Chinese idiom can impart a figurative meaning, so can the precise choreography of gestures on canvas unfold a nexus of events. “They’re all constructing and bringing to the viewer a broad worldview and inner spiritual space,” she said.  

The issue kicks off with an expanded Datebook section of exhibitions and events we’re sure you’ll want to know about in the coming months, with some books and films and other things thrown in. We’re introducing fun and thought-provoking new sections, like Battle Royale, which pits one art world fixture against another (in this case, Chelsea and Tribeca, New York’s most-trafficked gallery districts), and Object Lesson, in which we explore a single artwork by an esteemed artist (first up is Jaune Quick-to See Smith, who has a retrospective on view now at the Whitney Museum). You’ll also see that we’ve given additional space to our columnists Chen & Lampert, who have added an interactive quiz to their popular Hard Truths advice column.

As for New Talent, we’ve increased the number of artists this time to 20—more in line with the huge number of exceptional creators who arise on the worldwide art scene every year. This year’s group skews to the Global South, where some of the most intriguing new talents are being cultivated these days. We’ve also included a special focus on New Talent in New York—where square-footage is expensive and competition among artists is intense—with a feature taking you into five artists’ studios. We offer even more new talent scattered throughout a feature on artists who are using fiber and textiles in ways that elevate the medium to the status of painting.

And we aren’t just celebrating new talent. Emily Watlington conducted a revealing interview with Kerry James Marshall, an artist who is at the top of his game—but refuses to be pegged to any one style.

Finally, with this issue we inaugurate a feature that you saw before you even opened the pages here: a cover artist. The idea is that, for each issue of Art in America, we will choose an emerging (or re-emerging) artist whose work we’ll showcase on the cover, and you’ll find an interview with that artist on the final page of the magazine, along with a full view of the artwork from which we chose a detail. In this case it’s a painting by Drake Carr, who summoned a spirited milieu rooted in part in his work as a bartender at a self-described “queer tiki disco dive bar” in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Learn more about it on page 136—and enjoy the read.

New Talent
20 exciting artists to watch, as chosen by the editors of Art in America.

New Talent New York
A.i.A. visits the studios of five New York–based artists on the rise.

Fiber Is the New Painting
On gallery walls, tapestries are replacing canvases as young artists disregard distinctions between fine art and folk art.
by Wendy Vogel

Bow Down
As scholars revisit early matriarchal cultures, artists are rediscovering the Goddess movement.
by Eleanor Heartney

Grand Theft AI
A new lawsuit asks, can you steal a style?
by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei

Softer Power, with a French Touch
The Centre Pompidou’s landmark agreement with Saudi Arabia is more complicated than it seems. So are the politics of art there.
by Devorah Lauter

DEPARTMENTS

Datebook
A highly discerning list of things to experience over the next three months.
by the Editors of A.i.A.

Issues & Commentary
The best and worst artists of our time are sending work into space.
by Emily Watlington 

Battle Royale 
Tribeca vs. Chelsea—gallery districts face off. 
by the Editors of A.i.A.

Syllabus
A reading list for a crash course on video art.
by Emily Watlington 

Inquiry
A Q&A with Kerry James Marshall about his new exquisite corpse works.
by Emily Watlington 

Sightlines
Counterpublic curator Allison Glenn tells us what she likes.
by Francesca Aton

Hard Truths
A teacher and an artist ask for advice. Plus, an interactive quiz.
by Chen & Lampert

Appreciation
A tribute to Peter Schjeldahl, writer of vivid, unforgettable prose.
by Jackson Arn

Book Review
A reading of Amanda Wasielewski’s Computational Formalism: Art History and Machine Learning.
by Sonja Drimmer

Object Lesson
An annotation of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s Memory Map.
by Francesca Aton

Spotlight
Revisiting Leon Polk Smith’s abstractions in the context of identity.
by Barry Schwabsky

Cover Artist
Drake Carr talks about his painting featured on the front of the magazine. 
by the Editors of A.i.A.

REVIEWS

Hong Kong
Hong Kong Diary
by Andrew Russeth

New York
“Bispo do Rosario: All Existing Materials on Earth”
by Elise Chagas

“Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter”
by Maria H. Loh

Cape Town
“When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting”
by Nkgopoleng Moloi

Sharjah
The 15th Sharjah Biennial
by Emily Watlington

Berlin
“Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief”
by Martin Herbert

Andriessen sets up systems in which inorganic materials undergo chemical changes—crystallization, oxidation—and her arrangements are at once elegant and dystopic. These systems typically include ceramic forms that appear both bone-like and futuristic, as if reminding us that the materials she works with predate and will also outlast us. Her clay components are often accompanied by water pumps and stainless-steel armatures—industrial devices that suggest our species’ material legacy. They also enable the works to perspire and leak. Porous, unglazed ceramic surfaces absorb water that changes their appearance over the course of an exhibition, so Andriessen often designs elaborate plumbing systems in the gallery. You won’t necessarily see a piece changing in a single visit to one of her shows, but in works like BUNK (2021), crystalline deposits in shades of teal that have oozed, then dried up on the gallery floor attest to ongoing reactions involving nickel sulfate, which is listed on the wall label as a material.

Andriessen deflects technical chemistry questions, though. She received an MFA in 2015 from the Malmö Art Academy before immersing herself in physics and chemistry, mostly through YouTube videos. But when I asked her in a virtual studio visit how her pieces work, she told me, “It’s not that I speak of science. Maybe I just use science a little bit to tell my own story.” Her works help viewers conceive what will happen if our current environmental and economic conditions—for her, these are one and the same—continue or accelerate.

At the recent FRONT Triennial in Cleveland, the sculptor showed three works alongside prints and drawings by her father, Jurriaan Andriessen. His intricate, never-before-exhibited architectural renderings, made between 1969 and 1989, portray a fantastical anti-capitalist utopia in painstaking detail, including roadways that encircle post-and-beam skyscrapers like a roller coaster, and sustainable appliances that meld with and are powered by their users’ bodies. The juxtaposition highlighted how environmental science has impacted imagining the future in recent decades. 

Isabelle Andriessen’s worldview isn’t solely bleak, though, if you look at things from a nonhuman perspective—which she wants you to do. Yes, her sculptures evoke the ways that plastics and other synthetic materials are being absorbed into our bodies because we, like her ceramic pieces, are porous beings too. Yes, works like Tidal Spill and Terminal Beach (both 2018) refer to the blurring boundary between e-waste sites and natural landscapes. But Andriessen also asks us to acknowledge the vibrancy of various materials as the Anthropocene lays bare how life and nonlife are deeply entangled. She often uses biotic words to characterize her sculpture practice, describing, for instance, the relationships she is forging between metals and ceramics for new work in a group show at Moderna Museet in Malmö, Sweden, as “symbiotic.” “It’s interesting that nothing disappears,” she said, referring to the law of the conservation of mass. Substances of all sorts are entangled in convoluted systems, and with her art, Andriessen shows this fact at a scale we can more easily comprehend.

Work by Isabelle Andriessen is on view in the group exhibition “Twilight Land” at Moderna Museet, Malmö, Sweden, through Apr. 9, 2023.

Weston frequently incorporates imagery and elements from earlier projects into new work, rooting her practice in repetition. For an ongoing series of photographic abstractions, the artist printed installation images on large canvases. Using glass shards repurposed from studio accidents, she roughly etches into the printed surface, redacting imagery and transforming the original photographs into constructivist compositions. By returning to earlier works, Weston hopes to rearticulate questions the initial pieces addressed. She returns again and again to one question in particular, which she posed during our recent conversation: “How do Black people forge, retain, and protect spaces of intimacy and interiority in the context of the environment that we’re living in?”

Weston associates glass with “the atmosphere of risk and violence that Black people face.” Employing various strategies to manipulate the fragile, transparent material into something more opaque and resistant, she evokes a tension between the desire to share a story and to secrete it away from probing eyes. In early works, the artist used readymade glass panes, but in 2018 she began to experiment with the material’s fleeting malleability in its liquid state. To create the draped, bell-like forms in an appeal, but, in particular, very expressly, to (i sink) (2019), Weston slumped molten glass over upturned flowerpots, referencing the planters and washbasins enslaved Black people used to muffle their voices during clandestine meetings. For other sculptures, the artist bends, curls, and crumples heated glass, generating crevices that obscure the imprinted images and writings.

Weston’s current exhibition at the Queens Museum also contends with the symbolic links between glass and anti-Blackness. A new body of sculptures, and the pictures and poems seared into their glass surfaces, allude to “broken windows” policing, surveillance, and the loaded, pervasive media images of shattered and boarded-up shop windows during recent BLM protests. Several works draw on the historical record of an unrealized nonviolent direct action that the Brooklyn chapter of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) proposed for the opening of the 1964–65 World’s Fair. Demanding action on job discrimination, housing conditions, school segregation, and police brutality, the organizers called for motorists to stall their vehicles intentionally on the roadways leading to the fairgrounds. In the first of two galleries, Weston adopts a similar tactic of obstruction with her largest sculpture to date, suspending a 15-by-20-foot grid of smoky glass panes over viewers. Ominously hovering and dramatically pitched toward the passageway between galleries, it bars access and forces visitors to detour.

This tension between presentation and refusal is central to Weston’s practice, especially in her use of language. Circling around her most recent concrete- and lead-mounted sculptures—arranged at the Queens Museum on a multilevel plinth that keeps viewers at bay—we are aware of the inscribed texts but unable to fully absorb them. Intimate phrases faintly etched in her cursive stipple appear and recede from view; we catch only elusive fragments, like “a chromium-plated draw-near to neon plastic” or“such a jettison,” and strain to discern more. Weston’s multifaceted sculptures undermine the logic of a material associated with transparency to embrace the poetry of opacity, the power of resistance, and the value of withholding.  

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When Portland painter Srijon Chowdhury was invited to present a solo exhibition at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, he asked himself, “what’s the best kind of museum show an artist could have?” His answer: “a retrospective.” Endeavoring to create the effect of a career survey with his first-ever museum exhibition, he produced a series of new mural-size paintings on panel incorporating much of the imagery that has appeared in his work over the last decade.

The Frye show, titled “Same Old Song,” does not include any of his older paintings, but rather glimpses of past works in the form of motifs—things like morning glories, devils, angels, and knives. In creating the exhibition, the Bangladesh-born artist came to see these painted quotations as a kind of self-portraiture, so he literalized the concept: six of the works highlight his own facial features, all at enormous scale and in extreme close-up. “It turns the exhibition space into the inside of my head,” he told me during a studio visit.

Each of these six studies has one gigantic feature that, on closer inspection, abounds with allusions to Chowdhury’s symbolic vocabulary. Measuring a towering 10-and-a-half by 6 feet each, the five adjoined oil-on-linen panels that comprise Mouth (Divine Dance), 2022, induce a sense of envelopment. The interior of the mouth is a hellscape, with flayed and skeletal figures dancing around a fire, imagery reprised from a work Chowdhury painted as a hex against Donald Trump during the 2020 election. Surrounding the mouth, in the creases of the lips, about 150 figures from Chowdhury’s prior works are faintly rendered, like petroglyphs marking earlier civilizations.

The tension between epiphany and mystery remain an inspiration to Chowdhury. His 2017 exhibition “Revelation Theater” at the Art Gym at Marylhurst University in Oregon evoked the Book of Revelations, a Biblical series of visions representing the tribulations and final judgments that await saint and sinner alike. For “Memory Theater” in 2016, a show at Upfor Gallery in Portland, Chowdhury reimagined 16th-century philosopher Giulio Camillo’s proposed architectural structure, whose physical reminders of all the world’s important concepts promised the viewer omniscience. These ideas of sacred vision and prognostication appear again in the 2022 works in the form of divine messengers delivering succor and retribution. “I’m always going back to something,” he said. “I wanted to have ‘Revelation Theater’ and ‘Memory Theater’ in this show.”

Other panels depict some of the recurring motifs in Chowdhury’s illustrative oeuvre, including the morning glory and knife that replace the pupil and iris of Eye (Morning Glory), 2022. Both objects appear in multiple paintings made between 2018 and 2021—works that, for Chowdhury, allude to the thin veil that divides the everyday from the unknown.

The artist’s characteristic gestures include numerous art historical influences. The shell of the right ear in Ear (Good), 2022, holds a Blakean angel slaying a shadowy, semitransparent devil bearing a Francis-Bacon-style melted face. These references link Chowdhury to artists who have grappled with beauty and terror, exploring their moral expressions by producing works that are anchored to the real yet expand into the surreal. He sees these allegorical representations as a way to respond to contemporary circumstances: “In a moment when everything constantly seems awful everywhere in the world, I feel like the worst thing I can do is stop caring,” adding, “the modern world began with the symbol, and now we’re at the end of modernity. Symbolism is a good way to bookend that time.”  

Yang, 36, explained via an interpreter that her paintings often begin as offhand photographs. She has shot abandoned buildings in the fast-changing metropolis, domestic interiors, mannequins, friends. She prints the images, perhaps marks out a section, reworks the picture in her head, and finally picks up her brush. She earned degrees in traditional East Asian painting (BFA 2008, MFA 2010) at Sungshin Women’s University in the capital, and typically works with diluted acrylic on a type of hanji, paper made from mulberry tree bark that she pulls taut around stretcher bars or affixes directly to the wall. This highly absorptive material allows her to build many layers of color, controlling its intensity. Carefully mediated through paper and paint (blues, grays, browns), her subjects take on an otherworldly quality. Familiar moments feel ever so slightly off, filtered into a hazy and alluring cinematic ambience.

Dread and possibility commingle in this universe. People are alone: in pain, in contemplation, or gazing silently. Sometimes all that is visible is a single hand. The modest-size paintings in Yang’s solo show at Chapter II in Seoul earlier this year depicted various figures: a person’s face with tears streaming down, another apparently gazing through a grate (the shadows across the eyes offered the only clue), and a menacing individual, presented in three-quarter profile from below, slightly out of focus. In the bewitching Untitled 2 (2021), two people—a man and a woman, probably—kiss deeply as their faces blur into one another. Yang said that she is interested in “the thing that exists between what is in reality and what is seen or captured in a photograph,” and so she makes a point of rendering blurs and glitches in her work.

Yang’s paintings probe both the limits and power of photography—its sinister and seductive concision, its partiality. Intriguingly, over the past few years, she has been working on pieces of hanji whose tall, narrow proportions roughly match those of a smartphone. Ten examples are slated to be installed in a long row for the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, marking the first appearance of Yang’s work outside South Korea or Japan. One of them, Memory (2021), shows a white blouse held awkwardly, even uncomfortably, on a wire hanger. An earlier work in her studio, Curtain (2019), suggests a hotel room glimpsed on a first morning waking there, as one tries to apprehend the scene. The painting exemplifies, for me, what Yang meant when she said, “I want my works to be like a thorn in your mind that pricks from time to time, or like a very gentle fever.” A sliver of sunlight, represented by raw paper, is breaking through the fabric covering the window. The air is unsettled and anxious. There are clearly things here that we cannot quite see yet.  

Artists from the issue who attended the event included Diana Sofia Lozano, Laurie Kang, fields harrington, André Magaña, Alexander Si, Tiffany Sia, Kristi Cavataro, and Ronny Quevedo.

The artists spoke about their work in a panel discussion with Art in America Associate Editor Emily Watlington, who was introduced by Editor-in-Chief Sarah Douglas and Publisher Erica Lubow Necarsulmer. The event was presented in partnership with sister publication Robb Report, and featured sushi and passed canapes from Rhubarb Hospitality Collection.

For years, Art in America‘s First Look section has featured new artists before they became well known in the art community. Last year, the magazine revamped its historic new talent issue for its May/June 2021 edition, dedicating that entire issue to featuring up and coming talent.

With the issue available now, readers can learn about Liao Wen, one of China’s most innovative young women artists, and her semi-abstract sculptures centered on the human body. The magazine also features a profile on artist Alexander Si, who researches the impact of technology and media, and on Toronto-based artist Laurie Kang, who creates works best described as self-critical photographs without images.

There is so much more to learn about the artists featured in the issue.

Artists featured in Art in America‘s New Talent Issue sit for a panel discussion.

Guests sit and listen to artists featured in Art in America‘s New Talent issue speak during a panel discussion.