Hyperallergic

In Oscar yi Hou’s paintings, the American flag’s stars and stripes are ribboned, scattered, and reconfigured amongst East Asian artistic symbols in a semiotic constellation around Asian-American sitters, many of whom are queer.

His gutsy canvases render him and his loved ones with their gazes fixed firmly on the viewer, sometimes assuming historically White roles to confront the foundations of American “belonging,” other times calling back to the legacies of East Asian art.

Read more about his work in our New York art guide for August.

For all who see themselves in Hannah Barrett’s subjects, the strange, colorful spaces they inhabit — an otherworldly take on institutional workplaces — create the kind of magic that offers solace to anyone who is in search of a place to belong. ⁠

Jean Weisinger spent much of the 1990s capturing intimate portraits of revolutionary Black women — Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur among them — and impromptu photographs of people she met in her travels across the United States. ⁠ ⁠ Almost none of the artist’s work made its way into museum collections or gallery exhibitions, but from the tiny Alice Austen House in Staten Island, Executive Director Victoria Munro has spent the past two and a half years developing Weisinger’s unrevealed photographs and meticulously documenting the histories behind each one of them.⁠

Those traveling to Siena this summer can get a glimpse of one of the northern Italian city’s most astonishing sights.

At the Medieval Duomo di Siena cathedral, in addition to the many works of art that adorn the church’s interior and exterior, visitors will be able to see nearly 14,000 square feet of intricate mosaic marble flooring dating back to the 14th century.

Martha Alf transformed rolls of toilet paper and paper towels into monolithic altars set against a backdrop resembling an Ellsworth Kelly geometric abstraction.

No one can fault the Brooklyn Museum’s It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby for attempting to showcase a narrative of Picasso’s legacy that centers feminist artists, but the exhibition has rightly drawn criticism for its lack of critical engagement with the aesthetic contributions of the women artists it brandishes and their tenuous links with Pablo Picasso’s corpus. 

But what would a truly critical Picasso exhibition look like?

Using the exhibition as a point of departure, scholar Donna Honarpisheh offers a list of artists whose works are directly linked to Picasso and offer perspectives that are marginalized in the Euro-American art historical canon.

Stitch artist Diana Weymar collaborated with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project to center the work of writers tackling economic and racial justice — using embroidery.

A little like dogs themselves, Portraits of Dogs on view at the Wallace Collection in London is a complimentary companion piece to the human story.

Raven Halfmoon’s (Caddo Nation) stoneware sculptures embrace the monumental. The artist, whose first major solo exhibition, Raven Halfmoon: Flags of Our Mothers, opened on June 25 at The Aldrich Contemporary in Connecticut, situates her work within the canon of Caddo culture and production.

The show encompasses themes of power and Indigenous identity and perspective, and makes space for the stories of Indigenous women.

Dramatic glacier cliffs, painted in craggy daubs of blue and white, tower above the sea throughout Alexis Rockman’s paintings. 

The magical light that is synonymous with California is the primary subject for many Southern California-based artists, who chase it down and pin it to canvases, photographs, and sculptures, hoping to thwart its escape from collective memory.

“I like to watch the sunrise as much as possible,” painter Hayley Barker, who uses purple and pink tones to accentuate the luscious green gardens that overtake Los Angeles bungalows, told Hyperallergic. 

But to think of California’s light only as a pure, positive energy is to ignore some of the most challenging social and environmental issues affecting this region.

For a long time, the poster design process was closely guarded by agencies that specialized in the area, obscuring the artists behind the marketing visuals of major blockbusters. Thanks to social media and the internet, movie poster artists are no longer unnamed assets to the success of a film or show. 

Akiko Stehrenberger is a name that every film enthusiast should know. Odds are you’ve seen her work and it’s part of the reason you watched that movie or show you binged recently.

Thought to be an anonymous copy of Vermeer’s “The Guitar Player,” this mysterious oil painting might actually be an original work by the artist.

Cassidy Early delves into their experience of grief, Dungeons and Dragons, and how art organizations could better approach the work of individuals who don’t fit into a strict gender binary.