Occasionally, [his subjects’ fashion] is high street style, like the young man sporting a bronze-tipped pompadour in 2014’s “Saint Paul”; at other times, it’s more casual, such as “The Marchioness of Santa Cruz” from Wiley’s “Haiti” series (also 2014), in which a woman in denim and white t-shirt lies like royalty on a thin-cushioned chaise lounge, her weight resting on one elbow as it presses into a rolled bath towel. In every case, as seen in the portraits among the 56 pieces on view in “A New Republic,” Wiley’s backgrounds compete with his subjects to command the most attention, though neither overpowers the other. With their growing vines, blooming flowers and Rococo-influenced doily patterns, it’s as if the surrounding world rises to celebrate the people in focus.

Kehinde Wiley’s “A New Republic” is on view at the Brooklyn Museum from February 20 until May 24.

Read the rest over at T: The New York Times Style Magazine.

My column, Art Agenda, makes its 2015 appearance. One of my favorites, too.

Roberto Chavez fits that storied archetype of creative industry success profiles, in that his work, created decades ago, is only now starting to turn heads. Mehmet Guleryuz is another notable here – studied in Paris in the ’60s, where I have to assume he picked up that love of his for period genres treasured by the West like impressionism, but it’s still apparent in subject and what I’d call a cultural kind of despair (Orhan Pamuk, for example, calls it hüzün) that he was reared by the social, political and cultural histories of Turkey, his home country.

Read the whole thing at T: The New York Times Style Magazine. You can find a new one online, every Monday.

Shelby Hartman gave a high word count to the art and persona of Lorella Paleni, and was kind enough to ask me for comment. Featured in the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s Arts Culture Beat blog.

“Art has agency,” says Munnik. “It directly affects the nervous systems of its perceivers. It’s entangled in an interconnected web of people, technology, history and matter.” As a result, according to Munnik, the wall that we perceive separating the artificial from the biological is actually more like an unchartered network – not impossible to navigate, but so dense with intricacy it remains a mystery to contemporary human thought.

Read the rest over at POSTmatter.

David Hanes’ last major series of work, Aware (2014), is enriched by absence. Consisting almost entirely of white space, what subjects might have been present in its many scenes are now merely intimated by smeared blushes of colour, like the residue that trails across low shutter speed photographs of objects in movement.

Ultimately, the presence of a discernible subject becomes a secondary curiosity. Fleetingness is the focus – the feeling of a quick passage. And in the digital era, when new efficiencies have primed us to swipe from art piece to art piece online at blurring speeds, this makes Aware feel as if it mirrors the inattentive attitudes we often hold against the internet’s spill of creative output.

Read the rest over at POSTmatter.