Ken Johnson (born 1953 in Montclair, New Jersey) is an American artist and art critic who lives in New York City. Johnson was a writer for the arts pages of The New York Times until 2016, where he covered gallery and museum exhibits. Previously he wrote for Arts Magazine and Art in America. He is currently a painter, and exhibited a series of well-received paintings in April 2022 at Kerry Schluss Gallery in Manhattan. [1]
Johnson attended Brown University and University at Albany, SUNY, earning a degree in art from the former in 1976 and a master's degree in studio art, with a concentration in painting, from the latter in 1977. In his journalism career he has written on contemporary art for several art magazines, newspapers and publications. He published for the Art Review in the New York Times, doing reviews for artists in NYC such as Don Doe. [2] He was the art critic for the Boston Globe from 2006 to 2007. [3]
He is also an educator, having taught courses in painting, drawing, electronic art, art history, and art criticism at various universities in upstate New York. He teaches a writing seminar in the School of Visual Arts in art criticism and writing in New York. [4]
His book Are You Experienced? How psychedelic consciousness transformed modern art was published In June 2011. [5]
In November 2012, Johnson's review of the Now Dig This exhibition at PS1 for the New York Times caused considerable controversy. It was considered to be charged with racist biases, consistent with his apparent dismissiveness of women and artists of color in numerous past reviews. In response, an online petition was launched, demanding that the paper acknowledge their editorial lapse in allowing such a text to be published in its current form, and to address the larger issues of race in contemporary art. [6]
Alex Grey is an American visual artist, author, teacher, and Vajrayana practitioner known for creating spiritual and psychedelic artwork such as his 21-painting Sacred Mirrors series. He works in multiple forms including performance art, process art, installation art, sculpture, visionary art, and painting. He is also on the board of advisors for the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, and is the Chair of Wisdom University's Sacred Art Department. He and his wife Allyson Grey are the co-founders of The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors (CoSM), a non-profit organization in Wappingers Falls, New York.
Gordon Onslow Ford was one of the last surviving members of the 1930s Paris surrealist group surrounding André Breton.
Art criticism is the discussion or evaluation of visual art. Art critics usually criticize art in the context of aesthetics or the theory of beauty. A goal of art criticism is the pursuit of a rational basis for art appreciation but it is questionable whether such criticism can transcend prevailing socio-political circumstances.
Hilton Kramer was an American art critic and essayist.
The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors (CoSM) is a transdenominational church and nonprofit organization dedicated to the realization of a shared 1985 vision of the American artists Alex and Allyson Grey to build a contemporary public chapel as "a sanctuary for spiritual renewal through contemplation of transformative art".
The Chicago Imagists are a group of representational artists associated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center in the late 1960s.
Pat Lipsky is an American painter associated with Lyrical Abstraction and Color Field Painting.
Mira Schor is an American artist, writer, editor, and educator, known for her contributions to critical discourse on the status of painting in contemporary art and culture as well as to feminist art history and criticism.
Tom Moody was an American visual artist, critic and blogger based in New York City. He began his career as a painter, using traditional materials, but became sensitive to the chemicals. In the mid-1990s, upon moving to New York, he began working with MS Paintbrush during downtime at a day job and continued using this software throughout his life, despite more sophisticated programs such as Photoshop being widely available. Later works made use of animated GIF files.
Molly Springfield is an American artist whose work includes labor-intensive drawings of printed texts and visual explorations of the history of information and mediated representation.
Nancy Dwyer is an American contemporary artist whose works include paintings, works on paper, public art, word sculpture and furniture art. Her work has been exhibited widely at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, the New Museum in New York and many others. Her work was included in the 2009 exhibition “The Pictures Generation” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, alongside the work of her peers and contemporaries, including Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo, with whom she cofounded Hallwalls in Buffalo, New York in 1974, as well as work by Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, John Baldessari, Louise Lawler and Sherrie Levine, among others.
Jennie C. Jones is an African-American artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been described, by Ken Johnson, as evoking minimalism, and paying tribute to the cross-pollination of different genres of music, especially jazz. As an artist, she connects most of her work between art and sound. Such connections are made with multiple mediums, from paintings to sculptures and paper to audio collages. In 2012, Jones was the recipient of the Joyce Alexander Wien Prize, one of the biggest awards given to an individual artist in the United States. The prize honors one African-American artist who has proven their commitment to innovation and creativity, with an award of 50,000 dollars. In December 2015 a 10-year survey of Jones's work, titled Compilation, opened at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas.
Norman L. Kleeblatt is a curator, critic, and consultant based in New York City. A long-term curator at the Jewish Museum in New York, he served as the Susan and Elihu Rose Chief Curator from 2005 to 2017.
Richard Dorment, is a British art historian and exhibition organiser. He worked as chief art critic for The Daily Telegraph from 1986 until 2015.
Sidney Tillim was an American artist and art critic, known for his maverick painting and independent point of view on modern art in post-war America. Best remembered for his revival of history painting in the 1970s, Tillim alternated between the figurative and the abstract throughout his career. Likewise, although he wrote on a wide range of topics for Artforum and Arts Magazine, he is most identified with supporting representational art when few did.
David Humphrey is an American painter, art critic, and sculptor associated with the postmodern turn in painting that began in the late 1970s. He is best known for his playful, cartoonish, puzzling paintings, which blend figuration and abstraction and create "allegories" about the medium of painting itself. Humphrey holds a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art (1977) and a MA from New York University (1980), where he studied with film critic Annette Michelson; he also attended the New York Studio School from 1996 – 1997. He has been the recipient of many awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, the Rome Prize in 2008, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award in 2011. He was born in Augsburg Germany and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He lives and works in New York City.
Anne Steele Marsh (1901–1995) was an American painter and printmaker whose watercolors, oil paintings, and wood engravings were widely exhibited and drew critical praise. She was also a noted educator and arts administrator.
John Dilg is an American painter based in the Midwest. He is known for idiosyncratic landscapes that use a pared-down visual vocabulary drawing on imagination, vernacular artifacts, folk art and art historical sources. Critics describe them as dreamlike ruminations on place, the fragility of nature, the collective unconscious and mystical storytelling. Precedents for his work that have been cited include 19th-century Romantic landscape painters, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe and Horace Pippin, and the imaginary vistas of Henri Rousseau.
Virgil Marti is an American visual artist recognized for his installations blending fine art, design, and decor from a range of styles and periods. Marti’s immersive sculptural environments, often evoking nature and the landscape, combine references from high culture with decorative, flamboyant, or psychedelic imagery, materials, and objects of personal significance.
Amanda Church is an American artist known for abstract paintings that reference the human figure and other discernible elements. Her works straddle representational and formalist art traditions, suggesting recognizable body parts, objects, and perspectival elements in an otherwise abstract field. Church's distinctive use of contrasting style elements has been consistently noted by critics such as Hyperallergic's Cora Fisher, who described Church's work as "whimsically overruling the left-right brain dichotomy as well as the traditionally gendered axis that divides geometric and decorative art." Church received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015 and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2017, among other awards. Her work has been covered in publications such as The New York Times, The Boston Globe, ARTnews, Hyperallergic and Forbes Magazine. Her paintings have been exhibited in major U.S. cities as well as internationally, in galleries and museums such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Aldrich Museum. She lives and works in New York.