Last week’s standout art reads include influences revealed, legacies shaped, spirits channeled, memories captured, identities blurred, and a lot of NYC love.
Aug 04, 2025
Happy August, artsies!
Last week brought an abundance of great reads on modern and contemporary artists, but the news front was quiet. Aspen Art Week coverage was glowing (and the art looked incredible), but beyond that, not much to report today. You can check out all my week’s saves here.
Enjoy these artist-forward reads!
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Influencing & Influenced
Let’s kick things off with some classics!
New research suggests ‘Demoiselles’ borrowed more from Catalan church frescoes than African masks (which, apparently, weren’t even in Europe yet). I’ve saved and covered a few articles linking Picasso to primitivism, but I guess the case is now closed!
“I was walking along a path with two friends,” Munch wrote, when “suddenly the sky turned blood . . . [with] red tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city. . . . I stood there trembling with anxiety, and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.”
Van Gogh’s personal (and traced!!) copy of a Hiroshige print joins the British Museum show, revealing just how closely he studied what inspired him.
Belonging & New York
Very long, very Xerox-obsessed. But genuinely fascinating look at Jack Whitten’s mechanical mark-making and the ghostly poetry of toner.
I first encountered The Lams of Ludlow Street, Thomas Holton’s long-running portrait series of a Chinatown family, in Seward Park—now they’re back on Ludlow, anchoring the inaugural show at Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York.
Land & Light
Nancy Dwyer talks about her witty, text-driven sculptures and paintings that channel the psyche, pop culture, and a good dose of humor.
McQueen’s Bass is making the rounds. Now at Schaulager after an acclaimed Dia Beacon debut, the low-frequency, full-body work channels memory, diaspora, and physical presence.
A major Scottish retrospective marks 50 years of Andy Goldsworthy’s land art.
Legacy & Lineage
Marking 250 years since Turner’s birth (exact date contested), this tribute pairs his luminous paintings with modern-day photos of the same sites—proof that even in a changed world, his light still guides how we see.
At 81, Paz Errázuriz finally gets her first UK retrospective, spotlighting five decades of quietly radical portraits of Chile’s marginalized.
To celebrate her 99th birthday last week, Betye Saar enlisted a powerhouse group of curators to help steward her archive—an inspiring reminder of how artists can shape their legacies for future generations.
More love for Emily Kam Kngwarray!
Visions & Vessels
Great review of Alvarez’s survey at NYC’s El Museo del Barrio, where memory, grief, and identity blur into luminous form.
Sara Flores is a Shipibo-Conibo artist whose dream-born textile works turn ancestral design into spiritual and ecological resistance.
Once a dentist, Marian Spore Bush became a spirit-led painter whose eerie, allegorical visions are being shown anew at Karma.
Intimacy & Identity
In these paintings, Yosef zooms in to capture the blurred bigger picture of memory and intimacy.
Paintings of the in-between—petrichor, pets, headlights, and half-remembered evenings—each flickering with atmosphere, memory, and a hint of suburban mysticism.
On the rise, Erin M. Riley turns tapestry into testimony. Check out her works that blend embroidery with survivor-sourced text on her IG.
Despite recent waning interest in Black portraiture, Marshall’s monumental UK retrospective reminds us why it matters and that' it’s here to stay through 70 sweeping works of presence, power, and memory.
Thanks for joining me for another week of tld-art!
