Archive of Clara Olshansky

Clara has written 18 article(s) for AFC.

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Clara Olshansky

Alice Mackler’s Show is Nearly Perfect

by Clara Olshansky on July 25, 2013
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Alice Mackler’s exhibition at Kerry Schuss—18 paintings, drawings, small ceramics, and collages—has garnered quite a bit of hard-earned critical acclaim, much like her previous shows. But there’s one thing that the reviews I’ve read won’t touch with a ten-foot pole: the collages.

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6 Letters to and from Artists

by Clara Olshansky on July 24, 2013
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I love reading letters to and between artists. Maybe it’s the off-the-clock attitude that even published letters can give—you don’t really get that in interviews or essays. Or maybe it’s just sentimentality for all the physical, postal communication that my generation missed. Either way, here are six of my favorite art letters.

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5 Things to Know About the Guggenheim’s Updated App

by Clara Olshansky on July 10, 2013
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Both the Twitterati and the media sure love the updated Guggenheim app, and why not? The app lets you buy tickets, browse the collections, and keep up with current and upcoming exhibits, from within and without the museum. If phone memory isn’t an issue for you, the app is incredibly useful if you go to the Guggenheim a lot. If it is an issue, well, there’s nothing in the app that you can’t find elsewhere.

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Some Astronomical Art Executive Salaries

by Clara Olshansky on July 9, 2013
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You know how museums and art institutions never seem to have enough money? Funny story about that: thanks to Bloomberg Businessweek, we know where some of their money’s going.

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Curatorial Gender Bias Still Exists

by Clara Olshansky on July 9, 2013
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Ever forget a gender exists? It seems a little hard to believe. Nonetheless, women often get overlooked. Theresa Anderson, a Denver-based art blogger and artist reminded us on Friday, via facebook message, that curators are unintentionally but unrepentantly excluding women from their digital art shows.

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Piotr Janas’s Minotaurs: You’re Not Noble, You’re Just a Man

by Clara Olshansky on July 3, 2013
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Painter Piotr Janas’s exhibition Minotaurs at Bortolami is nothing if not commanding. The unadorned exhibition space is dominated by nine simultaneously stark and organic large-scale paintings of geometry and viscera. Seeing man’s guts strung out in these form-scapes makes the message very clear: Never forget how ugly your humanity is; never pretend it’s noble.

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Now with No Backer, the South Street Seaport Museum Struggles

by Clara Olshansky on June 26, 2013
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This week, the Museum of the City of New York announced they will pull out of their now 27-month (originally 18-month) project to put the South Street Seaport Museum back on its feet. Under the City Museum’s leadership, the Seaport Museum was finally emerging from its decades-long downswing, but that was before Superstorm Sandy hit in last October. Now, with $22 million worth of damage, the museum needs to find a financial backer or this historic Manhattan institution will fall into the hands of the New York attorney general.

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Pritzker Rejects Petition to Retroactively Recognize Denise Scott Brown

by Clara Olshansky on June 18, 2013
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On Friday, the Pritzker Prize issued their much-anticipated response to a petition to reconsider a decision many consider a sexist oversight: awarding their 1991 lifetime achievement award to architect Robert Venturi but not his wife and equally deserving partner Denise Scott Brown. Drafted by the Women in Design group at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the petition ended up garnering more than 17,000 signatures, including many well-recognized names in architecture: Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, and even Venturi himself. The Pritzker jury, comprised of one woman and seven men, rejected the appeals. (In somewhat more fate-of-humanity affirming news, the Internet is outraged.)

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