This is the first of two reflections Momus published on the occasion of Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999, on view at Dia Beacon through 2027.

Aaron Morse’s tall heavens evoke Georgia O’Keeffe’s painting Sky Above Clouds IV (1965); the big-sky country of the American West; and the empyrean ...

Launched in 1995, SITE International Biennial was the first biennial for contemporary art in the United States. Over the course of its eleven editions, the organization has primarily focused on ...

I got lost several times on my way to Casa Susanna, the exhibition I had set out to write about. It was a sticky Friday night in July—“date night” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as the Met ...

For the past weeks, I’ve kept a new monograph on the artist Emily Mason on my glass coffee table, observing the sea of its yellow cover reflect and shimmer. It’s not a rigid object but a source of ...

During the reign of Benito Mussolini, an enormous carved relief of the dictator’s head loomed over the streets of Rome, his downcast gaze surveilling the Italian public night and day. The oversize, ...

Historical hypocrisies are thus made into moments of sincere personal shortcomings rather than situated as forms of systemic oppression essential to the construction of the world’s most merciless ...

The materiality of images—how they can seem textured, the way each frame is composed, whether they were shot digitally or on 16mm—compels us to experience the kind of dualities that define our lived ...

Momus is an independent online publisher, mentorship platform, and podcast for art criticism and art writing. Momus is committed to a definition of art writing and criticism that is plural, inclusive, ...

I first saw Martin Wong’s prison paintings when I visited a two-person exhibition of Wong and the contemporary painter Aaron Gilbert at PPOW Gallery in 2021. Five of them were included in the show. I ...

Tilt your ear to a Jack Whitten painting and you might hear music. “You gotta be able to think like John Coltrane to do what I am doing in painting,” the artist said in the final decade of his life.

At three intervals throughout Vijay Masharani’s eighteen-minute video Good Attack (2021), the camera fixates on a sign hanging in a pet store above the cash register. The letters on the sign are ...