Meg Whiteford

Who is this woman looking out toward the sea? She could be me, she could be someone you know—I won’t say it’s you, I don’t know you. She’s probably white, possibly gay, but probably not. Able-bodied enough to climb down treacherous rocks to be near the water. She’s dealing with

Cecily Brown. ‘Selfie,’ 2020. Oil on linen, 43 × 47 in. The Swartz Family Collection. © Cecily Brown. Can a painting be its own opposite? The works in Cecily Brown’s mid-career survey Death and the Maid are both abstract and figurative, canonically referential and hedonistically maximal, their carnivalesque palettes slashed

There exists a certain genre I’ve grown to love. I will describe it as “writer struggling with a historical failure.” I don’t mean that the failure itself is historic, but rather that the artist is failing to write about or depict a historical figure, most often another writer or artist.