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one of my favorite exhibitions of 2024, this quiet and unassuming show at the Smithsonianā€™s National Portrait Gallery moved me. includes his usual candy piles and ticker-tape-like timelines, the curatorial edge is in really interesting pairings with portraits from the museumā€™s collection. a portrait of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Tolkas is juxtaposed with a photo of their flower-laden graves taken by GonzĆ”lez-Torres, decades later. i was floored to see a photo of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr., given their relationship to and inaction around the AIDS epidemic, but the image was made more poignant against the somber and poetic backdrop of GonzĆ”lez-Torresā€™s work. on view through early July ā€˜25.
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Jan 15, 2025

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my dad had a postcard when i was younger that I used to look at of a Leon golub paintingā€” not this one, just a contorted faceā€” but his paintings are a different type of representation or documentary approach of American life, maybe about the absent images that structure it. do you remember last year or whenever when people thought that Philip guston paintings were going to Get their institutes canceled and almost censored that exhibition? It did end up showing at the national gallery, and my dad went to see it (he doesnā€™t really engage with art anymore but guston is his favorite painter) and talking about it he said something like ā€œAmerica will really be ready to change when thereā€™s a national retrospective of Leon golubs paintingsā€ ao I think about that sometimes when I look at his paintings, which are in the end all about violence and rendered in these huge, textural scales (This one is White Squad V)
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Top Recs from @salad_valet

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i canceled my Spotify account over the summer and have spent the last few months rebuilding my digital music library on a refurbished iPod Touch. reading critiques of the app (and itā€™s enshittification), i realized i wasnā€™t even sure of my own musical tastes and preferences. i had stopped picking for myself, stopped seeking out new music, ceasing to know how to choose what i wanted or articulate what i like. breaking free from the algorithm has been such a joy! iā€™m borrowing gobs of music from the library, rebuilding my old playlists, and consuming more music than i have in years. and better yet, my data isnā€™t being tracked by Spotify and i own whatā€™s in my personal library. further, my receptors are more open when iā€™m out in the world exposed to music, searching for recommendations in an organic way.
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