Nancy Princenthal
is a New York-based art writer. She is the author of Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (Thames & Hudson, 2015) and Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s (Thames & Hudson, 2019).
Guest Critic
Prolixity and Painting
By Nancy PrincenthalVerbal language has, arguably, gotten the jump on visuality.
In Conversation
JANET BIGGS
with Nancy Princenthal
Breathtakingly beautiful, like all of Janet Biggs’s work, A Step on the Sun (2012) is also—again characteristically—a haunting account of several kinds of mortal danger.
Performance Anxiety
By Nancy PrincenthalIt is an odd, bracing time to be writing art criticism. I used to think of the job as starting with a dialogue between writer and artist, an exchange that might widen to engage other interested artists and writers (and, ideally, interested bystanders as well). It has always seemed like an enormous privilege, and also a huge stroke of luck, to participate in this kind of discussion.
In All Innocence: Women, Children and Others at the Venice Biennale
By Nancy PrincenthalThe dominance of women in this Biennale is unquestionably cause for jubilation. Its importance can’t be exaggerated. Similarly momentous is its embrace of artists from beyond the cosmopolitan centers of the West.
With Her Back to the World and Her Face to the Camera
By Nancy PrincenthalThere is a wonderful documentary called Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World, produced near the end of the artist’s long life by the filmmaker Mary Lance.
Feminism Rising
By Nancy PrincenthalWhy is feminism resurgent now? One answer may be the galloping growth of an economic inequality that no amount of effort or merit can overcome.
Against Closure
By Nancy PrincenthalIt’s possible that one of the most important things Linda Nochlin has done is to have launched her best-known salvo in the form of a question. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” was not just an indictment (though it was that, and a forceful one). It was also an invitation.
Leo Steinberg, Rosalind Krauss, Scott Burton, Siah Armajani, Betsy Baker, Printed Matter
By Nancy PrincenthalAmong the people I’ve had the very good fortune to know, and want to recognize, are a couple of formidable teachers (Leo Steinberg, Rosalind Krauss); a few artists who early on prodded me by their wisdom and invention (Scott Burton and Siah Armajani); and one editor, who, I’m guessing, I won’t be the only person to thank, profusely: the inimitable and indomitable Betsy Baker.
Artists Space
By Nancy PrincenthalShocking but true: Artists Space, essential model for a generation of feisty, funky, youth-driven nonprofits, is nearly half a century old. More surprising still, initially it depended entirely on government support, at a time when both the governor of New York (Nelson Rockefeller) and the US president (Richard Nixon, newly re-elected) were Republicans. Promising to make up for a dearth of opportunity for young artists, Artists Space’s founders rounded some up and offered them the chance to call the shots, all on the state’s dime.
