A Painter Famed for Recreating What She Lost, in the Spotlight
Recent coverage, including from The New York Times, highlights 2025 as a
significant year in Craven’s career marked by major exhibitions and an
increased focus on the theme of “revisitation”.
You can read the full article here
Ann Craven featured on cover on Lilacs By Rainer Diana Hamilton
Bear (Climbing Trees and Mountain Sides)
2021
Oil on canvas / 84 x 72 inches
Courtesy of Karma and Colby College Museum of Art
In Lilacs, syringa vulgaris gives its name to a form of long
poem that promotes sense memory. Here, we have one lilac for
each of the senses, and a sixth for love, which synthesizes them all.
Presented by the Farnsworth Art Museum
July 18, 2025
Rockland, Maine
Halsey McKay, Brooklyn, NY
Karma 70 Main, Thomaston, ME
Losing the Empty Feeling
“What is the literature of food?” asked my undergrad poetry professor, some twenty years ago.
“A Moveable Feast!” I blurted out.
“No… That’s a social history of a bunch of artists and writers. Try again.”
To which I should have replied: “Tomato tomato, Professor Hart. Tomato tomato.”
The idea being that then and now (and earlier than then, and probably until forever) ideas—visual, verbal, and otherwise—are forged around a table. And they require nouriture if anything is to be expected of them.
Still lifes: stuff of country house collections and art school exercises. Still lifes: fodder for the materialists out there, happy to denigrate them as simply representing the bourgeois accumulation of wealth. (Look at all those lobsters!)
And since vegetables have more patience than humans when it comes to braggarts and half-starts, the still life has become the arena of virtuosity (Weston’s peppers) or experimentation (Cezanne’s napkins that resemble Mont Sainte-Victoire).
All of the above rings true, but the true value of the still life rests in the middle, and how that connects to the people gathered around. The artists in this group show represent an ideal, impossible dinner party. Studiomates break bread with the long deceased. What emerges is the temporal magic of the genre. Want to keep your fish fresh? Paint a picture.
Our desire to hold on to fleeting life is the tablecloth on which every still life rests. It’s also the emotion core to the formation of artist communities, if not the formation of art itself.
In our time, many of us have Brooklyn. Earlier artists had other places where they worked and ate together.
In the opening chapter of A Moveable Feast, which IS about food, an aged Hemingway looks back on his younger self as he looks across a Parisian café table at a young woman.
I ordered another rum St. James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink. I’ve seen you, beauty…
That would be enough for most of us, but his appetite remained.
As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.
The still life is the wine and the oysters, and it’s the person across the table, who might not even know it yet.
-Hunter Braithwaite, May 2025
About Frickin’ Time
By Ann Craven
May, 2025
This Month the Museum Will Open “Ann Craven | Painted Time: Moons (Laboratory)”
By Bowdoin College Museum of Art
April, 2025
The FLAG Art Foundation is pleased to announce A Rose Is, an expansive group exhibition that examines the ubiquity and multivalent meaning of the rose throughout art history and visual culture. Across a wide array of media, including video, sculpture, painting, and text, the exhibition considers the rose in all of its symbolic and ritual complexity, ultimately seeking to complicate our familiarity with it as a vehicle for consumption and desire.
Artists include: Farah Al Qasimi, Polly Apfelbaum, Arakawa, Genesis Belanger, Louise Bourgeois, Joe Brainard, James Lee Byars, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Ann Craven, Sara Cwynar, Alex Da Corte, Jay DeFeo, Ethyl Eichelberger, Awol Erizku, Cerith Wyn Evans, Tony Feher, Allison Janae Hamilton, Gabriella Hirst, Peter Hujar, John Jarboe, Anna Jermolaewa, Sarah Jones, Anselm Kiefer, Lee Krasner, Dr. Lakra, Linder, George Platt Lynes, Robert Mapplethorpe, Katie Paterson, Nicolas Party, Kay Rosen, James Rosenquist, Taryn Simon, Charles Sheeler, Kiki Smith, Haim Steinbach, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol
Drawing inspiration from Cy Twombly’s monumental, four-part painting The Rose III (2008), the exhibition situates the rose—both physically and figuratively—as an icon of beauty, enticement, excess, and abjection, all at the same time. Set against a vibrant turquoise backdrop, three purple, yellow, and tangerine roses overflow and drip down the face of the first three panels of the twenty-five-foot-long canvas, with the fourth panel containing text fragments from Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem The Roses (1926). Through an ecstatic combination of scale, color, and form, Twombly allows viewers to see the lushness and vitality of the roses while also contemplating their diminishment.
The literary and linguistic life of the rose is explored throughout the exhibition. From excerpted stanzas from Rilke’s poem to the language games found in Kay Rosen’s A Rose Is (1978/2025)—itself a reference to the line “rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” from Gertrude Stein’s poem Sacred Emily (1913)—the rose is framed as an idea, just as much as a perishable object to be given or received. Rosen’s large scale, fuchsia text on FLAG’s opening wall, as well as the photo-text work from which it is derived, casts the rose as a word to explore the tenuous relationship between concepts and the objects they point to. Leaning into Stein’s sensibility that “I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do,” Rosen repeats the word rose again and again throughout her poem, such that new phonetic sounds are produced and with them new directions of meaning and imagery as well. Rather than imagine the rose solely as a flower, or in relation to the ideas of consumption and desire only, Rosen captures its complexity as so much of the work included in A Rose Is does: as a malleable and historically layered entity open to contradiction and revision.
Throughout the exhibition, viewers are invited to consider the flower as a site of overlapping and contradictory meanings. Though the combination of advertising and cultural ritual has made the rose synonymous with Valentine’s Day and romantic gestures more broadly, it has equally strong associations with funeral processions and end-of-life commemorations. James Lee Byars’s sculpture Rose Table of Perfect (1989) highlights this duality, as 3,333 freshly cut red roses are studded into a perfect red sphere, only to fade and eventually die over the course of the exhibition. Like the Twombly painting, Byars’s sculpture complicates our familiarity with the rose by combining its conventionality with its ultimate undoing. As a foil, Tony Feher’s funeral wreath Saint Rosalie Intercedes on Behalf of the Plague Victims of Palermo (1991) positions white plastic roses into a perfect circle, creating a dime-store gesture that will never diminish. Equal parts glamorous and devastating is Peter Hujar’s photograph Candy Darling on her Deathbed (1973), made at the performer’s invitation on the occasion of her inevitable passing due to terminal illness. Surrounded by lavish flower arrangements—as if in her dressing room after a show—Darling is recumbent under dramatic lighting, wrapped in hospital bed sheets, her make-up just so, with a single long-stem red rose lying next to her failing body.
Just as the rose is a natural form called upon to reinforce human connection, so too is it a commercial form used to advertise and sell products globally. Sara Cwynar’s video Rose Gold (2017), displayed in a black-box room on the second floor of the exhibition, examines this facet of the rose as an artificial construct that produces tangible reactions. Made in response to the release of Apple’s Rose Gold iPhone, the video mines the history of product development and color theory, making both the color itself and the products it is used for seem glossy and attractive, while also calling attention to their status as kitsch objects of a clichéd consumerism. Further complicating the romantic connotation of the rose is Taryn Simon’s Framework agreement for economic cooperation. Quito, Ecuador, January 12, 2012, 2015, Paperwork and the Will of Capital (2015). The title of the work refers to the agreement between Ecuador and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), situating the rose as a witness to politics, governance, and globalization. Further expanding the cultural history of the rose and the rose as witness is Gabriella Hirst’s How to Make A Bomb (2015-ongoing). In response to a 1950s species of rose called Rosa floribunda ‘Atom Bomb,’ Hirst developed an interactive artwork wherein community members graft from the ‘Atomic Rose’ and surreptitiously plant the flower in public spaces, injecting the flower into collective consciousness as a vehicle for political violence.
FLAG would like to acknowledge the participating artists, artist estates, galleries, and private lenders for their generous loans of artworks to this exhibition.
Maine Is a New Art-World Hotspot. Here Is Painter Ann Craven’s Guide to the Scene
By Julia Halperin
July 2024
Timothy Taylor, New York, NY
James Cohan Gallery, New York, NY
Timothy Taylor is pleased to announce Dog Days of Summer, a group exhibition that centres on man’s best friend as a timeless subject in art history. Opening on 20 June in New York, the exhibition includes more than sixty works exploring the many roles a pup might play in the life of an artist: muse, metaphor, and companion.
This presentation features work by Craigie Aitchison, Trisha Baga, Sophie Barber, Hanna Brody, Gaby Collins-Fernandez, Ann Craven, Scott Csoke, Anthony Cudahy, Alex Da Corte, Armen Eloyan, Camilla Engström, Julia Felsenthal, Louis Fratino, Robert Gober, Camille Henrot, Peter Hujar, Timothy Hull, Paul-Sebastian Japaz, Susumu Kamijo, Alex Katz, Karen Kilimnik, Craig Kucia, Sean Landers, Sophie Larrimore, Sahara Longe, Robert Mapplethorpe, Eddie Martinez, Jesse Mockrin, Matthew Morrocco, Grandma Moses, Rocío Navarro, Justin Liam O’Brien, Gordon Parks, Hilary Pecis, Pablo Picasso, Paula Rego, Robert Roest, Will Ryman, Peter Saul, Allison Schulnik, Dana Schutz, Kiki Smith, Billy Sullivan, David Surman, Alison Elizabeth Taylor, William Wegman, and Jonas Wood.
Artmaking is a famously solitary process. What would art of the last century have been without such faithful studio mates as William Wegman’s Weimaraners or Pablo Picasso’s (ungenerously named) dachshund Lump? Dogs have been a feature of visual culture since at least 8,000 years ago, when hunter-gatherers carved an image of leashed dogs into a sandstone cliff. A symbol of fidelity, protection, playfulness, and unconditional love, canines pop up in the paintings of Titian, Jan van Eyck, John Singer Sargent, and Gustave Courbet, among countless other masters.
Dog Days of Summer will feature Yellow Lab (2022), a stately seaside portrait in meticulous detail by Sean Landers, alongside works created specifically for the exhibition by Hilary Pecis, Jesse Mockrin, and Ann Craven. In Pecis’s Mango (2024), a smart, diminutive pup nestles into an array of pillows whose vibrant patterns seem to distort the perspective of an otherwise familiar domestic scene. Another lapdog appears in Mockrin’s graphite drawing Pearl (2024); here, the dramatic curl of a pug’s tail mirrors the Rococo embellishments of its owner’s gown. Elsewhere, Craven’s lush, painterly Magic and Moonlight in Night Field (2024), evokes the sinewy physicality and anthropomorphic nature of a French Bulldog.
Across these works, artists explore the specific body language and intimacies that humans share with their canine companions. Wegman’s photograph Look (1989) pictures four of the artist’s famous pets sitting uniformly in chairs, perfectly rapt, their piercing amber eyes presumably meeting those of the artist. In Jonas Wood’s etching Three Dogs (2020), the titular crew appears with tongues wagging, each gazing lovingly at the viewer, while Louis Fratino’s work on paper Man and Dog (2018) suggests the similar ways in which humans and dogs find comfort and connection.
Other works reflect the role of dogs in history and fantasy, consumerism and psychology. Karen Kilimnik’s seductive and shadowy painting friends in the woods (2010) references Old Master canine scenes, picturing a nocturnal gathering of dogs of various stock beside a steaming cauldron. Robert Gober’s 1976 photograph Untitled also features an assembly of breeds, zeroing in on three distinguished “eager eaters” in dog food branding. Peter Saul, with characteristic irony, plays on our expectations of our furry friends in the work on paper Watchdog (2011), depicting a dopey, deranged creature with a halo. And with the sculpture Lucy (2021), a Pop-inspired puzzle of a pup holding a flower, Alex Da Corte suggests dogs are more than they seem.
With paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and photographs dating from 1915 to the present day and running the stylistic gamut, Dog Days of Summer offers up a collective portrait of our mutual evolution with our canine companions, in life and in art.
A Study in Form (Chapter Two) marks the second half of a two-part exhibition project curated by Arden Wohl that touches upon various relationships, dialogues, intersections, and companionships between artists and poets; and their poetry and art. Here, a range of disciplines, generations, and perspectives come together to push beyond the boundary of the visual artifact as an end point of the artwork.
Presenting work from over 70 artists, Chapter Two will be the final exhibition at 55 Delancey Street, where James Fuentes has been located since 2010 (the gallery was first established in the same neighborhood in 2007). In community, this project honors the gallery’s legacy on the Lower East Side and at the same time celebrates the future. From June of 2024, the gallery’s sole New York home will be at 52 White Street in Tribeca.
Chapter Two includes artworks by Alia Raza, Alice Attie, Alvaro Barrington, Amy Sillman, Ann Craven, Anton van Dalen, Bambou Gili, Becca Mann, Becky Howland, Ben Estes, Bennett Miller, Bryson Brodie, Charles Mayton, Charlie Ahearn, Cheyenne Julien, Cindy Sherman, Colleen Barry, Dana Schutz, Danny McDonald, Didier William, Dustin Yellin, Eleanor Friedberger, Eliza Douglas, Elsa Rensaa, Emily Sundblad, Gina Beavers, Greer Lankton, Hannah Black, Hannah Lee, Hans Accola, Helen Marden, Izzy Barber, Jane Dickson, Jenna Gribbon, Jennie C. Jones, Jennifer Herrema, Jessica Craig-Martin, Jessica Dickinson, Jim Jarmusch, Jo Messer, Joey Frank, John Ahearn, John McAllister, Jonah Freeman, Joshua Abelow, Julia Chiang, Justin Chance, Justin Lowe, Keegan Monaghan, Keith Riley, Kon Trubkovich, Leah Singer, Lee Dawson, Lee Quinones, Lee Ranaldo, Lily Ludlow, Lisa Robertson, Lizzi Bougatsos, Lua Beaulieu, Lukas Geronimas, Maggie Ellis, Marley Freeman, Matthew Barney, Matthew Higgs, Michael Berryhill, Michael Cline, Natalia Gaia, Nick Sandow, Oscar yi Hou, Pat Steir, Peter Halley, Peter McGough, Rachel Feinstein, Raúl de Nieves, Rebecca Watson Horn, Richard Heinrich, Ryan Johnson, Sadie Laska, Sahra Motalebi, Sam Messer, Sheree Hovsepian, Spencer Sweeney, Stefan Bondell, Stipan Tadić, Tauba Auerbach, Thom Zynwala, Troy Montes-Michie, Zoe McGuire, and poets hannah baer, Matvei Yankelevich, Anselm Berrigan, Anne Waldman, and Zêdan Xelef.
The ecosystem of the creative individual is a hard one to quantify or categorize. Sometimes groups emerge in well-defined movements with easily transmittable names—impressionists, minimalists, feminists—though most often, these descriptive nouns and adjectives only accrue long after the fact. (Alexandra Kollontai and Sheryl Sandberg both belong to the greater history of feminism, for example, but they might be perplexed to find themselves in the same boat.) Often, these names are not self-applied and function more as a marketing device than a useful and plausible heuristic for what is happening in any given historical moment. With any group, there is an individual effort to identify shared characteristics. What is that moment today, and is the situation of culture just as important as the solitary act of creation?
This is the realm of poetry and poet: the spirit that rejects explicit meanings and easily defined packages in favor of the lyrical and allusive. To disregard the pressure of commercial spectacle in favor of the quiet and personal is to defy the misconception that resisting market trends is useless. Poetic speech has its roots in humanity’s primordial creative endeavors. Were not the first written words images? I’d say that the preservation and propagation of poetic practice is just as fundamental as that of visual artwork.
The relationship between the visual arts and poetry is long and well established. “Ut pictura poesis”—pictures like poetry, the formula of the Roman poet Horace—is among the most influential directives to artistic expression since the Renaissance. Michelangelo wrote poems. But poetic and artistic influences often wend their ways along circuitous, unexpected, and perverse routes. Gertrude Stein was as famous for her gatherings that brought together artists and writers as she was for her writing. We know her for “Three Lives” and “The Making of Americans,” but Picasso’s looming, totemic portrait intrudes forcefully even for those who haven’t read her recondite prose and star-splattered verse.
Frank O’Hara was not only a poet but also an art critic and curator at the Museum of Modern Art. Marcel Broodthaers was a poet before he embarked on his mission to make “insincere” art objects. Now he’s accounted as the Arethusa of Institutional Critique: muse of the art world compulsively biting its own tail. Brice Marden’s “Cold Mountain” paintings took inspiration from the Tang Dynasty poet Hanshan—minimalism rerouted through a Floating World. While it would be impossible to make one reducible statement about the symbiosis of poets and artists, I would propose that the nurturing of creative community brings forward a collective energy that gives way to innovations in form and approach.
Though predominantly a collection of visual art, this exhibition beats with the heart of a poet. Its ambition is to position a group of artists and writers across generations and locations who are connected by a social and artistic foment. The scene, rather than something frivolous and fashionable, becomes a space where a group fosters collective boldness in stepping outside of accepted convention. This is not a show organized around simple aesthetic or demographic similarities. This show aims for a locus where the divergence of individual efforts finds communal reciprocity and fortification. In a moment when the social and cultural noise may feel deafening—and the artist’s work seems destined for the palette racks of eyeless dream brokers—this exhibition attempts to shift focus to the communal here and now.
—Arden Wohl
James Fuentes Gallery, NY, NY
Blurring Books, March, 2024
42 artists, 375+ stickers
Softcover, 48 pages
11 x 13 inches
The Unbelievably Fantastic Artists’ Sticker Book brings
museum artworks to the masses in sticker form, allowing
the public to create their own art galleries: on laptops,
skateboards, cellphones etc.
Includes stickers from:
Allan McCollum, Andy Warhol, Ann Craven,
Anthony Coleman Baraulio Amado, Chapman Brothers,
Daniel Johnston, David Jien, DAZE, Devin Troy Strother,
Donald Sultan, Elmgreen & Dragset, Erik Foss, Fred Tomaselli,
Hank Willis Thomas, Jackson Pollock, Jeff Koons, Jonas Wood,
John Baldessari, John Giorno, Josef Albers, Kay Rosen,
Linder Sterling, Louise Bourgeois, Marcel Dzama, Marilyn Minter,
Mr., Nate Lowman, Pam Glick, Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, Ray Johnson,
Raymond Pettibon, Rick Griffin, Robert Lazzarini, Rob Pruitt,
Shirin Neshat, Terence Hammonds, Tom Sachs, Tomoo Gokita,
Trenton Doyle Hancock, Wallace Berman and Yoshitomo Nara.
Between The Lines: An RxART Coloring Book Volume 10
Buy RxART Coloring Book Volume 10
Ann Craven is this “greatest hits” edition cover and
sticker page artist, alongside 48 incredible contemporary
artists who have contributed to the RxART Coloring Book over
the last 20 years.
Between the Lines: An RxART Coloring Book by
Contemporary Artists – Volume 10 is a compilation of
“greatest hits” from throughout the RxART coloring book
series, produced in celebration of RxART’s 25th Anniversary.
It features a vibrant cover and sticker spread designed by
Ann Craven and drawings by 48 other extraordinary established
artists, including Joel Mesler, Jeffrey Gibson, Rashid Johnson,
Hayal Pozanti, and Anna Weyant, among others!
GROUP SHOW
WISHING WELL
Los Angeles, CA
June 25 – August 5, 2023
parkergallery.com
Image:
Installation view
SOUTHARD REID, LONDON
October 3-6, 2019
Ann Craven, Prem Sahib, Bedwyr Williams
IMAGE:
Installation view
southardreid.com
YALE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF ART, New Haven
Painting Department Building
Monday, March 31, 2008
7:00-9:00pm
Tony Conrad, Ann Craven, Leslie Hewitt, Haim Steinbach
Moderated by Matt Keegan
Organized by 2008 MFA candidate Bianca Beck