February 7 – March 25, 2023

February 3 – March 25, 2023

How a major new show is refusing to look at what's inside the Egyptian artefacts

January 26 – March 25, 2023

February 9 – March 25, 2023

A thrilling end to a genius TV series

February 3 – March 25, 2023

February 24 – March 25, 2023

The controversial style of 'method acting' that divides the industry

February 17 – March 25, 2023

February 4 – April 8, 2023

How the plucky Nintendo character Mario has gone from arcade games to Hollywood

February 16 – March 25, 2023

February 22 – May 7, 2023

From tiny terrariums to tiger-print statements, how plants enhance any interior

12 min read

Royalists, Recipes and Real Hardship

Ann Fanshawe (1625 – 1680) is known chiefly for her writing, including a memoir detailing her time in the Royalist court at Oxford during the English Civil War, her exile with her husband during the Interregnum and her life as a diplomat’s wife in Europe following the Restoration. She is also known for her recipes influenced by her time spent in Spain and Portugal, among them the first recorded recipe for ice cream. She is remembered as a stoical and dutiful wife, performing the role she had been trained for despite the interruption of a war that divided the country, and finding purpose amid war, political upheaval, exile and personal loss.

Civil War

The English Civil War was fought from 1642 to 1651 between the Parliamentarians and the Royalists, over the right to rule the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland. Choosing a side was a complex choice, with class, financial, geographical and religious considerations. The Royalists, also known as Cavaliers, supported King Charles I and his divine right to rule, and were often stereotyped as flamboyant and wealthy, with Catholic sympathies. The Parliamentarians tended to be more puritanical, and fought for the abolition of the monarchy.

The country was divided up into Royalist and Parliamentarian held regions. Parliament seized London and forced many prominent Royalists out. They were based mostly in the South and South-East, controlling most major ports, including London, Hull, and Portsmouth, the largest arsenals and the Navy. The King held the North, the port of Newcastle, most of Wales and Cornwall. Those that found themselves occupied by their enemy fled if they were able, abandoning their homes and belongings.

Climate change tends to be visualized in Western culture in a few clichéd ways: a montage of graphs (the line goes up indicating rising temperatures), the chemical structure for carbon dioxide, scientists in white coats, a starving polar bear, and more increasingly, news stories accompanied by pictures of houses submerged in water after major storms or burnt down after raging wild fires.

The artist Minerva Cuevas, however, imagines a different way to visualize it, one that is probably unexpected. For her latest exhibition, “in gods we trust” at Kurimanzutto’s New York outpost, Cuevas insists that climate change be represented by the companies that are responsible for causing it, from oil companies like Shell to financial institutions like Chase Bank.

In a series of appropriated works, Cuevas displays ads from the oil and gas industry from the 1950s and ’60s: Mobil oil flows down a pristine snow-banked stream, slick tar is scooped with a spoon in a promotion of Shell’s new “recipe” for asphalt, and Humble oil (now known as Exxon) brags that “Each Day Humble Supplies Enough Energy to Melt 7 Million Tons of Glacier!” Given that oil companies spent the ensuing decades denying that the burning of fossil fuels cause climate change, these prophetic promotion of their sins is a tad on the nose.

These appropriated works give us a glimpse into Cuevas’s intense research process which is the basis of her art-making. In other works, like The Trust, Cuevas takes symbols of oil industries and submits them to her local context of Mexico. By alluding to ancient art practices that involved tar and the current oil industry in Mexico, climate change is not just a global phenomena but an act of pollution that speaks to a country’s past, present, and future.

To learn more about the exhibition, which is on view until April 15, ARTnews spoke with Cuevas to discuss her process and the role of the artist in times of crisis.

Born in 1976 in Saigon, Nguyen emigrated with his family as a refugee to the United States in 1979, and grew up in California. He began regularly visiting Vietnam during college, and after receiving his MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2004, relocated to Ho Chi Minh City, where he cofounded the Propeller Group artist collective in 2006 and the nonprofit art space Sàn Art in 2007.

While there can be a certain melancholy among diasporic artists grasping at generalized ideas of a motherland, Nguyen circumvents that disappointment by rooting his work in specific histories that he rigorously researches in order to make room for poetry. In The Specters of Ancestors Becoming (2019), Nguyen worked with members of the Vietnamese community in Senegal, whose origins trace back to West African soldiers sent by French colonizers to fight against the Vietnamese liberation uprisings in the 1940s. Nguyen asked members of the community to devise and enact conversations with their elders, showing how fragmented consciousness of cultural inheritance is communicated between generations.

Such intergenerational transmission recurs frequently in Nguyen’s work. We Were Lost in Our Country (2019) features interviews with members of the Aboriginal Ngurrara community in Western Australia alongside testimony about the Ngurrara Canvas II, an immense painting made by 40 Ngurrara artists that depicts a map of their land created as evidence to reclaim that land from the Australian government. Many of the original artists having died, the painting serves as a complex dialogue between ancestors and descendants. The ways in which land bears witness also figure in The Island (2017) and The Boat People (2020), both of which look at two sites of former Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian refugee camps. Rather than aligning these sites solely with past traumas, Nguyen presents them as places of generative fantasy, where bodies are empowered by oceans instead of drowning in them and where the fate of being the last humans on Earth affords new communion with objects and the landscape. For refugees past and present, this type of ingenuity is a survival strategy.

Nguyen is never satisfied with research as a static mode of exposition: when archival footage is interwoven into his films, it is in part to question the motives of the camera and the coercive tactics of the moving image, while conjuring distinct power in the refusal to present a single truth. In an interview over Zoom during a family visit in Orange County, California, Nguyen—the subject of a solo show opening at the New Museum in New York this coming June—spoke about his long-term relationships with his collaborators, using a biennial as a civic tool, and the potency of sharing personal histories.

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LUMI TAN For the sake of a shared vocabulary, how would you define “research” as it figures in your practice?

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When deciding on the best paint brush for your project, it’s important to consider the brush-head material as well as its size and shape. A quality brush will hold a good amount of paint, facilitate a smooth stroke, and won’t shed or split. Natural bristle brushes are made with coarse animal hair and are intended for oil and acrylic paints. A high-quality paint brush will feature bristle tips that have flagged, or split, ends that hold their shape and help hold and distribute paint better. The metal band joining the bristles to the brush handle is called a ferrule and keeps the bristles in shape and maintains their flex. Brushes come in many different shapes: from fan to round, with the most versatile being the trusted flat-headed brush. To help you choose, we’ve rounded up the best bristle brushes below. 

ARTnews RECOMMENDS
Grumbacher Gainsborough Bright Oil and Acrylic Brush
These professional-grade brushes are handmade with a unique tapered design that causes the bristles to interlock, allowing them to hold more paint and helping the head to stay in its original shape. Made from high-quality Chungking hog’s hair, these brushes move paint around beautifully, whether you are glazing thin layers, blending, or scumbling. The hairs, which are securely set in a nickel ferrule, are pleasingly springy and maintain their structure. Each brush features an ergonomic handle that’s wider at the grip and thinner at the end to provide a nice balance. It’s also long-handled to accommodate loose gestures. Available in sizes between 1 and 14.

Buy: Grumbacher Gainsborough Bright Oil and Acrylic Brush, Hog Bristle, Size 10 (1271B.10) $13.54

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Da Vinci Maestro 2 Hog Bristle Brushes
The hand-shaped bristles of these hog-bristle brushes interlock for better pigment-holding ability and are double oiled for extra spring and endurance. The nickel-plated brass ferrules are rust-resistant and keep bristles from falling out or bending. Manufactured via certified green processes and constructed with extra-long sustainable wood handles, these brushes are not only artist grade but environmentally friendly.

Of all the discourse that permeates today’s never-ending newscycle, gender, identity, and race issues create the most heat. But, where there is heat there is light, and comedian and ARTnews Top 200 Collector Cheech Marin was happy to shed some during an on-stage conversation with ARTnews at the 2023 edition of South by Southwest Conference and Festival.

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Marin was there to discuss the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture at the Riverside Art Museum in California, which opened last year and is propelled by his vast collection of Chicanx art.

“You know, Chicano is a voluntary category,” Marin said, when asked about identity politics in the US. “There’s no box you can check on the census that says Chicano. So, I took that as a cue—well if that’s the case, you can have voluntary rules too. We can make this up as we go along.”

Marin followed that with a brief history of the term Chicano and how he came to associate himself with the expression in the inimitable way that has garnered him millions of fans starting with the turned-on comedy duo Cheech and Chong.

“Chicano was originally a derisive term from Mexicans–to other Mexicans,” Marin said. “The concept being that the Mexicans who had moved from Mexico and were now living in tin shacks along the border in Texas, and Arizona, and California, were no longer truly Mexicanos because they had left their country. They were something less. They were little satellite Mexicans, little Chicos, you know, that where the term came from—at least according to me,” he added with a laugh.