Deborah Krieger
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Articles by Deborah Krieger
I On The Arts
Whether you’re spending your Pride in quarantine or protesting on the streets, your life has likely been touched by the power of the image these past few months. Perhaps it’s the television you’ve watched to stave off boredom, or through the haunting videos of police brutality that have inspired millions to don their masks and demand justice and change. Perhaps you were one of those millions, or perhaps you were the person behind the camera, documenting it all.
I On The Arts
During my last few years of living in Los Angeles, I have begun to wonder more and more why Los Angeles, well, looks like Los Angeles. Los Angeles’ strange, surreal nature comes into focus upon its absence; to live in vibrant cities outside of Los Angeles and then to return to Los Angeles is to see every one-story strip mall collared with a parking lot as a failure of imagination, to see every vacant lot overgrown with weeds as a broken promise.
THE KRIEGER LIST: I ON THE ARTS' TOP 2025
Hello dear readers! Before I get into my 2025 lists, I wanted to share a little info about my big project this year. I co-curated an exhibition at Louis Stern Fine Arts, where I am the Outreach and Research Manager. You can learn more about Perspective and Plane , and/or enjoy this video overview! And now.... Here's my year-end round-up of media I liked in 2025, including media from 2025 and media that I experienced for the first time in 2025. Everything is in chronological order (where possible).
Halsey Gets Vulnerable, Explores Motherhood And Childbirth On Provocative 4th Album, If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power: BUST Review
Halsey mastered dreamy indie-pop on their 2015 debut album Badlands, delivered club-ready jams on 2017’s hopeless fountain kingdom, and demonstrated a voracious musical appetite with detours into baroque pop, mainstream rock, and country on 2020’s Manic.
MOVIE REVIEW: Antigone
Anna Karenina opening line “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” has drawn in readers for over a century; it’s why The Godfather, Hamlet, Little Women, Shameless and even the increasingly convoluted machinations of the Star Wars “Skywalker Saga” have continued to draw in audiences and acclaim. When your family is all you have in this world, we are asked, what would we do to protect them?
BOOK REVIEW: “You Are the Everything” by Karen Rivers
With the exception of some poems and a few fanfics with song lyrics for titles, I have rarely encountered the second person used well and never within the context of a full-length novel.
ESSAY: Dieter Roth's "Banana"
$120,000 banana taped to a wall at Art Basel Miami, titled Comedian. This same banana, whose merit as an art object was hotly debated by art critics and lay audiences alike, appeared in the news once again after performance artist David Datuna pulled it off the wall and ate it, in a performance art action he called Hungry Artist. Can an ordinary banana be art? Can food be art?
ESSAY: Stained Glass Stories: Women, Art, and Labor
One of the Delaware Art Museum’s most striking works in the British Pre-Raphaelite galleries was actually designed and produced by Americans: our Tiffany stained-glass Spring and Autumn window set. The Spring and Autumn windows were commissioned by Samuel Bancroft, whose collection forms the core of the Museum’s Pre-Raphaelite holdings. In the early 1890s, Bancroft expanded his home in order to better hold and display his growing collection of Pre-Raphaelite art.
ARTIST PROFILE: SATOSHI FUJIWARA
Satoshi Fujiwara has made a career of highlighting distortions of the world, and the slippery nature of objective truth, through what has been considered to be the most honest form of reproduction: the camera. Fujiwara produces bodies of work that challenge photography’s ability to render truth, instead focusing on the medium’s ability to both produce and challenge reality as we understand it.
ESSAY: An Analysis of Postcommodity
(Note: This essay was a short assignment for my Indigenous Art, Issues and Concepts class at Brown University, which I took in Fall 2020.) As reflected in their name, Postcommodity creates works that address the contemporary global market.
ESSAY: How the Wedding Cake House, a Feminist Architectural Project, is Bigger on the Inside [PREVIEW]
As is the case with the some of the most enchanting experiences — be they books or buildings — Providence’s beautiful Victorian Wedding Cake House is “bigger on the inside.” The Wedding Cake House (previously known as the Tirocchi House) occupies the lot on 514 Broadway in Providence, Rhode Island.
MUSIC REVIEW: Taylor Swift Has Written the Best Music of Her Career with 'evermore' and 'folklore' [Preview]
seemingly to their eventual detriment. (As if a teenage girl writing award-winning songs about her feelings was unworthy of consideration, as if it meant she had nothing else on her mind.) But what happens when her love life is finally taken out of the spotlight, and her artistry stands alone, as on July's folklore and December's evermore? Will people (read: music snobs) finally be able to admit that she's an incredible songwriter when they aren't scoffing at the specter of tabloid fodder?
THE KRIEGER LIST: I ON THE ARTS' TOP 2021
Hello readers! 2021, am I right? (Looking back at my 2020 post, I realize I literally made this exact same joke. Seems appropriate this year as well.) As always, you can check out previous years here: 2020 / 2019 / 2018 / 2017 / 2016 / 2015 best/worst. Some life updates: I graduated from my Master's Degree program at Brown and got a job at the Museum of Work & Culture, where I work on the museum's temporary exhibitions and accompanying programs.
THE KRIEGER LIST: I ON THE ARTS' TOP 2022
With very little ado, enjoy my list of things I enjoyed in 2022 for the first time, in alphabetical order! You will notice a lack of my own writing here. That's because I've been doing very cool things at the Museum of Work & Culture, and you can check out those projects here! As always, you can check out previous years here: 2021 / 2020 / 2019 / 2018 / 2017 / 2016 / 2015 best/worst. Movies Chinatown, dir. Roman Polanski, 1974 Everything Everywhere All At Once, dir.
ROUND-UP September 2021
Hello faithful readers! It's sure been a while! I am now working as the Exhibit & Program Coordinator at the Museum of Work & Culture in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. I still plan to keep this blog updated with reviews of the shows I see in New England and elsewhere, along with albums and movies and other forms of art as I have time (and the inclination) to write about them.
ART REVIEW: Mary Brøgger at Rose Gallery
After remaining indoors for over a year, it's refreshing to be confronted with the idea of the natural passage of time in the outside world--how life consciously accumulates and mutates, even when we aren't there to watch it happen. Mary Brøgger's retrospective exhibition "Altercation," a small survey of her textiles, fiber art, and sculpture (all works mentioned 2021) illustrates this essential.
ART REVIEW: Larissa Fassler’s cartography at the Currier Museum describes socioeconomic disparities in Manchester
For me, the best way to experience a city is on foot--slipping through historic cobblestone alleyways; darting across one-way streets and making apologetic eye contact with an errant driver; observing the shifts from older architectural forms to more contemporary ones; watching what Jane Jacobs called "the ballet of the good city sidewalk"-- the ebb and flow of people in their daily living habits.
Netflix series ‘This is a Robbery’ about Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum art heist is sluggish, overlong, and fails to deliver a great story
At some point in my life, I was sure I wanted to solve the mystery of the stolen Gardner Museum paintings. Maybe it was because I had really enjoyed the children’s novel Chasing Vermeer, where two resourceful kids find a stolen Vermeer painting (“A Lady Writing,” c.
VIDEO POST: "Small Exhibit, Big Impact: Making SITES Poster Exhibitions Work For You"
I proposed and helped put together a panel for the 2022 Smithsonian Virtual Conference about the flexibility and utility of Smithsonian poster exhibitions in my work at the Museum of Work & Culture. Enjoy! VIDEO
VIDEO POST: “ART CHAT: TIFFANY WINDOWS: ART, LABOR, WOMEN”
Hello followers! A little over a year ago, I was invited to speak about the Delaware Art Museum’s Tiffany Windows (which I also wrote about while I worked there) for a Zoom "Art Chat." The video has now been shared by the Museum to its YouTube channel, so I’m sharing it here for you! Enjoy! VIDEO
BOOK REVIEW: Andrew Smith’s novel "RABBIT AND ROBOT" takes on new meaning in today’s world
The place: outer space. The time: the future. The situation: the class divide that we see in present-day America magnified to a ludicrous, outlandish degree, where robots (or in the world of Andrew Smith’s Rabbit and Robot, “cogs”) have taken all of the jobs except for soldiers, “bonks,” or “rabbits” who fight in one of over twenty pointless wars, and programmers who create the next generation of cogs.
ART REVIEW: The visceral impact of scenes of intimacy in “Any distance between us” at the RISD Museum
The general aura of both touch-starvation and touch-aversion that has enveloped me over the past eighteen months also influences my response to RISD’s Any distance between us, on display until March 13, 2022. The exhibition features beautifully-rendered images of lovers embracing, reclining, and being physically tender with one another, yet a small part of my mind reacts oddly to this kind of corporeality.
THE KRIEGER LIST: I ON THE ARTS' TOP 2023
Hello readers! Wow... the years start coming, and they don't stop coming. I think someone very wise once said that. As of July 2023, I am now an Angeleno again, and in November 2023, I began a new job as the gallery assistant at Louis Stern Fine Arts in West Hollywood. As such, this blog will largely be quiet for the foreseeable future to avoid conflicts of interest. However, you can always keep up with my life (and the art and culture I experience) on Instagram. Anyway...
ART REVIEW: "DEL CIELO" AT ROSE GALLERY
Birds in the trees: all is right in the world unless it’s three in the morning and their birdsong is interrupting your sleep. Birds on a telephone wire: a testament to adaptation in one’s habitat; I hope it doesn’t ruin your connectivity. Birds on the beach: better protect your picnic lunch. Birds in a graveyard: run like hell.
THE KRIEGER LIST: I ON THE ARTS' TOP 2024
Hello delightful readers of this dormant blog! Enjoy my favorite things I experienced in 2024.
Jenny Slate's Film "The Sunlit Night" Is An Earnest And Honest Attempt At Translating Creative Thinking Onto The Screen
I imagine it’s difficult to make a film about artistry. I’m not talking about a biopic of a real-life artist (or reasonable facsimile), or a film interpreting their works—those have been made, and several have been quite moving (Never Look Away with its stirring Gerhard Richter analogue, or the emotional catharsis surrounding Vincent van Gogh’s death by suicide as brilliantly painted across the screen in Loving Vincent, to name a few).
INTERVIEW: Kelsey Halliday Johnson leads and advocates for the arts and social justice at SPACE in Portland, ME
When you’re an ex-Philly resident meeting another ex-Philly resident in Portland, ME, the obvious attire of choice is a Gritty-themed shirt from an artist on Etsy. The shirt– DIY, joyful, and a bit unexpected– is oddly fitting for a meeting with Kelsey Halliday Johnson, Executive Director of SPACE– an independent “maker hub” in Portland. Kelsey’s work in Philadelphia included sojourns at Locks Gallery, the James Michener Museum, and elsewhere.
ART REVIEW: Soumya Netrabile at Anat Ebgi
Nobody walks in Los Angeles but ducking out of the overheated concrete jungle and into “Between past and present/ Between appearance and memory,”—Soumya Netrabile’s vivid exhibition of wildlife, texture, line and color at Anat Ebgi—may inspire the urge to lace up your sneakers and take a meandering stroll through unexpected places. Netrabile has created paintings reminiscent of—but not wholly belonging to—the natural world, where the fantastical and the experiential exist side-by-side.
GALLERY ROUNDS: "DEL CIELO"
Birds in the trees: all is right in the world unless it’s three in the morning and their birdsong is interrupting your sleep. Birds on a telephone wire: a testament to adaptation in one’s habitat; I hope it doesn’t ruin your connectivity. Birds on the beach: better protect your picnic lunch. Birds in a graveyard: run like hell.
GALLERY ROUNDS: Soumya Netrabile
Nobody walks in Los Angeles but ducking out of the overheated concrete jungle and into “Between past and present/ Between appearance and memory,”—Soumya Netrabile’s vivid exhibition of wildlife, texture, line and color at Anat Ebgi—may inspire the urge to lace up your sneakers and take a meandering stroll through unexpected places. Netrabile has created paintings reminiscent of—but not wholly belonging to—the natural world, where the fantastical and the experiential exist side-by-side.
Mary Brøgger - Artillery Magazine
by Deborah Krieger | Mar 8, 2022 Mary Brøgger, Untitled (low folding seat), 2021. Copyright Mary Brøgger. Courtesy of ROSEGALLERY. After remaining indoors for over a year, it’s refreshing to be confronted with the idea of the natural passage of time in the outside world—how life consciously accumulates and mutates, even when we aren’t there to watch it happen.
Halsey Gets Vulnerable, Explores Motherhood and Childbirth on Provocative New 4th Album, If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power: BUST Review
Halsey mastered dreamy indie-pop on their 2015 debut album Badlands, delivered club-ready jams on 2017’s hopeless fountain kingdom, and demonstrated a voracious musical appetite with detours into baroque pop, mainstream rock, and country on 2020’s Manic.
Jenny Slate's Film "The Sunlit Night" Is An Earnest And Honest Attempt At Translating Creative Thinking Onto The Screen: Review
I imagine it’s difficult to make a film about artistry. I’m not talking about a biopic of a real-life artist (or reasonable facsimile), or a film interpreting their works—those have been made, and several have been quite moving (Never Look Away with its stirring Gerhard Richter analogue, or the emotional catharsis surrounding Vincent van Gogh’s death by suicide as brilliantly painted across the screen in Loving Vincent, to name a few).
Taylor Swift Has Written the Best Music of Her Career with 'evermore' and 'folklore'
evermore Taylor Swift Republic 11 December 2020 For so long, Taylor Swift has been the girl who sang her heart out about her string of celebrity boyfriends, seemingly to their eventual detriment. As if a teenage girl writing award-winning songs about her feelings was unworthy of consideration as if it meant she had nothing else on her mind. But what happens when her love life is finally taken out of the spotlight, and her artistry stands alone, as on July's folklore and December's evermore?
Book review: 'Rabbit or Robot' by Andrew Smith
Indeed, the entire of Smith’s rollocking amplification of the United States’ worst militaristic, anti-intellectual, uncurious tendencies can be summed up in the following sentence: “It seemed like every boy in America—future coders and bonks alike, thanks to “Rabbit & Robot”—knew the precise make, caliber, and specs of every gun in existence, even if none of our boys could accurately point out more than two or three countries on a map of the world.” In this world that is almost completely...
How the Wedding Cake House, a Feminist Architectural Project, is Bigger on the Inside
The “Wedding Cake House”, an elaborate Italianate building at 514 Broadway, Providence also known as the Kendrick-Tirocchi-Prentice House, constructed in 1867, attributed to Broadway architect Perez Mason, and part of the Broadway–Armory Historic District (photograph by ) As is the case with the some of the most enchanting experiences — be they books or buildings — Providence’s beautiful Victorian Wedding Cake House is “bigger on the inside.” The Wedding Cake House (previously known as the...
On Bruce Springsteen's Music in Film and TV
Springsteen as Soundtrack: The Sound of the Boss in Film and Television Caroline Madden McFarland January 2020 Other While millions claim to be fans of Bruce Springsteen, only an extra-dedicated few have taken the plunge and written an entire book devoted to analyzing the nuances of the Boss' extensive discography.
A Look Into The Future: Four Pivotal Queer Artists Discuss Their Most Powerful Work
This cover story is part of We Are Everywhere, them.'s 2020 Pride issue. See more from the series here. Whether you’re spending your Pride in quarantine or protesting on the streets, your life has likely been touched by the power of the image these past few months. Perhaps it’s the television you’ve watched to stave off boredom, or through the haunting videos of police brutality that have inspired millions to don their masks and demand justice and change.
Nightwish Go in a Folk Direction on Their Double LP 'Human. :||: Nature.'
Human. :||: Nature. Nightwish Nuclear Blast 10 April 2020 When your favorite band releases a new album, you want to love it. You want to be dazzled, to be moved, to feel goosebumps flicker across your skin ideally once per song (conservative estimate).
The Art Houses of Naoshima Island
For the traveler in Japan with a day near Okayama to spare, Naoshima Island’s Art House Project is well worth the journey. Since the late 1990s, contemporary artists and architects from Japan and elsewhere have taken over a number of structures, all located within about a seven-minute walk from one another, and completely transformed them.
On “Manic,” Halsey Captures The Highs And Lows Of Young Adulthood
Halsey’s third studio album, Manic, is quintessentially an album about being in your twenties, about the muddle of being at what feels like the height of one’s youth and desirability while simultaneously being as uncertain and sensitive as you’ll likely ever be. In your twenties, you’re legally an adult, yes, but you still seemingly lack the power, privileges, and security of full adulthood in many ways.
Book Review: "You Are the Everything" by Karen Rivers
With the exception of some poems and a few fanfics with song lyrics for titles, I have rarely encountered the second person used well and never within the context of a full-length novel.
Rosabel Rosalind Kurth-Sofer Is Fighting Jewish Stereotypes With Art
Drawing its title from the Yiddish saying “a Jew is 28 percent fear, 2 percent sugar, and 70 percent chutzpah,” Rosabel Rosalind Kurth-Sofer’s 70 Percent Chutzpah offers a guide on conversion to the curious would-be Jew. In the large-scale ink drawing installation, the section “Becoming a Jew: How to,” raises the specter of every Jewish stereotype in the book and shreds them in glorious, graphic fashion.
The Lives of Objects: On Maira and Alex Kalman’s “Sara Berman’s Closet”
OCTOBER 2, 2019 SARA BERMAN’S CLOSET: A Small and Monumental Story sits on a sidewalk in Philadelphia. A white box filled with pale clothing and other objects behind glass, it rests just outside the National Museum of American Jewish History. Sara Berman’s Closet has been shown this way before — outside and in the midst of the busy world — but right now, it seems like a misplaced relic, almost like the phone booths that once stood on city streets.
“Pause” Gets To The Heart Of A Loveless Marriage
Elpida (Stella Fyrogeni) just wanted to get her doctor’s opinion on treating her symptoms of menopause. Instead, she leaves his office after an examination with every kind of pill and cream imaginable, a laundry list of side effects that are somehow delivered with a straight face, and confirmation that even when she seeks out help or advice, it won’t come in the form she wants. This opening sequence sets up Pause to be a much more darkly humorous story than it ultimately is.
Taylor Swift's 'Lover' Finds Her in Romantic Bliss and at Peak Creativity
Lover Taylor Swift Republic Records 23 August 2019 Taylor Swift albums usually drop in the autumn (see: every previous Taylor Swift LP). Taylor Swift's Lover has floated down to us on a summer breeze, dusted in glitter and drenched in color, less than two years after the moody, volatile Reputation. On Reputation, Swift embraced and reveled in every dig and petty fight that's taken up space in her brain, co-opting the snake motif from an insult to a defiant badge of pride.
“The Art Of Self-Defense” Wants You To Think About Toxic Masculinity
The best one-sentence description of The Art of Self-Defense I have managed to conjure up is “Fight Club, but directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.” It takes place in a completely generic 1990s-era town, where the dog food in the grocery store is literally labeled a brandless “Dog Food,” where the protagonist’s home answering machine informs him that he has “only” one new message, while a news anchor blithely recommends protecting oneself with a gun or large knife while out in public.
How Do You Curate Stonewall At 50?
Chad States, A Gift For the Queens, 2015, white marble, gold silk and concrete assemblage (Courtesy of the artist and Leonard Pearlstein Gallery) If you run a Google search for “Stonewall exhibition,” you will find dozens upon dozens of arts and historical venues across the United States that put together shows related (with varying degrees of specificity) to the Stonewall Uprising of 1969.
The Psychology of Time Travel, by Kate Mascarenhas (review)
The Psychology of Time Travel Kate Mascarenhas Crooked Lane Books Feb 2019 Other Appropriately for a novel that explores how people relate to one another and to themselves via the use of time travel, Kate Mascarenhas' The Psychology of Time Travel pushes and pulls the reader across various timelines, always keeping us slightly on our toes.
“Red Joan” Fails To Capture The Nuance Of Melita Norwood’s Life
Red Joan has Judi Dench seemingly as the main attraction, but as pretty much every other reviewer has pointed out, that’s quite the red herring; Red Joan, after all, isn’t “starring” Judi Dench, but “featuring” her. The film is, instead, a plodding, intermittently entertaining showcase for Sophie Cookson (who you might recognize as Roxy in Kingsman) encapsulated within a cliched frame narrative.
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