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Will Fenstermaker on Muck Rack

Will Fenstermaker

Verified
(He/Him)
Los Angeles, New York
As seen in: Frieze, Sotheby's Magazine, MSN, The New York Times, Yahoo Entertainment, Los Angeles Times, Artnet, The Nation, The Paris Review, Artforum, Dissent Magazine, BOMB Magazine and
Covers:  Art, film, literature, culture
writer, editor, interviewer 🖋 currently @sothebys & @friezeofficial
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Will Fenstermaker’s Journalist Portfolio

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The Formulaic Juxtapositions of Jasper Johns's 'Mind/Mirror'

The Formulaic Juxtapositions of Jasper Johns's 'Mind/Mirror'

Frieze — At the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a massive survey, focusing on the famed artist's legacy, bypasses new readings of his oeuvre.
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Adam Curtis's Theory of Everything

Adam Curtis's Theory of Everything

Dissent Magazine — Adam Curtis's latest film paints a picture of the world that is so complex, so dense, and so theoretical that the prospect of real change appears nearly impossible.
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Why Do We Believe in Photographs?

Why Do We Believe in Photographs?

The Nation — One of the more speculative tales surrounding the Shroud of Turin, which supposedly depicts the face of Jesus Christ, purports that the cloth was actually made by Leonardo da Vinci. The story goes that Leonardo passed off his own image as Christ's, possibly as an act of hubris or to trick the Catholic Church.
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To Declare a New World

To Declare a New World

The Brooklyn Rail — The word has the sound of an incantation. Presto, changeo, manifesto.
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Genesis Belanger's Scrumptious Last Supper

Genesis Belanger's Scrumptious Last Supper

Frieze — At The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the artist's series of stoneware works offer a feminist critique of domestic life under the unmistakable presence of death.
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Myth and History: Cassi Namoda

Myth and History: Cassi Namoda

BOMB Magazine — The emperor of Gaza. A plain, blue car. Burning red suns and ancient weapons. A young girl on crutches. A man eating a rose. A yellow canary. Conjoined twins and one's suitor. Sermons in a lake. Cassi Namoda's Mozambique has a vagueness and gravity that gives it the feeling of a communal dream.
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Diasporic Landscapes: Jordan Nassar Interviewed

Diasporic Landscapes: Jordan Nassar Interviewed

BOMB Magazine — Rolling, pastel-hued hills stretch toward a low-hanging sun. Wisps of clouds explode out of the sky. Steep valleys carve striations in the horizon. A vertical line ruptures each scene, splits it in two. Jordan Nassar's embroidered landscapes depict contested land.
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The Twisted Legacy of Alfred Jarry's Monsters

The Twisted Legacy of Alfred Jarry's Monsters

The Nation — The 1896 premiere of Ubu Roi in Paris was a violent affair. Alfred Jarry, the 23-year-old playwright, planted friends in the audience to pick fights and holler obscenities. Brawls began when Père Ubu-sometimes translated as "King Turd"-strutted onto the stage wielding a toilet brush as his scepter.
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Baaba Maal's Songs of the Sahel

Baaba Maal's Songs of the Sahel

The Metropolitan Museum of Art — When Baaba Maal walked onstage wearing a stunning sky-blue boubou, he signaled his place in a historic lineage. Boubous are classic West African garments, and Maal is at once inspired by and celebrating a vocation of musical storytelling established by Sahelian bards known as griots, or jeliw .
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How Elias Sime Emerged as One of Africa's Leading Contemporary Artists

How Elias Sime Emerged as One of Africa's Leading Contemporary Artists

artnet News — Five years ago, the Ethiopian artist Elias Sime, who is known for his sculpted aerial landscapes and river scenes and colorful striated patterns, didn't have gallery representation in New York. Sime had shown work regularly in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa since the 1990s, and was included in group shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Studio Museum in 2008.
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Fiona Tan: Archive / Ruins

Fiona Tan: Archive / Ruins

The Brooklyn Rail — The camera, looking toward the skylights, pans down to follow the slow cascade of light (one hears a soft murmur of voices) and reveals an open room filled with tables and shelves. People are hunched over books, quiet and oblivious to two men-rather, angels-who move through the aisles.
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Facing Duality: Arghavan Khosravi Interviewed

Facing Duality: Arghavan Khosravi Interviewed

BOMB Magazine — I first saw Arghavan Khosravi's lush and intimate paintings earlier this year at Four, a concise exhibition at Yossi Milo Gallery that featured four young artists curated by Doron Langberg. In Inward Element (2018), a woman folds her legs in a flat plane, framed by a vegetal motif borrowed from Persian textiles.
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Towards a Critical Insurgency

Towards a Critical Insurgency

AICA-USA — I first learned that criticism was in crisis when I was enrolled at the MFA art criticism and writing program at SVA. That was during the late Obama years. Superficially, these were cozy times for critics. We’d carved our way back near the mainstream, art criticism appeared in online magazines and young journalists were being trained in critical theory.
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MIRA SCHOR with Will Fenstermaker

MIRA SCHOR with Will Fenstermaker

The Brooklyn Rail — The works in Mira Schor's California Paintings: 1971-1973 were made during the artist's time as a graduate student, at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where she was enrolled in the inaugural year of the Feminist Art Program.
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How Artificial Intelligence Sees Art History

How Artificial Intelligence Sees Art History

The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Picture, if you can, the history of art. What does it look like? You can probably call up certain images and ideas-specific paintings and sculptures, the sounds of music and dance-or perhaps you know the characteristics of what we call Cubism, or the traditions of shan shui painting.
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Pierre Huyghe: UUmwelt

Pierre Huyghe: UUmwelt

The Brooklyn Rail — Many years from now, but surely fewer than one wants to think, those of us who survive ecological collapse and the technocratic reformation of the global economy will remember Pierre Huyghe.
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Max Neumann: Specter

Max Neumann: Specter

The Brooklyn Rail — A few years ago, I found myself hunting in a bookstore for the last copy of Wolfgang Hilbig's latest translation. A socialist from East Germany targeted with kompromat, an exile endowed with awards by the Federal Republic and later reunified Germany, subject of several good reviews in English but mostly unread on this continent.
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SETH PRICE with Will Fenstermaker

SETH PRICE with Will Fenstermaker

The Brooklyn Rail — Talking with Seth Price can feel like circumscribing an amoeba. One is aware of protean boundaries, but also a rigid cell wall where certain issues attempt to broach.
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Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today

Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today

The Brooklyn Rail — There can never be a complete history of the internet because the internet is, to a degree, atemporal-like culture or consciousness, it either exists (in one form or another) or it does not. This places it fundamentally at odds with linear narratives.
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Mirtha Dermisache and the Limits of Language

Mirtha Dermisache and the Limits of Language

The Paris Review — Despots, from those who composed the efficiently murderous junta that ruled Argentina to the petty kakistocracy that runs the United States today, curb the written word because they fear its expressive power.
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