The word "warrior" is summoned regularly these days when referring to women in art, politics, activism...but it's possible that the most primal act of feminism is that of reminding the world that women are the irrefutable caretakers of their own bodies. And no matter how much regressive men (and their female apologists) attempt to usurp that control, we have come to know that it will only grow stronger, more intractable.

Photographer Reka Nyari celebrates that primalness in her new series, Ink Stories, on view at BlackBook Presents gallery beginning January 16, 2020.

We pour over the works of the great artists. Curators write rapturous descriptions of those same works and their supposed meanings. And critics surely analyze them far too vigorously. But what if we were able to really get inside of the minds of Van Gogh, Picasso, Warhol, Basquiat? How would it evolve the way we see both them and their art?

Those are the questions that New York painter John Ransom Phillips undertook - and fascinatingly succeeded - to answer with his revelatory new series, Lives of Artists - which will be on exhibit at the BlackBook Presents gallery in Brooklyn starting October 24.

Painter John Ransom Phillips has a new, breathtaking artistic tribute to Whitman on view at the BlackBook Presents gallery in DUMBO, Brooklyn, under the title Robust American Love, from August 22 to September 5. It is a poignant, and very fitting title, considering its subject was one of the first out homosexual public figures in America. And, more directly explanatory, it was also a line from the provocative “Calamus” cluster of Leaves of Grass.

The artworks themselves are vivid, evocative illustrations, each based on a particularly affective or illuminating Whitman quote. The words become recontextualized, and vividly emboldened—as if Phillips has opened up little windows onto the poet's artistic and personal essences.

Miami, like other major American cities in the 1970s (ahem, New York) watched helplessly as its glory days gave way to a drug-riddled war zone, one that left hollowed out landmarks and blocks of Art Deco hotels in rueful ruins. Hindered by corrupt law enforcement and a significant Latin American narcotics pipeline, it struggled along until the latter end of the '80s, when a music/fashion driven revitalization began to at last introduce new hope.

Frieze Los Angeles made its much buzzed about debut yesterday, fully living up to the spirited anticipation surrounding the international fair. Thousands of art-seeking Angelenos, celebrities, New York transplants and far flung jet-setters flocked to the Paramount Pictures studio lot to experience what many feel has been long overdue for the art-driven city.