Art Review: Marisol Escobar Exhibit at Buffalo AKG Museum

This past weekend I wrote about the massive redo at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, now called the Buffalo AKG Museum. The new name has gangsta glam, and its new building is dazzling, but it’s sad to see the AKG’s venerable Beaux Arts pile dwarfed and marginalized. Still, it was good to see the collection and campus after a four-year construction project and always good to visit Buffalo.

Today I’m looking at Marisol, the AKG’s eye-popping, enlightening retrospective of the career of the sculptor Marisol Escobar (1930–2016). She was called “Marisol,” a childhood nickname playing on the Spanish word for sea and sun. I’ve always loved her weird, fresh, disruptive sculpture, tokenized as Pop Art but always much more. She defied categories and pushed boundaries, so simple minds among critics and art historians — and there are many — ignored her.

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Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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This past weekend I wrote about the massive redo at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, now called the Buffalo AKG Museum. The new name has gangsta glam, and its new building is dazzling, but it’s sad to see the AKG’s venerable Beaux Arts pile dwarfed and marginalized. Still, it was good to see the collection and campus after a four-year construction project and always good to visit Buffalo.

Today I’m looking at Marisol, the AKG’s eye-popping, enlightening retrospective of the career of the sculptor Marisol Escobar (1930–2016). She was called “Marisol,” a childhood nickname playing on the Spanish word for sea and sun. I’ve always loved her weird, fresh, disruptive sculpture, tokenized as Pop Art but always much more. She defied categories and pushed boundaries, so simple minds among critics and art historians — and there are many — ignored her.