Before the painter Pat Passlof, who died in 2011, would allow me to visit her in her Forsyth Street studio, she insisted that I join her and her Tai chi class held in the park across the street.

Lucy Mink was the first artist I came to know solely through Facebook. She didn’t live in Brooklyn but in rural Contoocook, New Hampshire, and I became cyber-obsessed, waiting for each new post from her studio.

In an exhibition of ten new paintings at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Ruth Root extends her definition of the medium and her own personal language.

Spend anytime out in the rural West, particularly the plains of southwest Texas, and you’ll discover the daunting challenge of repelling dust and dirt. At some point, you just have to accept a little discomfort as a small cost of the region’s wondrous horizons, desert winds, and moonlit nights.

In 1959, British scientist and novelist C.P. Snow, struck by the inability of intellectuals and scientists to communicate and thereby to make sense of and tame nuclear weapons, delivered a lecture at Cambridge arguing that the divide between the sciences and the humanities was intensifying world’s problems.

De Kooning once said, “Every so often a painter has to destroy painting.” Cezanne did it. Picasso did it. Then there was Pollock. As de Kooning put it, he “busted our idea of a picture to hell.”

Jenny Snider is a storyteller. The content and form of her art come from a variety of sources: history, popular culture, politics, and art itself in the form of grid-based abstraction representing natural and mechanical forms.