“The projection of the New York art world as the metropolitan center for art by every other art world is symptomatic of the provincialism of each of them.”(1) wrote in 1974 the Australian art historian Terry Smith, in the article “The Provincialism Problem,” (2) which has been contested ever since, especially by his fellow citizens. By then Smith had relocated from Sydney to New York, and his conclusion was as clear as it was controversial: anything created outside of that city was by definition provincial. Times have changed since Smith’s article was written, and New York is now one of many centers of art. If in the mid-1970s those who didn’t move there were provincial, the opposite is almost becoming true today, as perpetual global mobility is one of the current hallmarks of contemporary artists. Though the centers of art and its legitimizing forces have proliferated in many locations around the world, it is still common for arts councils of more peripheral nations to send artists to New York, London, and Berlin to build networks and increase the possibility that they will be picked up or discovered by curators operating outside of the artists’ local context. For 20 years, the International …

Every article one reads on de la Cruz’s work will begin with a character analysis of the firey Spaniard who gave birth to a child despite spending months of the pregnancy in a stroke-induced coma. This kind of mythologizing inevitably foregrounds the artist as the subject of her own work. And though her work has followed a similar trajectory since she first removed a canvas from its stretcher while studying at the Slade in the nineties—now especially, with de la Cruz being wheelchair-bound, the relationship between her persona and her artwork have become interlinked. De la Cruz’s latest exhibition “Transfer” at Anna Schwartz Gallery plays up this relationship explicitly with the press release referring to the works as “anthropomorphic” and asserting that the exhibition “forcefully foregrounds the body, both artist’s and viewers’.” Typically, with contemporary art the relationship between the artist and their work requires entire weaves from Ariadne’s skein to navigate our way through the labyrinths of reference and innuendo, however, with this exhibition there is an immediacy of access that is at once refreshingly direct and also problematic. Featuring an elegantly installed collection of works typical of de la Cruz’s practice, “Transfer” offers an important sampling of this ex-Turner Prize …