Report from the 2017 Contemporary Art Grand Tour: Venice, Münster, Kassel
Summer 2017 may very well be one of the most important art seasons in recent memory. In the wake of political turmoil and the record sale of a Basquiat for $110.5 million at auction, the art fairs of Europe aligned to create a Grand Tour for contemporary art devotees around the world at a moment […]
The Artist as Cultural Producer, a Defense of New Media, and Re-Shaping Public Attitudes about Contemporary Art
On September 12, 1940 four French boys stumbled into a complex network of caves in southwestern France. Their discovery of innumerable Paleolithic cave paintings dating to 17-15,000 BCE (Figure 1) soon led to excavations of the Lascaux cave system and in turn significantly altered scholars’ conceptions of human development.1 As evidenced by the wall paintings […]
Latin America Colonizes Los Angeles Via Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA
Despite Southern California’s large Hispanic population, Latin American art is seldom shown. Aside from some museums’ pre-Columbian sections and paintings by well-known artists like Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, the Americas south of ours might as well be unconnected to our landmass, perhaps on the opposite hemisphere. As of this month, all this has changed, […]
Connecting Charlottesville and Ohio: A Conversation with Sarah Boyts Yoder
Like most of the country, I watched in shock and horror as white supremacists swarmed the city of Charlottesville in a menacing rally of racist anger and hatred. The violence they ignited ultimately reached a deadly turning point when a neo-Nazi plowed his car into a crowd of anti-white supremacist protesters, killing Heather Heyer. It […]
“Reality of Nature” at Launch LA
Earlier this month, Richard Glasser, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction expressed deep concern about the future of our planet. In his words, “There can be little doubt that 2017 is turning into a year of historic significance in the struggle against climate change. We must realize that these disaster events are […]
A Painter’s Family Tree, "Predecessors" at the Contemporary Arts Center
Everyone has a family tree. Painter Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s exhibition, Predecessors, outlines her family tree poignantly. She gives us the women in her family in portraits and with important personal photographs that are photo-transferred and are featured in still life tableaux. She further imbeds in her paintings photo-transfers of important Nigerian political and popular figures […]
“Ana England: Kinship,” Cincinnati Art Museum, through March 4, 2018
Clay is, essentially, dirt, or, to be more poetic, earth. Many artists use clay metaphorically, including Ana England. However, she takes her material to a higher level, using it to represent the cosmos as well. England is an accomplished ceramist. In 1983, she earned a Master of Arts in ceramics at San Jose […]
Timing is Everything
Few exhibitions in our region have been more anticipated than the joint showing of oil paintings by David Mueller and MaryBeth Karaus at Eisele Gallery in Fairfax. This exhibition showcases the romantic figurative and still life work of this couple, relying on well rendered compositions of surface refinement and harmonized color palettes. The female figure […]
Familiar Connections at Miller Gallery
The Miller Gallery in Hyde Park closes a wonderful landscape show on September 29, 2017. The work of three artists is included in the show, though the work of Santa Fe artist Rich Stevens dominates; the other work is complementary to Stevens’, but overall, the paintings on display all have something of an Asian influence in […]
The Place of the Nude: “9th Annual NUDE: Exploring the Uncovered Human Form,” Manifest, August 17-September 15, 2017
A show about the nude can’t help but raise issues about voyeurism any more than it can help raise questions about sexual politics. (I counted, for example, only four representations of the male nude to nearly twenty female.) This is the Manifest Gallery’s ninth show featuring the naked body, and I would have liked to […]