A wise-ass Latina (me) blabs all about Sotomayor and wise Latinas — on Time.com. Your clicks kindly appreciated. And while you’re there, feel free to Digg it, Buzz it, Tweet it and otherwise social-network it to the max.
Grassy ass,
C.
Monthly Archive for July, 2009
Page 3 of 4
Black and White, 2009 by Eric White, an oil reproduction of The Stranglers’ 1978 album cover. (Image courtesy of Black & White Gallery.)
- In NYC: A Black and White World, a summer group show, at Black and White Gallery, opens Thursday.
- In NYC: Summer Reading, a group show, at Jen Bekman in SoHo, opens Wednesday.
- In Hempstead, NY: Burton Morris, Pop!, at the Emily Lowe Gallery at the Hofstra University Museum, opens Thursday.
- In D.C.: Paint made Flesh at the Philips Collection, through Sept. 13.
- In S.F.: Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946-2004 at SFMOMA, through Nov. 29.
- In S.F.: The Cresting Wave: The San Francisco Underground Comix Experience at Electric Works, through Aug. 22.
- In Seattle: Painting Under Attack: 1945-78 at the Seattle Art Museum, through Sept. 7.
- In London: Swoon, Elbow Toe and Matt Small, Ways of Seeing, at Black Rat Press, through July 23.
- Online: Summery Sexy, courtesy of Winkleman Gallery and Schroeder Romero.
Mundano’s painted recycling carts. (Photos by C-M.)
Paintings that spin, Brazilian street carts laden with scraps and drippy canvases that document São Paulo’s organically-expanding cityscape. That’s what’s currently on show at Factory Fresh in the intriguing group exhibit Lichen, which is showing the work of artists Apolo Torres, Loro Verz and Mundano, all of whom hail from São Paulo. Especially interesting: Torres’s urban landscapes, which celebrate a city in permanent contact with calamity.
Lichen is up through July 26.
Click on images to supersize. Continue reading ‘The Boys from Brazil: Lichen at Factory Fresh in Brooklyn.’
I Would Offer You My Pulse, I Would Give You My Breath, by Libby Black, in the group show Figuratively Speaking, opening this evening at 6pm at Lyons Wier in NYC.
- New, different, better.
- New Jersey artists wanted for art billboards.
- Tomas van Houtryve on how he photographed North Korea. See his images here.
- Okay, so no one’s looking at the Euphronios krater regardless of where it resides.
- Anselm Kiefer’s work of opera.
- David Lynch on his collaboration with Danger Mouse and Sparkle Horse for a gallery exhibit in L.A. And he sings! (Minute 7:20.)
- Ai Weiwei’s 10-hour video Beijing Chang’an Boulevard to arrive at LA’s MOCA. Will there be pee breaks?
- Nicholas Penny of London’s National Gallery says Trafalgar square sucks. (Arts Journal.)
- Someone please park one a these right outside my apartment: dumpster pools. (Thanks, Michele!)
- Rapture of the deep.
- When Las Vegas hotels invest in weird-sounding art. (What a Lovely Recession.)
- The Day in Eh: Canadian donuts make inroads in NYC.
- Untitled gentleman.
- Today’s Street Art: Above in Berlin.
- Shepard Fairey cops a plea.
- A wonderful profile of Toyo Ito, the architect who will be designing Berkeley’s new art museum.
- Photos of SANAA’s Serpentine Gallery pavilion.
- The Architecture of Madness.
- Rethinking the architecture of U.S. embassies.
- Your moment of air sex.
Brooklyn wall, with Celso, Cake and Chris Stain.
- An awesome Q&A with Gay Talese in the Paris Review. (@jennydeluxe.)
- Brush fire forces an evacuation at the Getty, which is scheduled to reopen today.
- China censors Ai Weiwei.
- Hrag Vartanian breaks down the numbers on arts stimulus funding, a lot of which goes to prop-up infrastructure at non-profits. Plus: he speaks with Reps. Louise Slaughter and Todd Russell Platt, of the House Arts Caucus, about the state of arts funding.
- L.A. Times questions “sketchy” OCMA sale in editorial.
- Van Gogh’s private letters to be exhibited at the Royal Academy in London early next year.
- Roman mosaic floor unveiled in Lod, Israel. (Arts Journal.)
- Opposition group to Christo project calles itself “Rags Over the Arkansas River.”
- Strangely fascinating: Blasting office chairs into space.
- More on plastics falling apart: Joseph Beuys’s pieces at the Walker Art Center are gettin’ drip-drip-drippy. (Eyeteeth.)
- Regina Hacket drops the atomic elbow on the TM Sisters.
- Free Jerry Saltz! (AFC.)
- The globalization of art. (To Fear It is To Know It.)
- Homecoming, photographs of vets.
- Boston’s Big Picture covers the clashes between Han Chinese and Uighurs in Urumqi, China. (Coudal.)
- Frida Kahlo’s lipstick traces.
- Foreclosure art.
- Rad Photo Essay: Buildings without walls.
- The rejected Wallpaper covers.
- Your moment of Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. What? Related: the Pizza Cone.
Yes, this is real. (Photos by San Suzie.)
If there’s one thing that abounds in Sicily – more than orange groves and vineyards – it’s concrete. True to stereotype, there are cement plants all over this Mafia-riddled island. And its once-beautiful capital, Palermo, is rife with hideous concrete buildings that hover next to Baroque palazzi. (These soulless structures are often constructed using pilfered funds intended to restore buildings bombed in WWII). Amid all of these mind-numbing edifices, we found what is considered the largest work of land art in Europe. And guess what? It’s made of the same poor-quality concrete as the buildings in Palermo.
Only here, it works. Titled Grande Cretto, by postwar Italian artist Alberto Burri, the piece commemorates the destruction of the Western Sicilian town of Gibellina in a catastrophic 1968 earthquake. In 1980, roughly twelve years after residents rebuilt their town 18 km away, Burri covered the hillside town’s streets and ruined buildings– an area roughly 900 x 1200 feet and about 5′ in height, with white concrete. The streets look like the crackle pattern on Burri’s fabled paintings, only you can walk through these. Or skate through them. (Not to give anyone any ideas.) But if you were to, no one would know: it’s in the middle of nowhere, a two hour drive from Palermo – and just a short stop from Castellammare del Golfo (birthplace of Joe Bonanno and Frank Stallone, Sr., father of Sly), where you can go for a swim at one of the pristine beaches at the nearby Zingaro nature preserve and then feast on a plate of pasta with sardines, pine nuts and raisins.
Find more information on Burri’s installation here.
Click on images to supersize.
Coextensia, by Apolo Torres. (Image courtesy of Factory Fresh.)
- In NYC: Lichen, Loro Verz, Apolo Torres & Mundano, straight from São Paulo at Factory Fresh, opens this Friday at 7pm.
- In NYC: Slavic Soul Party!, as part of Summer Nights at the Jewish Museum, next Thursday July 16th, at 7:30 p.m.
- In Beacon: We Are Familia, a salon, at Open Space in Beacon, opens this Saturday.
- In Miami: Balls in the Air at Locust Projects, be part of an interactive performance, this Saturday at 7:00pm.
- In Omaha: A Century of Retablos at the Joslyn Art Museum, through Oct. 4. (Art Newspaper.)
- In Austin: 60WRD/MIN ART CRITIC, a performance by Lori Waxman in which she receives artists and writes reviews of their work — and then signs, publishes and frames them; at the ArtHouse at Jones Center, from Friday through Sunday. (Why didn’t I think of this?)
- In Vancouver: Andreas Gursky at the Vancouver Art Gallery, through Sept. 20. (eyecurious.)
- In S.F.: Becca, Mike Maxwell & Paul Chatem at White Walls, opens Saturday.
- In L.A.: The West Coast premiere of Captured: 30 Years of the Lower East Side of New York tonight at ALIFE at 7:00pm.
- In L.A.: The Buff Monster Summer Party at Japan LA tonight at 7pm.
- In L.A.: Family Books and Aaron Rose present Three films about Sister Corita at CineFamily, this Sunday at 8pm.
- In L.A.: An exhibit and book signing for Jim and Karla Murray’s Miami Graffiti at Mid-City Arts, opens Saturday at 7 p.m.
- In L.A.: Urban Myth, with Pure Evil, Zeus and many others, at Cerasoli Gallery, opens Saturday.
- In L.A.: A Public Art Party, with lots of Yayoi Kusama, in Beverly Hills, this Saturday at noon. With box lunch by Porta Via.
- In Santa Ana, Calif.: R. Crumb at the GCAC Gallery, opens Saturday.
The Swing (After Fragonard), 2001. (Photos by C-M.)
There is such a thing as too much of a good thing and Yinka Shonibare’s solo show at the Brooklyn Museum is it. Don’t get me wrong. His sculptures are a wonder to look at, skillfully-crafted ensembles that meld African-style Dutch wax fabrics with 18th century and Victorian fashion — all arranged in dramatic dioramas. This is paired with an all-important subtext: the pieces insert representations of African-ness into traditional European art, reminding us that the African experience has long been a part of Western culture, even if it has been barely depicted on canvas. The effect is lush and beautiful and tragic. But, as enjoyable as it the show is to look at (boy, would I looove to rock one of them dresses), after a while, the repetitive imagery, relentlessly bright colors and hyper-hedonistic settings started to make me feel as if I’d eaten too much candy. Dizzy, disoriented, a little sick to my stomach. But, perhaps, that was the point.
On a side note: The Met’s Costume Institute might do well to study this show. It was wonderfully and elegantly installed — with some pieces incorporated into the museum’s period rooms. Who ever curated the Met’s sloppy cheese-fest otherwise known as Model as Muse (that ’60s fashion room with the lava lamp effects looked as if it was channeling the Woodstock museum) should get over to Brooklyn, stat! And start taking notes…
Yinka Shonibare MBE is at the Brooklyn Museum through Sept. 20.
Looking Around has a very interesting interview with the artist in one and two parts.
Click on images to supersize. Continue reading ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion: Yinka Shonibare MBE at the Brooklyn Museum.’
Tita3 in Peru. (Photo by enteserhumano.)
Support Jörg Colberg’s contemporary photo blog Conscientious!!
- The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies. (ackackack.)
- ArtNews‘s Top 200 Collectors.
- Dang, do I love me some lawsuit: Brooklyn’s River Café suing over salt water damage suffered from Olafur Eliasson’s waterfalls. (@kenwheaton.)
- The Art Industrial Average Continues Its Downward Slide: The market sinks at London auctions.
- After all the brouhaha about wanting it back, the Euphronios krater isn’t exactly attracting awe-struck crowds in Italy.
- One word: Plastics. They don’t live as long as we thought they did. (Arts Journal.)
- Sarah Jessica Parker talks to ArtNet for “literally three minutes” about her new art reality show. (Animal.)
- The Guardian crowdsources coverage of Gormley’s Fourth Plinth project. Plus: Rupert Christiansen at the Telegraph reports that the installation has already become a bore. (Best of 3.)
- Speaking of crowds: LACMA is dealing with Michael Jackson mourners intent on getting as close as they can to Koons’ sculpture of Jackson with Bubbles.
- The week in art world conflict: Philip Smith was left out of the Met’s Pictures Generation show and the Saltz-Master isn’t gonna take it anymore. Plus: Greg.org takes on the wall text.
- Photographs of Cuba by Ernesto Bazan.
- In other news: Alberto Gonzales finally found a job.
- Today’s Street Art: Amose in Tokyo.
- In time for Christmas? Zaha Hadid’s Chicago pavilion – which was supposed to open in June – still not open.
- Design schemes for NOLA homes from Brad Pitt’s architectural foundation.
- Frank Lloyd Wright’s various designs for the Guggenheim.
- Priceless: An open letter to Dwell Magazine.
- Your moment of Have You Heard of Hip-Hop?
Every beach needs a building like this: The abandoned Ospedale Marino in Cagliari, Sardinia. (Photos by San Suzie.)
There are two things we can’t get enough of here at C-Mon: Abandoned Modernist structures and graffiti. Which is why the Ospedale Marino, above, an old seaside hospital in Sardinia is such a find. The Ospedale appears to be a late or mid ’50s work of Sardinian architect Ubaldo Badas, considered one of Italy’s premier architects in the middle of the last century. It lies on Poetto Beach, an 8km Copacabana-style expanse of powdery white sand and clear water that is reachable by bus from the port of Cagliari. (The locals say the beach is no longer what it used to be, but our bar is not so high.) Badas’s graceful building is now in advanced stages of concrete and rebar decay. It was originally clad in plain, matte grey tile, which has partially fallen off.
Like most places in Italy, people here believe that taking the sea air is good for one’s health. And the sea air here is definitely pretty awesome. Sardinia is at the center of the Mediterranean and is generally considered to be the sunniest spot in Europe. On the day I took these pictures, it was about 90 degrees and I almost burned my corneas. But I quickly made up for the near-blindness by taking a dip in the cool, clear, Mediterranean, then heading off for a plate of octopus and pasta with fish roe, a glass of Vermentino, a scoop of ginger-pineapple sorbetto, and then a nap.
Click on images to supersize. Continue reading ‘Sardinia Dispatch: San Suzie examines abandoned coastal Modernism; eats fish roe.’
