Chas Smith, who died on May 13th, was a complicated, gorgeous assemblage of contradictions, the sort of bundle that is usually described as “larger than life.” But that phrase misses the nuances that made Chas a sought-after collaborator with artists and composers,...
“Phranc: The Butch Closet” at the Craig Krull Gallery is a joyous celebration of a Los Angeles icon. The ambitious exhibit, which includes work and documentation from the past forty years, illuminates how Phranc and her music—she identifies herself as the...
Carole Caroompas, an artist and widely admired teacher whose work encompassed painting, drawing, collage, prints and performance, died on July 30, 2022. In 2007, Western Project, which represented Carole for many years, published a catalog in which various artists,...
Rooting through used bookstores in Berlin in 2006, I discovered the minibuchs published in East Germany during the ’70s and ’80s. These tiny volumes, with their exquisite bindings and photos of happy children giving floral bouquets to returning cosmonauts, launched me...
We live in a time when the value of the work of art in society has changed radically. In February, the whole mercantile mechanism of the art world was in full swing, and by the end of March, with the global pandemic, life as we have known it had more or less stopped....
Sylvia Fein’s exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum (#275 in their MATRIX series running Nov 13, 2019–March 1, 2020) gave us the rare opportunity to see the work of an artist who has forged her own path for over 75 years. The exhibition is a concise, thrilling...
With trunk tucked up compactly—the elephant’s signof defeat—he resisted, but is the child of reason now. His straight trunk seems to say: when what we hoped for came to nothing, we revived.—From “Elephants,” Marianne Moore Dick Blau uses his camera to map...
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