Articles
GENOCIDE AND GENIUS "Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History" by Benjamin Balint
Bruno Schulz’s fantastic stories mesh familial dysfunction, metamorphosis and metaphor, complemented by a body of visual artwork filled with sexually charged imagery with a masochistic perspective. Benjamin Balint presents an impassioned narrative in Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History. Schulz may have been small in stature and unimposing in aspect, but he was expansively gifted. The success of his literary debut, Cinnamon Shops (1934), was followed by an equally impressive Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937), his only other surviving book. Although he remained a high school teacher in the drab oil...
PAINTER OF DARKNESS Cracking the Kinkade Vault
Shortly after Thomas Kinkade died tragically from an overdose of Valium and booze in April 2012, LA artist Jeffrey Vallance had a dream in which Kinkade showed him a secret vault of disturbing artwork that ran counter to the wholesome, uplifting image cultivated around the Painter of Light™ and his artwork during his lifetime. To Vallance’s astonishment, when he recounted the dream to Kinkade’s family during a symposium on kitsch a few years later, it turned out that the vault really existed, and indeed contained a mother lode of non-canonical Kinkades. In Miranda Yousef’s new documentary on Kinkade, Art for Everybody, Vallance tells the...
MICHELANGELO WHO? "The Story of Art Without Men" by Katy Hessel
Any project that attempts to recontextualize history is embarking on a daunting, arduous task. There’s a fine balance between providing too much detail and too little, in particular when the temporal scope of the story is ambitious. Embracing these challenges with confidence and clear mastery of her material is Katy Hessel, who has rewritten art history from the Renaissance to the present day to highlight the women artists who were working alongside and eclipsed by their male colleagues. The Story of Art Without Men is well researched and expertly told. Hessel, the art historian behind the popular podcast and Instagram called the Great...
THE BOOK AS BOOKWORK Luis Delgado's Physicality as a Thing
Luis Delgado, prolific photographer, documentarian and inveterate bookmaker seemingly operates under the radar—even after a nearly 50-year run. A recent Los Angeles transplant, he was born and educated in Mexico City to a Mexican father and American mother —immersed in a growing cosmopolitan milieu. Early on he studied under the tutelage of Guggenheim fellow Frank Gonzales, and took up painting, photography and theater, subsequently graduating from the University of the Americas Puebla. In the ’80s, he moved to the Bay Area where he attended the San Francisco Art Institute and honed his practice. After producing a body of social and...
ENVIRONMENT MAKING Malaya Malandro on Collaboration
Created by Francis Kanai and Malaya Malandro, Everything Is a Self-Portrait is a collection of photographs and poetry produced from years of phone calls and emails between their respective homes in Japan and the US. More than a simple display of two artists’ works, the book is a glimpse into a larger conversation—one that is ongoing. While the book is separated into sections by medium, the visual and written work is fluid. In fact, it’s not even clear there are two artists until you turn to the final page. Kanai and Malandro have formed a shared language, reflecting one another in their work. The result is a beautifully rendered book that...
