I always thought that Phyllis Diller’s public/comic persona (the hair, the toothy smile, the A-line dresses and feathery accessories, gloves, booties, cigarette and holder) was her greatest work of art. But she was also a pretty great comic and (with a little help from a couple of male comedians) broke some pioneering ground for the women who followed her into the business. Less obvious, and...
Remaining anonymous coupled with becoming a globally recognized figure is no easy feat; it seems almost a requirement of celebrity status that the entire world know your name and face. The crux of what has catapulted some into the spotlight also necessitates a need for anonymity. For street artists and superheroes alike, this is the case—vital to their continued success exists a need to protect...
Dr. jack Kevorkian, the infamous “Dr. Death” who passed away in 2011, sits somewhere in the public consciousness between the Unabomber and Mother Theresa depending on whom you talk to. The physician served eight years in Michigan State Prison for second-degree murder (assisted suicide) in 1999, after facilitating the deaths of approximately 130 patients. Gallerie Sparta in Beverly Hills showed...
I have often been encouraged to launch a Kickstarter campaign, but I have never been able to decide on a specific project that justifies urging potential donors to dig deep into their pockets on my behalf. There are so many Kickstarters these days and there is only so much money: One has to be selective about one’s contributions, and if one embarks upon such a campaign, it had better be for a...
With her “Untitled Film Stills,” Cindy Sherman played with the idea of the Hollywood sex symbol; she disappeared into one role after another, showing how art and film noir convention could collude to create sex appeal from the trappings of innocence and repression—and from the beauty and implicit dangers of dark shadows, startling camera angles, the open road and the American city.Now a genuine...
THAT WAS THEN THIS IS NOW. Ed Ruscha’s lithograph and the banner image for his 40-year survey at Gagosian Madison Avenue says it all: it was a different art world when Ruscha arrived in Los Angeles in 1956. Now, he’s blue chip and according to my editor, a celebrity—the inverse to the James Franco phenomenon. We’re shuffling through the names of various uber-successful artists, attempting to...
Editor’s Note: With the highly-coveted Pritzer-Prize awarded this year to architect Shigeru Ban—known just as much for his disaster relief projects and elegant, temporary paper-tube architecture as for his commercial and institutional works—we asked Martina to weigh in on the redefinition of “star” architecture in our age of instability.At the 2008 Venice Biennale, starchitects Frank Gehry and...
The image of “the road” is one of the metaphors most deeply embedded in the American cultural landscape, perhaps most poignantly for the inter-war generation that produced both Dennis Hopper (born 1936) and Jack Kerouac (born 1922) among so many others.Beginning in the early 1960s, Dennis Hopper produced a rich body of photographic work that has garnered ongoing critical and scholarly attention,...
Contact: Melinda Machado Media Contact,National Museum of American History T: (202) 633-3129The National Museum of American History to Exhibit Artworks by Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and George W. BushThe National Museum of American History is pleased to present Presidential Pictures: Paintings & Drawings by Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald...
If you have not seen Ryan Trecartin’s videos, imagine flipping at break-neck speed through 500 channels of reality TV contestants in garish makeup reading random fragments of text from the Internet out loud. More readily, you could also just go check them out on Vimeo where they reside just as comfortably as they do in an art gallery: maybe more so. In a sense, they practically are the Internet....
In contrast to city symphonies’ majestic depiction of high-rises and new machinery, Yu Ji displays discarded objects and debris. Instead of emphasizing order and repetition, the artist embraces liquidity and discord.
YU JI Chisenhale Gallery OUTSIDE LA: London, UK By Eran Sabaner Kalaora At the center of Chisenhale’s main gallery, a black net is suspended, hanging between multiple points on the ceiling. Resembling a post-nuclear hammock, the net carries rubble...
For an artist who has deliberately cultivated a naïve style, Umar Rashid (who also occasionally calls himself Frohawk Two Feathers) appears to have calculated the exhibition’s title, “Per Capita” with almost labyrinthine deliberation—an amalgam of the coyly...
Alexander Harrison’s aptly named exhibition “Midnight Everywhere,” is an exploration of the moods, tones and colors that the night brings. The paintings in the exhibition form a cohesive collection and tell the story of a solitary artist living in an old wooden house...
All good art has at its core an essential moment of transmutation, a point at which the object and the idea which informs it fully coalesce. The essence of the object—whether it’s a painting or a bag sculpture—versus the impulse to create it in the first place are the...
A new suite of swimming-pool themed paintings by Brandon Lipchik look like everything but what they are. Their physical surface textures are varied from shape to shape, and even more so the range of techniques employed in each image. Their reductive geometrical and...
Mari Evans’ poem, “I am a Black Woman” was resurrected through the “Passion Power Prayer” exhibition at Band of Vices, featuring abstract paintings by Lisa Diane Wedgeworth. With a singular vision her works extend an invitation, as in The Matrix (1999): to take the...
While an artist-in-residence at Artpace, in San Antonio TX, Elana Mann created work for her exhibition “Year of Wonders.” Executed during the height of the recent pandemic and inspired by Geraldine Brooks’ Year of Wonders (2001) that focused on the 1666 pandemic...
In “Sanctuary of the Aftermath” at Angel’s Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro, curators Jason Jenn and Vojislav Radovanovic give viewers a lush, graceful experience with poignant experiential moments. Comprising 10 multimedia artists—David Hollen, Ibuki Kuramochi,...
The silencing of protest is the hallmark of authoritarian governments. While often this silencing can be very bloody, the most effective form of violence is legislative. The fight for democracy in Hong Kong – and the accompanying crackdown – is a prime example of how...