When Hannah Black wrote in her open letter to the Whitney Biennial curators “it is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun, though the practice has been normalized for a long time,” she did more than bolster a national debate about ownership of black pain, she connected with Denver artist Taylor Balkissoon and her frustration with her work mediated by a...
It feels like last summer was a long time ago. What with a year filled with electoral rage politics, acquitted police shootings of black people, the withdrawal from the Paris Accord, the Wall, the reintroduction of the Mexico City Policy, the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education’s yanking of transgender protections in public schools—we’re so freaked out that maybe it’s time for a break....
There’s a scene in Paul Greengrass’s 2007 film The Bourne Ultimatum when former CIA operative Jason Bourne/Matt Damon kills a Moroccan man named “Desh” using a book, what appear to be shampoo bottles, and a towel. The death match goes down in a Tangier apartment, and reaches a peak when Desh grabs a brass candlestick and slashes it at Bourne’s head. Bourne, on his back, reaches around and...
Click Here for Part 1. Art Star and painter Masami Teraoka conceived of a collaboration with Russian performance collective Pussy Riot. These words document their performance in Hawaii. THE NINTH WAVE The marketing of The Tempest was limited to an events newsletter from the Honolulu Museum of Art. The invitation to the free event caught my eye by chance. The audience on the night of the...
Artist Masami Teraoka said, “Let’s make art!” and they did. Pure art rumbles, bubbles and springs forth, like the eruption of a magnificent geyser. As the plume spray drifts and evaporates in the wind, the beauty of the gesture is the impermanent purpose. A site-specific, immersive interpretation of Shakespeare's The Tempest was conceived, planned, strategized and rehearsed for a singular...
Figuratively speaking, this year’s Venice Biennale is a “Brick House;” a metaphor for what creative women are capable of achieving when given the opportunity. Cecilia Alemani, the first Italian female curator since the inaugural Biennale in 1895, has included a...
Japanese artist Takashi Murakami is known globally for his colorful, smiling flowers, anime-inspired paintings and sculptures, and collaborations in fashion and music. His new exhibition, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow, presents an intimate but powerful display of...
Roy Dowell’s acrylic paintings are abstractions filled with interlocking and overlapping shapes of differing opacities. Though created from the depths of his imagination, Dowell’s many works reference textile designs, floral patterns, Tantric diagrams and mandalas,...
The work of Jovencio de la Paz exists between the ideal and abstract and what the press release referred to as the “fallibility of physical space.”I don’t think of “physical space” as a “fallible” domain, nor are digitally constructed spaces necessarily ideal. Yet...
In Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (2012) bell hooks states, “The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is—it’s to imagine what is possible.” Such words were actualized in “Known & Understood: Selections from the Permanent Collection” on...