Art. Word. Thought.
One of the videos on view at the entrance of The Broad’s exceptional new exhibition, Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (opening March 23), is Angela Davis speaking to the idea of what it means to be a revolutionary. It is a timely reminder and an historical call to hone once-again one’s revolutionary teeth. A review of Soul of a Nation is forthcoming.
Angela Davis (1972)
That Evening Sun is a photo-journal of life, love and interminable lasting on LA’s Skid Row
by Suitcase Joe
Michael here is from Montana. I’ve been seeing him around for the last four-to-five months. In that short amount of time his physical appearance has quickly transformed into what he appears like now. Just a short while ago, he looked like your average kid from anywhere America. [Read More…]
Announced on the last day of Black History Month, Solange Knowles’ fourth studio album, When I Get Home, surprise released at midnight as a digital drop and experimental short film. A method originally pioneered by her sister, mega-superstar Beyoncé, many other artists have since adopted the technique of the ‘surprise drop,’ eschewing the popular single. But Solange elevates it to high art with Home, a thought-provoking concept album that’s as much video installation and interactive performance piece as music. [Read More…]
at The 8th Floor, NYC (through May 4)
Reviewed by Ellen C. Caldwell
Revolutionary Cycles is an expansive two-year series of art showing at The 8th Floor, a New York exhibition space run by the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation. The series will feature different themes such as issues around surveillance, gender, and media. Curated by Sara Reisman, Revolution from Without… kicks off the first installment of the series focused on the topic of resistance, with this exhibition featuring art from Tania Bruguera, Tony Cokes, Chto Delat, Raqs Media Collective, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Dread Scott, and Mark Wallinger. [Read More…]
Archive Project No. 1
at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles (through April 14)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner
There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware
–-Lyrics: Stephen Sills/Buffalo Springfield
“For What It’s Worth”
Annie Leibovitz has combed through her enormous archive of negatives to personally curate and print these 4,000 (yes, that’s right) mostly black and white photographs for this poignant and profound exhibition at Hauser & Wirth. The exhibition chronicles the turbulent late sixties, the “me decade” of the seventies and the beginning of the prosperous early eighties. Printed in various sizes with some as small as 3”x5” straight from a contact sheet to later work that is printed much larger with an irregular black border (that echoed both Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon, two photographers that she admired), they are push pinned to a hemp wall in a precise grid in a sometimes curiously casual looking installation meant to evoke a kind of walk-in scrap book. These pictures are truly an amazing visual history of the way we were, while clearly indicating where we were headed. [Read More…]
To most, a slithering snake might inspire fear. But to Mara (Alice Englert), in the new film Them That Follow, these creatures are beautiful, strong, and hold deep ties to her faith. Mara is a snake handler, part of a Pentecostal sect rooted deep in the woods of Appalachia. Like the snakes they use in their worship, these people are fiercely loyal, keeping to their own on a remote mountain. Martial engagements are made within their church community, involving all in a proposal process that includes quilting, snake-hunting, and a public acceptance. They avoid outsiders, like the police who will snatch their snakes, as well as their members, whenever possible. And if one of their members should be bit, they reject modern medicine, seeing the bite not as a health concern but a God-ordained test of faith. This life is all Mara has ever known. But as she grows into womanhood, her faith is rattled. [Read More…]
All hail Lupita Nyong’o, the Scream Queen of SXSW! On Opening Night, the Academy-Award winning actress shocked and awed the packed house at the Paramount Theater with Us. In dueling roles, she gracefully and ruthlessly filled the audience with tension and terror. The following day, she returned to the Paramount for a victory lap, fronting the outrageous zombie-comedy Little Monsters. It was a one-two punch that deftly establishes Nyong’o’s range as well as her status as modern-horror royalty.
My first historical theater experience was at 16, when my mom took me to see Jason Robards star as Hickey in The Iceman Cometh, by Eugene O’Neil. The dialogue was deep, fast-paced, dramatic, the characters themselves characteristically downmarket. The play, in brief, revolves around a classic crew of bottom-of-the-barrel drunks, has-beens who never were, pimps who claimed they were bartenders and their sleazy whores in a bar at the bottom of a flophouse in lower Manhattan in 1907. Harry Hope, the benevolent proprietor of the Greenwich Village Saloon, had not been outside the establishment in the years since his sainted wife had met her maker. [Read More…]
Mars Poetica, by Wyn Cooper
White Pine Press, 76 pages, $16.00
Not everyone knows the sun moves around the Earth. To prove it, simply extend a line between the two largest stars in Orion. It will take you to another constellation, Pegasus. Draw another line between the winged horse’s brightest stars, and you’ll find another mythological tribute, and so forth. Find one constellation, and you can find them all. In this way, the hunter, the dog, the bear, the goat, and others can always guide us because Earth is the center.
From time to time, a random star appears which seems out of place. [Read More…]
at Launch LA (through March 23)
Reviewed by Genie Davis
If California is in many ways a state of mind, as well as a state in the western continental U.S., Paradox California exemplifies its mystique. The California dream depicted in this lush and burnished exhibition from photographic artist Osceola Refetoff and mixed-media artist Chelsea Dean is desiccated by desert heat, burnished gold and amber and brown by desert sun, and crested by dry blue skies as vivid as a Mojave wildflower. [Read More…]
at White Cube Bermondsey, London (through 7 April)
Reviewed by Christopher P Jones
Some artists use their art to put up a facade for the world; others seek to bear themselves whole. The art of Tracey Emin – who has a remarkable exhibition of new work at the White Cube Bermondsey, London – undoubtedly falls into the latter category. The title, A Fortnight of Tears, has apparently been rolling around in the artist’s head for fifteen years, distilled by the recent death of her mother, but first kindled by a relationship breakup in her thirties when, she explains, “I was crying for the loss of my future. Then when my mum died, I was crying for my past.” [Read More…]
Gaspar Noé is drawn obsessively to the dark and decadent corners of human experience. Squalor, sexual taboos, substance abuse, and violence are as crucial to his toolkit as handheld cameras and eye-popping color as he spins carnal stories of love and fury. With Climax, this Argentine provocateur explores passion and fear by following a dance troupe through a life-changing night of partying, panic, and LSD. [Read More…]
What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? Mommie Dearest and Sunset Boulevard. There’s a glorious freedom to the psycho-biddy genre. Playing deranged dames whose sanity has been shattered by loneliness, iconic actresses like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Gloria Swanson are given cart blanche to go wild in tales of female rage that are scandalous, grotesque, and often unapologetically campy. Writer/director Neil Jordan (Interview With A Vampire, The Crying Game) extends this grand opportunity to Isabelle Huppert with Greta. The French luminary makes a feast of its tale of female fury, chewing the scenery with a gruesome relish, then licking her chops, leaving us craving more. [Read More…]
