Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Romare Bearden And The Collapsing Of Worlds Into Fabulant Forms

By

Reviewed by Sarah Elizabeth Lewis
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The Romare Bearden Reader
edited by Robert G. O’Meally
Duke University Press, 413 pp., $29.95 (paper)
NYR

Every year, Congressman John Lewis has made a pilgrimage to honor the anniversary of the campaign to march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capitol in Montgomery. The journey began on Sunday, March 7, 1965, when Lewis, then twenty-five years old and chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was severely beaten and nearly killed by state troopers as he led six hundred peaceful protesters in a march that started at a church in Selma and was forcibly intercepted by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named after the Confederate general and grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

[Read more…]

How to Hate the City: A Storyboard Of Canvases

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Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
at The Neue Galerie, NYC (through January 13)
Reviewed by John Haber

No movement in early modern art was as cosmopolitan as German Expressionism — and the group that called itself Die Brücke. Who else took to the streets when Picasso was just finding his way from circus performers to still life? Who else first exhibited in a former butcher’s shop, where it also met? When, decades later, Adolf Hitler denounced the movement as “degenerate art,” his rhetoric feels familiar from religious conservatives even now blaming a perceived moral decline on urban liberals. And who in Die Brücke was as cosmopolitan as its oldest founding member, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner? [Read more…]

Stray Dog Of Tokyo, Daidō Moriyama

By

by Ian Buruma

Daidō Moriyama: Record 
edited by Mark Holborn
Thames and Hudson, 424 pp., $70.00

Provoke: Between Protest and Performance—Photography in Japan 1960/1975 
edited by Diane Dufour and Matthew S. Witkovsky, with Duncan Forbes and Walter Moser
Steidl/Le Bal/Fotomuseum Winterthur/ Albertina/Art Institute of Chicago, 679 pp., $75.00 (paper)

Daido Tokyo
by Daidō Moriyama
Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain/Thames and Hudson, 192 pp., $40.00

Courtesy of The New York Review of Books

One of Moriyama Daidō’s most famous black-and-white photographs is of a stray dog, a bit wolfish, with matted hair, looking back into the camera watchfully, with a hint of aggression. He took the picture in 1971 in Misawa, home to a large US Air Force base, in the northeast of Japan. Moriyama has described this dog picture as a kind of self-portrait:

I wander around, glare at things, and bark from time to time…. Something there is close to how I look at things and to how I probably appear when I’m wandering. Having become a photographer, I always sensed that I have strayed.  [Read more…]

Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre?

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an exhibition at the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam, (through March 25, 2018)
Reviewed by Lisa Appignanesi

Life? or Theatre?
by Charlotte Salomon
Overlook Duckworth, 815 pp., $150.00

Charlotte Salomon: Life? or Theatre?: A Selection of 450 Gouaches
Taschen, 599 pp., $35.00

Excerpted from Painting on the Precipice, in  the 22 February issue of  NYRB 

A woman walks down the red stairs of a tall roofless building. Her dress is almost black. Her hair is pulled back, her arms crossed against the cold, her face melancholy. She walks past denuded trees up a darkened street, curves into another, and another. The wind seems to be propelling her, tugging at her, so that at one point her hair tumbles free, her dress whirls. Lamplight turns pavement and road a stormy sea blue. As she comes closer her path is outlined in blood red, until red takes her over to transform her into a drowning figure in a blackened lake. [Read more…]

Georganne Deen: Psychic Violence in America

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CB1 Gallery, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Emily Nimptsch

Renowned for her searing portraits of corruption, complicity, greed, and inequality in modern society, celebrated Joshua Tree-based painter Georganne Deen further explores this ubiquitous elitism and immorality in her latest collection of haunting figurative paintings, Georganne Deen: Psychic Violence in America, currently on view at CB1 Gallery in downtown Los Angeles.  [Read more…]

Stories of Desolation, Dystopia And Joyous Dance

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Simphiwe Ndzube’s Bhabharosi 
at Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles (through October 14, 2017)
By Lorraine Heitzman

Simphiwe Ndzube, in his bold debut at the Nicodim Gallery, has produced a personal and political tragicomedy that is an insightful commentary on the human condition. Set against the backdrop of South Africa where Ndzube was born, Bhabharosi tells the timely story of the hero’s journey that is steeped in the colors and customs of his birthplace but speaks to universal themes. His fresh perspective resonates with a vocabulary that is both witty and visually stunning. [Read more…]