A woman encounters a child. Encounter is an image photographically captured by Bob Gates, and one of 53 works of art included in the 60th Rochester-Finger Lakes Exhibition. Yet, what is a seemingly simple title for an equally simple action is actually a complex interplay between images and our way of seeing them. Who is […]
Heidi Nickisher
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Screening cultural differences
The View From Here: Contemporary Russian and American Screenprints, an exhibition dedicated to printmaking, is definitely one you can sink your teeth into. The exhibition consists of screenprints by 22 artists — 12 Russian and 10 American — with a total of 70 works between them. The differing artists’ styles are brought together through the […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
The new pilgrims
After the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act mandated an end to discriminatory immigration policies that favored white Western Europeans, the phrase “Give us your poor, your hungry, your huddled masses” began to take on new meaning. A local exhibit, Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America, presents a kaleidoscopic INA update (of […]
Posted inSpecial Sections
What’s the alternative?
Although Rochester has a number of respectable art museums and galleries, rarely will these venues show anything outside the mainstream. For an art space to do something daring, quite often it has to rely on the vision and resources of an individual or a small group of people. Fortunately, Rochester has a few such alternative […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
A tale of two landscape artists
Of two artists on display at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, one is very popular and well known; the other is hardly known at all. When you hear the name Georgia O’Keeffe, you tend to immediately think of the wrinkle-faced old painter who lived in the desert and painted flowers. But when you hear the […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Put me in the water
Water flows down the river. Jungle sounds in the background. Thunder. More water rolling over rocks. A man puts a painted canvas into the river. New Age music, more jungle sounds, and monkey chatter. The painting floats by, only to be pulled out, carefully wrung, and taken to a cave where it is smoothed out […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Crime at the museum
As you approach the entrance to the gallery, you can hear Law & Order: Crimes Scenes before you can see anything. It is only after you enter the gallery from the hallway that you immediately encounter six television screens, each continuously playing and replaying the teasers for six different episodes. A couple walks down the […]
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It looks like art, but is it?
Recently opened at the George Eastman House are two new exhibitions that, although not intended to be viewed together, offer interesting insights into thequagmire of contemporary art. Law & Order: Crime Scenes is a cross-examination of crime-scene photography from TV; it investigates perceptions of illusion and reality (see next week’s review of that exhibit). The […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
Heritage found
Walter Evans says he doesn’t remember going to art museums when he was growing up. At first it was because in the 1940s in the South (first Savannah, Georgia, and then Beaufort, South Carolina), African Americans weren’t allowed in places like museums and galleries. Later, after moving to Connecticut, he was by then a typical […]
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Burying and resurrecting visual pleasure
Ever since the invention of photography, the “death” of painting (and by association, drawing) has been proclaimed. Every time new forms of representation are announced, the death of old technologies is reiterated. Painting should have been buried a long time ago. Of course, painting has survived, although not in the service of “objective” representation but […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Desiring the everyday
“The Ceramics Program is vital because at its center are dynamic faculty who embody the integrity and core values we associate with expertly handcrafted objects,” writes Michael Rogers, chair of the School for American Crafts at Rochester Institute of Technology. The faculty Rogers refers to are Rick Hirsch and Julia Galloway, whose work is the […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Convulsive anatomies
In 1992 Paul Schimmel, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, curated the infamous Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990’s. In his catalogue essay Schimmel equated the anxiety at the end of the 19th century and the work of the Symbolists — which was imbued with an obsessive fear that […]
