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 […]
Art
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Original prints by American greats
This Friday and Saturday, in conjunction with the exhibit The Art of the Print at Rochester Contemporary, master printer Bill Goldston of Universal Limited Art Editions will show and discuss original prints by contemporary artists like Jasper Johns, Elizabeth Murray, Robert Rauschenberg, Lisa Yuskavage, James Rosenquist, and others. The discussion and exhibition are presented by […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Visit the documentary buffet
With 22 television monitors relaying images at once, More than Moore, a video installation at Visual Studies Workshop, instills a feeling of sensory saturation, even though the TV sets are all silent. (Headphones are provided.) VSW Associate Gallery Director-Acting Gallery Manager Bleu Cease is trying to make independent political documentaries more accessible to the public. […]
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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 […]
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We’re not quite in Arcadia anymore
Some time in 1988 I learned one of my biggest lessons in aesthetics. I was living in the Los Angeles area and went to a movie theater in Century City to see Terry Gilliam’s film, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. I walked away enthralled, excited, and inspired. The next night, wanting to share my enthusiasm […]
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The Bridges between film and photography
An intimate exhibition of black-and-white photographs by Jeff Bridges opened at the George Eastman House in July. Whether entirely intentional or not, the exhibit is a subtle companion to Site Seeing: Photographic Excursions in Tourism. It continues to foster our ongoing romance with photographs, and perhaps more importantly, with photographic memory. Pictures is a […]
