To be coarse, today’s souvenirs suck. Nothing you get anymore as a memento from a vacation or of some event is imbued with any significance or feeling. What was the last souvenir you bought that you will keep a lifetime?
Radcliffe Bailey creates lavish, painterly homages to black American experience in the form of socially inflected, somewhat elegiac sculptural wall assemblages. The pieces, which are made of mixed mediums on wood and are often shaped, function as platforms for Bailey’s ruminations on culture and history.
John Scott and Ellis Marsalis discuss and demonstrate the use of improvisation in their work. Arthur Roger Gallery, January 28, 1998.
John Waters, famed underground director of such outrageous, cult classics as Pink Flamingos, Polyester, Hairspray, Cry Baby and Serial Mom, “re-directs” forgotten art films, obscure melodramas, lurid pot-boilers and his own early films in the form of photographic story boards made up of stills. The resulting work is this brilliant twist-off from Waters’ absurd, comic view of life, and the images are as funny and delightfully edged as the very best of his films. Waters shakes the fantasies of normalcy into a new, often delicious, taste of Heaven. 165 photos, 150 in color.
Ida Kohlmeyer would have turned 85 this month. She was arguably the best-known female artist in the South, and her death early this year came as a shock because, in spite of her age, her presence in the art community seemed timeless, unquestioned, a given.
For more than 30 years, Dale Chihuly’s work, principally in glass (but occasionally including such unconventional media as neon and ice), has challenged traditional distinctions between craft and art. Chihuly’s oeuvre is notable for its vibrancy of color, the boldness of its shape and execution, and, in recent years, its studied mimicry of natural forms, from cacti to seaweed and jellyfish.
When the 47th Venice Biennale commences in mid-June, the U.S. pavilion will offer the world’s oldest, most Prestigious festival a display of 18 artworks by Robert Colescott.
“Landscape Reclaimed,” a consistently smart show comprising the responses of conceptual artists to “landscape” and curated by Harry Philbrick, took full advantage of its site: a museum surrounded by aging, under-appreciated Minimalist sculpture and sweeping suburban lawns – in short a site just waiting for Komar & Melamid to stage a local version of their America’s Most Wanted, 1994.
John Alexander, a Texan, first gained prominence as a regionalist specializing in lush, painterly depictions of swamp and cartoonish paintings of humans and animals that satirized the conflict between civilization and the wild. His new landscapes, painted over the last two years, look back at the bayou but also study the woods and waters around eastern Long Island, his current home.
