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.
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.
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.
Ida Kohlmeyer, an abstract painter known for colorful pictographic canvases, died on Friday at the Touro Infirmary in New Orleans. She was 84 and lived in Metairie, La., a suburb of New Orleans.
Dawn Dedeaux employs various media, including photography, print, film, and video in her efforts to make political art that goes beyond mere documentary reportage. Like Sister Helen Prejean, the subject of Tim Robbins’s Dead Man Walking, a very conventional film, she is from New Orleans and very concerned with the underclass, specifically black youths abandoned to lives of violence and incarceration.
In the spring of 1980, sculptor Jesús Bautista Moroles was trekking up a mountainside in Italy when he found his artistic way. Under his feet lay a footpath, a carpet of grass dotted with marble steps. The steps bore a worn patina, polished by centuries of feet padding over the stone, often by men bound for work in the quarries.
Dawn Dedeaux has been a student of political economy. Departments of political economy have not as yet been established in the traditional university and as a result she has had to pursue these studies in the public housing facilities and prisons of New Orleans that offer the most up to date variants of the curriculum and where admission requirements and rankings are commensurate with the local murder rate.
How do we think, with the brain or with the mind? If a voice in your head whispers “brain,” stop and consider why we think. To make decisions, obviously —”yet most essential life decisions are not made consciously. We do not tell our blood how much oxygen to absorb through our lungs; our body does that for us.