Editors Note: Ai Weiwei has been arrested in Beijing and on April 4, 2011 there are fears for his safety amid a crackdown on intellectuals in China. The catalog of Ai Weiwei: Dropping the Urn, Ceramic Works, 5000 BCE – 2010 CE, begins ominously, with the declaration, “…ceramics is kind of crazy. I hate ceramics… I think if you hate something too much, you have to do it. You have More …
In a moment of anger two years ago, Conrad Burns, the Republican former senator from Montana who received campaign funds through super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff declared that “Jack Abramoff should never have been born.” It was an easy comment for Burns to make. Abramoff was already under indictment and cooperating with US authorities who were investigating allegations of crimes committed by Abramoffs political friends, some of whom would end up in More …
June Wayne is nearly 93 years old, though were it not for an occasional quiver in her voice and movements, you might never guess it. In Albuquerque for the celebrations of Tamarind Institutes 50th anniversary, the elegant founder of the Institute — who remains its eloquent champion — wore her signature black glasses and communicated to a full house at Rodey Theater her sense of social consciousness, that led her More …
ASPEN–Richard Carters New Paintings: Future Beauty, constitute a 44-painting series, exploring fire in its contemporary apocalyptic forms””forest fires, prairie fires, fires burning oil in the Gulf of Mexico from the Deep Horizon well, flames of meteor fragments entering the atmosphere. He will show some of them – and an unrelated suite of seven digital prints – at David Floria Gallery in Aspen from September 10 to October 6. “Even as More …
Mierle Laderman Ukeles has performed as an artist for 40 years, setting up her work as situations that show the overlooked civic sanitation worker. Ukeles spoke at the Santa Fe Art Institute May 10. The Denver-born New Yorker cited the freedom of her “kin,” 20th-century artists Pollock, Duchamp and Rothko, as inspiring her to become an artist. Ukeles, 71, said the “epiphany” of recognizing that motherhood was maintenance work stimulated More …
Theres no theme to the recently opened Whitney Biennial, in a year when the themes of collapse and disillusion that haunt the real world and the film world couldnt be more apt. This themeless-ness may be the only way in which the Whitney is bucking trends in the show that has defined the museum. The other theme might simply be that all the artists are American, which could mean anything More …
There are plenty of themes in this year at the Berlin International Film Festival, the 60th anniversary of the annual event, but one that recurs – mostly like a nightmare – is that of the institution, the prison. Shutter Island by Martin Scorsese, the most carefully monitored film at the festival for its world premiere, is set in 1954 in a hospital for the criminally insane on an island in More …
A major event at Haifa had nothing to do with the festivals competitions. It was the screening of the new Israeli feature, Lebanon. It was not the official Israeli opening of the film, which had played already in theaters in order to qualify for an Oscar nomination (which went instead to Ajami, a collaboration by two directors, one Jew and one Arab, about Arab street kids in Jaffa – and More …