Tom Lea & the Art of War

While on a visit to my local library as a nine-year-old in 1962, I randomly pulled a dog-eared picture book about the Second World War from a shelf, retreating to an isolated table to thumb through the digest in solitude. Flipping through the book’s tattered pages I received an unexpected surprise I would never forget. I had come to a…

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Art Hate Week!

The British Art Resistance (B.A.R.) has organized National Art Hate Week for “the disruptive betterment of culture” and for purposes of giving UK bourgeois art institutions “a necessary kicking.”  Sarcastically modeled after the two-minute hate rallies found in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, Art Hate events will encourage people to express contempt for “the business of culture” as well as…

Trickle Down Arts Relief?

Funds from the Obama administration’s stimulus package, the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, are beginning to trickle down across the nation to various arts organizations and museums. $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts was included in the stimulus package, and it is that money that is now being dispersed. Nationwide over 2,400 arts organizations applied for…

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Mexican Prints at University of Notre Dame

The prints of the Mexican Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP – Popular Graphic Arts Workshop), are being presented at the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana from July 12, 2009 to September 13, 2009. Titled Para la Gente: Art, Politics, and Cultural Identity of the Taller de Gráfica, the exhibition presents forty prints created by…

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LACMA & BP’s Iraqi Oil Fields

On July 1, 2009, the U.S. backed Iraqi government announced that BP (British Petroleum) and China National Petroleum Corp., had been awarded contracts to exploit Iraq’s al-Rumeila oil field – one of the largest oil fields in the world. In the past BP has attempted to rebrand itself as a “clean energy” company, going so far as to promote itself…