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Art in Action: El Salvador
The International Center of Photography in New York is hosting an exhibition of wartime photographs titled: El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers. This important exhibit details the bloody US backed counterinsurgency war that ravaged the Central American nation, with the photos documenting the period from 1979 to 1983. Organized more than twenty years ago by photographers Susan Meiselas and Henry Mattison,…
The Builders & The Destroyers
Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) was one of America’s greatest African American artists – but you could just as easily say that he was one of the preeminent artists of the 20th Century. There’s no doubt that his narrative style, a blend of social realism and flattened abstract picture planes, was to influence legions of artists – myself being one of them….
Abstract Art & The Cultural Cold War
For those who still regard art as being above politics consider the following. The Central Intelligence Agency financed, organized, and assured the success of the American abstract expressionist movement, using artists like Jackson Pollock, Sam Francis, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, and Mark Rothko, as weapons in the struggle against the Soviet Union. Frances Stonor Saunders has presented…
The Dumbing Down of Culture
I’ve long understood the connection between visual art and music. To me the musician and artist are kindred spirits, and music has always fanned the flames of my own creativity. Naturally I’ve always been an avid music fan, and since my childhood I’ve enthusiastically collected music recordings. In fact when I was 7 years old in 1961, the very first…
Germany’s Art Controversies
In Berlin Germany, the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art opened a major exhibition on January 29th, 2005 – Regarding Terror: The RAF Exhibition. Through the works of some 40 contemporary artists working in various media, the exhibit focuses on Germany’s infamous terrorist organization, Red Army Faction (RAF). In the 1970’s and 80’s, the communist urban guerilla group conducted a violent…
Nude Statues Liberated!
In January of 2002, then Attorney General of the United States, John Ashcroft, censored a pair of classic Art Deco statues located in the Great Hall of the Justice Department. I wrote about this ridiculous act of Taliban-like extremism at the time it happened. Ashcroft, a Christian fundamentalist, was made terribly uncomfortable by the statues. In order to protect western…