The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. That was the title Spanish artist Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828), gave to an etching he created in 1799. The print was Goya’s comment on the lack of critical thinking in Spanish society at the time, the etching part of the artist’s 80 print edition known as Los Caprichos, a suite of…
Since January 2005, this web log has been following the history of América Tropical – the famous 1932 mural painted by Mexican Muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros on Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles. So it is my pleasure to announce the first of three important L.A. panel discussions regarding the mural and the legacy of Siqueiros. Organized by Amigos de…
As BP’s broken underwater oil well in the Gulf of Mexico continues to gush over 100,000 barrels of oil per day into the fragile ecosystem, and as sheets of the thick sticky crude start to fill the delicate marsh lands of the Mississippi Delta – Greenpeace UK has launched an art competition to redesign the BP corporate logo. The contest…
In 1989 the Guatemalan Information Center (GIC), a human rights organization founded by a group of Guatemalan exiles living in Los Angeles, commissioned me to create a poster. Its purpose was to announce the Guatemalan Human Rights Tribunal, a public forum the GIC was planning to hold in the Council Chambers of Los Angeles City Hall on the subject of…
If you think the eerie green photograph shown at left is just another postmodern artwork to be found in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), then you are not too far off the mark. While the weird image was certainly not conjured up by one of today’s fashionable art stars, it is in a manner…
The Mexican Muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros completed his second Los Angeles mural, América Tropical, in 1932. Created on the rooftop of the Italian Hall building located on the city’s historic Olvera Street, the mural was formally presented to the public in an official unveiling that took place on the evening of October 9, 1932. Within six months the portion of…
Celebrated American paintings were presented at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in an exhibition titled American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915. The exhibit was comprised of 103 paintings that depicted the American experience from the colonial period to the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. On display were iconic canvases by the likes of John Singleton Copley,…
The Los Angeles Times abandoned all pretense of being a serious newspaper guided by high journalistic standards, when on March 5, 2010 the daily ran a full color paid advertisement as its front page rather than headlines and photographs from the news stories of the day. It has been confirmed by the Hollywood news publication The Wrap, that the Walt…
