Americans for the Arts is a leading nonprofit organization that advances the arts in the United States. With offices in Washington, DC, and New York City, it has a record of more than 45 years of service. On February 5, 2007, Americans for the Arts President and CEO Robert L. Lynch, responded to the Bush administration’s fiscal year 2008 Arts…
Shams (Arabic for “Sun”) is a popular female Kuwaiti singer who has just released a controversial song titled, Ahlan Ezayak (or “Hi! How are you!”) Accompanied by a slick MTV-like video that lambastes George W. Bush and his occupation of Iraq, the song has become all the rage in the Middle East. Shams croons in the Khaliji style, one of…
Fernando Botero’s suite of paintings and drawings depicting the torture of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of their American jailers in Abu Ghraib prison, will at last be exhibited in an American museum. An exhibit of 24 paintings and 23 drawings by the 74 year old Columbian master, will go on view at the Doe Library, located at the University…
Major General William Caldwell, a senior commander of U.S. forces in occupied Iraq, compared the war in that country to a work of art in progress. At a weekly briefing in Baghdad, Caldwell addressed the violence now spiraling out of control, which includes the rising U.S. casualties (2,828 dead at the time of this writing), by saying, “Every great work…
The Iraqi surrealist painter, Muayad Muhsin, has painted a rather unflattering portrait of U.S. Defense Secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld. Muhsin’s surrealism is not informed by dreams and the unconsciousness mind, but by the horrors and barbarity of war. His painting titled, Picnic, portrays a combat boot wearing Rumsfeld relaxing comfortably in a chair, his raised feet resting on a destroyed…
In February of 2005, I wrote about artist Donald Shambroom and his Fatalities window installation assemblage in Boston’s Watertown area. Shambroom’s statement on the human cost of war seems more pressing today than when it was first conceptualized. On November 19th, 2005, U.S. Marines went on a revenge killing spree in the western Iraqi city of Haditha after one of…
The Peace Tower is a powerful statement of protest. By constructing it outside the museum’s entrance for all to see, Mark and Rirkrit remain true to the spirit of the original. The tower gives us a chorus of artists’ voices in a public reminder that art is being made in a world that is, in the words of Antonin Artaud,…
On February 16, 2006 Australia’s Special Broadcasting Services (SBS) program Dateline aired previously unpublished video and photos taken by US troops at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003. The damning pictures show Iraqi prisoners bound, naked, wounded, some covered in blood or excrement – undergoing abuse at the hands of their American jailers. Caution: this essay contains violent imagery not suitable…
