On March 4, 2023, six eco-extremists from Die Letzte Generation (The Last Generation), attacked the monument to the German constitution that sits just outside of the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament. The story went largely unreported by the US corporate media. The radicals raided the Grundgesetz 49 (Basic Law 49) art installation located in front of the parliament building that is known…
This is a tale of two cities, though I imagine Charles Dickens never imagined anything like the following. The story has to do with one garden city where gentlepeople exalt art, and another cosmopolis… actually the very same burg, where those identical magnificos step over bodies to see first-class art exhibits. Wherever you are in Los Angeles, you will come…
On August 6, 2015, a highly praised public mural funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and the D.C. Commission on the Arts & Humanities was defaced by a vandal or vandals. Unashamedly, a leading left-wing activist wrote a vile article celebrating the willful destruction of the artwork because it depicts eleven US presidents from Eisenhower to Obama. Then,…
Enthusiasts of American social realism are generally familiar with the outstanding murals that were painted in 1934 on the interior walls of San Francisco’s Coit Tower. Few however, can name a single artist out of the twenty-six that worked on the murals inside the splendid Art Deco tower. One of those artists was Bernard Baruch Zakheim (1896-1985), a Jewish immigrant…
On May 1st, 2008, the Los Angeles Times reported that famed L.A. muralist Kent Twitchell settled his lawsuit against the U.S. government for obliterating his six-story mural depiction of artist Ed Ruscha. Starting in 1978, it took Twitchell nine years to complete his mural on an outside wall of the L.A. headquarters of the U.S. Department of Labor. In 2006…
I spotted this anonymous street art poster of Republican presidential candidate John McCain in the North Hollywood district of Los Angeles. The title of the poster, Police and Thieves, comes from a Jamaican reggae hit written and performed by Junior Murvin and produced by Lee “Scratch” Perry in 1976. The song was popularized further in a 1977 punk version by…
For the last month or so, posters that look as if they were made from stencils have been appearing on city streets from Los Angeles to New York City. Giving the impression of having been created with black spray-paint and a cut-out template, the grim face on the poster is imperfect with its fuzzy edges and runny paint drips. The…
In July of 2005, I wrote about Myth of Tomorrow, a long lost but rediscovered mural by famed Japanese artist, Taro Okamoto. This article was updated on April 9, 2016 to reflect recent developments regarding Mr. Okamoto’s monumental mural. The video above shows the mural in situ at the Shibuya railway station in Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan. Painted in Mexico between 1968…
