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…
It was in 1984 that I originally carved the linoleum block from which I would pull the black and white print titled, Sandinista. In 1986 I reworked the block print into a full nine-color silkscreen print. I hand-pulled an edition on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Augusto César Sandino, the legendary Nicaraguan leader who was murdered Feb. 21,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
In 1932 the Mexican Muralist Diego Rivera began painting a series of 27 fresco mural panels at the Detroit Institute of Arts in Detroit, Michigan. Titled, Detroit Industry, the monumental paintings had been commissioned by the president of the Ford Motor Company, Edsel Ford (son of Henry Ford), and the director of the D.I.A., William Valentiner. The theme of Rivera’s…
