The following account of a community being gentrified, is now so commonplace a story across America as to hardly merit attention. While this chronicle concerns a district in the City of Los Angeles, the dynamics apply to cities everywhere. I was born and raised in Los Angeles, and North Hollywood is a district in the north-western section of L.A. known…
The group, Saffron Revolution Worldwide (SRW) has created stencil art in support of the people’s uprising for democracy in Burma, also known as Myanmar. SRW encourages groups and individuals around the world to download the stencil template, utilizing it to create spray-paint stencil art in deep orange paint as an expression of solidarity with Burma’s marching monks. If making stencil…
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….
Two very different diamond rings are the focus of artworks currently being discussed in the art world and beyond – Blue Diamond, a sculpture by postmodernist Jeff Koons, and Marine Wedding, a photograph by Nina Berman. The artworks are poles apart, but each illustrates in its own way the crisis American society has fallen into. The works also exemplify the…
I make a short appearance on one of the special features appearing on the 30th Anniversary DVD edition of Sid & Nancy, Alex Cox’s 1986 movie about British punk rocker Sid Vicious and his American girlfriend, Nancy Spungen. In May of 2007, I was asked to appear in the special feature for the MGM movie re-release and contribute my thoughts…
What possible relevance could Adolphe-William Bouguereau, a French academic painter from the Victorian age, have in today’s world? That in essence is what the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette asked when it interviewed me regarding a display of the painter’s works at the Frick Art & Historical Center of Pennsylvania. The Frick exhibit, In the Studios of Paris: William Bouguereau & His American…
I was horrified to read in the Los Angeles Times that the historic collection of African American art owned by L.A.’s Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company has been “carted off to be auctioned in New York.” The LAT article, Historians angered by auction of black art, revealed that “Golden State plans to sell 94 artworks Oct. 4 at Swann…
The American painter, printmaker and sculptor, Leonard Baskin (1922-2000) once said “Art is content, or it is nothing.” As a teenage artist searching for role models, I discovered Baskin in the late 60’s – and I took his words to heart. A figurative realist shaped by the earthshaking events of the 1930’s, Baskin would first be recognized for his sculptures,…
