In March of this year I wrote an exposé that uncovered the relationship between the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the multinational oil company, BP (British Petroleum). LACMA is expanding and renovating its facilities, and it has taken $25 million dollars from BP as a “gift” towards the projected cost of the reconstruction, which is $191 million….
The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles will be exhibiting, Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas, running Oct. 21st, 2007 through Jan. 20th, 2008. The exhibit takes place at the MOCA annex located at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, California. Approximately 150 works created by Douglas while he was the Minister of Culture for…
Life long social realist painter, printmaker and activist, Pele deLappe (pronounced: “Peelee Dahlap”), died from a stroke on Monday, October 1st, 2007, at the age of 91. Ms. deLappe’s art captured the life and times of her native San Francisco during the depression years and beyond, but the universal themes addressed in her artworks also gave them an eternal quality….
Fifty years after the death of Diego Rivera, the Palacio de Bellas Artes (Palace of Fine Arts) in Mexico City has launched a major exhibition to celebrate the famed Mexican Muralist. Having opened on September 28th, 2007, the important exhibit titled, Diego Rivera: Epopeya Mural (Diego Rivera: Epic Mural), presents 170 works of art by the radical Mexican artist, including…
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…
