As Christo and Jeanne-Claude prepare to inflict The Gates upon New York’s Central Park, the famous commons is beginning to look as if it’s under police siege. Several hundred police will flood the park around the clock to guard the installation for sixteen days starting Feb. 12th. Private security, park enforcement, and hundreds of police officers both uniformed and undercover,…
On February 7th anti-war artists held a protest outside of the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, to voice disapproval over the museum’s exhibit, Fire and Ice: Combat Art from Afghanistan and Iraq by Staff Sergeant Michael Fay USMCR. The exhibit was made possible by the support of the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation, and the protest took place as the…
On February 6th, the Mayor of Blacktown Australia banned anti-war street artwork by artist Zanny Begg. The artist’s works consisted of life-sized poster cut-outs of a US soldier gripping his M-16 rifle. Each wildly painted artwork incorporated the words, Checkpoint for Weapons of Mass Distraction. Hmm… whatever happened to those weapons of mass destruction we went to war over? The…
I first discovered the works of Black American artist Jacob Lawrence, as a teenager in the late 1960’s. Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement and the rising tide of dissent all around me, I was naturally enthusiastic over Lawrence’s epic series regarding the great Haitian slave rebellion of 1791. Lawrence was only twenty one when he completed his forty one…
Ben Shahn was one of my earliest inspirations as an artist. He believed art was “one of the last remaining outposts of free speech,” and his dedication to social realism led him to paint and draw the American experience of the 1930’s as he lived it. Shahn captured the poor and the working class with his pen and brush, and…
Back in December I wrote that Universal Pictures was going to produce, No True Glory: Battle for Fallujah, a pro-war film with Harrison Ford starring as Lt. Gen. James Mattis. Well the news just keeps getting stranger and stranger. At a recent forum Gen. Mattis publicly said: “Actually, it’s a lot of fun to fight. You know, it’s a hell…
When the US Army captured Iraq’s capital of Baghdad in April of 2003, people around the world were shocked by the whirlwind of looting that followed in the wake of liberation. Quick to seize and guard Iraq’s Oil Ministry, US forces left other government buildings unprotected and open to pillage by throngs of impoverished Iraqis. The country’s art and history…
Pioneering American architect Philip Johnson died on Tuesday, January 25th, 2005, he was 98 years old. His controversial designs encompassed everything from magnificent corporate headquarters to the Crystal Cathedral in Los Angeles. Johnson coined the architectural term international style and invented the role of museum architecture curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in 1931. Terrence Riley, the…
