Posts from the “Art” Category

Eisen Bernard Bernardo: Album+Art

Posted on February 19, 2017

Artwork: Lemonade by Beyonce + Natural Princess by Sophie Anderson. © Eisen Bernand Bernardo

Artist Eisen Bernard Bernardo is the mastermind “Album+Art,” a brilliant series of visual mash-ups that pair classic pop music albums with classical paintings to breathtaking effect. This is fourth installment of the “+Art” project, which started in 2009 with “Mag+Art,” a series pairing magazine covers with paintings that went viral in 2014. The following year, a follower challenged Bernardo to use album covers instead of magazines, and the result has thrilled people around the world.

The pairings reveal the eye of an expert with a vast vocabulary of both pop music iconography and art historical references. “I’m fond of homage, similarities and references in movies, music, and other art forms. I felt that album covers (like other contemporary artforms) were inspired directly (and/or indirectly) by classical paintings. I wanted to compare and contrast modern and classical aesthetics,” Bernardo explains.

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Artwork: The Freewheelin Bob Dylan + The La Rue Bavolle by Claude Monet. © Eisen Bernand Bernardo

Categories: Art, Crave, Music

The David Hockney Takeover!

Posted on February 16, 2017

Artwork: David Hockney, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) 1971 Private Collection© David Hockney. Courtesy of Tate Britain.

Has there ever been a painter of modern life as celebrated as David Hockney? The British artist, who celebrates his 80th birthday this July, is being fêted with the largest retrospective of his career at the Tate Britain and a flurry of fabulous new art books celebrating his incredible body of work.

While a student at the Royal College of Art in London, Hockney was included in the 1963 exhibition Young Contemporaries, which signaled the arrival of British Pop art. A year later, he moved to Los Angeles, where he lived for four years, creating his seminal painting, A Bigger Splash (1967), which has been knocked off with reckless abandon.

Over a period of six decades, Hockney has transformed the nature of picture making through his relentless questioning of conventions, always seeking to go deeper to connect with art’s very essence. The exhibition at the Tate, simply titled David Hockney, starts with the Love paintings, early work made in 1960 and ’61, in which he subverted the macho language of abstract expressionism and subverted it into a vehicle to express homoerotic ideas and experiences.

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Artwork: David Hockney. English 1937–. The group XI, 7-11 July 2014. acrylic on canvas. 122.0 x 183.0 cm. Collection of the artist. © David Hockney. Photo Credit: Richard Schmidt. rom David Hockney: Current (Thames & Hudson, May 2017).

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Painting

Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors

Posted on February 13, 2017

Artwork: Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, 2013. Wood, metal, glass mirrors, plastic, acrylic panel, rubber, LED lighting system, acrylic balls, and water, 113 ¼ x 163 ½ x 163 ½ in. Courtesy of David Zwirner, N.Y. © Yayoi Kusama

“Art is like an endless ocean. I can feel a sense of infinity, the heaven and sky—all a sense of infinity that I can feel through the ocean,” Yayoi Kusama tells Melissa Chiu in a conversation in Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, the exhibition catalogue published by DelMonico Books/Prestel that accompanies an exhibition by the same name at the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. this February. The Hirschhorn is the first stop on a two-year, five-city tour; a full list of venues and dates appears at the end of this story.

Infinity Mirrors is one of the most anticipated exhibitions of 2017, as it includes six of Kusama’s mindblowing Infinity Mirror Rooms. By now you’ve seen them in countless selfies taken by museum attendees around the world. Kusama has constructed magical spaces that capture the captivating expanse of vast, unknowable universe in rooms filled with multi-colored LED lights. All the surfaces are mirrors so that the result is a gloriously expansive sense of being launched into outer space.

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Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Japan

Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks

Posted on February 9, 2017

Artwork: Untitled Notebook (front cover), 1980–81. Jean-Michel Basquiat (American, 1960–1988). Mixed media on board; 9 5/8 x 7 5/8 x ¼ in. Collection of Larry Warsh. Copyright © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, all rights reserved. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Photo: Sarah DeSantis, Brooklyn Museum

Like a prophet, Jean-Michel Basquiat was ahead of his time, alternately embraced and exploited by the art world. The artist, who first became known in the late 1970s, produced more than 2,000 paintings, drawings, sculptures, and mixed-media works before his death in 1988. He also kept an unknown number of notebooks, where he recorded his private thoughts and ideas, some of which would later be realized in his finished works.

It is into these notebooks that we can glimpse the artist’s mind at work, the process of working through ideas in images and words, of things that pass through the mind like “Higher Monkeys” “Spring Onions” and “The History Of The World” at the end of a list that began as “Rubber Monkey At A Buffet.” The pages of Basquiat’s notebooks string together like memories of a dream. Reading through these notebooks is like reading a diary of sorts. It’s a deeply private space that exists between the brain and the eyes. It is being inside and outside of your self at the exact same time.

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Artwork: Al Jolson, 1981. Jean-Michel Basquiat (American, 1960–1988). Oilstick on paper; 24 x 18 in. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Estelle Schwartz, 87.47. Copyright © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, all rights reserved. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum

Artwork: Jean Michel Basquiat in his Great Jones Street studio, New York, 1987. Tseng Kwong Chi (Chinese-Canadian-American, born Hong Kong, 1950–1990). Chromogenic print; 50 x 50 in. Muna Tseng Dance Projects, New York & Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, New York. © 1987 Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc. New York. www.tsengkwongchi.com

Categories: 1980s, Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Painting

Winning the Fight to Bring the Coral Reefs of the Florida Keys Back to Life

Posted on February 8, 2017

Photo: Key Largo, Fl. Rick Loomis/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images.

Since the late 1970s, the coral reefs throughout the Florida Keys and the Caribbean have experienced unprecedented declines, with massive losses in the population of local staghorn and elkhorn reef-building corals. In recent decades, an estimated 25 to 40 percent of the world’s corals have died due to rising seawater temperatures, ocean acidification, and coral bleaching—all symptoms of climate change. Fortunately, Dr. David Vaughan is leading the Coral Reef Restoration project to bring these vital biospheres back to life, just as the reefs had reached an all-time low.

The Executive Director at the Mote Tropical Research Laboratory in Summerland Key, Florida, Dr. David Vaughan is the manager of the Coral Reef Restoration program. In 2013, he developed “microfragmenting,” a technique that allows him to create coral colonies that grow at 25 to 50 times fast than in the wild. This quick-growth process has enabled the team to develop culture or propagation for more than 20 species of reef-building hard corals that can then be transplanted to dead or dying reefs in the Keys.

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Categories: Art

The Vast Treasures of The Met Now Available in the Public Domain

Posted on February 8, 2017

Artwork: Egyptian, Fragmentary Head of a Queen, 1352-1356 B.C.E. Image provided by The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

On Tuesday, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, made about 375,000 public-domain images available for commercial and scholarly use through Open Access for anyone with a Creative Commons Zero license. This policy, which introduces partnerships with Wikimedia, Artstor, the Digital Public Library of America, Art Resource, and Pinterest, allows people from all walks of life free use of a vast range of digital images and data in from The Met’s vast history, collection, exhibitions, events, people, and activities.

Although the initiative was considered controversial when it was first introduced, as society continues to adapt itself to a digital interface, the movement to digitize and share works in the public domain has made major leaps and strides, recognizing that the open content movement is a necessity of modern life.

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Artwork: Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bashi-Bazouk, 1868-69. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Categories: Africa, Art, Crave, Painting, Photography

Long Live Frederick Douglass, Man of the New Millennium

Posted on February 6, 2017

Photo: Frederick Douglass, circa 1960,s courtesy of Picture History/Wikimedia Commons.

On February 1, Donald Trump kicked off Black History Month with a breakfast meeting where he quixotically announced, “I am very proud now that we have a museum on the National Mall where people can learn about Reverend King, so many other things. Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.”

The public quickly took note, wondering if the President was aware that Douglass had died in 1895 at the age of 77. Not to be missed amid the head scratching and jokes is the fact that Douglass continues to be one of the most prolific, influential Americans of our time. In recent months, his work has inspired the publication of two new books, a magazine, and an exhibition of photography and art.

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Categories: Art, Books, Crave, Exhibitions, Photography

Devin Allen Awarded the Inaugural Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship

Posted on February 6, 2017

Photo: © Devin Allen, courtesy of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum

The Gordon Parks Foundation has named photographer Devin Allen as one of two inaugural recipients of a new fellowship program. Allen, who was born and raised in West Baltimore, catapulted to national fame when his documentary photograph of an unidentified black man running from a phalanx of police made the cover of Time magazine in May 2015 – only the third time the work of an amateur photographer had ever received such prominent placement.

The photograph was taken on April 25, 2015, as Allen documented the Baltimore uprising in the wake of the extrajudicial execution of Freddie Gray. Allen, who grew up just five minutes away from the site of Gray’s fatal encounter with the police on April 12, told Crave last year, “People don’t understand Baltimore. They only think of ‘The Wire’…it’s worse than that. But we have a strong community. My city is real. There’s no sugar coating. It’s a small city. In twenty, thirty minutes I can be anywhere. You see the issues the people face. That’s why I love it so much. If you’re from Baltimore you can make it anywhere.”

Indeed, Allen has shown the world he has what it takes to make it. Committed to his community, he established “Through Their Eyes,” a project that trains Baltimore students in underfunded public school in photography. The mission is to arm the youth of his city with cameras, not guns, and to show them how to spread “hope and love through art.”

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Categories: Art, Crave, Photography

Manuel Alvarez Bravo

Posted on February 4, 2017

Photo: Manuel Alvarez Bravo, The Daughter of the Dancers (La hija de los danzantes). 1933. Gelatin-silver print. 9 1/4 x 6 11/16″. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase.

I can still remember the first art show I ever reviewed. It was the Manuel Alvarez Bravo retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, which was 20 years ago this month. I was on assignment for The Village Voice, writing for this brand new thing folks were calling “The World Wide Web.”

I stepped into my first press preview and had a croissant, picked up a folder I still have (and I keep nothing) with an image a woman looking through a porthole in the wall. I was mystified, intrigued, and absolutely enthralled. I can still remember the first line of the review: “A man lies dead in the dirt, his hair slicked with blood like it was gel.” I knew then this was all I ever wanted—needed—to do. Be still and listen for the words that weave the spell.

It’s been a rather round about road, such is life, and on this, the 115th birthday of Alvarez Bravo, I give thanks. It all began with a photograph and the urge to give voice to the thousands of words that speak every language at the same time deep within the silent realm of a picture hanging on the wall.

Categories: Art, Exhibitions, Latin America, Photography

Meet Awol Erizku, the Man Who Photographed Beyoncé’s Maternity Pictures

Posted on February 3, 2017

Courtesy of Beyonce’s Instagram

Crave fave Awol Erizku has made headlines worldwide as the artist who photographed Beyoncé’s pregnancy photographs. The superstar wowed the world on the first day of Black History Month when she posted a portrait of herself on Instagram wearing nothing but a bra, panties, and veil, showing her bare belly swelling with life, with the announcement that she and Jay Z are expecting twins. That post, which set the internet aflame, now has more than 9.2 million likes.

Seated in profile in front of an enormous wreath, Beyoncé evoked the goddess of fertility and the rites of spring. Yesterday, ARTNews reported that a source close to Nina Johnson gallery, Miami, revealed that Awol Erizku confirmed via text that he took the photograph.

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“Vision and Justice,” Sarah Lewis’s bestselling issue of Aperture Magazine

Categories: Art, Crave, Photography

Symbols: A Handbook for Seeing

Posted on January 31, 2017

Photo: (Triangle) “Pyramids” Courtesy of The Monacelli Press.

The human mind is a magical, mysterious place where things are (as much as they not) what they appear to be. Within the mind, layers are added to experience in the form of narration, translation, and interpretation in search of the great, vast overwhelming call for meaning in this majestic and monstrous world. There are so many questions we ask ourselves when we behold that which lays before our eyes. The desire to know can become a need, as our mind is inclined to require a structure upon which it can operate.

So we find ourselves in this curious space where we both seek and receive information that we do and do not understand. Most of us are disinclined to the rigors of critical thought, for it drains us of illusions and fantasies and replaces it with a state of ongoing doubt. It is far easier, and less unnerving, to skate along the surface of life–though invariably the ice is thin in places we may not foresee. Thus, the questions show themselves. Who the what now—and can someone tell please me why?

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Categories: Art, Books, Crave