“Surveying the Spanish master’s oeuvre from 1904 to 1971, Picasso Black and White examines the artist’s lifelong exploration of a black-and-white palette through 118 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper. Picasso’s deceptively simple use of isolated black, white, and gray hues belies the extraordinary complexity and power of these expressive works, which purge color in order to highlight their formal structure. “
I am his Mistress Keira Knightley as Anna Karenina
Exceptional films are those films where everyone involved takes a chance. Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina is breath-taking, luxurious, magical and pushes to the edge every element of movie making. The staging, cinematography, costumes, lighting, and acting etc. every inch of this film is sumptuous and in particular it is the choreography (Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui) that captured my imagination and made the unreal real for me.
See the movie, it is really much bigger then the trailer.
The Columbia Museum of Art presents an exhibition devoted to Mark Rothko, (1903-1970).
The event “celebrates one of the world’s most influential and best-known artists of the 20th century by featuring 37 paintings, watercolors and works on paper which are drawn largely from the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. “
“Mickalene Thomas: Origin of the Universe” is the first solo museum show for this Brooklyn artist, whose portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.
She is “best known for her elaborate, collage-inspired paintings, embellished with rhinestones, enamel, and colorful acrylics. Her depictions of African American women explore a spectrum of black female beauty and sexual identity while constructing images of femininity and power… the exhibition highlights recent bodies of work that examine interior and exterior environments in relation to the female figure. Their settings are often inspired by her 1970s childhood.”
The Cleveland Museum of Art offers a retrospective, “Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video” thru September 2013.
“The first section of the exhibition will feature selections from the 1980s and early 1990s that were inspired by the artist’s direct experiences and observations. The next section will feature works made in response to historical situations that have impacted African American identity, as well as that of other disempowered peoples. A third grouping will contain photographs that focus on the role of place in Weems’s examination of the underlying causes and effects of racism, slavery, and imperialism… A notion of universality is present throughout: while African Americans are typically her primary subjects, Weems wants “people of color to stand for the human multitudes” and for her art to resonate with audiences of all races.”
The beautiful and extraordinary work of Lisa Call is on at exhibit at the Art Quilt Gallery in New York, a gallery committed to contemporary art quilts.
Structures #143 by Lisa Call * copyrighted by the artist
Lisa Call’s is imaginative, edgy, bold, and comforting. Comforting in that the forms she uses to construct her work are patterns that we experience in our minds, like the things we want to say and do but never do. Another way of saying this is that Lisa says in her art what we (me) wish I had said.
“Lisa Call creates bold geometric contemporary textile paintings where color is of primary importance and is combined intuitively, often in unexpected ways, employing a unique palette of cotton fabrics she hand dyes. Her work is abstract but draws elements from many places: her love of the colors and geological forms of the southwest, repetition, pattern, and an attraction to human-made structures for containment such as fences and stone walls. Extensive stitching on the surface adds rich texture to her finished work.”…The Art Quilt Gallery.
Lisa’s work is bold in that she is not looking to trick or confuse the viewer. Each piece, says what needs to be said, simply and beautiful. The Show will be up until Oct 20th.
