by Bob Martin | Aug 5, 2011 | Art, Culture, Directors, Movies
Awkward love stories are not unusual, however they are seldom about African Americans or as elegantly told as this film. The normalcy of the main characters existence, in one of the world’s most beautiful cities, sets the stage for the complexity of racial transformation. The juxtaposition, that some of us want to keep what we’ve got and others want to move on to something new and that reconciliation is both difficult and necessary.
Medicine for Melancholy is a small film which tries to tell a lot and succeeds for the most part. It goes to show that you don’t need a huge budget to make a movie that tells a good story and enlightens its audience.
I am hopeful that the Director, Barry Jenkins, is still working his craft and will get the opportunity to continue to do insightful movie making.
Wyatt Cenac, Tracy Heggins and Barry Jenkins
by Sandy | Aug 2, 2011 | Art, Arts, Entertainment and Music, Blogroll, Museums
Museum of Fine Arts Boston / MFA – opened a new “Art for the Americas Wing”: 
“…the new wing takes a global perspective on Art of the Americas, showcasing more than 5,000 works of art produced in North, Central, and South America over the course of three millennia. Art in all media will be arranged chronologically on four floors. The wing’s 53 brand-new galleries include nine beautiful period rooms and four Behind the Scenes galleries to enhance the way visitors experience and interact with the collection.”
“Art of the Americas”
Museum of Fine Arts Boston,
Avenue of the Arts, 465 Huntington,
Boston, Massachusetts
(Images: “Room in Brooklyn”, 1932, Edward Hopper and “New York Harbor”, 1855, Fitz Henry Lane)
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by Sandy | Jul 31, 2011 | Art, Blogroll, Exhibits, Movies, Museums, Reposted
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents a program celebrating the gifted, often bizarre, and controversial director of such movies as “Sweeney Todd”, “The Nightmare Before Christmas”, “Ed Wood” and “The Corpse Bride”. 
The exhibit is “Tim Burton, a major retrospective exploring the full range of Tim Burton’s creative work, both as a director of live-action and animated films, and as an artist, illustrator, photographer, and writer… the exhibition brings together over 700 drawings, paintings, photographs, moving-image works, storyboards, puppets, concept artworks, maquettes, costumes, and cinematic ephemera, including art from a number of unrealized and little-known personal projects.”
Tim Burton * Until October 31, 2011
LACMA/ Los Angeles County Museum of Art
5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles
by Sandy | Jul 30, 2011 | Art, Arts, Entertainment and Music, Blogroll, Culture, Exhibits, Museums
This month the Newark Museum opened a dynamic exhibition addressing the mix and richness of Cuban art- The Ajiaco: Stirrings of the Cuban Soul.
“In 1939, anthropologist Fernando Ortiz characterized Cuban culture as ajiaco, a rich stew consisting of a large variety of ingredients. The ingredients of the “stew” include Catholicism brought in by the Spaniards; the spirituality of the Yoruba slaves and their cultural traditions from Africa; and the Chinese indentured servants who brought Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism. The base of the stew is the indigenous people, such as Tainos, who were almost wiped out by the Spaniards. “
The Ajiaco: Stirrings of the Cuban Soul – Until 8/14/11
The Newark Museum
49 Washington Street, Newark, NJ
Images: El Artista (The Artist), Luis Cruz Azaceta (b. 1942) and Se Alimenta mi Espíritu (My Soul is Nourished), Manuel Mendive (b. 1944)
by Bob Martin | Jul 28, 2011 | Art, Culture
Photo by Robert Capra
We should thank Photo Journalists and others for preserving reality for us. The reality of what life is really like for the majority of people on the planet is 
difficult to comprehend, especially for those of us who live on the outer fringe.
For almost seventy years citizens of the United States experienced themselves as living on the edge and outside of the “fishbowl” looking inward, with occasional concern for the fish in bowl. Earthquakes, floods and other disasters would catch our attention, but it was always someone else’s problem and we would dump money on it like it was water and we were putting out a fire.
In the last ten years we’ve begun to slip into the reality of the rest of the world (our feet are wet) and find it difficult to hide behind Lindsay Lohan’s incarceration or Tiger Woods’ overindulgence and we can hear the utter fear in peoples voices and on their faces as their reality inches closer and closer to that of the rest of the world.
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by Cybel Martin | Jul 26, 2011 | Art, Fashion
The Alexander McQueen : Savage Beauty exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is mind-blowing. The curator managed to create an experience that, I imagine, replicates wearing his clothes: woman as mythical creature. The Met has extended the show until August 7th and introduced a new program, Met Mondays with McQueen, which will allow visitors to view the exhibit on Mondays (while the Museum is closed to the public).
Savage Beauty at the Met until Sunday August 7th, 2011
by Sandy | Jul 25, 2011 | Art, Blogroll, Culture, Exhibits, Museums
You may have guessed that I really like quilts. (I post about their exhibitions frequently.) I consider quilting an art form. These coverings, also used as wall hangings, are not only colorful, but often tell stories, family history, etc. Quilts can be comforting to the body, the eye and the soul.
MoAD/ Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, CA presents: “Soulful Stitching: Patchwork Quilts by Africans (Siddis) in India”. This is an introduction to a little known people (at least to me) and their quilt tradition called “Kowandi”.
Featured are “32 striking patchwork quilts made by Siddi women, heirs to the culture and values of Africans brought to Goa on India’s west coast beginning in the 16th century. While they have adopted and integrated many cultural aspects of the Indian peoples with whom they have lived for generations, Siddis have also retained and transformed certain cultural and artistic traditions from Africa”.
Soulful Stitching: Patchwork Quilts by Africans (Siddis) in India – Until September 18, 2011
Museum of the African Diaspora/ MoAD
685 Mission Street San Francisco, CA
by Sandy | Jul 22, 2011 | Art, Blogroll, Exhibits, Museums
The Museum of Fine Arts Houston/ MFAH, is featuring “Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian Painting” until mid August. 
“…25 masterworks of the Venetian Renaissance—13 paintings and 12 drawings—that include two of the greatest paintings of the Italian Renaissance: Titian’s Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto. These two paintings from the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland have never before traveled to the United States. The exhibition also features paintings from the collection by Jacopo Bassano, Lorenzo Lotto, Jacopo Tintoretto, and Veronese.“
Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian Painting: Masterpieces from the National Galleries of Scotland * Until August 14, 2011
Museum of Fine Arts Houston
(Image: “Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist”, Titian 1517-1520)
by Bob Martin | Jul 21, 2011 | Art, Art Travel, Exhibits, Reposted
Window Cleaning 1935 - Aaron Douglas
Currently at the Saint Louis Art Museum there is an exhibit of works by Aaron Douglas and feature three rarely exhibited gouaches from the collection of Anita White. Well celebrated and often referred to as a “Harlem Renaissance painter” and as “African American Modernist”, I’ve grown to love some of his early paintings, that have not received, in recent years , the same attention that his more famous graphic works have. Would love to see a complete retrospective of his work.
The exhibit at the Saint Louis Art Museum
by Bob Martin | Jul 18, 2011 | Art, Exhibits
