SAN FRANCISCO — The past year has seen many powerful, violent images.
AX Mina
AX Mina (aka An Xiao Mina) is an author, artist and futures thinker who follows her curiosity. She co-produces Five and Nine, a podcast about magic, work and economic justice.
Posted inArt
An Iranian-American Artist Revisits Images from the 1979 Revolution
SAN FRANCISCO — Follow a major social movement today, and unless you can afford to travel onsite, you’re likely to experience it through photos, hashtags, and video uploads. But a movement’s record has always had global resonance, distributed through a mix of broadcast and pre-internet forms of citizen media like pamphlets, posters, and zines.
Posted inArt
Architecture for Humanity at the New Aspen Art Museum
ASPEN, Colorado — Despite its reputation as a resort town for the 1%, the heart of Aspen looks much like a classic Western American town. The new Aspen Art Museum, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Shigeru Ban, stands out in this context in both height and design.
Posted inArt
Behind the Scenes with a Beloved Children’s Book Illustrator
SAN FRANCISCO — Anyone who’s read Arnold Lobel’s iconic Frog and Toad series may wonder: why pick a frog and a toad? And what’s the difference between a frog and a toad anyway?
Posted inOpinion
Surreal Puppets Retell the Jabberwocky
SAN FRANCISCO — At San Francisco’s annual Dickens Fair, I learned about the work of Darren Way, whose Dangerous Puppets creations feature fanciful characters and bizarre imagery bordering on the fantastical and grotesque.
Posted inArt
Remembering the West Coast Mail Art Scene
SAN FRANCISCO — While we tumble, tweet, and post our remixes of media online in a daily creative dialogue, it helps to remember that the history of creative correspondence extends to well before the internet.
Posted inOpinion
Why Do Short Messaging Platforms Matter?
SAN FRANCISCO — The day before the WhatsApp acquisition was announced, I was just using the app. It’s one of many mobile messaging platforms I use, along with Viber, Line, and WeChat. I used WhatsApp to chat with friends as far away and diverse as Southeast Asia, East Africa, and Western Europe, and with all the other short-messaging apps, I’m regularly chatting with a good chunk of the world.
Posted inFilm
Capturing Slow Portraits of People and Landscapes
Koyanisqaatsi, a debut collaboration between filmmaker Godfrey Reggio and composer Philip Glass, broke ground in so many ways in the 1980’s for exploring film as a poetic, rather than narrative or theatrical expression. Over ten years later, Reggio and Glass have come together to produce Visitors, another moving poem, at once visual and musical, without words or a clear narrative.
Posted inArt
An Online Community for Young Poets
“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry,” Emily Dickinson once wrote.
Posted inNews
An Anthem For Uganda’s Oppressed Queer Community
This past December, Uganda’s Parliament passed an Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which would extend criminalization of homosexuality to life in prison and up to seven years for advocacy work. Nkoyooyo Brian decided to respond with an anthem for the country’s LGBTQ community.
Posted inArt
From Mapping Solar Potential to Mapping the American Empire
SAN FRANCISCO — According to Cliff Chen, a senior energy analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists, if a solar power system were built in the American Southwest it would apparently only need to be 100 miles by 100 miles to provide enough energy to power the entire United States.
Posted inOpinion
Using New Media to Shed Light on Old Art Narratives
The internet is a visual space, where virality comes most frequently to media rich in images, whether videos, animated GIFs or simple memes. Connecting these new forms of media with all the classic ways that human beings have told visual stories is a powerful way to reanimate them, sometimes literally, for the digital age.
