LOS ANGELES — As he raced against cancer to finish his fourth and final book, Leonardo’s Brain, author/inventor/surgeon Leonard Shlain was motivated by the possibility that his manuscript-in-progress might help answer a very vital question: How can mankind achieve a more creative and peaceful future?
John Seed
John Seed is a professor of art and art history at Mt. San Jacinto College in Southern California. Seed has written about art and artists for Arts of Asia, Art Ltd., Catamaran, Harvard Magazine, International Artist, The HuffingtonPost and Poets and Artists. An archive of his writings can be found at www.johnseed.com
Posted inBooks
Contemporary Art’s Body Language
The Figure: Painting Drawing and Sculpture, Contemporary Perspectives has the look of a high-end coffee table decoration, but don’t judge this book just by its Martha Mayer Erlebacher cover.
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Not at the New York Galleries
For your reading pleasure: six short reviews of nonexistent shows, none of which are actually on view in New York this week.
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The Immoveable Feasts of French Modernism
LOS ANGELES — In 1988 Jed Perl, a critic in his mid-thirties who had written for Vogue, Art in America, and The New Criterion, published his first book: Paris Without End: On French Art Since World War I.
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Artifacts of a Patriarchy that Was and Wasn’t
LOS ANGELES — The Paternal Suit: Heirlooms from the F. Scott Hess Family Foundation, on view at the Long Beach Museum of Art, is an exhibition that examines the imperfect influence of patriarchs and fathers on American history and American families.
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Painting with 5,000 Facebook Friends in Your Studio
LOS ANGELES — Most artists like to think of their studios as private domains: as places where they can wrestle with the problems and possibilities of art making without anyone looking over their shoulder. Mark Dutcher, a Los Angeles painter, has spent the last five years gradually breaking down that privacy.
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Meet the Ladies of the West Hamilton Koons Club
The Koons club, which Amelia and Marilyn co-founded three and a half years ago, currently has 21 members — all women — who meet on the first Thursday of each month in the Founder’s Hall of the West Hamilton United Methodist Church to discuss and celebrate the life and art of Jeff Koons.
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Growing Up in the Shadow of the Art World
In 1972, at the age of fourteen, Gabrielle Selz was attending a party following the third wedding of her father, the art historian and UC Berkeley professor Peter Selz, when a naked woman she had never seen before climbed into Selz’s lap and began to roll a joint. As she did so, other wedding guests began to cheer.
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A Children’s Tour of the Metropolitan Museum: 2034
Twenty years in the future at a little museum called the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Shifting Silhouettes in Oak Park
CHICAGO — At Terrain Exhibitions, an artist-run space in Oak Park, Illinois, artist Karen Azarnia has created an installation consisting of a suite of banners that appear in varying light situations on the front porch of a suburban home.
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Bridging the Coasts: Bay Area Figurative Painters at Yale
Jock Reynolds, the Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG), has held his job for 16 years now but has the energy of a man who is just getting started.
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Six Decades in Wolf Kahn’s Landscape
The earliest painting on view in Wolf Kahn: Six Decades is a large landscape-derived abstraction from 1960 titled “Into a Clearing.” It features a loose, pulsing welter of brushstrokes that coalesce into lush zones of breathing, blooming color.