Posted inNews

Early Diego Rivera Uncovered on Antiques Road Show

Masterpieces sometimes pop up in the strangest places. Antiques Road Show, that public television stalwart showing unwitting collectors having their finds appraised, has uncovered plenty of surprises, but this is one of the biggest. A Road Show participant from Corpus Christi, Texas, brought Boston-based antiques expert Colleene Fesko a 1904 easel painting by Mexican muralist Diego Rivera.

Posted inArt

Impressions from SFMOMA: A Photo Essay

BERKELEY, California — I just moved to Berkeley, California after living in Brooklyn for two years and the second arts institution I visited was SFMoMA (the first was the Luggage Store gallery but I didn’t have my camera with me). The museum is not unpleasant but has an odd construction with a consistent zebra-stripe patterning throughout — it reminded me of the Orvieto Cathedral in Umbria, Italy.

Posted inArt

Patti Smith, MoMA and a Revolutionary Year

On December 19th of last year, Patti Smith and Michael Stipe gave a “walk-in performance” in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art to celebrate the centennial of Jean Genet — poet, playwright, novelist, radical leftist, hustler and thief.

It was also the final day of the uprising in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, which started three days earlier when Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor, set himself on fire and burned to death to protest the confiscation of his merchandize by the police. The timing of the performance and the Tunisia riots were, of course, purely a coincidence.

On December 19th of this year, alone with her guitar, Patti Smith returned to the same place — now occupied by an enormous obelisk holding aloft Sanja Iveković’s golden, hugely pregnant “Lady Rosa of Luxembourg” — to mark Genet’s 101st birthday.