My sense is that people come to this museum and this show wanting to learn other histories by having their way of looking tutored and trained.
Reviews
Posted inArt
A Group Exhibition in Iceland Trades Local Character for International Appeal
Many of the works in Iðavöllur are big and chock-full of issues and socially engaged ideas, like so much art elsewhere.
Posted inFilm
As a Mockumentary About Celebrity, Nowhere Inn Just Bores
In this film about stardom, the viewer has nowhere to appreciate and connect with the characters and concepts.
Posted inArt
The Democracy of Abstraction
Thomas Nozkowski believed that each person’s experience of the everyday was fundamentally unique and set out to honor that in his work.
Posted inArt
Searching for Frans Hals’s “Laughing Cavalier”
So many of us have seen this painting too often in reproduction, without perhaps ever having really seen it at all.
Posted inArt
A Final Show Honors the Legacy of a Bay Area Art Legend
Hung Liu, an artist who “defied the stereotype that’s thrust on Asian women.”
Posted inBooks
Robert Vas Dias’s Words Explore the Fact of Things
In a hybrid text combining criticism and poems Robert Vas Dias explores the paradoxes of still life painting.
Posted inFilm
Film Reels Dredged from the Sea Become an Eerie Meditation on Mortality
Bill Morrison’s new documentary The Village Detective: A Song Cycle is an eerie meditation on mortality made from forgotten parts of cinema history.
Posted inArt
A Major New Exhibition on Afrofuturism Touches Down Right on Time
This rich history is undercut with urgency, as gentrification is displacing Oakland’s Black population at a staggering rate.
Posted inArt
In the Hudson River Valley, Artists Navigate Ecology
The exhibition includes paintings by Thomas Cole and Frederic Church, along with contemporary works focusing on habitat protection and environmental sustainability.
Posted inFilm
What is the Point of HBO’s Remake of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage?
This update brings the star power of Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac, but can’t match the emotional intensity of the original.
Posted inArt
Judy Chicago Retrospective Brings the Artist Full Circle
No one can deny that Chicago tackles “big” topics, but paradoxically it’s her most intimate and personal work that comes across as universal.