Art
BRIGHTON, UK — Tucked behind an aging mews of terraced houses in the historic city of Cambridge is a hidden modernist science facility. Negotiating tight security and an immaculate grey gravel drive, expectations climb as you approach an understated entrance in a warm yet sleek façade. The straight
Art
CINCINNATI — Meet Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes, who may be one of the last people to create a black-and-white movie. In order to make his art-house drama Tabu the way he wanted, Gomes searched and found one of the remaining labs in Europe capable of processing black and white 35mm film stock, r
Art
Mickalene Thomas's current exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum is a visual marvel. Bright colors, shimmering rhinestones, chaotic patterns, and bold-faced women abound. And not separately, mind you — Thomas has a proclivity for mashing up up into exquisitely rendered wholes that take the cut-and-paste
Music
2012 was a good year for hip-hop heads not least because it was a year that saw the emergence of Joey Bada$$, a preternaturally-gifted rapper from Flatbush who (incredibly) turns just eighteen later this month.
Art
For those weary souls who claim that there is nothing new under the sun, especially in the realm of art, where everything has already been done, I offer this observation by Kenneth Baker, which appeared without fanfare in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle …
Art
Just the other day, I was deep in the bowels of the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art when I thought of Paul Resika. I had met him briefly many years ago, when I was a graduate student and he was a guest critic. In the middle of a group critique he mentioned that he visited the
Art
CHICAGO — Edie Fake is a radical punk queer feminist activist. He is currently "at large" in Chicago. Before that, he was driving around the country in a yellow school bus doing the gay performance "Fingers." At the opening of his solo exhibition Memory Palaces at Thomas Robertello, he told me that
Art
Like ghosts of a future that never arrived, the United States is littered with space age relics that landed in the 1940s to 1960s in the form of diners, banks, motels, and other commercial architecture. While the futuristic style definitely made its mark on the big coastal cities, like with Eero Saa
Art
Moby is a polymath, that we know. If we didn’t know that, we found out after visiting the tea shop he used to own on the Lower East Side. Maybe you’ve also heard other factoids about him too, like his support for animal rights or his alleged ancestral link to Herman Melville. We do not jest. (Actual
Art
SAN FRANCISCO — When learning Chinese, it's often difficult to appreciate the subtle beauty of each character. In the mist of trying to hammer each one into memory, a Chinese learner rarely pauses to admire the carefully crafted order of strokes and hidden meanings.
Books
LOS ANGELES — Brazilian Art under Dictatorship, a new book by John Jay College's Claudia Calirman, takes a look at the works of three artists: Antonio Manuel, Artur Barrio and Cildo Meireles. These artists worked during the height of Brazil's most repressive military regime in the late 1960s and ear
Art
Those who do make physical objects today are sometimes in danger of retreating so far into their own medium as to remove themselves from the conversation. I recently went to objects in the mirror are closer than they appear, an exhibition of six contemporary painters and sculptors at Chelsea's Krave