All posts tagged: Art

The Radical Familiar: Matisse’s Early Nice Interiors

By ARDEN HENDRIE

The paintings may be best known for what they are not. They were made on the heels of work now considered Matisse’s most groundbreaking, the paintings from the period between 1907 and 1917 when he engaged with the early perceptions of modernism. His trajectory through these years widened his ambitions and shows him becoming more cutthroat within them, first leaving behind the saturated exuberance of fauvism, then, by degrees, flattening color and form into strange and austere near-abstractions.

The Radical Familiar: Matisse’s Early Nice Interiors
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Under Current: Tidal Pull

By AMANDA VALDEZ 

Suck Face Sunrise

Where do your shapes come from? This is a common question I encounter.

I dislodge shapes stored in my body through the act of drawing. These shapes originate from a vast matrix of experiences. There are typically three categories of overt reference: art and archeological objects I seek out through research and travel; landscape; and direct physical experiences (floating on a lake, running in the woods, dance, aging, sex).

Under Current: Tidal Pull
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Rico Gatson: Selections

By RICO GATSON

 

Rico Gatson Elizabeth

Introduction by David E. Little

What was required was a new story, a new history told through the lens of our struggle.

—Ta-Nehisi Coates

They say there’s nothing harder than hitting a fastball. In America, clichés on the difficulty of sports abound. But how to describe the challenges of art?

Rico Gatson: Selections
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Millennium Camera

By JONATHON KEATS

Keats’s Millennium Camera in blueprint. Courtesy of the Mead Art Museum; gift of the artist.

Jonathon Keats has been described by The New Yorker as a “poet of ideas.” Keats’s latest project is the Millennium Camera, a custom-built pinhole camera with a one-thousand-year exposure time that will remain inside Amherst College’s Stearns Steeple until 3015. In May 2015, the college’s Mead Art Museum documented the intellectual and material creation of Keats’s camera, displaying its blueprints and predecessors alongside the camera itself in an exhibition titled Jonathon Keats: Photographing Deep Time. To commemorate the opening of the exhibition, Keats spoke with Vanja Malloy, the Mead’s curator of American art, about deep-time photography and about the rapidly changing nature of humanity’s relationships with its environment and its descendants. This essay has been adapted from that conversation.

Millennium Camera
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The Story Behind the Scenes

By MORGAN ADAMS

Yellow house
I

I take the number 25 bus from Piazza San Marco north into the hills and get off at La Pietra—a stone marking one Roman mile from Florence. Behind the imposing gate, Villa La Pietra waits at the top of the long drive lined with Tuscan cypress trees.[1]This fifteenth-century villa is the centerpiece of a fifty-seven-acre estate of Renaissance-revival gardens,a vast art collection, a library of over twelve thousand volumes, and olive groves with views of the Duomo.

The Story Behind the Scenes
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Three Poems

By MAZEN KERBAJ

TO THE READER

Comic, Eye

 

SPACE-TIME

Abstract Comic, Kerbaj

 

COLD SWEAT

Abstract Figure

 

Mazen Kerbaj is a Lebanese comics artist, visual artist, and musician born in Beirut in 1975. Kerbaj has authored more than fifteen books. His work has been published in anthologies, newspapers, and magazines, and translated into more than ten languages. His paintings, drawings, videos, performances, and installations have been shown around the globe.

Purchase your copy of Issue 10 here. 

Three Poems
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The Dictator’s Bedroom

By ILEANA SELEJAN

“The bunker was the reality of totalitarianism, its hideous remnant and reminder. The beheaded, violated, mutilated ghosts of Nicaragua bore witness, every day, to what used to happen here, and must never happen again.”

 —Salman Rushdie, The Jaguar Smile

In the early hours of July 17, 1979, Anastasio Somoza snapped shut the last of his suitcases, preparing to leave. He took one last look at his newspaper; little things like pens, paper clips, and dust lay scattered around the desk, his daily mess. He’d expected this departure for days, yet he was still rushed; he was irritated and scared. In the bunker office, the stiff leather furniture and the leather-covered walls gleamed as the dim ceiling light flickered. Behind him, caught in the somber solitude of that late night of surrender, hung a large relief map of Nicaragua, the country he had “inherited” and ruled, and was now abandoning. The country whose people he had abused, tortured, waged war against. The country that was now aflame at his doorstep.

The Dictator’s Bedroom
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Poetry Month: Emily Dickinson Cartoon

By ROSANNA BRUNO 

April is POETRY MONTH, and we’re kicking it off with a satirical cartoon of local poet Emily Dickinson: girl voted most likely to dwell in possibilitycartoon

Get into the spirit of POETRY MONTH with this satirical cartoon of Emily Dickinson, who reminds us to be wary when travelling…

cartoon

Rosanna Bruno is a visual artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Poetry Month: Emily Dickinson Cartoon
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Our Poor Perishable World

By BRIAN SHOLIS

In a photograph Robert Adams took northeast of Riverside, California, in 1982, serpentine paths lead toward the horizon line; it’s not easy to discern whether these are creeks, dirt trails, or roads. Human presence takes the form of wooden poles carrying electric wires, which stride diagonally from the bottom left of the composition toward the distance at right.

Our Poor Perishable World
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