Tag: assemblage
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Artist a Day: Radcliffe Bailey
Artist Radcliffe Bailey conducts a unique form of artistic alchemy through the use of his keen sense of curiosity, his penchant for found materials, and his mined memory that he combines to preserve the legacies of people who may otherwise be forgotten to time. Bailey’s practice draws on specific memories, one of which is a…
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Extreme Times Call for Extreme Heroines: Betye Saar at the Craft & Folk Art Museum
Wall color plays a specific role in Betye Saar’s latest exhibit at the Craft and Folk Museum in Los Angeles. The second floor gallery is painted in a soft shade of stone blue and in the world of laundry products, blue is a color reflector that makes whites appear whiter. The color has been a…
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The Price of Passage: Betye Saar at Roberts & Tilton
The human brain works as a binary computer and can only analyze the exact information-based zeros and ones (or black and white). Our heart is more like a chemical computer that uses fuzzy logic to analyze information that can’t be easily defined in zeros and ones. ~Naveen Jain One world deals in absolutes: “Black vs White”…
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Artist a Day Challenge 2016-18: David Hammons
Most of David Hammons work is aligned with assemblage (the practice of incorporating found materials in art), so this particular piece departs from his traditional aesthetic. Despite this, the work remains contextually rooted in some of his earlier themes. In the 1980s Hammons created the “Basketball Hoops Series” to address the myth of sport as…
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Artist a Day Challenge 2016-7: Thornton Dial
Thornton Dial, “Stars of Everything”, 2004. Photo credit: Souls Grown Deep Today I’m highlighting an artist I wrote about for my second site TONDI. TONDI hosts digital exhibitions and explores broader social themes relating to contemporary art, music and design. I recently wrote a piece about Thornton Dial that was a commentary on how arts writers categorized him as an artist, but for…
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The Paradox of Having the Last Word
Today I came across an essay by art critic Ken Johnson defending himself against a group who circulated a petition to the New York Times which called attention to two questionably written/edited reviews published by the paper. Johnson’s critical wound was re-opened last month when a fellow critic, David Levi Strauss, lambasted Johnson and used…
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Black History Art #9: Betye Saar
All month I’ve been highlighting African American Art in various forms. One of the California artists I learned about through this process is assemblage artist Betye Saar. Saar was born and raised in Los Angeles/Pasadena, graduated from UCLA and taught art at both Otis and the University of California. Her influences in assemblage began when…
Colony Little, Culture Shock Art 