Lynn Hershman Leeson is historic.  Some of the most exciting moments of her recent documentary on feminist art, !W.A.R., or !Women Art Revolution, 2010, were shot on her own living room couch.  She and her alter-ego, Roberta Breitmore, are synonymous with an era of women’s art to which all artists (especially—but not exclusively—women) owe a great debt. But we are no longer in the seventies. […..]

For the last year, Bay Area artist Chris Sollars has sported a biblical behemoth of a beard, although his cleanly shaven cheeks are once again on view in Sollars’s newest project, Hairy, shown as part of YBCA’s Bay Area Now.  It’s an interesting update on an identity-probing lineage that includes predecessors like Chris Burden, Gordon Matta Clark, James Luna, Ana Mendieta, and David Hammons.  DailyServing[…..]

The growing spotlight on artists with developmental disabilities simultaneously questions ethics, challenges definitions in Art and inspires viewers. The current exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, Create, features the works of 20 artists from three pioneering Bay Area centers for arts and disability – Creativity Explored, Creative Growth Art Center and the National Institute of Art and Disabilities. Once in the museum, I[…..]

Zoe Crosher’s haunting photographs—showcasing spots where both fictional and non-fictional characters disappeared—have been on display for the last month at Las Cienegas Projects in Los Angeles.  The show closes July 16th.  Crosher recently sat down with DS writer Carmen Winant to talk about the project and her work in general. Carmen Winant: Hi Zoe! Thanks for agreeing to talk with us.  In your latest series,[…..]

Many of us, at one point, have felt near our breaking point with the life we live and the sacrifices we have to make in order to even have that life. Escaping our day-to-day, or “the man” at large is at times the sweetest fantasy. Through a collection of portraits of the lives of men who have removed themselves from society,  Alec Soth’s Broken Manual[…..]

In the self-explanatory show entitled Video, an Art, a History 1965 – 2010, the history and evolution of the video art genre are recounted through 50 video works and installations, drawn from the collections of both the Singapore Art Museum and Centre Pompidou. Having developed in tandem with the apparatus of television and the analogue and then digital video cameras, video art’s reconfiguration of the[…..]

In The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, scholar Elaine Scarry describes the inability of language to interpret and express physical pain: “By its very nature, pain resists, even destroys the language that grapples with it.” But what of the capacity of visual art to interpret and translate this bodily experience? “For a Long Time”, on view now at Roberts &[…..]