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[…..]

It’s true.  The state of Utah now owns Spiral Jetty.  For the last decade, the Dia Foundation has paid Utah’s Department of Natural Resources $250 a year to maintain the 20-year lease on the land surrounding the earthwork.  In February, the Dia received and paid its annual invoice, only to have the payment returned in June with a note that the lease had expired—a fact[…..]

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[…..]

The natural tendency, when attending a show that promises to give you a sampling of a locale, is to define that culture through the exhibition’s cohesion. With everyone in Berlin identifying as an artist (a little hyperbolic), the saturation leads to a lot of “bad” art and “good” art, however you personally define it, making pinning down what is vital in the art world here[…..]

In Still Life Landscape at Baer Ridgway, the artist team of Castaneda/Reiman works with two overlapping strategies: the appropriation and transformation of the customary depiction of terrain, and the invention of new landscapes by purely formal means. They apply these methods to the well-worn convention of the painted vista in search of the core or essence of landscape.  The result is a large group of[…..]

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley “It’s best to turn people on. The hippies were always talking about being turned on,” said artist Dan Graham, speaking on a panel at the Museum of Contemporary Art two years ago. Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, his co-panelists, had been his downstairs neighbors before they became Sonic Youth. They’d introduced him[…..]

Navigating through Venice in the off season can be challenging, but trying to move through hot, narrow streets and massive crowds of people during the Venice Biennale is completely dizzying. Illuminations, the 54th Venice Biennale, was the largest and most comprehensive to date with 89 national participants alongside 37 collateral events arranged by international organizations and institutions.  As usual, the exhibition spread liberally over Venice’s[…..]