For today’s Summer Session topic of celebrity, we bring you Genevieve Quick’s review from our sister publication Art Practical of the 2010 SFMOMA exhibition Exposed, a show on the history of photography and the camera. Our contemporary fascination with celebrities is heavily shaped by the photographic medium, and Exposed explored some of the earliest iterations of the iconic paparazzi shot that is a quintessential celebrity experience. This review was originally published[…..]

As part of this month’s Summer Session regarding the theme of labor, today we bring you a video clip from our friends at SFMOMA. Artist Akram Zaatari describes the work of Hashem el Madani, the first person to own a 35mm camera in Saïda, Lebanon. Zaatari calls Madani the “photographer of the working class,” whose studio both documented daily life in the city and became an important[…..]

Today from our friends at SFMOMA, we bring you a short video of Ewan Gibbs discussing the concept and labor of the drawings he completed for his 2009 exhibition at the museum. Daily Serving also conducted an interview with the artist that year, and we invite you to read it for a deeper understanding of how the artist came to use these techniques.

The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography and Film presents a dynamic portrait of one of the most significant narratives in the history of 20th-century avant-garde art, and examines the vital place of still and moving images in the creation of early Soviet history and national identity. Originally organized by the Jewish Museum in New York under the curatorial vision of Jens Hoffmann, this exhibition[…..]

Expressions of both individual psychology and grand family histories are easily found in the architecture of a past home. These two narratives are counterintuitive yet closely related. When a family invests in a house, apartment, or some shared space, its interiors, like one’s mind, can feel simultaneously claustrophobic and inexhaustibly complex, and revisiting a former home can bring up fraught confrontations with descendants and sentimentality.[…..]

Robert Mapplethorpe is forever associated with scandals that erupted at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati, as well as the crippling drawdown of federal funding that rendered the National Endowment for the Arts a casualty of the late-1980s culture wars. More recently, Mapplethorpe, or the foundation that bears his name, made headlines with two significant acquisitions made by the J.[…..]

Sarah Rara is a Los Angeles–based artist who works with video, film, photography, and performance. She is also a contributing member of the band Lucky Dragons. Rara was most recently an artist in residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, where she worked on a new video, Broken Solar, and a libretto for a new opera, Neglected Treaty, that considers the sonic impacts of climate change[…..]