As the artist’s first comprehensive retrospective moves from coast to coast, we’ve got Bruce Conner on our minds. Bruce Conner: It’s All True opened first at the Museum of Modern Art (and closed in early October) and now travels back to Conner’s old stomping grounds in the Bay Area to open on October 29 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Ashley Stull Meyers’ 2014 review of[…..]
On the outskirts of Coatepec—a small, foggy town, located in the forests of Veracruz and known for its coffee production—lies a former hacienda in the village of La Orduña. Built in the 16th century, this magnificent building currently fosters one of Mexico’s most interesting community printmaking centers, La Ceiba Gráfica, which was established in 2005. To commemorate the organization’s first decade, the Museo Nacional de[…..]
Sympathetic magic—the use of a surrogate object to magically influence the person or circumstance it represents—has long been one of my favorite subjects. The Ulrich Museum of Art’s current exhibition, Bruce Conner: Somebody Else’s Prints, is an impressive collection of prints, etchings, and lithographs, a number of which Conner attributed to pseudonyms. The show inventively chronicles the artist’s use of surrogate figures for a variety of[…..]
Congratulations to our partners at Art Practical on their sixth annual issue of Shotgun Reviews! Today’s review is from Matthew Harrison Tedford, who offers an assessment of the exhibition at Galería de la Raza in San Francisco: “At a time when the U.S. political system is failing to address immigration and when millions of American families risk being uprooted, Carving Through Borders offered a much-needed platform for conversation.” This article[…..]
Ronald Ventura’s latest suite of works, produced at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute, examines how humanity relates to the environment, and how we often leave in our wake, a trail of destruction. Recyclables is Ventura’s show of lithographs, cast paper sculptures and paper relief on canvas produced from the discarded waste of urbanity, which he has recycled into a visual mélange of apocalyptic tales drawn[…..]
Back in early March 2012, I reviewed Mark Bradford’s solo show at SFMOMA and learned shortly thereafter that the oft-repeated narrative about the circumstances of his early work—that he grew up in poverty in a depressed African-American neighborhood of Los Angeles—was simply not true (he was raised in Santa Monica, an affluent suburb). Given that I’ve heard this myth repeated even by knowledgeable curators, I[…..]
