Such transformative moments, big and small, make up the core of the new show, Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite, at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles through Sept. 1, curated by his son, Kwame Jr. On display are over 40 black-and-white images of everyday people as well as jazz legends like Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, Dizzy Gillespie or Art Blakey taking five with a smoke and a drink.
Art News
Since March 2, the Driehaus Museum has been imbued with new, electric energy courtesy of British Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare CBE, whose ongoing solo show marks the first time contemporary art has filled its spaces. It’s also the first in a new series of exhibitions at the Driehaus collectively titled A Tale of Today, a name that nods to Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s eponymous novel that critiques the corrupted politics of the Gilded Age.
This week, the Met debuts a large new exhibition sure to please the summer the crowds. Play It Loud: Instruments of Rock & Roll is the first exhibition at a major museum to tell the history of rock and roll through its instruments.
Several connecting threads run through the show, promised to contain both regional and larger world themes. Many artists explore the variegation of human condition, ranging from politics and racial identity to grief and humor. Yet some so embrace or distance themselves from their source material that they create cerebral, technical works.
Upon seeing the first daguerreotype around 1840, the French painter Paul Delaroche (1797-1856), declared: “From today, painting is dead.” Painting did not die that day, but photography was born, disrupting the world and its social order through the creation of new ways to see, understand, and explore.
For nearly four decades, Chippewa aritst David Bradley has been a major participant in and critic of the Santa Fe art scene. Luckily, Bradley has a biting sense of humor, and he brings this and a vibrant palate to his paintings that honor his Native heritage, stand up for it in the face of commodification, and poke fun at the community he calls home.
This month the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, DC, presents a comprehensive study of one of the greatest painters of the 16th century. Jacopo Tintoretto (c. 1519–1594) was one of the most prominent painters of Venice during his lifetime.
Self-portraits fulfill two purposes: not only do they give insight into the art of one particular time period, but they also shed light onto the self-perception of the artist. A new exhibition at the Neue Galerie in New York, The Self-Portrait: From Schiele to Beckmann, showcases how the genre lent itself to a wide variety of interpretations and artistic freedoms between Germany and Austria from 1900 to 1945. Quite expectedly, given the cultural and historical upheaval that consumed these two countries in that time period, variations on that theme abound.
La Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) celebrates the artistic journey of Ren Hang (1987-2017), one of the most influential Chinese photographers of his generation. The exhibition Love, Ren Hang is a luscious, melancholic, and provocative journey through bold colors, animals, naked bodies, and nocturnal shots.
Pioneering photographer Oscar Gustaf Rejlander wrote, “It is the mind of the artist, and not the nature of his materials, which makes his production a work of art.”
