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Events ArchiveDATE 12/7/2024 Artbook at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles Bookstore presents Chloe Sherman on 'Renegades San Francisco: The 1990s'DATE 12/5/2024 The Primary Essentials x Artbook Pop UpDATE 11/28/2024 Blue collar pilgrims in 'Denim: The Fabric That Built America, 1935–1944'DATE 11/24/2024 Photorealism lives!DATE 11/22/2024 2024 Staff Pick Holiday Gifts!DATE 11/21/2024 NYPL Jefferson Market presents Neal Slavin with Kevin Moore on 'When Two or More Are Gathered Together'DATE 11/18/2024 “All is beauty, all is measure, richness, serenity and pleasure” in ‘Matisse: Invitation to the Voyage’DATE 11/16/2024 Kaleidoscopic and dynamic, Orphism comes to the GuggenheimDATE 11/13/2024 From Belly Dancers to Bingo EnthusiastsDATE 11/11/2024 Know your propaganda!DATE 11/9/2024 Yumna Al-Arashi pays poetic tribute to her great-grandmother and an ancient tattooing practiceDATE 11/7/2024 Long before social media, Sophie Calle fearlessly oversharedDATE 11/6/2024 Holiday Gift Guide 2024: For the Lover of Letters | IMAGE GALLERY DATE 11/28/2024 Blue collar pilgrims in 'Denim: The Fabric That Built America, 1935–1944'For many Americans, Thanksgiving is the most festive of holidays. For others, it’s fraught—because of family, politics or the dark reality of our national history. This year, we found a little brightness through the lens of Reel Art Press’s new book on FSA-era Denim, “the fabric that built America.” Graham Marsh writes, “Known as the color of the working class, blue was the cheapest color to produce. Even today, the term ‘blue-collar’ refers to someone who does manual labor. This wasn’t the designer denim look, brothers and sisters, but clothing for real back-breaking hard work. When this clothing wore out, they patched it, sometimes patching a patch until they were wearing the patch itself. It was a tough life, but these were the pilgrims that built America with determination and grace.” Pictured here, “Daughter of a farmer resettled on Kearney Farmsteads in Nebraska,” May 1936. DATE 11/24/2024 Photorealism lives!Amy Sherald’s 2017 oil painting, The lesson of falling leaves, is reproduced from new release Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968, published to accompany the major survey opening this week at MOCA LA. Spanning from the 1960s to today, and including everyone from Robert Bechtle and Richard Estes to Joan Semmel and Marilyn Minter, this book proves that the genre is not just alive and well, but sometimes challenging, weird and confrontational. In her catalog essay, MOCA curator Anna Katz discusses Sherald. “The dichotomy between painting and photography, drawn along lines of racial exclusion and inclusion, is stark in the work of self-described ‘American Realist’ Amy Sherald, who was catapulted to national fame at the unveiling of her portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama in 2018. The lesson of falling leaves exemplifies her selection of Black sitters, often strangers, whom she chooses for their ‘quality of existing in the past, present, and future simultaneously.’ … Sherald’s signature is the depiction of the bodies (skin, hair, nails, eyes) of her portrait subjects in grayscale. She uses grayscale to invoke the nineteenth-century daguerreotype, which comprised some of the earliest portraits of African Americans. In the history of European and North American art, Black people rarely figured in painted portraits and enjoyed their first opportunities to be portrait subjects upon the dissemination of the relatively accessible means of photography. The photographic is thus doing heavy lifting here: whereas in [works by artists like Jesse Treviño and Robert Bechtle], the nonhierarchical distribution of details anchors the images to a specific time and place, in Sherald’s painting the photographic locates a historical origin of representation for Black subjects, while also pointing out a history of absence and pointing toward a future inclusion. The photographic is a corruption, an acknowledgment and an abrogation of painting’s racist foundations.” DATE 11/18/2024 “All is beauty, all is measure, richness, serenity and pleasure” in ‘Matisse: Invitation to the Voyage’There is so much to see in new release Matisse: Invitation to the Voyage. Published to accompany the major retrospective at Fondation Beyeler, on view through January 2025, it features the artist’s work across all movements, from early Fauvist landscapes and interiors to the radical, monochromatic nude cutouts of the 1950s. The book’s design is also notably pleasing and unique, with two heavy gatefolded covers bound in to the one beautifully produced paperback volume. Pictured here: Grand nu couché/Nu rose (1935). Excerpted in the headline: an excerpt from Charles Baudelaire’s 1857 poem “Invitation to the Voyage,” which inspired Matisse throughout his life. |
