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[ Meanwhile... in Guatemala - Mark Vallen. 1988. Pencil on paper 10" x 14". On view at Man's Inhumanity to Man. Military death squads were responsible for torturing and murdering tens of thousands of civilians during Guatemala?s 36-year long civil war. By the time the conflict ended in 1996, some 200,000 civilians had been killed. In 1999 the U.N. backed Guatemalan Commission for Historical
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On March 16, 2009, Mauricio Funes won the presidency of El Salvador as the candidate of the former rebel guerrilla army, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). The electoral victory is a momentous event for El Salvador, representing the culmination of a long and often exceedingly gruesome struggle to shape the nation into a functioning democratic society - yet, there is still a
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The March 2009 edition of The Art Newspaper reported that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), is funding the building of a monumental sculpture by postmodernist artist Jeff Koons - at a cost of $25 million. Titled Train, the "sculpture" consists of an actual 70-foot long steam locomotive hung from an immense 161-foot construction crane. If the project actually proceeds, it will become,
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The equation is a simple one, in good economic times people feel they can afford to support the arts, in bad economic times - much less so. I do not mean to frame the question of art purely in financial terms, since some of the greatest art we know of has been created in the most impoverished settings and some of the best artists were, and are? paupers. Moreover, no matter how dire things are,
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Edward Biberman was born in Philadelphia in 1904, but left his mark as a California Modernist painter. Now almost forgotten save for aficionados of the California Modernist school, Biberman is the subject of a fascinating retrospective: Edward Biberman Revisited, at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park.While the small Biberman exhibit catalog that accompanies the show rightly
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On February 17, 2009, President Barack Obama signed his massive $787 billion economic stimulus package into law. After an acrimonious quarrel in both houses of Congress, the somewhat altered and much trimmed down bill that reached the president?s desk managed to preserve funding for the arts - which at first glance appears to be a victory for arts advocates.Obama?s Recovery and Reinvestment Act
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Spencer Jon Helfen Fine Arts is tucked away on the second floor of a charming old building in Beverly Hills, and though most of those living in the city of Los Angeles have never heard of the gallery - it is one of L.A.?s treasures. The founder and director of the enterprise, Spencer Jon Helfen, has a passion for Modernist art of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s - and his gallery specializes in the
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[ I was recently interviewed by Ms. Emily Wilcox, an art student at Western Kentucky University, as part of her undergraduate thesis research project conducted on the subject of "Art as Activism." The results of our dialogue are a reasonable glimpse into my take on things, so I am publishing the interview here with the kind permission of Ms. Wilcox. ]Q: How do you gauge whether an artwork is
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"We have real people out of work right now and putting $50 million in the NEA and pretending that's going to save jobs as opposed to putting $50 million in a road project is disingenuous." Thus spoke Georgia?s Republican Senator, Jack Kingston on February 5, 2009, on the subject of President Obama?s economic recovery plan, now being debated in the U.S. Senate. Apparently there are many, both in
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In April of 1967 the Heritage Gallery of Los Angeles published Images of Dignity, a monograph on the life and work of the great African American artist Charles White (1918-1979). I acquired a copy of the book just a year later when I was fifteen-years-old, the hardback volume providing one of my first insights into the works of White, American social realism, and the very idea of political
Marc Chagall
Chema Madoz
José Saborit
