Speed of Life

I n honor of #MemorialDay , artist Carrie Mae Weems ( @WEEMSCarrie ) and Carl J. Cruz, descendant of the first Black soldier to win the Medal of Honor, reflect on the connections between The 54th Massachusetts Regiment and ongoing struggles today.

Gregg Chadwick The Painter of the World (   Seol-min)   12"x9"oil on panel 2021 At the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco a few years ago, I watched the Korean Buddhist Nun artist Seol-min paint a gorgeous artwork of the Water Moon Avalokiteshvara, also known as Guanyin. Her canvas was laid flat on the floor and she painted on top of it as if she was bodysurfing a gentle wave with brushes in hand. The large hall where Seol-min painted was quiet. The gentle sound of her brushes created a kind of music that echoed off the marble walls. My oil on panel painting "The Painter of the World" is my latest artwork inspired by this experience with the artist Seol-min. The Asian Art Museum has created a video of Seol-min at the museum. I am in the background, off camera, watching the events. Video Below. Link at: https://education.asianart.org/resources/korean-buddhist-art/ Featured at Saatchi Art's The Other Art Fair Los Angeles at Barker Hangar from September 23-26, 2021....

This week's The Modern Art Notes Podcast by Tyler Green features artist  Julie Mehretu  and curator  Jane Aspinwall. Tyler's podcast is timed with the new Julie Mehretu mid-career survey that opens at LACMA on November 3, 2019. More info from LACMA here:  https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/julie-mehretu From LACMA: Co-organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Whitney Museum of American Art, Julie Mehretu is a mid-career survey that will unite nearly 40 works on paper with 35 paintings dating from 1996 to the present by Julie Mehretu (b. 1970, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia). The first-ever comprehensive retrospective of Mehretu’s career, it covers over two decades of her examination of history, colonialism, capitalism, geopolitics, war, global uprising, diaspora, and displacement through the artistic strategies of abstraction, architecture, landscape, movement, and, most recently, figuration. Mehretu’s play with scale, as evident in her intimate dra...

Wonderful podcast by Tyler Green featuring artist Lari Pittman. The Hammer Museum at UCLA is featuring the exhibition “Lari Pittman: Declaration of Independence,” a retrospective of Pittman’s nearly forty-year career.  Tyler writes: The exhibition reveals Pittman’s engagements with America’s history and with issues and subjects that have been core to our history and identity, including landscape, violence, citizenship, belonging and more. The exhibition was curated by Hammer chief curator Connie Butler. It is on view through January 5, 2020. The excellent exhibition catalogue was published by DelMonico Prestel.  Amazon offers it for $51.

Must Watch: Scenes From the Border Crisis: Sketches by the Artist Molly Crabapple – Rolling Stone

by Gregg Chadwick Julia Elliott's new novel,  The New and Improved Romie Futch , takes us on a Southern adventure that seems inspired by the absurdly picaresque world of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces , the cyber/ historic cosmography of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas,  the dangerous science of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein , the obsessive hunt of Herman Melville's  Moby Dick , and the eerily foreboding scape of Don De Lillo's White Noise, blended with the environmental warning of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, all played to a soundtrack by the pioneering electronica musician Delia Derbyshire.  Romie Futch lives in an alternative yet still contemporary South Carolina, where hipsters seem to have swarmed South from Brooklyn and East from Portland to mingle and clash with characters that still haven't moved far from their High School glory days. Romie Futch is one of these down at the heels locals.  Romie's ex-wife haunts his d...

For my friends and family in Wisconsin and across the United States. Please support Lori Compas in her May 8, 2012 election for Wisconsin State Senate in Wisconsin's 13th Senate District!  Find out how Lori plans to restore honesty and integrity to Wisconsin's political system. Much more info here: Lori Compas for Wisconsin! A message from Lori about the upcoming primary election on May: Lori Compas for State Senate Don't fall for Scott Fitzgerald's tricks: The person running against me in the primary is a FAKE DEMOCRAT. His name is Gary Ellerman and he's a Fitzgerald supporter. This photo of him with Scott Fitzgerald is all over the internet -- it was taken at the 2012 Jefferson County Republicans' Lincoln Day Dinner. As you can see he has the GOP elephants on his nametag. And yet his name will be on the primary ballot with a D after it -- this is a lie, plain and simple. Please tell your friends. Link to Fake Democrat Photo ...

by Gregg Chadwick In his first work of fiction,  The Wandering Falcon , Jamil Ahmad depicts a world caught between timeless paths of migration and geo-political modernity. Ahmad knits together a series of short stories that cover the life arc of one young man, Tor Baz - the wandering falcon of the title, as he journeys from infancy to manhood. Inspired by his time as a civil service worker in the tribal areas of Pakistan, Ahmad writes of a world governed by clan and custom. During his time as a powerful emissary of the Pakistani government under the tribal region's frontier governing system, Jamil Ahmad simultaneously served as politician, police chief, judge, jury and executioner. Bits of this personal history are woven within the stories, including hints of Jamil's wife's German heritage. Environmentalist and activist Helga Ahmad was instrumental in encouraging her husband Jamil to move from  halting first attempts at poetry to richly crafted stories of people, p...