Speed of Life

by Gregg Chadwick Bruce Springsteen's latest album will be released on April 26th, 2005. But the title track, "Devils and Dust" is already available. Like the compelling story in the newspaper that you find well after the hype of the front page, the characters in this new song are riveting yet invisible to the general public. The music is stripped down, at times hardscrabble and barren like the physical and emotional landscapes that these characters roam. As a painter, when I listen to Springsteen's hard fought melodies and stark vocals, I see images. And many times I see images painted by Edward Hopper. Edward Hopper Gas Museum of Modern Art, New York Hopper's figures share with Springsteen's characters a very American way of being. Not always pretty- but always present. Both Hopper's paintings and Springsteen's songs are lit by a sort of American light that exists not to create atmosphere, but to light objects. This same light is ...

by Gregg Chadwick Gregg Chadwick "Poem of the River" 36"x29" oil on linen 2005 Julie Weiss, who designed the costumes for the films Frida, American Beauty and Twelve Monkeys, recently stepped into my studio to view my new paintings. She was struck by the garments of remembrance that ran across the wall: saffron robed monks, a trio of women in kimonos, a boy in blue running across an open beach. Julie Weiss said, “ The paintings all together are like a ribbon across time and experience. We are following these monks on their journey. We see with their eyes as they pass by storefronts and streets. We are with them in fate, chance and accident.” This ribbon began a few years ago in Thailand during a journey with my father. He was acting as a visiting lawyer involved in issues of justice and human rights. I would scurry out at dawn to wander the alleys of Chiang Mai and would catch the monks on their small morning pilgrimages. The morning of my last day wa...

Miranda July, recently involved with the Learning to Love You More project which made stops along the West Coast as part of the Baja to Vancouver exhibition and was in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, has a new film and a new blog . Miranda July, The Swan Tool "I loved Miranda July's piquantly original first feature film, "Me and You and Everyone We Know", about a fragile, quirky,and imperfect human connection. It was probably my favorite among the American Dramas I saw at Sundance, and I loved it like a poem or perhaps like a piece of performance art for which Miranda July is known; it is also poem-size, the kind of exotic delicacy likely to bloom only in festival soil." - Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

by Gregg Chadwick California's actor governor knows all about film screenings. After his latest off the cuff and out of control quip: "Close the borders. Close the borders in California, and all across Mexico and the United States. Because I think it is just unfair to have all of those people coming across, and to have the borders open the way it is. We in California have to still finish the border. That is the key thing -- to have borders and to keep the law, enforce the law.", Schwarzenegger told hundreds of newspaper publishers at the Newspaper Association of America convention at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. Arnold needs to arrange a private screening of Sergio Arau and Yareli Arizmendi's film - "A Day Without A Mexican". In an interview with Bija Gutoff on the Apple Final Cut Pro site Sergio explains the genesis of the film: “I was waiting for my car to be washed, and this guy handed me a tip,” says Sergio Arau. “In a restaurant someone...

by Gregg Chadwick Cardinal Ratzinger of Germany Is Elected 265th Pope, Taking Benedict XVI as Name The newly elected pope is a divisive figure and an acknowledged opponent of a contemporary, pluralistic and modern culture. In a world beset with war, over-population, environmental degradation, religious strife, AIDS, prejudice and racism, we need a religious leader who embraces humanity in all its colors, genders, orientations and talents. Instead we are presented with a man who is according to Rose Marie Berger of Sojourner's Magazine, "dogmatic, and rule-bound. Inclusive language makes him queasy. Liberation theology and women's ordination give him hives." The new pope sees pluralist modernity as heresy and homosexuality as a moral and psychological disorder. As Cardinal, Ratzinger predicted that Buddhism would replace Marxism as the Catholic Church’s main enemy this century. "Art itself, which in impressionism and expressionism explored the extreme...

by Gregg Chadwick "I was really changed by my experiences in Afghanistan. It is a luxury for people to say war is bad when they are in San Francisco. You need to make friends with people in the U.S. government in order to get a change in policy. You can't say something is bad unless you come in with ways to fix it." -Marla Ruzicka Marla Ruzicka and Matt Gonzalez at Laila Carlsen's show, San Francisco City Hall photo by Gregg Chadwick The war in Iraq is a senseless accumulation of deaths. Marla Ruzicka, the founder and tireless leader of CIVIC (The Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict) and Faiz Ali Salim, (CIVIC's Iraq Country Director) were just two of the most recent casualties. But for the San Francisco art community these deaths struck home. Marla was good friends with Matt Gonzalez and frequented the art openings in Matt's office at City Hall when she was in town drumming up support for her campaign to account for the civilian deaths...

by Gregg Chadwick The Los Angeles Times reports on the controversy over the gift of a sculpture by the figurative artist Robert Graham to the city of Venice, California. Diane Haithman in the LA Times reports,"The Los Angeles City Council approved the yet-to-be completed artwork, a gift to the city from the artist and Venice donor Roy Doumani, last June. But earlier this month a handful of Venice residents filed appeals with the city to block the sculpture's placement in Windward Circle, a traffic circle ringed with funky eateries, wacky gift shops and chic boutiques." Robert Graham's work, like that of the Bay Area sculptor Stephen de Staebler and Rodin before him, plays on the history of classical sculpture and its fragmentation over time. The proposed sculpture for Venice is an elevated stainless steel female torso. The work would focus on the core of the body minus extremities. This emphasis helps to exclude a reading of the sculpture as a portrait of an indi...

J.T. Kirkland on his site: thinking about art has a call out for artists to interview other artists. Formulate five interview questions that you would like another artist to answer. Send them on to J.T. He will then provide you with five questions from another artist that you will answer and return. JT will post the interviews periodically.

Peter Schjeldahl was also at SFMOMA last Thursday evening - Anna Conti who graciously provided a link to my entries on Neil Welliver and Peter Schjeldahl provides a detailed account of Thursday's lecture: Peter Schjeldahl at SFMOMA

by Gregg Chadwick Neil Welliver, who died this week, painted the Maine landscape with rigorous vision and an all-over technique inspired by abstract expressionism that gave his work a Thoreau-like spirit of both the pragmatic and the numinous. He settled on a daringly simple method of painting. Starting from the top of his large, usually square paintings, Welliver would finish a corner, then a horizontal strip and work his way down the surface of the work until he painted his way out in the last corner. There is a freshness of seeing and paint in these works that bring to life both the crisp light of Maine and the inner workings of Neil's richly intelligent and humorous mind. Neil Welliver, Vickie 48"x48" oil on canvas 1970 "Courbet looked very hard and had a method. Bierstadt did not look very hard and had a method, and de Kooning makes it up as he goes along. I think I relate much more to de Kooning because I look very hard and then I make it up as I...

by Gregg Chadwick Peter Schjeldahl at SFMOMA photo by Gregg Chadwick Peter Schjeldahl , currently the art critic for the New Yorker, held a roundtable discussion with Neal Benezra, director SFMOMA, and Janet Bishop, curator of painting and sculpture SFMOMA, yesterday at the Wattis Theater in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His enthusiasm for art and artists was palpable. And his wit was in rare form. During the question and answer session following the discussion it was announced by an artist in the back rows of the Wattis Theater that painting was dead. Peter chuckled and then asked,” What kind of art do you do?" The artist responded that she was involved in art that utilized new technologies. Peter laughed again and blurted out, "Well, there you go, trying to kill off the competition." He neither dismissed the woman nor her art but instead pointed out the careerism hiding behind many art labels and preferences. When I asked about the place of beauty...

From: Japan Society Gallery, Spring 2005 Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture Curated by Takashi Murakami April 8 - July 24, 2005 Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture explores the culture of postwar Japan through its arts and popular visual media, from the perspective of one of Japan's most celebrated artists. Focusing on the phenomenally influential subcultures of otaku (roughly translated as "pop cult fanaticism") and its relationships to Japan's artistic vanguard, Takashi Murakami explores the historical influences that shape Japanese contemporary art and its distinct graphic idioms. The exhibition's title, Little Boy, refers to the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, clearly locating the birth of these new cultural forms in the trauma and generational aftershock. In Murakami's perspective, a resonant figure for Japan's contemporary condition is that of the "little boy"--both the nickname fo...

by Gregg Chadwick Thomas L. Friedman's new book, "The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century'' , argues that the fall of the Berlin Wall was the first in a series of important events that have ushered in the 21st Century. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the ensuing dissolution of the Soviet hold on Eastern Europe allowed us to see the world, maybe for the first time, as one whole fabric. Moby April 1, 2005 photo by Gregg Chadwick "It was a result of events and forces that all came together during the 1990's and converged right around the year 2000 ...The first event was 11/9. That's right -- not 9/11, but 11/9. Nov. 9, 1989, is the day the Berlin Wall came down, which was critically important because it allowed us to think of the world as a single space.’ The Berlin Wall was not only a symbol of keeping people inside Germany; it was a way of preventing a kind of global view of our future,' the Nobel Prize-winning economist...

In the current issue of "Science News", Barbara Berrie and Louisa Matthew, from the conservation department at the National Gallery of Art, report on new discoveries in the paint formulation of sixteenth century Venetian paintings. It seems that ground glass was added to the powdered pigments upon grinding in linseed oil to increase transparency and to speed the drying time of the paint. Microscopic traces of glass were found in samples of Lorenzo Lotto's pigments viewed by Berrie "using scanning electron microscopy, energy-dispersive spectrometry, among other sophisticated analytical techniques" "Upon closer examination, Berrie found high-quality silica in a form routinely used by Venetian glassmakers. During the Renaissance, they obtained it from quartzite pebbles along the Ticino River in northern Italy. They would then grind the quartzite into a fine powder." Lorenzo Lotto detail: Allegory of Virtue and Vice, 1505, National Gallery of ...

" De Kooning: An American Master " by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Biography today. Portrait of De Kooning photo by Harry Bowden  Courtesy of the Charles Campbell Gallery, San Francisco

David Hockney's current exhibition of landscape watercolors at the LA Louver Gallery in Venice, California brings him back to the fields of East Yorkshire where as a teen on summer breaks from school he worked the fields he now paints. There is a youthful expansiveness in these new watercolors. Hockney's deep study of Picasso and Braque's cubistic space allows him to blow open these paintings in a way seldom seen in watercolor. The type of bent and overlapping space found in Hockney's earlier photo collages such as "Pearblossom Highway"(up the road at the Getty) is very much in evidence here. Moving from the foreground with its patterned arrangements of vegetation, to the lozenged fields in the middleground, to the horizon line in "East Yorkshire Spring" (above) which seems to bend with the curvature of the earth, leads us not to a single point, but to the vast interconnected nature of time and existence. We have seen these wide-open vistas ...

Donald Sultan Spring 1999 "Robert Creeley is an artist’s poet....I think of him as one of the most  thoughtful poets ever to explore this complex relationship between the eye and the object."  - Donald Sultan, 1999 "(Battery) There" Wherever it was, I took this place To be in mind as well as there Where persons walked with muffled forms, Marked by the high sky's yellow glare. The measured look placed all in squares, Boxed by a distance fixed in space. Lampposts blackened against the day. The shuffled passage of persons faded. The building, it seemed, they would never           get to. Its vertical strips of window reflected Light from a world they might have heard of, But, try as they would, they would           never reach. - Robert Creeley From the New York Public Library: "Over his lifetime Robert Creeley explored the profound connections between visual art and creative writing in collaborations with artists such as Georg Base...

Gregg Chadwick Speed of Life Study 33"x20" monotype 2005 From the San Francisco Art Institute Art Auction The annual San Francisco Art Institute Art Auction will be held Saturday, April 2, at SomArts, 934 Brannan St., in San Francisco. Works donated by such artists as Marcel Dzama, Jay DeFeo, Lynda Benglis,Gregg Chadwick, Imogen Cunningham, David Ireland, Annie Leibovitz, Larry Thomas, and Charles Hobson will be offered to the highest bidder. The range in value is expected to be $150 to $15,000 for the works. In addition to paintings, works on paper, photographs, and sculpture, other items to be auctioned include art-related travel tours, restaurant gift certificates, and fine wines. The reception and silent auction begin at 5:00 P.M., and the live auction commences at 7:00 P.M. The auctioneer is Malcolm Barber, from Bonhams & Butterfields. SKYY Vodka will sponsor the open bar. Co-chairs of the event are Nicole Fife and Will Wick (Art Auction Committee) and Caro...

A wonderful discussion is continuing on the place of arts writing and elitism in contemporary art. From Mark Vallen's art for a change "A poet living in Southern California made a few points I’ve been wanting to touch upon. Although the poet practices a discipline apart from that of the visual artist, the two are linked in many ways. When artists malign the public for having ‘bad taste’, or when critics say that ‘art is not for everyone’, they fail to see how this is a problem of acculturation. For instance, in much of Latin America crowds fill stadiums during poetry festivals, while such an event is impossible to envision for the US: “I wish I had been present at the forum because the same thing is happening in the world of poetry. Some academics say that poetry is not for everyone. But how come that is not so in many other countries? I grew up in Persia and poetry was in our blood. In the smallest villages, even the illiterate could recite poetry by heart. In Afghanistan the...

Gerard Bourgeois Après le Bain 41" x 54" oil on canvas 2005 Currently on view at the Sarah Bain Gallery in Brea, California is a new collection of paintings by Gerard Bourgeois. These seemingly Degas inspired images of a woman at the bath are rich in painterly nuance accomplished by a rigorous process of painting, readjusting, overpainting, sanding, scraping down and finishing. Like a frescoed wall eroded over time, the images in Gerard's paintings emerge from the accumulation of paint. The history of the painting, with its ghosts and pentimenti, is the painting. Gerard's work is extremely sophisticated, notice the nuances of hip and shoulder, yet these paintings ring true emotionally. Based on intimate moments with his wife, the paintings in this exhibition are not mere exercises involving painter and model, but instead portray an intimacy normally found in the cinema. Gerard was raised in the South Pacific on the island of Vanuatu. Like a reverse Gauguin,...

“The Bias of Costume Design” a lecture by Oscar & Tony Nominated, Emmy Award Winning Costume Designer JULIE WEISS Sunday, April 3rd, 2005 6:30 PM On The Re-Defining of Beauty Through Costume films include: Frida American Beauty 12 Monkeys Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas and many others •The costume as part of the character…or •The character as part of the costume •Can the costume dress the spirit •How does the costume help the written word? •The loss of individuality through dress •The definition of the veil as privacy or ownership •Is a trend without a story nothing more than a blink? $5 donation RSVP 310/ 397-7449 Lecture held in ARENA 1 GALLERY 3026 Airport Avenue Santa Monica, CA 90405 hangarstudios@verizon.net 310 397 7449 phone 310 397 7459 fax

Update: RB Kitaj Exits R.B. Kitaj Los Angeles no. 20 1990-2003 Collection of the National Gallery of Australia "Don't listen to the fools who say either that pictures of people can be of no consequence or that painting is finished. There is much to be done. It matters what men of good will want to do with their lives." -RB Kitaj We are fortunate to have Kitaj back in Los Angeles. Much like Alex and Jane Eliot, Kitaj should be declared a living national treasure. Almost thirty years ago Kitaj curated an exhibition, for the Arts Council of Great Britain, entitled The Human Clay. Let me be the first to propose a new exhibition incorporating Kitaj's School of London with our new - School of L.A. The School of London - School of L. A. connection is a natural one with Kitaj and Hockney working here and inspiring a whole new generation of artists. In the catalog essay for the original Human Clay exhibition, Kitaj wrote, "If some of the strange and fascinat...

photo courtesy Heritage Watch "There is not a single site that is not affected," said Helen Jessup, the founder of Friends of Khmer Culture, describing the looting of Cambodia's artistic treasures. "The Western collectors continue to be as guilty as those who do this." -Jane Perlez in the New York Times Jane Perlez' New York Times article, on the looting of Angkor Wat , shed light on a growing problem in Cambodia and Thailand - the defacement and looting of national treasures for collector's cash. Hidden in the article, a single photo credit, is the identity of an organization that refuses to accept these events as inevitable. Headed by Dr. Dougald O'Reilly, Heritage Watch is actively promoting a series of measures to combat looting and the international trade in stolen art: "The initial phase of HeritageWatch’s projects will focus on education. By targeting a broad spectrum of Cambodian society and visitors to Cambodia we hope to sl...

Richard Diebenkorn "Ocean Park No. 54" 100" x 81" oil on canvas 1972 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art "There is a kind of light on Diebenkorn's stretch of coastline - mild, high and ineffably clear, descending like a benediction on the ticky-tack slopes just before the fleeting sunset drops over Malibu - that is all but unique in North America, and Diebenkorn's paintings always appear to be done in terms of it. It is part of their signature." -Robert Hughes on Diebenkorn, from "Nothing if Not Critical" I think of Diebenkorn almost every evening when I step out of my studio for some air and catch the late afternoon light glowing on the horizon. The WWII era hangar at the Santa Monica Airport that houses my studio brings to mind a sense of the American space found in Edward Hopper, who was a major early influence on Diebenkorn. But the sea-light tempers the tight ruled architectural structure with Bonnard-like fluctuations of ...

Leonardo da Vinci Woman's Head Almost in Profile  "Since the time of Pliny the Elder unfinished works were cherished because they seemed to reveal the thoughts of the artist. In the Renaissance, Leonardo honored the sketch as capturing the very instant of inspiration....Inspiration thus was valued as something even more urgent and vital than the conceptual planning of a work of art." From Peter Sutton's catalog essay accompanying the exhibition, "Drawn by the Brush: Oil Sketches by Peter Paul Rubens": In the past few years, two exhibitions have captured my attention because of the light they shed on the process of creation. "Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman" was on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York during the frigid winter of 2003. The current exhibition, "Drawn by the Brush: Oil Sketches by Peter Paul Rubens", at the Berkeley Art Museum at the University of California continues this theme. Both da Vinci's ...

"Contemptuous of the Insults" Goya 1816-1820 From: "A Revolutionary Age: Drawing in Europe, 1770–1820" organized by the Getty as a companion exhibition to the traveling exhibition " Jacques-Louis David: Empire to Exile" "Sometimes the most determined of invaders, equipped with strong armies and copious intelligence about its enemy can make myopic blunders that later seem close to madness" Robert Hughes, from "Goya"- on Napoleon's invasion of Spain Two years into our debacle in Iraq it is helpful to turn to art and history for some perspective. Napoleon invaded and occupied Spain from 1808 to 1813 prompting Goya's series of etchings, "The Disasters of War", and a related group of drawings . Currently on view in the Getty is a small, ink wash drawing from this period depicting a modish, probably anti-monarchist Spaniard (note the outfit- no pretensions to court style). He mockingly doffs his hat to two miniatu...

"The list of foreign writers, artists and intellectuals who, at one time or another, have been denied entry to the United States on ideological grounds is a long one. It includes English novelist Graham Greene, Italian playwright Dario Fo, and French actor Yves Montand, as well as Nobel-prize-winning authors." -Joanne Mariner Find Law columnist and human rights attorney Joanne Mariner analyzes the case of Dora Maria Tellez, a Nicaraguan historian and former Sandinista official who was recently denied a U.S. visa. Tellez was barred from entering the U.S. for her purported involvement in terrorist acts, but Mariner argues that the decision to bar Tellez had little to do with national security and everything to do with politics: Playing Politics with Visas

Bouquet photo by Gregg Chadwick From Judge Richard Kramer's decision: "The state's protracted denial of equal protection cannot be justified simply because such constitutional violation has become traditional. In 1948 California's statutory ban on interracial marriages was challenged as violating the equal protection clause of the United States Constitution. Advocates of the racial ban asserted that because historically and culturally, blacks had not been permitted to marry whites, the statute was justified. This argument was rejected by the court." Judge Kramer continues,"Simply put, same-sex marriage cannot be prohibited solely because California has always done so before."

photo by Gregg Chadwick "In ads, displays, altars, graphic design, fashion, magazines, signage, architecture, television, movies, web sites, on and on we’re being addressed and coddled and seduced and terrorized and we can't talk about it because we don’t have words for it. Visual "language" is a one way communication." -David Byrne, entry from david byrne's tour journal I was at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles yesterday and was struck by the tortured language used in the wall labels. As soon as the text moved from historical information - artist, date, place, and provenance- the thoughts grew murky. Some of it is art historical posturing. But part of the difficulty is the lack of a contemporary vocabulary that engages visual communication as well as verbal communication. Yes, we are bombarded with visual stimulii. But the typical response from art critics such as Kenneth Baker, who writes for the San Francisco Chronicle, is to declare that this visu...

gregg chadwick temple of the mind (for montien boonma) 60"x28" oil on linen 2005 Ordinary men hate solitude. But the master makes use of it, embracing his aloneness,realizing he is one with the whole universe. Lao-Tzu, Tao-te-Ching I am currently gathering a group of paintings together for my next exhibition which opens on May 6th, 2005 at the Art Rental & Sales Gallery, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036. The opening reception will run from 6:30-8:30 and will be held in the Leo S. Bing Center, Lower Level at LACMA. These new paintings are appreciations of the deep mystery of life and acknowledge the connection that exists between all existence. The exhibition will run from May 6th through June 9th. The gallery is open 11am - 4 pm Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday Closed Sunday, Monday and Wednesday. Phone: 323-857-6500 Art

An international art incident seems to be brewing this week complete with gold, royalty, theft, smuggling and muck-raking journalism. A gold crown on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art as part of "The Kingdom of Siam" exhibition, currently at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, appears to have been looted from a crypt in the historical city of Ayutthaya in 1957. It entered the Philadelphia Museum of Art's collection in 1982. After Jom Patch, from the Thai network ITV, reported last week that the crown might have been looted in the '50's from a sacred chamber at the Buddhist temple of Wat Ratchaburana at Ayutthaya, a furor erupted in Thailand. From Jesse Hamlin at the San Francisco Chronicle- "I am kind of brokenhearted,'' says Forrest McGill, the museum's chief curator, a Thai art scholar who wrote his doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan on the kingdom of Ayutthaya. "A group of American and Thai scholars has ...

Gregg Chadwick Of Sleep and Skies 33"x20" monotype 1999 To be auctioned on Saturday, March 5th at the Monterey Museum of Art Benefit Courtesy the  Lisa Coscino Gallery & the Artist MARCH 5 Art Lovers' Benefit. 6-10 p.m. Saturday, March 5 at the Highlands Inn, Carmel. Food, entertainment and music. A live art auction will benefit the Monterey Museum of Art's educational programs. Tickets are $125 per person. Auction artwork may be previewed and absentee bids can be placed until Feb. 28. The art is in the Buck Gallery at the Monterey Museum of Art, 559 Pacific St., Monterey. Information: 372-5477, ext. 66.

Jared Diamond's new book, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" will prove to be as influential for this generation as Rachel Carson's, "Silent Spring" was to the embryonic environmental movement of the early 1960's. In "Collapse", Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" examines the downfall of some of history's greatest civilizations This is an important book and President Bush better be reading it right now. Unlike most books of the moment, Diamond's "Collapse" is brilliantly written and persuasively argued. Diamond takes an unstinting look at the failures of past societies - from the deforestation and eventually depopulation of Easter Island to the vanishing civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya and the doomed Viking colony on Greenland. Jared argues that,"environmental damage, climate change, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were ...

The exhibition "To Never Forget: Faces of the Fallen" organized by Chester Arnold at the College of Marin has now traveled to Syracuse University. Photo by Ashley McDowell More than 1,400 paintings of U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq since March 2003 line the first floor wall of Syracuse University's Shaffer Art Building. The initial “Faces of the Fallen” originated when Chester Arnold at the College of Marin was moved by a story in The New York Times on U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq. Faculty and students at the college painted, drew and produced more than 1, 100 portraits of soldiers killed since the war began. Stephen Zaima, professor of painting in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, arranged to bring the exhibit to Syracuse University. Students, faculty, staff and Syracuse community members will paint an additional 350 portraits of soldiers who have died since the exhibit began at the College of Marin in November 2004. All of the portraits in th...

Currently at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco is the exhibition- THE KINGDOM OF SIAM: THE ART OF CENTRAL THAILAND, 1350-1800 The exhibition is the first to focus on art from Thailand’s lost kingdom of Ayutthaya, and the first exhibition of classical art from Thailand shown in the United States in more than thirty years. This exhibition is rich in spiritual and artistic inspiration. The works are exhibited in chronological order, and according to the curators (classical Thai art authority Dr. Forrest McGill, the Asian Art Museum’s Chief Curator and Wattis Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art and M. L. Pattaratorn Chirapravati, Assistant Professor of Asian Art, California State University, Sacramento): three major themes are explored: the development of a distinct national culture; cosmopolitanism and the importance of trade; and art as an instrument of royal power. On the day I visited, the galleries housing the traveling exhibition were crowded, yet hushed. Two Thai ...