Speed of Life

Eye Unidentified Artist 3/4" x 3/4" watercolor on ivory ca. 1900 Smithsonian American Art Museum Kriston Capps announces: "I'm excited to introduce Eye Level , the blog for the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It's one of just a few museums forging new ground with new media (and is host to the Smithsonian's first blog!). Today's the official launch and I hope you'll check in frequently. When the Smithsonian American Art Museum reopens its renovated historic main building in July 2006, it will be a showcase for American art that celebrates this nation's vision and creativity. SAAM's blog Eye Level is part of the museum's continuing effort to explore the stories central to the American experienceand to search for what connects Americans today. Using the museum's collection as a touchstone, the conversation at Eye Level will center on the ways in which the nation's art connects to its history and culture. The discussion will extend ...

Edwin W. Dickinson American, 1891 - 1978 The Cello Player, 1924 - 1926 oil on canvas 60" x 48 1/4" DeYoung Museum photo by Gregg Chadwick "Dickinson is not a name that carries instant recognition outside the circles of art historians and artists. He spanned (1891 - 1978) a period in American art history which jumped from academic Realism to Cubism and Abstract Expressionism and through all of these changes he retained his own style, pausing here and there to prove that he was thoroughly informed by all the new schools in the arts while continuing his mission as a representational artist. His studios were in New York and in Cape Cod and it is here that he observed and painted the world as he saw it. Some of his canvases took years to complete." -Grady Harp

by Gregg Chadwick Olmec Sculpture photo by Gregg Chadwick "In 1862 plantation workers in Huaypan, Veracruz, thought that they had found a large overturned iron kettle buried in the ground. Believing that it might hide a cache of gold, they dug -- and dug -- and dug, eventually revealing a colossal stone portrait head. This was the first Olmec sculpture to be discovered in Mexico. It would be nearly 70 years before a number of extraordinary objects of jade and stone were to be seen as stylistically related and of a culture which nobody had known. That culture was arbitrarily named "Olmec" for the peoples who, at the time of the Spanish conquest, had inhabited the region where the first head had been found." - Gillett G. Griffin, from the catalog eesay for "The Olmec World: Ritual and Rulership" exhibited at The Art Museum, Princeton University in 1996. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco have a new building to house the de Young museum and a n...

Lee Mullican "Space" 40" x 50" oil on canvas 1951 Los Angeles County Museum of Art "Mullican, like many other artists of his generation, was consumed with the question of how spirituality could be effectively represented in art. He had been stationed with the Army in Guam when atomic bombs landed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and, with thousands of other American soldiers in the Pacific, he was sent to occupy Japan immediately after. Faced with the unprecedented potential for nuclear annihilation, and soon given the emerging truth about the Holocaust in Europe, matters of life's sanctity were pressing in the years following the war. Creativity itself held profound intrinsic value — and in a measure unmatched in American culture before. History had brought the world to the brink. Artists, many of them returned from the battlefields, reasonably surmised that a reconsideration of prehistory might provide a platform from which to start over." - Christopher Kn...

Gregg Chadwick "Acadia" 48"x36" oil on linen 2005 Upcoming Workshop Weekend of December 2-4, 2005 The Painted Word: A Conversation between Word & Image at Esalen,Big Sur Phil Cousineau & Gregg Chadwick "Painting is silent poetry, and poetry painting that speaks." — Simonides For thousands of years, one of the profound mysteries of the human adventure has been the creative impulse. The urge to make new things, to leave our mark, to express ourselves, is essential to what makes us human. While most creative people focus on one art form, there is a venerable tradition, from Leonardo and Michelangelo to Picasso and Akira Kurosawa, that teaches creativity as one vast continuum with no real distinction between drawing and writing. In this spirit, Gregg Chadwick and Phil Cousineau will use slideshows, film-clips, music, and discussion to explore the intimate relationship between words and images, as well as innovative writing, drawing and painting ex...

by Gregg Chadwick Lise Patt "Traumbagger" On Sunday, November 13, 2005, from 2-5 pm, a reception will be held at The Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICI) at 1512 South Robertson Blvd in Los Angeles. This special open house will borrow from the Renaissance “Wunderkammer” tradition—every usable surface of the Institute will be covered with projects created during the organization’s 15 year history. Ole Worm's Wunderkammer (Cabinet of Curiosities) Frontispiece from the 1655 catalog : "Worm's Museum, or the History of Very Rare Things, Natural and Artificial, Domestic and Exotic, Which Are Stored in the Author's House in Copenhagen."* The Danish professor of medicine Ole Worm (1588-1654) believed that learning comes about through the observation of nature - "through empiricism and experiment" - and not just through the study of texts. Worm firmly believed that vision was the most trustworthy sense for investigations of our environment....

Wim Wenders's 2003 film The Land of Plenty will be opening on November 11th for an exclusive one-week run at the Laemmle's Music Hall in Beverly Hills, California. The film deals with themes that are common to Wenders's work: angst, alienation, and America—but in Land of Plenty these themes are explored through a uniquely spiritual and post 9-11 perspective. The film tells the story of Lana (Michelle Williams), who returns to the United States after years of living abroad with her American missionary father. Though she has returned to America with plans to continue her education, Lana instead sets out to find her only other living relative—her uncle Paul, her deceased mother’s brother. A Vietnam veteran, Paul is a reclusive vagabond with deep emotional war wounds. A tragic event witnessed by the two unites them in a common goal to rectify a wrong and takes them on a journey of healing, discovery, and kinship. The Hollywood Reporter says in a recent review of the film, ...

Jessey Dorr's "Off to the Oyster Beds," a painting found at a garage sale, led the buyer, Davis Dutton, on a several-year search for the painter. Photo courtesy of the Davis Dutton Collection Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle has a wonderful piece by the Los Angeles bookseller* and author Davis Dutton on the search for the artist behind a haunting painting found gathering dust in a garage. This account is so well written that it calls out to become a book. It has much to say about art and life in California in the early part of the 20th Century: The Burnt Paintings Artist Jessey Dorr: Born into a wealthy Nob Hill family, she was a strong-willed woman who burned her paintings after a bad review. Photo by Imogen Cunningham As an artist I always wonder where my works will end up in fifty or a hundred years. Like most painters I know,(See Martin Bromirski at Anaba ), I have found a few treasures stacked against the walls in small shops. I once found an original Cezanne etc...

On Monday November 7th at Book Passage in Corte Madera at 7 pm, Phil Cousineau and Huston Smith will talk about their new book "A Seat at the Table: Huston Smith in Conversation with Native Americans on Religious Freedom ". The book is cast as a series of dialogues in which the most widely read and beloved historian of religions in the world, Huston Smith, engages in conversations with American Indian leaders about their five hundred year long fight for religious freedom. These intimate, impassioned dialogues yield profound insights into one of the most striking cases of tragic irony in history: the country that prides itself on religious freedom has resolutely denied those same rights to its own indigenous people. Phil Cousineau and Huston Smith With remarkable erudition and curiosity, Smith and Cousineau, respectfully engage ten American Indian leaders: Vine Deloria, Jr. (Lakota), Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabe), Walter Echo-Hawk (Pawnee), Frank Dayish, Jr. (Navajo), Charlot...

Stewart Lupton and Betsy Wright "I'm coming into my own," Stewart Lupton says. "Every painter or poet has this period - the good ones always reinvent themselves. There's always this little epoch where you step into your own skin and leave what T.S. Eliot called 'the anxiety of influence' behind." Gregory Korn, a talented writer and artist, passed on word of The Childballads recently, and the lone song available on the band's website haunts me: Childballads: "Cheekbones (White Chocolate Tea)" . This song was in my dreams last night and I woke up singing it this morning. Of course the name, Stewart Lupton, sounds familiar. Recently in the New York Post , Maureen Callahan wrote: "IT'S rare that someone gets another shot at becoming the next big thing - especially when people aren't quite sure whether you're still alive. In the late 1990s, Stewart Lupton was poised to be the biggest rock star to emerge from the burgeonin...

Arcade Fire on Pancake Mountain Filmmaker Scott Stuckey created Pancake Mountain , the Washington, D.C., cable-access show on which alt-rockers like Ted Leo, Shonen Knife, Weird War, Fiery Furnaces and Arcade Fire play before an energetic and very young audience. "Bands started hearing about it and called us," Scott Stuckey says. "So many parents write us," says Stuckey, "and they're like, 'Wow, this is something I really like watching with my kids.'" Rufus and Henry Rollins In addition to live performances by bands, Pancake Mountain features interviews between the show's puppet host Rufus Leaking and musicians — including Henry Rollins and George Clinton. The program is currently available on cable in DC and New York, but you can buy the episodes on DVD from the Pancake Mountain website. While created with children in mind, the show appeals to kids of all ages. My favorite clips include Shonen Knife performing "Twist Barbie" and...

Army Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, director of the force's combined press center, described the number as an "artificial mark on the wall." "I ask that when you report on the events, take a moment to think about the effects on the families and those serving in Iraq," Boylan said in an e-mail. "The 2,000 service members killed in Iraq supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom is not a milestone. It is an artificial mark on the wall"

I voraciously gather images to use for reference in my artwork. I especially like to collect photographs of artworks that move me in some way. I spend hours in the studio looking at these images of paintings and sculptures and then jotting down my thoughts and ideas. A year ago, on my birthday, I was traveling in Maine and shot a few photos along the way. Modern Kicks' entry on the Neil Welliver exhibition, currently at the Portland Museum, brought back memories of that journey. On that gray day in Portland, two works in the collection stood out. Winslow Homer (1836-1910) Sharpshooter, 1863 oil on canvas 12 1/4 x 16 1/2" Portland Museum of Art, Maine USMC Sniper Team, 2004 Photo by: Gunnery Sgt. Keith A. Milks Winslow Homer's "Sharpshooter" is as relevant as the front page of today's New York Times.* Alexander Eliot in "Three Hundred Years of American Painting" describes how Winslow Homer's "huntsman eyes saw the world his contempo...

Rosa Parks died today, October 24, 2005 at 92. On December 1, 1955, Mrs. Rosa Parks set the modern civil rights movement in motion when she refused to give up her seat on the the Cleveland Avenue bus in Montgomery, Alabama to a white passenger. When the front of the bus filled up, the driver ordered Rosa Parks, a seamstress for the Montgomery Fair department store, to give up her seat for a white rider. She refused and was arrested. Rosa Parks's arrest for breaking Montgomery's segregation laws started a boycott of the city bus line that lasted over a year. This eventually led to the 1956 Supreme Court decision which ruled that segregation on public buses is illegal. Rosa Parks: "The famous U.P.I. photo (actually taken more than a year later, on Dec. 21, 1956, the day Montgomery's public transportation system was legally integrated) is a study of calm strength. She is looking out the bus window, her hands resting in the folds of her checked dress, while a white man si...

de Young Museum in fog A party was held at the new de Young Museum in San Francisco on October 20th for the local art world. The event was sponsored by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which encompasses both the de Young and the Legion of Honor, and the San Francisco Art Dealers Association. We were asked to arrive in festive attire. A heavy San Francisco fog shrouded the new building which seemed to appear briefly then vanish into the mist. The new structure looked less like a beached aircraft carrier and more like the Enterprise cloaking and uncloaking in Golden Gate Park during one of the Star Trek films. The new de Young is both spacious and elegant which gives the art room to breathe. The architects, the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron and Fong & Chan Architects from San Francisco, have allowed the function of the building to determine its internal look and structure. "We wanted to keep the art itself in the foreground," Herzog says. Looking down on Andy Go...

Currently at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis is a Huang Yong Ping retrospective entitled "House of Oracles". Huang Yong Ping "11 June 2002--The Nightmare of George V" "The title identifies the hunter as King George V of England. Huang explains that in 1911 the king, while hunting in Nepal, killed four tigers in three days, a remarkable feat. One of the tigers attacked the king, and he donated this specimen to a museum in Bristol, where Huang found it. In Paris the artist located preserved animals from other treks. He attached to a wicker howdah on the elephant’s back a tiger in the documented position of attack, but he replaced the royal howdah–an emblem of empire–with the sort used to protect well-heeled tourists. The tableau looks back to the approaching end of the colonial period." - Artforum Crate Logo for Huang Yong Ping Exhibition at the Walker Art Center Designed by Phil Docken The Walker's visual arts blog has a wonderful piece on the tr...

This Sunday on the Cal Berkeley campus, the writers of the Simpsons will come clean as closet math geeks. "We couldn't handle the pressures of academia", they might say, "but at least we kept our day jobs in animation." MSRI’s Archimedes Society invites you to this FREE public event Mathematical Writers from The Simpsons and Futurama Sunday, October 16, 2005 • 2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. Valley Life Sciences Building's Chan Shun Auditorium (Rm. 2050) at UC Berkeley Writers David X. Cohen, Ken Keeler, and Jeff Westbrook have kept their math habit alive by sneaking in hundreds of mathematical and scientific references into The Simpsons and Futurama. Join in as the writers discuss their mathematical backgrounds, favorite theorems from Homer and Bart, along with thoughts on the representation of mathematics in Hollywood. In honor of this event , and in anticipation of the upcoming Simpson's Halloween special, we join The Simpson's episode "Treehouse O...

(Jennifer S. Altman / LAT) "I try to find beauty in the middle of the horror, and vice versa," she says. "Sometimes, really horrible things — you can turn into a weapon of beauty." -Shirin Neshat in an interview with Tyler Green Tyler Green's article on the Iranian- American artist Shirin Neshat in the Los Angeles Times is well written and provacative. A must read: Shirin Neshat: Trapped Between Two Worlds More on Shirin Neshat: Shirin Neshat: Photo Essays- Time Europe

HAROLD LEVENTHAL 1919 - 2005 Harold Leventhal, died on Tuesday at the age of 86. A renowned folk music champion, Leventhal acted as promoter, producer, and manager for Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and countless others. Leventhal presented a 21-year-old Bob Dylan at Town Hall in New York in Dylan's first major concert hall appearance on April 12th, 1963. Harold Leventhal was featured most recently in Martin Scorcese's documentary "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan" in which he provided glimpses into Dylan's early years in New York. Harold Leventhal enlisted in the US Army during World War II and was stationed in India from 1944-46. These years had a profound impact on his life both politically and artistically. In India, Harold's political interests led him to seek out members of the Indian National Congress. He met with Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi. Harold Leventhal and Jawaharlal Nehru,1945 Jorge Arevalo, in the concert notes to the Tribute to...

Shahzia Sikander (detail from dissonance to detour, mixed media on paper) Shahzia Sikander, who has traveled from Pakistan, to Rhode Island, to New York is now in Los Angeles for a short time, as a guest artist at the Otis College of Art and Design. Her recent work is on view until November 12 at Otis' Ben Maltz Gallery. Shahzia Sikander's exhibition "Dissonance to Detour", curated by Meg Linton, features new paintings on paper, a digital video animation, and a large wall painting. There is a rich fluidity to this work, especially in the details which play with the idea of 17th century Mughal miniatures. There is an expectation of narrative and resolution within the paintings. But upon closer examination, the works slip into a vivid flux of color and line. By shifting the viewer's expectations from narrative to paint, Sikander refuses to create the works that might be expected. Instead Shahzia Sikander's exhibition evokes an imaginative response. While viewin...