Deanna Templeton: Scratch My Name On Your Arm

Deanna Templeton: Scratch My Name On Your Arm at Kopeikin Gallery. More... Works by Deanna Templeton at her personal site.

Claire Pentecost: Interior Studies

Claire Pentecost: Interior Studies at Higher Pictures. "...Higher Pictures presents Interior Studies by Chicago-based artist, advocate and educator Claire Pentecost. The series of site-specific drawings re-presented as photographs describes an interior space, the physical and mental process of collection, consideration and organization of information. The exhibition features over fifteen Palladium prints created from 1999 to the present."

William Albert Allard: Five Decades

William Albert Allard: Five Decades at Steven Kasher Gallery. "...William Albert Allard’s work has moved millions in the pages of National Geographic for nearly five decades. He is the colorist and dramatist that National Geographic photographers esteem the most as a pioneer and peerless exemplar of natural, expressive color in magazine photography. Allard is Manet with Kodachrome, wielding slashing strokes of blood red and bullhide black. Allard is Hemingway with a Leica, crafting complex tales of matadors and cowboys, of fishermen and farmers. His characters struggle, with dignity and grace. They attend to the ceremony of their own survival, alone, but in touch with sympathetic others. William Albert Allard could be the greatest photographer you’ve never heard of."

Happy Thanksgiving

Carving The Turkey (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, November 25, 1965). Happy Thanksgiving from gmtPlus9(-15).

Unica Zürn: Twelve Drawings + Two Paintings

Unica Zürn: Twelve Drawings + Two Paintings at Ubu Gallery in New York. "...an exhibition of recently acquired works by the tormented and visionary German author and artist. Born in Berlin on July 6, 1916, Unica Zürn grew up surrounded by exotic, ephemeral objects collected by her father, a cavalry officer stationed in Africa. Inspired perhaps in part by her father’s gifts from afar and a longing for greater contact with him, Zürn developed a rich fantasy life and a vivid imagination. This is evidenced in her dense, otherworldly drawings of fantastical creatures meticulously constructed out of finely rendered, obsessively repetitive shapes and lines."

Houdini: Art and Magic

Houdini: Art and Magic at the Jewish Museum in New York. "...Through impossibly daring feats Harry Houdini (1874-1926) captivated audiences worldwide, and his legendary escapes instill awe to this day. Houdini: Art and Magic, the first art exhibition in an American art museum on the master magician, features magic apparatus such as his straitjacket, handcuffs and milk can, posters, broadsides, period photographs, archival films, and contemporary art work by artists such as Matthew Barney, Petah Coyne, Jane Hammond, Vik Muniz Deborah Oropallo and Raymond Pettibon.
The exhibition explores how Houdini's role as an American icon was transformed across three centuries, first in the late nineteenth century by Houdini’s own interpretation of his status, next by twentieth-century popular culture, and today by contemporary artists who conjure Houdini as an audacious performer and showman of raw physicality. The theme of escape animates Houdini's work and permeates the film footage, posters, photographs from Houdini’s day. While Houdini deliberately controlled his image, after his death in 1926 and his wife’s death in 1943, contemporary culture held sway. The magician was no longer an audacious apostle of grueling physical activity but a leading man with silver-screen appeal. By the 1970s his edgy performances that caused fear, excitement, and apprehension in his audiences at the turn of the last century was a source of inspiration for contemporary vanguard artists."

David Vestal: Once Upon a Time in New York

David Vestal: Once Upon a Time in New York at Robert Mann Gallery. "...Featuring an array of photographs taken in New York spanning from the 1940s to the 1970s, David Vestal: Once Upon a Time in New York offers the opportunity to consider this under-appreciated master in greater detail. Learning the idiom of photography through the Photo League, where he was a member and befriended Sid Grossman, Vestal developed a distinctive approach outside the general doctrine associated with that group, generally eschewing the photographic essay in favor of single images that could stand on their aesthetic qualities alone. With an outstanding flare for the atmospheric, Vestal's photographs from this era place him in dialogue with luminaries such as Robert Frank, Aaron Siskind, and Berenice Abbott."

Films of the Vienna Actionists (1957-1995)

Films of the Vienna Actionists (1957-1995) at UbuWeb Film & Video. "...The term Viennese Actionism describes a short and violent movement in 20th century art that can be regarded as part of the many independent efforts of the 1960s to develop "action art" (Fluxus, Happening, Performance, Body Art, etc.). Its main participants were Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. As "actionists", they were active between 1960 and 1971. Most have continued their artistic work independently from the early 1970s onwards. Included here are films by Otto Mühl, Kurt Kren, Hermann Nitsch & Otmar Bauer."

Jamie

Happy Birthday to my son Jamie - 15 years old today.

Works by Agustín Víctor and Miguel Casasola

Works by Agustín Víctor and Miguel Casasola at Poemas del río Wang. "...The Mexican Agustín Víctor Casasola, with the intermittent help of his brother Miguel, began to set up around 1900 one of the most important photographic archives for the history of a country. However, the international recognition of these almost 500,000 photos has not matched its importance. Born in 1874 and raised in the years of the Porfirio Díaz government, Agustín Casasola was a direct witness to all the adversities that led to modern Mexico, and breathed as nobody else the air of a country and a city that developed during the first third of the 20th century at a runaway pace." Via... wood s lot.

Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand

Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand at the Met. "...This exhibition features three giants of photography—Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864–1946), Edward Steichen (American, b. Luxembourg, 1879–1973), and Paul Strand (American, 1890–1976)—whose works are among the Metropolitan's greatest photographic treasures. The diverse and groundbreaking work of these artists will be revealed through a presentation of approximately 115 photographs, drawn entirely from the collection."

Eugene Von Bruenchenhein: ‘Freelance Artist—Poet and Sculptor—Inovator—Arrow maker and Plant man—Bone artifacts constructor—Photographer and Architect

Eugene Von Bruenchenhein: ‘Freelance Artist—Poet and Sculptor—Innovator—Arrow maker and Plant man—Bone artifacts constructor—Photographer and Architect—Philosopher at the American Folk Art Museum in New York. "...focuses on the formal leitmotifs of leaves and floral patterns as organizing principles in Von Bruenchenhein’s multidisciplinary oeuvre. The exhibition highlights the evolution of these forms from the fabric and wallpaper featured in the early “pinup” photographs of the artist’s wife, Marie, to hand-built ceramic flowers, vessels, and crowns. These ideas are further abstracted in vertical chicken- and turkey-bone towers and thrones and in paintings of spires, castles, and visionary buildings. The installation culminates with a book of drawings housed in a wallpaper-sample book and 34 rarely displayed ballpoint-pen drawings, unifying the two structural strands. Made in the early- to mid-1960s, those works range from studies of arabesque curves to architectural designs."

Manabu Someya Gallery

Japan Exposures... Manabu Someya Gallery. "...Japan Exposures is pleased to present a gallery of work from Manabu Someya, drawn from his series 'Nirai'. Writes Japan Exposures’ editor Dirk Rösler in his review of Someya’s Nirai photobook: 'I have struggled to find some adjectives that would describe the work, and whatever I think of does not seem entirely adequate so the reader should not put too much weight on them. One word is 'lush', even though that is certainly not what the photgraphs are meant to show primarily. The exquisitely warm and brownish color palette, signs of earth and vegetation set an important fundamental tone. We are in a hot and painfully humid place here, a place that lets us move only slowly and longing for rest in the shade of a forest, surely with the expected amount of various exotic insects that would soon settle on us.'"

Works by Joseph Sterling

Works by Joseph Sterling at Stephen Daiter Gallery in Chicago, IL. "...Joseph Sterling (American 1936-2010) received his M.S. at the Institute of Design in 1962 where he studied under the renown teaching team of Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. Sterling's immediate group included artists Joseph Jachna, Charles Swedlund, Ken Josephson and Ray Metzker; collectively, they were known as the 'ID 5.' After graduating, Sterling pursued a career as a magazine and corporate/industrial photographer. He established the photography department at Columbia College of Chicago and has taught and lectured at both the Institute of Design and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Among other publications, Sterling's work has appeared in Aperture Magazine and Time Life's 'This Fabulous Century.' His photographs can also be found in the collections of MoMA, George Eastman House, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago. In 2005 Sterling's monograph Age of Adolescence (Greybull Press - essay by David Travis) was released." RIP: Joseph Sterling. Also... Joseph Sterling: The Age of Adolescence at Stephen Wirtz Gallery.

Works by JJ Cromer

Works by JJ Cromer. "...JJ Cromer is a self-taught artist from southwest Virginia."

Ikue Mori: Bhima Swarga

Ikue Mori: Bhima Swarga (2007) at UbuWeb Film & Video. "...Eye of Sound: Loosely based on a section of the great Indian Mahabharata epic, Mori's Bhima Swarga (The Heaven of Bhima) is a riveting audiovisual exercise that uses mural paintings from the 18th century Kertha Gosha court in Bali to create a beautiful jigsaw of colour, glitch, figurative exoticism and plastic abstraction. The 'original' Bhima Swarga tells the story of Bhima's excursion into hell (naraka) to rescue the souls of his father and co-mother and escort them to the gods' heaven. After fighting hosts of ill- and good-natured demons, Bhima and the remaining Pandava brothers must face the violent opposition of ill- and good-natured gods, who, though respecting the hero's resolve to fulfil his promise, cannot tolerate such an inversion in the established order of things. Bhima eventually dies in heaven but is restored to life and glory and given the amrut, the elixir of immortality."

Passenger Pigeons: The Extinction of a Species

Passenger Pigeons: The Extinction of a Species at the WHS. "...A collection of 24 photographs of captive passenger pigeons from the late 19th century documents some of the last living specimens of the now-extinct bird and provides the substance for another Wisconsin Historical Images photo gallery. The photos, taken by J.G. Hubbard in Chicago in 1896, detail part of a passenger pigeon collection belonging to Frank M. Chapman, former curator of ornithology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The photographs show pigeons as chicks and adults, singly and in groups."

In almost every picture #7

Lens Culture... In almost every picture #7 - photographs collected & edited by Erik Kessels and Joep Eljkens. "...In almost every picture #7 tells the story of a Dutch woman whose life is seen from the point of view of a fairground shooting gallery.
The chronological series begins in 1936, when a 16-year-old girl from Tilburg in Holland picks up a gun and shoots at the target in a shooting gallery. Every time she hits the target, it triggers the shutter of a camera and a portrait of the girl in firing pose is taken and given as a prize.
And so a lifelong love affair with the shooting gallery begins. This series documents almost every year of the woman's life (there is a conspicuous pause from 1939 to 1945) up until present times."