This mural was created by German artist Case Maclaim for 2016’s Top to Bottom mural project- a group of murals covering a building in Long Island City organized by Arts Org NYC.
Aug 232024
admin
Aug 212024
Marilyn Moore, UAW Local 1112, Women’s Committee and Retiree Executive Board, with her General Motors company retirement gold ring on her index finger, (Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co., Lear Seating Corp., 32 years in at GM Lordstown Complex, assembly plant, van plant, metal fab, trim shop), Youngstown, OH, 2019 from “The Last Cruze” 2019
Frances Turnage, UAW Local 1112, Women’s Committee, holding her 10, 15, and 20 years of service General Motors company anniversary gold bracelets in her dining room, (34 years in at GM Lordstown Complex, paint shop) Youngstown, OH, 2019 from “The Last Cruze” 2019
LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity, currently on view at MoMA, presents several of the photographer’s bodies of work. Documenting her family, her town, and the hardworking people of several communities- she is telling the important stories of people whose lives are often overlooked.
From the museum about the exhibition-
“For this reason, it is incumbent upon me to resist—one photograph at a time, one photo essay at a time, one body of work at a time, one book at a time, one workers’ monument at a time—historical erasure and historical amnesia,” says artist-activist LaToya Ruby Frazier. Born in 1982 in the steel manufacturing town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, Frazier has used photography, text, moving images, and performance to revive and preserve forgotten stories of labor, gender, and race in the postindustrial era. LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity surveys the full range of the artist’s practice, highlighting her role as a social advocate and connector of the cultural and working classes in the 21st century.
For this exhibition, Frazier has reimagined her diverse bodies of work as a sequence of original installations that she calls “monuments for workers’ thoughts,” which address the harmful effects of industrialization and deindustrialization, the healthcare inequities facing Black working-class communities in the Rust Belt, the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and the impact of the closure of a General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio. Monuments of Solidarity celebrates the expressions of creativity, mutual support, and intergenerational collaboration that persist in light of these denials of fundamental labor, human, and civil rights. As a form of Black feminist world-building, these nontraditional “monuments” demand recognition of the crucial role that women and people of color have played and continue to play in histories of labor and the working class.
“The Last Cruze” display
About The Last Cruze from the museum-
“A monument to the working-class people in this country,” as Frazier has characterized it, The Last Cruze was created in solidarity with the United Auto Workers Locals 1112 and 1714 in Lordstown, Ohio. In 2018 General Motors decided to cease North American production of the Chevrolet Cruze, leading to the “unallocation” and shuttering of the Lordstown assembly plant. Collaborating with Locals 1112 and 1714 members, Frazier made photographs that documented union-led efforts to prevent the closure.
Here more than sixty portraits of white, Black, and Latinx workers as well as images of factory labor are paired with printed excerpts from interviews Frazier conducted. These photographs and texts are displayed on a massive cadmium-red structure that resembles both an assembly line and cathedral buttressing. Framed by walls painted in two blue hues to match General Motors’ logo colors, a film featuring photographs by autoworker and photographer Kasey King follows the very last Cruze coming off the assembly line and the employees whose livelihoods depended on the plant.
“Self-Portrait with Shea and Her Daughter Zion in the Bedroom Mirror, Newton, Mississippi”, from the series “Flint Is Family, Part II”. 2017
“John Frazier, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Andrew Carnegie”, 2010
This exhibition closes 9/7/24.
Aug 202024
Laura, 2013, and Awilda, 2014, by Jaume Plensa, located in the Faye Sarkowsky Sculpture Garden which surrounds the Artists Council gallery in Palm Desert.
The sculpture garden is open all year round from sunrise to sunset. The gallery will be reopening on 9/5/24 for the Hot Times Cool Art Show.
Aug 202024
Above is Jaume Plensa’s sculpture Laura with Bun, 2014, on view at Tampa Museum of Art.
From the museum-
At more than 23 feet tall, this artwork expresses both individual and universal traits at great scale, inviting viewers to consider multiple aspects of beauty and human nature. Like all of his large-scale female portrait heads, Laura has her eyes closed, as if looking within. In speaking about these works, Plensa has said, “Look into yourself. My piece is a mirror to reflect your image, so you can think about your own interior—how much beauty we have inside of ourselves.”
Aug 192024
Dehd- Dog Days
This song is from Dehd’s 2024 album Poetry.
The band is playing a free show on Friday 5/23/24 in KCRW’s courtyard in Los Angeles as part of their Summer Nights programming.
Aug 182024
Famous French actor Alain Delon passed away on Sunday, 8/18.
The stills above are from his film Le Samourai from 1967, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. The beautifully shot film follows a mostly silent Delon as an assassin trying to discover who is trying to kill him. It also stars his then wife Nathalie Delon.
Aug 172024
This mural was created by Claudia Walde, aka MadC, for the 2022 edition of SHINE Mural Festival in St. Pete, Florida.
For more of her work, also check out her website and Instagram.
Aug 162024
What does a wall of color make you feel? Does that change if it exists in a gallery? What about the specific color? And if you add text?
These are some of the questions that arise when viewing Haim Steinbach’s mypoemisfinishedandIhaven’tmentionedorangeyet, 2019. The work was part of his 2019 exhibition Appear to Use at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Los Angeles.
From the press release-
Holding a wall of the back gallery is an expansive wall painting consisting of the color orange along with the line—mypoemisfinishedandIhaven’tmentionedorangeyet—from the poem “Why I Am Not a Painter” by Frank O’Hara. Here, Steinbach challenges our perception of architecture in the relationship between language, color and cultural structures, encompassing the core themes of the exhibition.
Here is the Frank O’Hara poem being referenced-
I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.
But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.
And below is Michael Goldberg’s Sardines.
Michael Goldberg, “Sardines”, 1955, oil and adhesive tape on canvas, image via Smithsonian American Art Museum
Aug 152024
The images above are of Terence Gower’s El Muro Rojo (Barragán), 2005, from the group exhibition Color Effects at Galerie Lelong in NYC last year.
From the artist’s website about the work-
A large black and white photograph of the roof patio of the Casa Barragán is mounted on an enormous red wall. The photograph is a copy of Armando Salas Portugal’s famous 1953 photograph (this time commissioned from architectural photographer Jorge del Olmo), and shows a corner of Luis Barragán’s roof patio with its famous coloured walls reduced to grey tones. The work separates a tonal and planar understanding of the architecture from the “emotional” encounter with colour that Barragán aspired to.
From his statement about his practice-
I work on a number of bodies of work at once, each developed over several years. In the past decade my work has focused on a critical re-reading of the modern movement and its utopian bent. A desire to reexamine the notion of progress—a term corrupted by the excesses of technological modernism—has fueled my research on the post-war period and has led to a search for models from the past that might still be relevant today.
Below is the Armando Salas Portugal color photograph referenced by Gower’s work.
Armando Salas Portugal, “Barragán House”, Mexico City, 1948. View of the roof terrace in the late 1960s. Image via Barragan Foundation
Armando Salas Portugal is known for his photographs of the Mexican countryside and the architecture of the city. He captured the work of several famous architects, in addition to Luis Barragán’s projects.
From Wikipedia about the influence of modernism on Barragán and his concept of “emotional architecture“-
Barragán visited Le Corbusier and became influenced by European modernism. The buildings he produced in the years after his return to Mexico show the typical clean lines of the Modernist movement. Nonetheless, according to Andrés Casillas (who worked with Barragán), he eventually became entirely convinced that the house should not be “a machine for living.” Opposed to functionalism, Barragán strove for an “emotional architecture” claiming that “any work of architecture which does not express serenity is a mistake.” Barragán used raw materials such as stone or wood. He combined them with an original and dramatic use of light, both natural and artificial; his preference for hidden light sources gives his interiors a particularly subtle and lyrical atmosphere.
Aug 152024
After seeing the Albert Frey exhibition at Palm Springs Art Museum Architecture and Design Center, you can visit his recently unveiled Aluminaire House near the museum’s main location. It’s incredible at every angle as it reflects its surroundings.
The structure has an interesting history. Before it arrived in Palm Springs, it was rebuilt on architect Wallace Harrison’s property in Huntington, Long Island where it remained from 1931 until 1987. From 1988-2012, it was partially rebuilt on New York Institute of Technology’s Central Islip campus before being dismantled and stored in a trailer.
From the museum-
Designed by Albert Frey, Aluminaire House is one of the first examples of European-style modernist architecture in the United States. Built in 1931 as a full-scale model house for a temporary exhibition, it was intended to be a prototype of mass-produced housing, factory made with modern materials. Composed primarily of aluminum, steel, and glass, it was an experiment in realizing a democratic ideal in architecture of creating affordable, well-designed homes using modern industrial methods and materials. Palm Springs Art Museum acquired the Aluminaire House to add to its rich holdings by Albert Frey, who spent most of his life and career in Palm Springs.