Artist, writer and professional wrestler Rosalyn Drexler, born on November 25, 1926, sadly passed away in September of this year. In addition to her famous artworks, she also wrote several novels and won Obie awards for her plays.
The painting above, Marilyn Pursued by Death, 1963, is currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
From the museum about the work-
Rosalyn Drexler’s work often explores the dark backstories of postwar media culture and gender roles. She frequently clipped subjects from printed materials-here, a news photograph of Marilyn Monroe fleeing the paparazzi with her bodyguard in tow-enlarged and collaged them onto canvas, and then painted over the image. In the artist’s words, her source images were “hidden but present, like a disturbing memory.” On the day this source photograph was taken in 1956, Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller were to announce their upcoming marriage; in the frenzy to cover the event, a car carrying reporters crashed, killing at least one member of the press.
This song is from San Diego band Blair Gun‘s 2024 album, There Are No Rival Clones Here. In this interview the band discusses the song and the process of animating the video which uses over 3000 hand-drawn frames.
The band is playing on Friday, 11/28/25, at Oblivion in Los Angeles along with Loophole, Fat Lady Sang, and Manners.
In Welcome to Li’l Wolf, 2022-3 Fellow Amy Ritter‘s solo exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery, she explores the mobile home park where she grew up and her parents continue to live. Throughout her career she has documented several mobile home parks around the U.S. and considers how they reflect on the American Dream. For this exhibition the work is more personal and includes depictions of her father, his life, and his feelings of nostalgia.
From the press release-
In 2015, Ritter created the MH Archive to document the forgotten and marginalized mobile home communities across the United States. Through meticulous documentation consisting of interviews, photography, recordings, and video, Ritter has gained a deeper understanding of the diverse world of manufactured housing. This ongoing process of visiting mobile home parks now brings her back to where her interests originated, Li’l Wolf, her parents’ mobile home community in eastern Pennsylvania. Using her father’s camcorder from the ’90s, she turns her focus inside her childhood home for the first time. She offers the audience a glimpse into her father’s life by investigating the spaces he inhabits.
When the visitor first steps into the gallery, they are confronted by Li’l Wolf 6, part of the artist’s ongoing MHWindow Series. In this life-sized photograph, taken of a window at her parents’ home, Ritter captures the exterior of a world often guarded and hidden from society. Installed opposite the photograph is the video “Happy Birthday Dean.” Here, Ritter gives the viewer an intimate tour of the inside of her father’s home, culminating with footage from a recent birthday party. The celebration evokes feelings of nostalgia in her father and a yearning for his childhood—a time when things were easier for him. As his age has increased, so too have his fears and resistance to change, encapsulated by the fifteen-minute video Fear | Comfort, projected on the central wall.
The insecurities that haunt Ritter’s father flicker across the projector and TV screen. But, unlike the details of his home’s exterior, they remain partly hidden from view. The viewer is asked to project onto Ritter’s father their own baggage about the American Dream. Seen through his daughter’s lens, he becomes a window into the psyche of an entire generation, leaving us with the question: “How do we restore the dignity of those who get left behind?”
Ritter more recently created work in a similar vein for the 2025 installation What Does it Feel Like To Be You at Ortega y Gasset Projects.
In Andrei Tarkovsky‘s 1983 film, Nostalghia, a Russian author finds himself lost in memories of home while traveling in Italy researching the life of an 18th century Russian composer who committed suicide after returning to Russia from Italy. The film initially follows the author, Andrei Gorchakov, and his relationship with his attractive interpreter. Drifting between dreams of his family in Russia shot in black-and-white and the present day in color, he later becomes fascinated by a local man, Domenico, who struggles with complicated issues of his own.
Nostalghia features motifs Tarkovsky used in many of his films including reflections, mirrors, water, and birds. There are also several scenes reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman‘s work, including the dream scenes of his wife and the interpreter (seen below). Tarkovsky’s feelings while living in Italy, away from his homeland, are also mirrored by those of Gorchakov.
It is in the character of Domenico (played by actor Erland Josephson who was also in several Bergman films), his past, and his connection to the author, that the film takes a more interesting and tragic turn.
Through Domenico’s moving speech, given from on top of a statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, Tarkovsky comments on a culture he sees headed in the wrong direction.
“What ancestor speaks in me? I can’t live simultaneously in my head and in my body. That’s why I can’t be just one person. I can feel within myself countless things at once.
There are no great masters left. That’s the real evil of our time. The heart’s path is covered in shadow. We must listen to the voices that seem useless in brains full of long sewage pipes of school wall, tarmac and welfare papers. The buzzing of insects must enter. We must fill the eyes and ears of all of us with things that are the beginning of a great dream. Someone must shout that we’ll build the pyramids. It doesn’t matter if we don’t. We must fuel that wish and stretch the corners of the soul like an endless sheet.
If you want the world to go forward, we must hold hands. We must mix the so-called healthy with the so-called sick. You healthy ones! What does your health mean? The eyes of all mankind are looking at the pit into which we are plunging. Freedom is useless if you don’t have the courage to look us in the eye, to eat, drink and sleep with us! It’s the so-called healthy who have brought the world to the verge of ruin. Man, listen! In you water, fire and then ashes, and the bones in the ashes. The bones and the ashes!
Where am I when I’m not in reality or in my imagination? Here’s my new pact: it must be sunny at night and snowy in August. Great things end. Small things endure. Society must become united again instead of so disjointed. Just look at nature and you’ll see that life is simple. We must go back to where we were, to the point where we took the wrong turn. We must go back to the main foundations of life without dirtying the water. What kind of world is this if a madman tells you you must be ashamed of yourselves!
O Mother! The air is that light thing that moves around your head and becomes clearer when you laugh.”
Although written in the 1980s the speech feels relevant today, perhaps more than ever. Below is the re-release trailer.
Jasper Frances Cropsey, “Autumn in the Ramapo Valley, Erie Railway”,1873, Oil on canvas
Jasper Francis Cropsey, “Autumn in the Ramapo Valley, Erie Railway”,1873 (closer)
Andrew Wyeth “Fall at Archies”, 1937, Egg tempera on panel
Andrew Wyeth “Fall at Archies”, 1937,(detail)
Jasper Francis Cropsey, “Autumn on the Brandywine”, 1887, Oil on canvas
Autumn is a perfect time to see the latest exhibition Cropsey, Wyeth, and the American Landscape Tradition at the Brandywine Museum of Art. The exhibition offers the first opportunity to view the large painting Autumn in the Ramapo Valley, Erie Railway by Jasper Francis Cropsey in a museum, as well as to see several additional works by artists including the always wonderful Andrew Wyeth.
From the museum about the exhibition-
A stunning example of Gilded Age patronage, Autumn in the Ramapo Valley, Erie Railway of 1873, has been in private British collections since it was commissioned the same year by Irish-American railroad magnate James McHenry. This major canvas changes our understanding of Jasper Francis Cropsey, one of the iconic talents of American art. Almost seven feet in length, Autumn in the Ramapo Valley, Erie Railway is both a celebration of the American landscape and American industry. The train passing through the valley is a reference to the Erie Railroad, in which McHenry had recently acquired a majority stake. Just after it was completed, McHenry had the painting shipped to England where it remained until purchased in 2025 by the The J. Jeffrey and Ann Marie Fox Foundation for American Art. Seen by the public for the first time since 1873, the painting will be at the heart of a special exhibition, Cropsey, Wyeth, and the American Landscape Tradition, which draws on the rich and varied holdings of the Brandywine Museum of Art and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art to provide a focused appraisal of the complex art of American landscape painting.
Alongside this exceptional large-format Cropsey, additional works by Cropsey, Alfred Thompson Bricher, Albert Bierstadt, William Trost Richards, John Frederick Kensett, Mary Blood Mellen, Martin Johnson Heade, and more survey the nineteenth-century boom in landscape painting in the United States and the relationship to industry that was a key context at the heart of this movement. The exhibition continues the story with Cropsey’s afterlives. Through key works in the Brandywine and Wyeth Foundation collections, a clear line of descent traces the further development of American landscape art, via Homer, Bellows, and N.C. Wyeth to an especially rich flowering in the works of Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009). Documentation in the Wyeth family library and archives shows a depth of engagement with artists of the Hudson River School not previously recognized, including specific lessons in composition, allegory, and the aesthetic potential of industry that Andrew Wyeth learned from paintings like Autumn in the Ramapo Valley. With a variety of works in watercolor and tempera, some of which have never been exhibited before, the story of the rich American landscape tradition continues and intriguing commonalities between the artists of the Hudson River School and Wyeth emerge.
Some additional information about Cropsey from the museum-
Cropsey was one of the leading lights of American art in the third quarter of the nineteenth century: a period in which new fortunes from natural resources and transportation were being spent on ambitious landscape paintings depicting the very regions that were the sources of their wealth. Cropsey’s rivals included the likes of Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt. All three worked regularly for railroad barons, and all three achieved notable success, while the so-called “landscape boom” lasted, that allowed them to build statement mansions in New York’s countryside.
It was at Cropsey’s country home, “Aladdin,” in Warwick, New York that he made this painting for the transatlantic businessman James McHenry. Irish-born, Philadelphia-raised, Liverpool-launched, and London-based by this time, McHenry was a European supplier for, and investor in, American railroads. By this date, he had taken control of the Erie Railway and, in celebration, commissioned a depiction from Cropsey of its passage through the scenery of the Ramapo Valley near the northeastern border of New Jersey with New York. Cropsey had already gained a national reputation for paintings that blend industrial and natural subjects in this way, most famously in his 1865 painting Starrucca Viaduct, Pennsylvania (Toledo Museum of Art) depicting a major engineering feat of the same railroad McHenry now controlled, so he was a fitting choice for this commission.
While many American landscape artists were traveling and painting internationally in the period, interest in their work generally came from American audiences. Cropsey was an exception: he worked in London for seven years and exhibited thirteen paintings at the Royal Academy of Art’s competitive annual exhibitions, was presented to Queen Victoria, and sold numerous works to British buyers. The return of Autumn in the Ramapo Valley, Erie Railway to the United States is a landmark moment for scholars and art lovers alike that helps in telling a fuller story of the global networks that surround historical American art.
This song is from the 2025 Jay Som album, Belong. She is currently on tour and playing at the El Rey in Los Angeles on Sunday, 11/23/25, with Fashion Club.
Auguste Rodin‘s The Thinker was originally conceived to be a part of The Gates of Hell, his sculptural group depicting a scene from Dante Alighieri‘s Inferno, but several larger bronze versions were created later. This version was installed outside the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1917. It is one of less than ten created under Rodin’s supervision.
This particular version of The Thinker also has an interesting history. In 1970, a pipe bomb was planted at the base of the statue and the resulting explosion damaged the work. The perpetrators remain a mystery to this day.
This song is from Vundabar‘s 2025 album, Surgery and Pleasure. The band is playing at Scribble in Los Angeles on Thursday and Friday (11/13 and 11/14/25) to celebrate the 10th anniversary of their sophomore album, Gawk.
“Drexler Pigeon (Columba blued)”, 2022, Oil on wood panel
Clive Smith‘s incredibly detailed trompe-l’œil paintings of birds were part of the 2024 exhibition From Cellar to Garret at Marc Straus gallery in NYC.
The first image is of the painting Drexler Pigeon (Columba blued) which uses elements from fellow artist Lynne Drexler’s 1961 painting Blued.
