A STREAK of semi-dried blood runs across an Iraqi boy’s face. A father and his three sons guard their Kadhamiya neighbourhood from looters. Children in a Shiite religious learning centre re-enact scenes they witnessed during battle between American soldiers and the Mahdi army. These and many other scenes of Iraqis were captured on camera by [...]
KEHINDE WILEY, an African-American artist, has gained attention for his vibrant, large-scale paintings that appear to mix urban hip-hop imagery with old-master portraiture. His subjects tend to be young black men in hoodies and jeans, who strike the confident poses of kings and aristocratic dandies against bright and ornate wallpaper-like backdrops. For his World Stage [...]
Photographs of the Middle East regularly make the front pages of newspapers. But photography by contemporary artists from the region is woefully under-represented in Western galleries. An exhibition at the Victoria and Albert museum in London is an attempt to address this imbalance. “Light from the Middle East” is the first major show of contemporary [...]
A PINK lollipop has fallen to the ground in London, smashing a miniature Audi convertible no bigger than a lego brick. The car’s tiny owner stands next to the crumpled vehicle, holding his hand to his head in distress. In Hong Kong, a little man in a shirt and tie prepares to leap off a [...]
For four years, Taryn Simon traveled the world photographing 18 family bloodlines and their related stories. The resulting images document victims of genocide in Bosnia, a polygamist family in Kenya, the alleged body double of Saddam Hussein’s son, Uday, Filipino farmers and miners, children with no known bloodline from a Ukrainian orphanage, and many more. [...]
When the Memphis design group turned up at the 1981 Milan Furniture Fair with their plastic laminated, brightly colored and highly patterned furniture, the exhibition was reportedly mobbed and streets were blocked as people tried to cram into the tiny exhibition space. In an effort to explore how this and other examples of postmodernism across [...]
The Barbican Art Gallery is offering a glimpse of life in downtown Manhattan in the early 1970s — at least through the eyes of a particular group of artists. The “Pioneers of the Downtown Scene, New York 1970s” exhibition, at the gallery through May 22, features sculptures, drawings, photographs, documentation of performances, and mixed-media works. [...]
In London, you can take classes on how to make graffiti. On weekends, street artist Andy Seize gives graffiti lessons to children and adults who pay between £35 and £150 per session. Since he works in pre-approved spaces, Seize doesn’t have to worry about London’s active graffiti clean-up crews. “[Graffiti] will always have people who [...]
Throughout the three-day Kinetica Art Fair, fans of scientific specifics — robotics, wave forms, gravity — will grapple with more human, philosophical ideas — spirituality, relationships. The fair, which runs Feb. 4 to 6, is a place to witness artists “harnessing the powers of nature and cosmic energy as a means of expression,” according to [...]
In the late 1980s, Miles Davis once told a Canadian journalist that a lot of his paintings and drawings in that period were simply “faces and lines,” and that making art helped him relax. When asked how he compared to other musicians pursuing visual art at the time — Tony Bennett, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie [...]
