Pass the Ketchup

Misha

The Pursuit of Happiness

By George

Stephano de Luigi / VII

A giraffe felled by drought lies dead on a road in Wajir, Kenya, on Oct. 9. The country has had virtually no rain in several years and is facing a severe water crisis.

The New Yorker, June 1

No homage here — this cover is a true original. New Yorker covers are often topical, and they are known for their wit and keen cultural timing. But several times a year, they just run covers that capture the New York–ness of America's greatest city. This cover found a groundbreaking way to do that, featuring a piece by illustrator-designer Jorge Colombo that was created on an iPhone applicaton called Brushes. If it had been done just for novelty's sake, it would be noteworthy but not significant. But this illustration meets the impeccable standards of New Yorker covers — an accomplishment in any medium.

Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction

The Whitney's colorful show puts aside the Georgia O'Keeffe we know best — the Gray Lady of New Mexico — to retrieve an O'Keeffe we ought to know better, the young woman who went fearlessly down the road of entirely abstract art in 1915, when it was a fresh idea with which only a few artists anywhere in the world were experimenting. Her taut vertical thunderbolts and giant crests of rainbow colors are like campaign banners being unfurled by an artist who has set herself — and the art of painting — entirely free.

Yinka Shonibare

Nigerian-born, London-based and at work all over the world, Yinka Shonibare is the last word in transnational artists. And in the work he's best known for — headless mannequins in British colonial dress that's cut from African-style cloth that's actually made in the Netherlands — the very ideas of nationality and ethnic identity are constantly up for grabs. Full of deadpan meditations on the complexities of cultural identity, this was the funniest show of the year, even when the topic was dead serious.

Song Dong

Info here.

Fallen Princess

by Dina Goldstein

Nancy Jurs, Artist Statement: My Life Has Gotten So Busy That It Now Takes Up All of My Time

Happy birthday, Mary Cassat!

Judith and her Maidservant, Artemisia Gentileschi

School of Athens, Raphael

This came up in a recent trivia game and we spent ages trying to remember who painted it. Embarrassing for me - I bought it at one of those university poster sales and had it hanging on my wall for two years. I bought it right after changing my major from history to classical studies because I loved my archaeology classes.

Allan D’Arcangelo (1930-1998)

We read a radio play in my E1 class called "The Hitchhiker." It's a ghost story about a guy driving along lonely, deserted roads on his way to California and being haunted by a hitchhiker that no one else can see. The kids thought it was really cool. One of the illustrations was by Allan D'arcangelo, who I hadn't heard of before. It wasn't this painting, though this one is close.

The Knights of Linda Stein

The Dinner Party, Judy Chicago

The Dinner Party elevates female achievement in Western history to a heroic scale traditionally reserved for men.



Judy Chicago's table has place settings which feature a table runner embroidered with the woman's name and images or symbols relating to her accomplishments. A collaborative effort of many female artists, The Dinner Party celebrates traditional female accomplishments such as textile arts (weaving, embroidery, sewing) and china painting, which have been framed as craft or domestic art, as opposed to the more culturally valued, male dominated fine arts. The white floor of triangular porcelain tiles is inscribed with the names of a further 999 notable women.



Wing I: From Prehistory to the Roman Empire
1. Primordial Goddess
2. Fertility goddess
3. Ishtar
4. Kali
5. Snake Goddess
6. Sophia
7. Amazon
8. Hatshepsut
9. Judith
10. Sappho
11. Aspasia
12. Boudica
13. Hypatia

Wing II: From the Beginnings of Christianity to the Reformation
14. Marcella
15. Saint Bridget
16. Theodora of Byzantium
17. Hrosvitha
18. Trotula of Salerno
19. Eleanor of Aquitaine
20. Hildegard of Bingen
21. Petronilla de Meath
22. Christine de Pisan
23. Isabella d'Este
24. Elizabeth I of England
25. Artemisia Gentileschi
26. Anna van Schurman

Wing III: From the American to the Women’s Revolution
27. Anne Hutchinson
28. Sacajawea
29. Caroline Herschel
30. Mary Wollstonecraft
31. Sojourner Truth
32. Susan B. Anthony
33. Elizabeth Blackwell
34. Emily Dickinson
35. Ethel Smyth
36. Margaret Sanger
37. Natalie Barney
38. Virginia Woolf
39. Georgia O'Keeffe

People from One to One Hundred

The Optimists

I wouldn't say I loved the Optimists by Andrew Miller, but I found it interesting. It's an oddly visual novel, as the protagonist is a photographer and his sister writes about painters - many of the names I looked up. The photographer was in Rwanda during the genocide and the novel is a story about how he tries to process his experience.


Theodore Gericault, The Raft of the Medusa

There are quite a few references to Greek mythology as well, which I must admit to liking in a novel. When she leaves the mental hospital, Clare refers to three of the nurses as the Three Fates: Clotho, the "spinner" who spun the threads of life with her distaff to bring a being into existence; Lachesis, the apportioner, who decided how much time for life was to be allowed for each person or being, measured the thread of life with her rod and chose a person's destiny after a thread was measured; and Atropos, the "inflexible" or "inevitable" who chose the mechanism of death and ended the life of each mortal by cutting their thread with her "abhorred shears." After swimming in a quarry, she references Lethe, the River of Forgetfulness, and Acheron, River of Woe.

One of my favourite parts was Ray handing out the postcards with good news written on the back of them. Clem, the protagonist, joins in on a trip to help Ray buy a suit for a wedding.

"People do what they can," said Ray. "I find it helps to think of them as slightly better than they are."

Later in the novel, when Clem goes to Brussels with his photographs and interviews a man responsible for the genocide, he also makes postcards of one of his photos and distributes them around the city. Public art like this has always struck me as something I'd love to get involved with, I just don't have the slightest idea of where to start.

Many of the settings were incredibly familiar - I've taken that train ride between London and Edinburgh, through Berwick. I've been to Dundee and down the Arbroath Road. I've been to Brussels. The descriptions of Toronto - Chinatown, Union Station, Yorkdale - call up lots of memories. The product names were also very familiar - like Habitat furniture and Bialetti coffee machines. I loved when he described a library of books "more furniture than literature." The references to Chiang Kai-shek glasses reminded me of my trip to Taiwan, just this time last year for Lunar New Year.



Plus I googled to figure out what the hell a fish kettle is. It's worth a read.


Weegee


Dorothy Lange


Don McCullins


Don McCullins


Capa

Stunning photographs of landmark captured over six-month period

A series of majestic emerald arcs light up one of Britain's most iconic landmarks in this stunning photograph taken with one of the longest-ever exposures.


Solargraph: Justin Quinnell's photograph of the Clifton Suspension Bridge

The spectacular picture shows each phase of the sun over Bristol's Clifton Suspension Bridge taken over a six month period.

It plots the sun's daily course as it rises and falls over Brunel's famous structure, which spans the 702ft (214m) Avon Gorge.

Incredibly, the eerie image was captured on a basic pin-hole camera made from an empty drinks can with a 0.25mm aperture and a single sheet of photographic paper.

Photographer Justin Quinnell strapped the camera to a telephone pole overlooking the Gorge, where it was left between December 19, 2007 and June 21, 2008 - the winter and summer solstices.

His final photograph, called 'Solargraph', shows six months of the sun's luminescent trails and its subtle change of course caused by the earth's movement in orbit.

The lowest arc shows the first day of exposure on the winter solstice, while the top curves were captured in the middle of summer.

Its dotted lines of light are the result of overcast days when the sun struggled to penetrate the cloud.

Mr Quinnell, a world-renowned pin-hole camera artist, of Falmouth, Cornwall, said the photograph took on a personal resonance after his father passed away on April 13 - halfway through the exposure.

He says the picture allows him to pinpoint the exact location of the sun in the sky at the moment his father passed away.

Light & Water

Rune Guneriussen

I Am Sean Bell

I AM SEAN BELL, black boys speak from Stacey Muhammad on Vimeo.