Bijayini Satpathy animates Met Museum galleries with her dance
photo credit: stephanie berger When Odissi dancer Bijayini Satpathy was selected as the MetLiveArts Artist in Residence for 2021-22, she contemplated how to use the much-coveted opportunity─a year-long association with the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its superlative architecture and collections. Satpathy was still in the nascent stages of exploring her own choreographic voice when ...
Peace for Ukraine: the paintings of Leonid Steele 3
May
9
2022
Daisies (1971), Leonid Steele ed. note: We are pleased to share images of the work of Leonid Steele shared by his son Alexey Steele, who himself is a painter of great force, a host of Classical Underground, and a friend of artsmeme (FOAM). Alexey and his wife Olya have organized a group in Los Angeles, ...
A flash of modernism: E.O. Hoppé meets The Firebird 2
Tamara Karsavina, Adolph Bolm in “The Firebird” (1911) A moment of silence, please, for this splendid photograph, a capture of choreographer Michel Fokine’s “The Firebird,” a ballet created to Igor Stravinsky’s stirring score for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Dancing in their originating roles are Tamara Karsavina and Adolph Bolm. Yes, it’s a sensational, dance historic moment. ...
The Huntington’s people of color: the Blue Boys 1
Nov
1
2021
Kehinde Wiley’s “A Portrait of a Young Gentleman” (2021) (© Kehinde Wiley, collection of the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, and commissioned through Roberts Projects, Los Angeles) Funny … they don’t look Blueish. But both are dandies. And there they are, well hung, in Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Garden‘s Thornton Portrait ...
Act out your photographic fantasies: LACMA’s ‘Acting Out’ cabinet-card show
Aug
23
2021
This is fabulous. I love to ‘act out.’ (Just ask my family.) Now there is an entire exhibition dedicated to that proposition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, aka LACMA. It illustrates one of the few ways people in the late 19th Century could indulge their little dramatic fantasies — by visiting the ...
Film museum … or oil refinery?
We’re very excited about the opening of the new Academy Museum at Wilshire and Fairfax, but as a story in Curbed L.A. demonstrates, no one should be blamed for the confusion. We’ve been living around them forever!
‘United States of Abstraction’: a nice way of putting it
Jul
16
2021
Shirley Jaffe, The Red Diamond (detail), 1964 So that is what we have going on here … abstraction! Life certainly feels abstract lately. When you untether from science, reason, and truth, and when the ravings of a mad man are considered worthy of the public square, never mind that children hear his rants, things are ...
Searching for Nina(s), with coffee & Al Hirschfeld
I don’t quite agree with the exhibition title that calls ‘looking for Ninas’ “a “national insanity.” Donald Trump has a lock on that. But apparently that was how the late great caricaturist/arts journalist Al Hirschfeld, whose charming shtick of inserting his daughter’s name into his cartoons in the Sunday New York Times Arts & Leisure ...
Through the eyes of Milton Glaser 2
If you lived in America in the last half of the 20th Century, you saw the country, in part, through the eyes of illustrator and graphic designer Milton Glaser (1929-2020). So prolific and widespread was his visual sense that, for a while, almost all good design looked like his. He co-founded Push Pin Studios, the ...
Get serious, Los Angeles!
Richard Valitutto, Pianospheres Jan 14photo: Jonathan Nesteruk It’s January. So, no excuses. Clear the eggnog out of your noggin — and get ready for some serious art. In Los Angeles, it’s all around us. Artists and their presenters are hitting the new decade afresh, and with force. It does not get headier than the L.A. ...