Lauren
Greenfield: Girl Culture
2004-10-20 until 2004-12-17
Southeast Museum of Photography
Daytona, FL, USA United States of America
Renowned photojournalist Lauren Greenfield will be presenting a lecture at the Southeast Museum of Photography about her five-year project documenting ways in which American girls are being influenced by popular culture. From strippers to pre-teen softball players, the color images in the exhibition, “Girl Culture,” reveal the common struggle for girls to understand their femininity. Greenfield follows the young women through private moments and social milestones as they try to weave their own identities. Her images provide a candid glimpse into the social process of becoming a woman and demonstrate how far the model for modern femininity has deviated from the past. “The body has become the primary canvas on which girls express their identities, insecurities, ambitions, and struggles. I have documented this phenomenon and at the same time explored how this canvas is marked by the values and semiotics of the surrounding culture,” said Greenfield in the book, “Girl Culture.” The museum will be hosting another event for the “Girl Culture” exhibition in November. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, author of “Girl Culture,” will present the lecture, “From Corsets to Body Piercing – American Girls and Their Body Projects, an Historical Perspective.” from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Nov. 4 in Building 110, Room 112 at Daytona Beach Community College. A reception will be held before the lecture from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. at the museum. In addition to “Girl Culture,” three other exhibitions are included in the Southeast Museum of Photography’s fall season, which will close on Dec. 17. They are “The Chain,” a collection of 40 nearly life-sized black and white portraits by Magnum photographer Chien-Chi Chang of mental asylum patients in Taiwan who are paired together with a chain as part of their treatment; “Our Daily Bread,” four decades of photographs from the state of Israel by native Micha Bar-Am; and “The Persian Image,” by Armenian-Iranian artist Antoin Sevruguin, whose images from the 1870’s to 1930’s chronicle the changing Persian landscape from traditional Islamic society into a fast-paced modern realm.
Robert Arneson: Political Drawings Brian Gross Fine Art is pleased to announce the opening of Robert Arneson: Political Drawings on Wednesday, October 20th. This exhibition highlights Arneson’s wit and humor coupled with the skillful draftsmanship and painterly colorism of his increasingly political drawings of the 1980s and early 1990s.
Robert Arneson: Political Drawings"
2004-10-20 until 2004-11-27
Brian Gross Fine Art
San
Francisco, CA, USA United States of America
Featured are hard-hitting works from Arneson’s cycle of drawings concerning the Moscone assassinations, his nuclear war works, and his Bush/Gulf War pieces.The reception and controversy sparked by Arneson’s depictions of people involved in the Moscone affair marked a turning point in the politicization of his art. He realized for perhaps the first time that his art could serve as a meaningful platform for political and social commentary. Included in this exhibition are tour-de-force, large scale drawings of the key players: Mayor George Moscone, Supervisor Harvey Milk, then-Supervisor Dianne Feinstein and Supervisor Dan White. Arneson addressed the threat of global annihilation and the destructiveness of war, and often caricatured world leaders to highlight their shortcomings. In the masterful drawings, Club Social, Field Trip, and Special Forces, Arneson depicts nightmarish visions of maniacal military leaders encouraging the use of weapons of mass destruction. These expressive and spontaneous works markedly reveal Arneson’s exasperation with the insanity of the arms build-up during the Reagan presidency. Arneson reserved harsher criticism for George Bush Sr. in Oily Bush by depicting him smiling and doused in oil. The image refers to Arneson’s belief that Middle East oil was the real motivation for the 1990 Gulf War. Although some of these works were created over two decades ago, the subject matter and its implications resonate in the current political and social consciousness.
Robert Arneson is most well known for his ceramic and bronze sculptures, but the artworld has known for years of his brilliance in the medium of drawing.
He produced over 600 drawings in his lifetime, works that were often related to sculptural ideas and projects. This is one of the few exhibitions to date to focus solely on Arneson’s drawings. Included will be works from the artist’s estate, and from Bay Area public and private collections. Robert Arneson was born in Benicia, CA in 1930. A professor of art at the University of California at Davis for 29 years, he retired in 1991, and died in 1992. Recent museum exhibitions include Arneson and the Object, organized by the Palmer Museum of Art at The Pennsylvania State University at University Park, 2004; Big Idea: The Maquettes of Robert Arneson, mounted by the Palo Alto Art Center in Palo Alto, CA, 2002-2004; Robert Arneson: Bronze Self-Portraits and Drawings, coordinated by DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Massachusetts, 1999; and Robert Arneson: Self-Reflections, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1997. His work can found be in major museums nationally and internationally, including the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.
Walter King's Final Thoughts of Mountains, Lions and Rivers
Essentially my trip was over and it was just a matter of driving back through the panhandle of Oklahoma back to Columbus. The first stop was a return to Santa Fe where Michelle talked me into staying one extra day so we could climb another trail. We were up above the Pecos River climbing Round Mountain. At about 7000 ft we began to find large Mountain Lion scat along the trail. We’d just been watching the news coverage of the mountain lion who killed a guy and mauled a female hiker in California. I’d heard about it in Tucson but hadn’t caught any of the gruesome details until I hit Santa Fe.