During his career, Brooklyn-born artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 – 1988) filled numerous notebooks with poetry fragments, wordplay, sketches, and personal observations ranging from street life and popular culture to themes of race, class, and world history. The first major exhibition of these notebooks, now on view at the Brooklyn Museum, features 160 pages of rarely seen documents, along with related works on paper and large-scale paintings. Continue reading Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks, at the Brooklyn Museum→
One of the foremost installation artists working today, Pepón Osorio here presents two cats wearing medallions that say, respectively, fear and denial. These oversize domestic animals (their scale accentuated by the small table they sit on) may say something about the exaggerated role that our fears and denials play within our own imaginations.
It was a complete accident that Geoffrey and I ended up making a pit stop at the gorgeous Brooklyn Botanic Garden as part of a recent trip to visit the Brooklyn Museum. It wasn’t until we were on the train that I noticed (for the first time, ever) that the Eastern Parkway Stop off the 2 and 3 is also the stop for the BBG, so I suggested to Geoffrey that we “See how far away it is from the museum” once we got out of the subway. What we discovered, much to our ecstatic delight, is that the Garden is literally right next to the Museum. It could not possibly have been more conveniently located. Even better, Geoffrey’s work ID card got us in for free, and since we had no strict agenda to follow, we spent over an hour exploring nature as a prelude to some hardcore, art-viewing action. It was an amazing day!
These boots combine the traditional technique of beadwork with modern fashion in an entirely contemporary way. To create them, artist Teri Greeves (Kiowa, Native American, born 1970), elaborately embellished the pair of high-heeled sneakers designed by Steve Madden with imagery significant to the Great Lakes tribes. Continue reading Great Lakes Girls Bead Embellished High Heeled Sneakers→
These superb Wrought Iron Gates (circa 1900) by Emile Robert (French 1860 -1924) are rendered by hand in the curvilinear Art Nouveau style, which originated in northern Europe in the late 1890s and flourished until World War I. The revival of interest in wrought iron work in this period was inspired by the beautiful, ornate, Rococo gates and fences around the main square and garden of the French city of Nancy, an early center of the Art Nouveau style. The butterfly motif in these gates is indicative of the main influences of Art Nouveau design: observation of the natural world and motifs popular in Japanese art.
