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Museums
High and Low Culture
There are few artists in the world who have utilized the darkly comical potential of digital and performance art like Austrian-born Erwin Wurm. In his latest exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, "I Love My Time, I Don't Like My Time," a chronological range of Wurm's artistic output adorns the gallery in a zany display of the creative potential of time, mass, and material form. Wurm's exhibit includes experimental performance, photography, video installation, and text. More
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Museums
Saving the Planet, One Brushstroke at a Time
Centuries before Jackson Pollock dribbled paint on a canvas or Andres Serrano relieved himself on a crucifix, a young Aristotle argued that all art inherently imitates nature. Such a rigid assertion might seem oversimplified today, but its essence holds true. More
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Museums
Uniting the Esoteric and Commercial
The lures of the ancient Mayan civilization are many. The visual magnificence of surviving artifacts, bas-reliefs, sculpture, vases, beveled mirrors and bowls, and other items signifying luxury run rampant in the culture's surviving relics. However, the esoteric appeal of the civilization, with its extravagant goods, mysterious rituals, architectural sophistication, and ancient cache of symbols, is perhaps the strongest draw for the current exhibition at the Legion of Honor, Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya. More
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Museums
Everywhere is Anywhere
William Eggleston: Los Alamos at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a small gem of a show and required viewing for any serious student of photography. The dye transfer prints featured in the exhibit are from a recently rediscovered series of eighty-eight photographs taken by the artist in the mid-sixties to mid-seventies in Memphis, Tennessee and from a series of road trips through the American South. Considered by many to be the "father of color photography," Eggleston's saturated, snapshot-style photographs of automobiles, storefronts, and parking lots are beautiful yet wholly unromantic portraits of ordinary American life. More
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Museums
The increasingly palpable link between the Buddhist principle of wakefulness and site-specific conceptual art is practically a moot point. After all, it's inarguable that the primary function of the latter is to educate both sentient and oblivious beings in the subtle art of perception -- but this alone does not a work of "Buddhist" art make. Thankfully, artist Tom Marioni's Golden Rectangle exhibit doesn't rehash the same truisms of the Zen experience, but instead enchants viewers with a complex, elegant interplay between the sacred and colloquial, the contemplative and the social. More
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Museums
It's easy to mythologize artists who die before their work reaches the widest audience; it's easier still when they, tragically misunderstood, kill themselves. In Mark Lombardi's case, though, one feels that his work is so timely, it is a cosmic conspiracy that he is not around to comment on events since the second George Bush took office. In a traveling exhibition entitled "Global Networks," five pieces of from larger collection of drawings shown in New York have arrived at Yerba Buena. More
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Museums
The Streamlining of Decadence
For much of the past half-century, critical pundits have treated Art Deco like the spoiled brat whose father's wealth and connections have allowed it easy access to the otherwise impenetrable echelons of the creative elite. "Indulgent", "capricious", and "exploitative" are some of the epithets hurled its way, and while Deco's aesthetic and academic implications have remained largely intact, a gradual acceptance of commercial art has allowed this movement more breathing space in the otherwise stuffy corridors of art criticism. More
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Museums
Creating a Geometry of Experience
Romare Bearden found his calling in collage-making in the 1960s at the age of 51, a venture that led to his indoctrination in the modern canon and boded a half-century of imitations and tributes. His collages present an exercise in attention and intellectual fortitude, placing spectators in a position where they are forced to reconstruct the artist's meandering fragments and convolutions into a coherent whole. More
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Museums
Rise and Fall of a Global Icon
The latest exhibit at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is a methodical multimedia retrospective that probes the legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the controversial Nigerian Afrobeat musician and activist who died of AIDS-related complications in 1997 at the age of 58. Conceived by Brooklyn-based curator Trevor Schoonmaker, the exhibit showcases the work of 30 contemporary artists who distill Fela's enigmatic persona and revolutionary proclivities... More
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Museums
Life of Israel
Adi Ness's striking photographs at the Legion of Honor create an otherworldly portrait of life in Israel. Ness turns the banality of daily life into the monumental. He lights and saturates his giant and elaborately-staged tableaux to reference nearly every iconic image type: classical paintings, films, fashion stills, even photojournalism and war photography. More
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