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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
Frolicking in the Fertile Fountain of Fabulousness
So what are you wearing right now? Wait, let me guess: jeans, t- shirt, hoody, sneakers, mostly in dark shades. I know I’m right. That’s what we all wear in this country, the only difference in San Francisco is that everything’s usually in shades of gray or black. For a city that the rest of the country thinks is hip and cool (well, they used to think that at least) our collective fashion sense now seems to be located somewhere between Nihilistic Schlump and Generic Gap. What happened to our flamboyance, joie de vivre, and iconoclastic freedom? Vivienne Westwood wants to help. More
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Museums
By Julie Kim
It's hard not to like what's showing in the little hallway tucked away in the otherwise expansive Architecture & Design galleries at SFMOMA. It's an intimate space, reminiscent of the corridor connecting the bedroom and kitchen in your Victorian flat. A visit to this gallery provides a much needed respite from rainy-day-museum-overload, where you might find yourself wandering aimlessly from one large white box to the next, unable to really focus on or be enlightened by the art. There's only room enough for a handful of contemporary design pieces, so it's a good place to hide out if you really want to absorb. More
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Museums
By Rachel Churner
Can you create an exhibition around a title? Co-curators Elizabeth Armstrong and Victor Zamudio-Taylor have done just that in Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art currently at SFMOMA. What emerges from this masterful title is a collection of the contradictions and multiplicities inherent in the baroque itself. Used to describe a style of art prevalent in the 17th century that was characterized by bold ornamentation and contrasting elements, the term baroque also denotes grotesqueness, extravagance, and flamboyance. 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
New Visions of Masculinity
Tim Gardner, Marcelino Gonçalves, and Zak Smith are the three artists whose pieces are featured in the “New Work” series at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art -- and they have little in common beyond their razor-sharp perspective on masculinity, in all its sinewy, culture-garbled trappings. While male artists are the classical bête noire of feminist critics (for adequate reasons, mind you), Gardner, Gonçalves, and Smith articulate a keen responsiveness to the problematic discourse of male-dominated art history. In interrogating formal art-making techniques, the three effectively turn conventions against themselves. More
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Museums
Independent Publishing Explored at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
As the second of four consecutive exhibitions at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts highlighting the growing phenomenon of collaborative art making, The Zine Unbound: Kults, Werewolves, and Sarcastic Hippies is ideologically rooted in the work of three particularly sought-after publications: K48 (Brooklyn), Werewolf Express (LA), and Hot & Cold (Oakland). Artworks made by these zines' editors and contributors expand conceptually from the printed page and into the gallery, where some of the larger thematic forces shaping the contemporary art world inform these installations. More
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Museums
Internal Dialog
One can easily imagine the ecstasy of 15th and 16th century artists and anatomists, especially Leonardo da Vinci, had they been able to see what we can now do -- carefully and accurately preserve human bodies, dissected, sliced, and revealed in almost any way possible. Thanks to a technology called plastination, whereby water and lipids in biological tissues are replaced by curable polymers (otherwise known as plastic), cadavers can be transformed into odorless, dry, durable specimens invaluable for anatomical study and analysis. More
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Museums
A Dam Shame
Are dams evil? Are they necessary? What are their “hidden” costs, and, even if these costs turn out to be much greater than the supposed benefits (as is usually the case), why do we keep building them? The answers to these questions are as varied as the groups that conceive, approve, finance, construct, and operate dams, and the groups that oppose them, fight them actively, or lose their land, livelihoods, and cultures to them. More
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Museums
The Grand Dame of Sculpture at the de Young
Inhabiting a museum building that is itself a sort of sculpture -- the de Young’s angled walls, jutting towers, and twisting, broad steps are considered by many to be works of art -- Louis Nevelson’s creations have found a fitting stopping place, resting for the moment at Golden Gate Park in their monochromatic glory. Nevelson, sometimes referred to by critics as “the grand dame of sculpture, joined the party (at least publicly) late in her life. More
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