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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 Hidden History of Woman Comics
Comic books have always been a boys' club. From the bulging muscles of Marvel superheroes to the hyper-sexualized women of R. Crumb, the overwhelming odor of adolescent male fantasy has permeated the form. In my ignorance of the comic world, I had no idea what to expect from an exhibition of female comic artists as I entered "She Draws Comics: Great Woman Cartoonists", currently showing at the Cartoon Art Museum. My reluctance to engage with comics has had a lot to do with the feeling that I could never "get" it; comics seemed to be in a wholly different language, created for boys by boys. What, I wondered, could be in it for me? More
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Museums
Intention to Fail
Celebrated film and video artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila is a master at depicting the kinds of oppressive horror and despair that can only be unearthed from domestic matters. Ahtila depicts women who are imbricated in a web of phobias, fears, and dysfunctions. In a series of cinematic episodes entitled Intention to Fail, currently on display through September 5 at the Berkeley Art Museum, Ahtila reimagines conventions of film and video by removing her characters from traditional narrative and exploring insanity through multiple perspectives. More
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Museums
Innocence Lost
Beyond his treatment of common children's motifs - dolls, toys and ambivalent nymphets- Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein's vision is shrouded in an aura of enigmatic darkness. With his giant color portraits of stillborn babies; paintings that juxtapose Nazi-era photographs with his own images; and pictures of deformed, abjectly countenanced children swathed in bandages, Helnwein is preoccupied with the indelible suffering that mirrors the more delicate aspects of youth. More
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Museums
Skateboards, Slang, and Symbols
Propounding the DIY ethic and jabbering about street cred are, by now, cliches, but something about the persistent vogue of skating culture makes me feel like a downright luddite. Beautiful Losers, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, is a celebration of skateboard memorabilia and contemporary art inspired by skateboard culture. In the 1990s, a group of American artists barely out of their teens redefined youth subculture by connecting the dots between skateboarding, graffiti, street fashion, and music... More
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Museums
Adding Context to Myth
With her prominent white face makeup and elegantly flowing kimonos, the geisha is one of the most compelling and misconstrued icons in Japanese culture. The subject of the Asian Art Museum's current exhibit, Geisha-Beyond the Painted Smile, casts a decorous shadow on her own mythologized images; while there's an clear cultural context that attempts to dispel prevalent stereotypes about the geisha, the ritualized élan of her world retains its esoteric charm. 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
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
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
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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