Tag Archive "mia-rosenthal"

Narcissus in the studio at PAFA – embracing life, death and the figure

Bay area figure painter Joan Brown hugs a fish. Hans Weingaertner, a German-born transplant to the US, shows his naked reflection in the mirror on which he crouches–but keeps his fish out of sight. Narcissus in the Studio, an exhibit of portraits and self-portraits at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, is full of delights and surprises, fearlessly hung to show the many ways that portraits are about more than reproducing a face or even suggesting an identity, but that they can be about mortality; life with its woes and joys; and the mind.

The harmony networks – It’s Who You Know at Projects Gallery

Projects Gallery did something unique for their current exhibition. Instead of choosing 25 artists for a summer group show, they chose five and asked them to each pick five more. The show’s fate rested on networking.

Eternity and memorials in Chinatown last Friday

I toured the Vox building quickly last First Friday roaming the floors, happy to see that even in June the energy was high with lots of interesting work everywhere. Oddly, there seemed to be memorials on every floor. Memorials to art, to art-makers, to…well in many cases it wasn’t clear what was being memorialized. But the boom in nostalgia is big and getting bigger. At this point, we could all benefit from some heat and rage to temper the flood of sadness in the air.

What’s it Worth? Works on Paper at Arcadia–the show

This is part 2 of a 2 part post. Part 1 is about the talk delivered by show juror Joao Ribas. Ribas’ choices for the Arcadia Works on Paper exhibit raise issues of sharing, reproducibility and loss of copyright control. They raise disturbing questions about the value of all art at a time when works on paper have never been more highly valued.