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This publication is the result of one of those relatively rare but exciting discoveries in the depths of a large museum’s store rooms–an album of drawings by one of the great illustrators and print designers, Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). Moreover, it likely corresponds to the original drawings for one of his announced, but never-printed, best-selling books of illustrations. It was billed as Master Iitsu’s Chicken-Rib Picture Book; Iitsu was one of Hokusai’s more than thirty aliases, and the term “chicken-rib” refers to a Chinese literary term for something trivial but worthwhile–like the bits of chicken left on the rib bones.
Read MoreIn mid-November, the medieval cathedral of Burgos in northern Spain was lit from within–not by any divine power, but by the miracle of technology. For her temporary light installation “Chromotopia Santa María,” (November 3-13, 2016) Vienna-based artist Victoria Coeln used projected rays of light in brilliant colors to fill the ample space of the cathedral, the white limestone walls intensifying the vivid colors. It’s as if the cathedral’s stained glass windows had turned themselves inside out, dissolving the solid stone structure into layers of light.
Read MoreI lost track of time as Cassils (who prefers the pronoun “they”) attacked the clay in a frenzy of finely choreographed violence. A single photographer circled the performer, the brilliant strobe lights of camera flashes sporadically illuminating Cassils, a small but impressively muscular figure.
Read MoreJulie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust” is a haunting story of a family torn apart by change. Set in 1902, the film unfolds at the sea island family Peazant’s reunion on the beach called Ibo Landing, where a younger generation talks of moving to the mainland and the older generation fights to stay. The beach is paradise but there’s trouble. A wife is pregnant with another man’s child, a sister returning from the North is a prostitute, another is a Christian religious fanatic. In a movie where characters play symbolic roles, these two returning sisters, shaped by their experience in the big cities, are cautionary examples of something pure having been tainted.
Read MoreThe unusual combination of works appears to represent studies of the human condition–music stilled, broken bones, poverty, torture, a near-death experience, and more. The works are crammed together, much like the city, much like Temple University itself, as they present artists’ views of disparate problems facing us.
Read MoreThis stunning, indeed mind-boggling, monograph is the ultimate resource on the art of Paul Laffoley, whose works function as charts and diagrams of the Boston artist’s highly individual understanding of the physical, psychic, and spiritual world. They could be illustrations to a cosmology textbook written by a multi-authored committee which included Plato, Dante Alighieri, Giordano Bruno, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, P.D. Ouspensky, H.P. Lovecraft, and the physicist who named “black holes,” John Wheeler.
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