Category: Articles
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Ornamentation Everywhere
Still lifes and flower paintings don’t usually summon adjectives like “rebellious,” “subversive” and “transgressive.” But spend a little time in “Ephemeral Beauty: Robert Zakanitch” at the Nerman Museum, and you may see the connection. It’s a bower of a show, filled with mural-scaled evocations of lush organic growth, riotous color, exuberant brushwork and flowers, flowers, flowers.
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Visions Dark and Dreamy
Dark Days, Bright Nights,” an exhibit of contemporary Finnish painting at the Kemper Museum, gathers familiar vocabularies and styles, including figurative expressionism, narrative realism, stripe paintings and graffiti art. But the spirit of this show, curated by the museum’s executive director, Barbara O’Brien, is something intriguing and different.
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Dual Personality
As a student in the early 1970s at the Kansas City Art Institute, Jerry Eisterhold found himself pondering wine in addition to graphic design. It was a brief phase, yet one that foretold the future. “I thought it would be a cool thing to be a wine aficionado,” Eisterhold remembers.
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“Venus Rising” Contains More Than a Female Body
One of the gems of the Nelson-Atkins’ American painting collection is Raphaelle Peale’s Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception. Often acknowledged as the artist’s most important work, it was a natural choice for inclusion in the exhibit, “Audubon to Warhol: The Art of American Still Life,” now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
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Potential Pitfalls Keep Devon Carney on His Toes
Alas, sometimes things go wrong at the ballet. Tutus can tear wide open. Lights can fail at a critical moment. Scenic backdrops can get hung up and not appear before an audience’s waiting eyes. And dancers, bless them, might even miss an entrance – which makes it difficult to stage a proper twinkle-toes spectacle in the first place.
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Last Glance: Seeking Change and Transformation
The closing of Grand Arts, the cutting-edge project space founded 20 years ago by Margaret Silva and Sean Kelley, sets some talented people in play. Foremost among them is artistic director Stacy Switzer, the gallery’s intellectual driver for the past 11 years. Since 2013, when Grand Arts announced its plan to close, Switzer has been weighing her options.