Photography & Art

The Yarn Bombing Movement Hits the Streets

Nancy Lackey Shaffer

Yarn bombing, yarnstorming, knit graffiti, guerilla knitting, urban knitting—regardless of the name it goes by, the art form is unmistakable. Colorful knit and crocheted materials have been popping up in urban spaces all over the world, as tree cozies, pole warmers, statue scarves and numerous other decorations. Bicycles have been bound, cars covered and entire buildings blanketed with cleverly woven yarn pieces. And make no mistake: yarn bombing is a new type of street art, often full of as much intricacy and artistic expression as a work by Banksy or Retna. 

Yosemite: A Photo Essay

Binh Danh

Danh is well known for his rigorous photographic experimentation, having previously innovated a method of printing images on living leaves in order to create a botanical archive of victims of the atrocities in Vietnam and Cambodia. Similarly, creation of the Yosemite series involved outfitting a specialized van for the on-site creation of large-scale daguerreotypes and spending many seasons camping and working from within the park.

New Paintings by Eric Freeman

Eric Freeman

While we understand that these works are fastened to the canvas, that the paint is permanent once dried, there is an ever-evolving quality to their surface—one seems to not only respond emotionally, but the paintings themselves react optically to the colors and light around them. Stripped of narrative and void of external references, what remains is pure and intense color. In an age where artists are constantly exploring new mediums and trying to break away from what has already been done, Eric Freeman finds his mode of expression by pushing through the traditional medium of oil on canvas. 

Londoners: A Photo Essay

Miguel Lois

Beyond the media spectacle and daily tourists, a parallel world exists within London. A world that seems not to observe the visitor. A reality away from the opulence, the speed and the cosmopolitan daily routine. These are neighbors, people with experiences, or those with more or less truncated lives. People who move silently, unheard, ubiquitous among visitor masses, blind and hardworking.

 

The Art of Oliver Sin

Oliver Sin

Oliver Šin (1985-) is an award-winning Hungarian artist based in Budapest. His influences come from street art, underground and pop culture mixed with scientific interests. The focus of his artworks are built around prophets, visions with dates, real places and existing people. With direct brushwork, he mostly uses unmixed colors structurally, like an abstractionist, but in the service of a narrative agenda. 

Artist Shanequa Gay’s Paintings Shed Light on Homicides in Chicago

Frederick H. Lowe

Unlike some who have thrown up their hands in understandable despair, the shootings and the plight of black men in Chicago and elsewhere have sparked Gay's imagination and creativity. She used her skill as a painter to provoke members of the black community to take a new look at what is happening to their sons, not to look away. Gay's paintings also bid the black community to look at black men as human beings and fathers.

 

Exploring the History of Punk Rock Through Fashion

Gabriella Tutino

Mannequins sporting colored wigs and wearing torn shirts, tartan pants, hardware-embellished dresses and trash bags line the walls; accompanying them are sound bites and video clips of Blondie, the Ramones, Sid Vicious and Patti Smith. This is the set-up for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s latest Costume Institution exhibit, “PUNK: From Chaos to Couture.”The exhibition takes a look at, and focuses on, the do-it-yourself aspect of punk fashion and how it influenced high fashion. 

Celebrating 50 Years of Artist Llyn Foulkes’ Unvarnished, Unapologetic Vision

Nancy Lackey Shaffer

Ever the maverick, Foulkes was not content to stay with this format, however popular. While he would reference his rock paintings in future pieces, he took a dramatic turn with his “Bloody Heads” series—although “obscured heads” might be a better descriptor. Portraits with faces obstructed by bright red, blood-like strokes or symbolic objects (a doctor’s head, for example, has an X-ray superimposed upon his face, while a geometry teacher has a triangle) are jarring in their juxtaposition of the macabre with the mundane. 

Remembering the Genius of Chris Marker

Steven J. Chandler

Chris Marker wrote in the introduction to his 1997 multimedia CD-Rom Immemory, “I claim for the image the humility and powers of a madeleine.” In that CD-Rom and in many of his other creative endeavors, Marker continued the process of memory’s cartography. He embraced a multitude of genres as mapmaking tools, the span of his work communicating the dependence of the image to its memory. He cobbled together the realities of disparate cultures, mending the breaches in time through preservation of minutia and banality. 

How Pop Art Icon Peter Max Became the Quintessential American Artist

Kristin Sancken

Max’s studio is a massive 10,000 square foot loft on the Upper West Side of Manhattan filled with  photographs of the artist with every president from Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George Bush and, of course, Barack Obama. The rest of the space is filled with paintings of patriotic icons and pop culture subjects: athletes, the New York City skyline, sporting events, even Taylor Swift have somehow come to find refuge in Max’s work. 

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