Robert Benjamin’s photographs are post it notes from a quiet life lived and practiced. The father, husband, photographer shares his Chromogenic color prints for the first time in this exhibit at the Denver Art Museum that is not to be missed.
I’m more interested in what is unique to Colorado and not just some rehashing of the latest trends in contemporary art. Art happens everywhere in the state, not just on the Front Range.
Schuckit grew up in San Diego, went to college in Santa Cruz then moved briefly to New York before settling in San Francisco, and a thirteen-year career as a master printer at Crown Point Press. Today she lives in London, where in 2008 she completed her MA in painting at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.
Here is a video of the Liberators exhibit on display through September 26, 2010 at Museo de las Americas in Denver. The video originally appeared on adobeairstream.com.
Face to Face is not merely a show about the many ways to draw a face, that’s oversimplistic. It’s an exhibition of work that challenges identity and representation, filled with the work of subjects portraying subjects with all their fractured and complex elements. By looking at these images we know more about the artist, the subject and ourselves. Or as Heinrich said: “A portrait is always a face with a soul. What makes a face a portrait is the intention or wish of the artist to capture some of the soul. The artist is trying to tell us the character and charm of the person.”
Though not a realist,
Schuckit’s categorizing of headline imagery is similar. She creates a raster of images
and allows them to produce a rhizome of new impressions. The scale of these
average-sized paintings is large, perhaps larger than life, as indicated by the tiny
human figures in the bottom foreground of Aerial Event 2, which plays on our
psychological distance from these dramatic events; these images play over and over,
but somehow do not manage to connect us to the disasters, whether natural or manmade.
Is a Titan IV Stage II rocket engine a work of art? It was designed to fly to Saturn, but never made the journey. How about a B61 Thermonuclear Bomb? According to Adam Lerner and Paul Andersen, curators of Energy Effects: Art and Artifacts from the Landscape of Glorious Excess “nuclear weapons are designed to produce fear, and thereby they are made specifically to prevent their own use.” Try telling that to the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Everything you wanted to know about the Biennial of the Americas and more happening in Denver this summer.
Is the Denver Biennial already a success as Mayor Hickenlooper claims? Yes and No. Read more here in Leanne Goebel’s post on Huffington Post.
The primary buyers of art seem to be hotels, hospital and blue-chip billionaires hedging their funds in Warhols and Picasso’s. Collectors are not spending their discretionary income because their walls are already filled. Artwork Network doesn’t claim to be an art expert and they are not representing artists. For them, art is a product and they are a tool to help sell that product. Perhaps websites like Artwork Network can build their brand around a new kind of art buyer, one that doesn’t have to know the difference between acrylic and oil, whose willing to spend $500 for something because they like it and it matches the furniture, and for whom art is not a luxury but a necessity.
Leanne Goebel 