|
|
|
Sort By:
 |
Museums
A new show at the Cantor Arts Center displays the disparate visions of 13 Stanford art profs
JESUS, barefoot and with a lamp protectively cradled in his arm, strides in close formation with Abe Lincoln in a stove-pipe hat and Julie Andrews in her Sound of Music dirndl, looking ready to break into song at any moment. Is this a trio of saviors—religious, political and pop cultural—or an just an accidental meeting in neutral painterly space? More
|
 |
Museums
The Tech museum boldly goes where many fans want to go
IT IS weird how deeply a Star Trek exhibition can work on the feelings, even if you’re only an indifferent fan who still hasn’t seen most of the original episodes. The first round aired on NBC 1966–69 and was past my bedtime. My affection for it at all is due to one man, screenwriter/director Nicholas Meyer, who has just published his account of everything he gave to the best films in the series, The View From the Bridge: Memories of Star Trek and a Life in Hollywood. More
|
 |
Museums
For their MACLA show, the Mexican-American glass artists mashup the symbols and kitsch of two cultures
THE MEXICAN-American artist/brother team of Einar and Jamex de la Torre use blown glass in ways that would appall the guild members at the Murano or Steuben factories. With bravura technique and a wicked sense of humor, they fuse sensuous fat rolls and globs of colored glass and assemble them into comic grotesqueries. More
|
 |
Museums
A look at new textile shows at the San Jose Museum of Quilts
THE TWO CURRENT exhibits at the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles seem to be as different as night and day. “Fabric Tattoos: The Spirit of the Mola” displays brightly colored, rectangular patches of embroidered works that are sewn into clothing, while “The World According to Joyce Gross: Quilts From the Dolph Briscoe Center” showcases exquisite show quilts meant to be showoff pieces. But these exhibits are threaded together through the women who made them. More
|
 |
Museums
A group show at WORKS/San Jose examines the changing world of the Earth's poles
BACK IN THE mid-’90s, the World Wide Web was first emerging as a new medium, and several academic institutions and art collectives across the world were starting to develop ideas for a new environment called “hypertext.” CADRE, which stands for Computers in Art, Design, Research and Education, was an interdisciplinary academic and research program within the School of Art & Design at San Jose State University, and several folks decided to launch an online new media art journal called SWITCH. More
|
 |
Museums
From paper ice floes at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art to neon nature at the Headlands: Is the new eco-art trend a mere fad or a sturdy critique that’s here to stay?
KATIE KURTZ is really worried. She has good reason to be. So do the rest of us. “Polar bears are eating other polar bears!” she exclaims. “That’s never happened before.” It is detestable to have to literally spell it out, but polar bears of course are eating other polar bears not because they have suddenly developed a heady taste for cannibalism but because the ice that has supported their species for the millennia is thinning, melting and disappearing. More
|
 |
Museums
San Jose galleries and museums host receptions and music all evening on Friday (Aug. 7)
A VERY BUSY weekend is shaping up for downtowners as San Jose hosts the annual Jazz Festival and the monthly art happening known as First Friday. All along South First Street, just a marimba’s toss away from the jazz stage in Plaza de Cesar Chavez, galleries and museum will open their doors for receptions, music and mingling. As a bonus, the Jazz Festival will place its Jazz Beyond stage in the middle of the DIY Street Market outside Anno Domini Gallery, with performances by Midival Punditz (8pm) and Panthelion (10pm). Serious collectors will also want to check out the vinyl record swap and sale—proof that there’s more to life than MP3 files. More
|
 |
Museums
The San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art shows visions of environmental distress in 'NextNew: Green'
RECENTLY, I read a sci-fi novel about the usual hardy band of survivors picking up the pieces after a world-winnowing disaster—something along the lines of swine flu. The story included a number of au courant asides about man’s ecological mistakes, so I figured it must have been written in the last decade or so. Then I came upon a reference to Charlie McCarthy and Edgar Bergen. Turns out that the novel, Earth Abides, was written by UC-Berkeley English professor George R. Stewart—in 1949. More
|
 |
Museums
A new show at MACLA features a wide range of visions and materials
SEN. SESSIONS and his colleagues on the Judiciary Committee should visit MACLA’s new group show, “2009 Chicana/o Biennial.” The pieces on display certainly prove the point that wise Chicana and Chicano artists can reach revelatory decisions based on diverse experiences that will be different from—in enlightening ways—those of artists of other backgrounds. “Impartial art” is as much an oxymoron as “impartial justice.” More
|
 |
Museums
The San Jose Museum of Art showcases the pop surrealism of L.A. painter Todd Schorr
EVERY AGE gets the gods and devils it deserves. The pantheistic ancient Greeks and Romans populated their pantheon with lightning-bolt-wielding Zeus and dog-walking Artemis. The Christian Middle Ages quaked before pits of hell full of fallen angels and demons based on the seven deadly sins. In the jumbled-up mythos of L.A. artist Todd Schorr, now generously displayed at the San Jose Museum of Art, late-period capitalists pay homage to consumerist icons like Speedy Alka Seltzer, Elsie the Cow and the Jolly Green Giant. The whole prep-walk of modern advertising spokesgods make an appearance in Schorr’s mammoth The Hydra of Madison Ave More
|
|
