Berkeley-based photographer Katy Grannan is known for portraits that reveal intimacies about her subjects, even as they skirt conventions of portraiture. Her earlier work used models and other people known to her, at specific times and places, often in evocative poses borrowed from art history. But for the last few years, Grannan has taken her practice to the streets and replaced her complicit subjects with anonymous passersby. Her current show, Boulevard, at San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery assembles an eclectic array of ordinary folks of outlandish appearance — interesting strangers, unaware of their role.
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Celebrated French artist Annette Messager transforms everyday objects into sculptural installations that bustle with creativity, memory, melancholy, mystery, and obsession.
Messager enshrines the images of deceased friends and family, and knits little sweaters for dead birds. Her frequently interactive works are elaborately hand-crafted, with the sacrosanct OCD quality of private archives. Describing herself as “collector, every-task-doer, artist, woman in love, tale-teller,” she fashions her shadowy monuments from an endless accumulation of textiles, stuffed animals, photographs, newspapers, and other detritus that speaks to her from beyond.
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National Public Radio chronicles four decades of broadcasting independent-arts and political programming across America with a new book presenting the faces behind the radio dial.
A constant companion to daily commuters and fans of arts and culture journalism, NPR celebrates what it does best in This Is NPR: The First Forty Years, combining stellar graphic design, in-depth interviews, behind-the-scenes photos, and rare anecdotes from its best-loved voices. And if reading the radio is too strange, there’s also an audio version.
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Artist Lori Nix photographs evocative urban and pastoral scenes from a post-human world of disaster and decay — but first she has to build them.
The most astonishing thing about Nix’s magical, melancholy masterpieces is how they are made. Each museum, mountain vista, library, and laundromat is a painstakingly detailed diorama, taking the artist months to imagine and hand-craft — in fully examined ruin. The artist’s obsession with the apocalyptic informs every one, down to the most stunningly executed bits of minutiae.
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Collecting four decades of work, James Hamilton’s You Should Have Heard Just What I Seen combines the dedication of a photojournalist with the passion of a true music fan and the eye of a fine-art photographer.
The new book, edited by longtime friend and frequent subject Thurston Moore, chronicles Hamilton’s 40 years immersed in the downtown NYC music and art scene. Lovingly culled from the artist’s vast private archive, the volume also features never-before published candid photographs of icons from Joni Mitchell to the Ramones.
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Filmmaker, photographer, and de facto performer Laurel Nakadate takes on the thorniness of female adolescence and self-image in her funny, wistful, dark, and uncomfortable images.
Already enjoying festival-circuit acclaim for feature films The Wolf Knife and Stay the Same Never Change, Nakadate holds her first museum show in New York next month. The survey spans a decade of deadpan subversion that includes her runaway-chic panty-flags, provocative self-portraits in anonymous men’s homes, precocious teens aping American Apparel softcore, and her newest work, in which she documents her own daily crying jags.
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The new book from preeminent alphabet historian David Sacks combines eye candy, font fetishism, and sociological etymology in a lavishly illustrated love letter to the modern A-to-Z.
Sacks examines the development of written language from the ancient to the digital world, from Medieval illuminations to advertisements, and from fine art to boxcar tagging. The result is an engaging, encyclopedic romp through our collective visual history that celebrates human creativity and cultural expression not only in the use of the written word, but in its very invention.
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Sofia Coppola’s new film stars Elle Fanning and Stephen Dorff in a father/daughter story of Hollywood ennui and budding self-awareness that, like much of the director’s work, was inspired in part by her own life.
Currently in limited (aka Oscar-consideration deadline) release, the film features a sparse production style and narrative ambiguity that are more Virgin Suicides than Marie Antoinette, with Coppola returning to her early style of character-driven cinematic intimacy. Plus, with related media projects, such as her online video diary featuring footage shot by her mom, the autobiographical line stays blurry.
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A post-apocalyptic, paranoid, Baroque fantasy, Zenith is set in a future in which geneticists have eradicated unhappiness, giving rise to a black market in pain-inducing drugs — and one man’s self-destructive quest to break through.
A visually stunning art-house Blade Runner for a generation in thrall to sex, violence, conspiracy, and urban tribalism, the film fits its “retro-futuristic steampunk thriller” tag-line perfectly. Its many plot twists innovatively even cross over into social media, drawing viewers into the mystery at its heart with engagement far beyond the film itself.
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Bernard Tschumi Architects design buildings, bridges, and plazas that blur the boundaries between art, society, symbol, and function.
They are responsible for some of the most staggeringly original and unforgettable — and sometimes controversial — edifices and public projects, both built and imagined, in the modern world. From the 1983 high-profile urban sculptural experiment of Paris’ Parc de la Villette, to the more recent Blue residential tower watching over New York’s Lower East Side, Tschumi’s progressive vision of fractured, expressive architecture embraces new materials, vibrant color, and the element of surprise.
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