(Photo: © Matthew Gerard) It takes a certain élan to posit an insect-eating girl, a man in a straightjacket and a tassel-twirling stripper as embodiments of the “democratic golden age” of American cultural tradition. But that’s what Coney Island USA Artistic Director Dick Zigun has been doing since 1981, when he first established the Sideshow…
Like the technicolor allure of poisonous frogs or the dazzling yet deadly pufferfish, Kyung Jeon’s paintings act as decoys — her soft, pastel colors; fields of flowers; and flitting fairy-children initially cloud the sinister grotesquerie of her perspectiveless panoramas. Jeon’s disfigured figures are antagonized and accosted in ways that allude to Hieronymus Bosch’s depictions of…
Melanie Baker standing with In the Company of Men (2001). Charcoal on paper. How does a visual artist age and still remain active? What are the distinct disadvantages to being an older artist, and what are some of the behavioral patterns that might lead to such disadvantages? A group of graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University…
“We don’t walk on like elderly people; we come on ready to dance, and they know it.” So says 88 year-old tap dancer Elaine Ellis during filmmaker Heather Lyn MacDonald’s new documentary Been Rich All My Life. Ellis is a member of the Silver Belles, a New York-based troupe of tap dancers now in their 80s and…
Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler. 5 Factories—Worker Control in Venezuela (2006). Still from a color video. From the exhibition Now-Time Venezuela, Part 1. All images courtesy BAM/PFA. On April 28, 2006, Chris Gilbert resigned from his post as Berkeley Art Museum’s MATRIX curator. After holding the position since September of 2005, Gilbert resigned when the museum’s administration demanded that he remove…
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