Category Archives: Uncategorized

  1. Reading Poetry while on a Camping Trip

    Reading poetry while camping gives me the space to enjoy every word.

  2. My May 1st

    May 1 Seattle creativity, resistance, and hope echo our current world

  3. The #Occupy Movement: Conversations

    This blog marks my exciting experiences with  the early stages of the Occupy movement,  before the police in the service of the oligarchy started using pepper spray and obliteration tactics. You can see I look really happy here.  I was on the road lecturing on my book and I was able to visit five Occupy […]

  4. Istanbul Biennial 2011

    This is the beginning of my analysis of the Istanbul Biennial which has the title “untitled” based on the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who titled his work “Untitled” then added a parenthesis with a particular reference. In the Istanbul Biennial 2011, the curators made five group shows with the following references untitled(abstraction), untitled(Ross), untitled (history) […]

  5. Protesting Greed

    Getting these banners in the air was not easy. Making these banners at the Action Camp on Vashon was fun, but it helped to be with experts. First we figured out what we were going to say. Then we projected giant letters ( 8 feet high) onto Tyco fabric painted orange, then we cut it […]

  6. Dia al Azzawi’s monument to academics assasinated in Iraq

    As of last August 2010 304 University academics have been killed in Iraq, most of them professionally assassinated. Many of them had spoken out against the occupation. That number only includes academics, it does not include the staff that belongs to other fields and institutions, who have been targeting since the beginning of the occupation, […]

  7. Cultural Activism in a Time of Crisis, the exhibition

    It is a time to return to blogging after the excitement of the book publication and the art exhibition. What better way than to analyze why the show “Cultural Activism in a Time of Crisis” is so exciting. As I have been giving people tours, I realized that all of these artists, whom I have […]

  8. Nick Cave hits Seattle

    Nick Cave costumes for performance joyful celebration of
    creativity or political statement about moving beyond prejudice?

  9. Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire: An Exhibition

    Response to Tirangle Factory Fire

  10. Art and Politics Now is published!

    The book is launched!

  11. Olive Ayhens new painting

    Olive Ayhens is a wonderful painter and a great artist. This is a new painting called Amphibian Emergency. If you look closely you can see that inside the glass condominiums are frogs, an endangered species. They are disappearing everywhere. They are an essential part of our ecosystem. The condos are popping up everywhere in her […]

  12. Afghanistan Treasures and Bagram Afghanistan

    While I am on the subject of contradictory language and situations, the stunning exhibition of Afghanistan art, the Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul, is full of them. First, it makes no bones about the fact that the war in Afghanistan starting in 1979 and continuing to the present has completely destroyed archeological sites […]

  13. Artemesia RIP

    I have lost a member of my family.Someone told me they liked personal information in my blog, of which I have very little. Today though is different. I must write in honor of my dear cat, Artemesia, whom we found dead yesterday under our front steps, after six days of wondering what happened to her. […]

  14. Inside the Northwest African American Museum

    One of the featured artist is James W. Washington, Jr. painter and sculptor, born in Gloster Mississippi in deep Jim Crow, moved to Seattle in 1944 to become a successful artist. Here is the symbolic portrait of Mark Tobey with whom he studied for a few years in the 1940s. The James Washington Foundation put […]

  15. Martin Luther King Day in Seattle!

    All ages all ethnicities, all came together for peace and justice

  16. my new website and my new grandson

    www.artandpoliticsnow.com is now online and available for everyone to see!and this is my brand new grandson for everyone to see!Art and Politics has a lot to do with the future of our planet which belongs to this tiny infant and the other children of the world. Let’s make sure we stay on the task of […]

  17. Kara Walker

    Kara Walker has really started to talk loudly about miscegenation. Although I have seen her works for years, they always seemed to me to be perpetuating racism rather than countering it, but her recent retrospective as well as her new works, on display at Sikkema Jenkins and Co in Chelsea, are unavoidably challenging. In the […]

  18. Extreme Interiors Olive Ayhens

    Olive Ayhens expressionist nightmares of contemporary life currently on view in New York City at Frederieke Taylor Gallery are tour de force paintings that present us with the chaos of our contemporary world.One recent series represented interiors of computer labs where the wiring has taken off on its own in a nightmare of disorder. At […]

  19. Not only possible but also necessary, optimism in the age of global war

    The lengthy title of the 10th Istanbul Biennial suggests Hou Hanru’s desire to address the role of art in the midst of the pressing social concerns of the contemporary moment. To a surprising extent he was successful.There were several reasons for his success. First, he looked at the modern and contemporary history of Turkey, rather […]

  20. Reinventing Books in Contemporary Chinese Art

    On a positive note, Seattle has an extraordinary exhibition of contemporary Chinese art at the Asian Art Musuem until December 2Originally curated by Wu Hung at the University of Chicago for the China Institute Gallery it was supplemented in Seattle, due to the efforts of the assistant curator of Chinese art, Josh Yiu. Yiu was […]

  21. Willie Cole in Seattle

    The exhibition of the work of Willie Cole at the Frye Art Museum is a stunning installation by a major American artist. Cole’s relationship to the masters of twentieth century sculpture and painting is obvious in every work. This postage stamp photograph of With a Heart of Gold, shoes, stone, wood screws, metal, staples and […]

  22. James W. Washington, Jr. Creativity as a path to freedom

    This sculpture by James W. Washington, Jr, The Chaotic Half, was made in 1945, long before the so-called era of Civil Rights in the 1960s. I say so called because African- Americans had been fighting for their Civil Rights ever since they arrived on Slave ships. Washington made this sculpture one year after he moved […]

  23. "Stuff Happens" David Hare

    Last night I saw the new David Hare play about the Bush administration march to the Iraq war. It was terrific.Even though we knew the whole story, we were still sitting on the edge of our seats with the tension and stupidity, arrogance, malice, and ignorance of the whole thing. Colin Powell was the central […]

  24. Shahram Karimi and Shirin Ebadi

    In the 2003 Istanbul Biennial the artist Shahram Karimi showed a work with the title “Traces” which he referred to as presenting the creative people of Iran who participated in the “collective struggle toward modernity.” Painted on rice sacks, he made realistic portraits of 248 intellectuals many of whom are dead or in exile. Beside […]

  25. Venice Biennale: A Note on Turkey and Lebanon

    For the first time Turkey and Lebanon are officially represented at the Venice Biennale. Those of us who cannot afford to go there can visit the sites online. Turkey is represented by a quirky artist Huseyin Alptekin . Alptekin has been doing offbeat interventions in Europe and Turkey for quite awhile. In Albania, for example, […]