There is more to Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s installation than meets the eye. Bend and pick up one of the “pebbles” and you can see that it resembles a sunflower seed encased in its striped husk. In fact, each one – and there are 100 million of them, covering an area of 1,000 square metres […]
A Cartier-Bresson picture taken in Shanghai, 1948, shows people storming a bank for gold in the days before the Communist forces arrived. A 1972 photo of a Georgian family picnicking near a medieval monastery A Photographer Whose Beat Was the World, New York Times Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century MoMA April 11—June 28, 2010
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Stephen Wiltshire of London is drawing a panorama of New York City from memory. Wiltshire, who has autism, took a 20-minute ride over the city in a helicopter last Friday. Wiltshire has drawn panoramas of eight cities: Tokyo, Rome, Hong Kong, Frankfurt, Madrid, Dubai, Jerusalem, and London. The New York panorama will be his ninth […]
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Funeral—St. Helena, South Carolina, 1955 Charleston, South Carolina, 1955 Trolley—New Orleans, 1955 “It is always the instantaneous reaction to oneself that produces a photograph.” —Robert Frank Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans The Metropolitan Museum of Art September 22, 2009—January 3, 2010
Limestone fountain spout. Gold necklace set with turquoise, garnet, and pyrite. Folding gold crown. Could be laid flat and packed in a saddlebag when the tribe moved from place to place. Omara Khan Massoudi knows how to keep a secret. Massoudi is director of the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul. Like the French citizens […]
Purely to survive, Song Dong’s parents adhered to the Cultural Revolutionary dictum of frugality in daily life, with his mother carrying conservation to extravagant lengths. The Collected Ingredients of a Beijing Life, New York Times Waste Not MoMA June 24—September 7, 2009
The neighborhood was like a rundown version of Paris in which life was lived outside, on the streets, amid the fading glory of its grand boulevards. The Harlem That Was by Camilo José Vergara, Slate Harlem, 1970-2009: Photographs by Camilo José Vergara New York Historical Society April 30—July 12, 2009
“Wasting time is my concept of life. Living is nothing but consuming time until you die.†—Tehching Hsieh The Art of Tehching Hsieh, New York Times