Thomas Cooper Gotch (English, 1854–1931), The Lantern Parade, c. 1918. Oil on canvas, 61 x 76.2 cm. Private collection.
Hans Hofmann
Elysium, 1960
Oil on canvas
Gift of Mari and James A. Michener, 1991
Hofmann used a Cubist-like, grid-based pictorial structure to impose order upon the wild expressiveness of his high-keyed, opposing colors and rich, impastoed surfaces. His best paintings, like Elysium, created when he was eighty years old, achieve harmony within intensity, and embody both tension and balance. About the title, Hofmann said to collector James Michener, “It’s where old artists go when they die. It’s very clean and simple—only a nest of squares, but they tell everything.”
The Infinite Progression by Jiyen Lee
I went walking once and it was horrible. Imagine walking on a never-ending, infinite stretch of twisting sidewalks, escalators, and bridges, eternally attempting in futility to get somewhere. Jiyen’s digital collages are like a consumerist’s personal Hell.
Artist: Portfolio (via: Faith is Torment)
“Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare”
Jack Whitten (b. 1939), Black Table Setting (Homage to Duke Ellington), 1974. Acrylic on canvas, 72 × 60 inches. Collection of the Art Fund, Inc. at the Birmingham Museum of Art; Purchase with funds provided by Jack Drake and Joel and Karen Piassick. Image via the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Paintings by James Nares
His paintings seek to capture the very moment of their own creation, and are most frequently made in a single brush stroke, using brushes of his own design.
John Maloof was at a Chicago thrift auction house when he purchased, on a whim, a box of photographic negatives that had caught his eye. He had no idea at the time, but he had just discovered one of the best street photographers of the 20th century.
Vivian Maier was born in New York, grew up in France, and lived most of her adult life in Chicago working as a nanny. She had absolutely no photographic education or training. Maier’s work was never shown to anyone during her lifetime, and out of the over 100,000 negatives attributed to her, many remain undeveloped.
Vivian Maier: Street Photos is the first published collection of her work, a tribute to one of the great pioneers of American street photography, that for 60 year, no one knew existed.
Dream Memetics by Chad Alburn
Emerging from a course in Memetics, which examines our modern informational culture as an analog to biological evolution , suggesting that ideas and concepts can be passed on to others in the same way genes are, helping us to adapt when the original idea is proven to be successful in the environment. Chad’s digital collages literally blur the edges of the information presented, presenting a softened, cohesive picture that could only exist through the evolutionary adaptation of art.
Artist: Website (via: Faith is Torment)
Miguel Endara
“The portrait took nearly 138 hours to complete, and at a rate of 4.25 dots per second, he estimates the piece contains roughly 2.1 million of them”
In 2004 an unconscious man was discovered behind a fast food restaurant in Richmond Hill, Georgia. He had no belongings, severe sunburn, and was nearly blind from cataracts. The man also had absolutely no idea who he was. After months of ongoing evaluation from doctors and psychologists it was determined he was suffering from dissociative amnesia. He adopted the pseudonym Benjaman Kyle and has embarked on a search for his true identity sparking massive amounts of media coverage and even a short film, Finding Benjaman, by John Wikstrom. He is the only citizen in the United States officially listed as missing despite his whereabouts being known. One strange aspect of this predicament is that Kyle now lives completely in limbo: for the past 8 years he has been denied the ability to obtain a new social security number which in turn prevents him from opening a bank account or having a credit card. The government argues that he already has one, but despite the efforts of fingerprint matching, DNA tests, and exposure on television, he simply cannot determine his true identity.
After catching a screening of Finding Benjaman at the Tribeca Film Festival artist Miguel Endara (previously) was inspired to help in any way he could, which meant making art. Endara embarked on this portrait of Benjaman using stippling, a tedious technique which involves a pen, patience, and an obscene amount of dots. The portrait took nearly 138 hours to complete, and at a rate of 4.25 dots per second, he estimates the piece contains roughly 2.1 million of them. The hope is to spread awareness for Bengaman’s plight and to help raise money through the sale of prints to support a petition to get him a new social security number.
Todd Robertson hung up his photography career nearly 20 years ago, but one of the Gainesville man’s images seems destined to live on as it speaks to one of the nation’s most heated and enduring social issues: race relations.
No one who sees the photo soon forgets it: A small boy, about 3 years old, dressed in a child-sized Ku Klux Klan robe and pointed hat, reaches out to touch his reflection in a riot shield as the African-American trooper holding the shield looks down at him.
It was a fleeting moment away from the main action during a Barrow County Ku Klux Klan group’s rally on Sept. 5, 1992, in downtown Gainesville, and just before the little boy’s mother pulled him away.
Robertson, a 1991 graduate of the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, was trying to make it as a freelance photographer then, shooting for Gainesville’s The Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and other north Georgia publications.
The photo might not have been published; an editor told Robertson the staff photographer’s images were fine and they wouldn’t need his freelance shots. But once a managing editor saw the photo, the paper published it in its Sunday edition, on the front of the local news section.
Robertson’s image then picked up some notice. It won a photography award, and other newspapers, including some European tabloids, picked it up from the Associated Press wire, Robertson recently recalled.
The anti-racism Southern Poverty Law Center also noticed, and featured the photograph (with Robertson’s permission) for many years on the cover of one of the center’s publications.
“The raw, untutored curiosity of that child and the sympathy in the face of that trooper just spoke to what we are as human beings before our minds are poisoned,” said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the law center. For years and years we have gotten calls and letters and emails about that photograph. It says something about what it means to be human.”
Recently, many people have discovered the image through Facebook and other social media.
“It’s been around a lot, but it’s seemed to pick up new legs after all these years,” Robertson said in a telephone interview.
A recent online article by The Poynter Institute’s David Griner has generated even more interest. Griner tracked down Robertson to Gainesville, where Robertson works with his father in the family business, Area Decor. The company makes and installs commercial and residential cabinets and countertops, Robertson said.
“I tried my best to make a living at (photography),” Robertson said. “I was a freelancer at the time. I was trying to build a portfolio. It’s kind of a secondary thing to me now, which kind of surprises people.”
Now married and the father of 12-year-old twins, Robertson still owns cameras, but mostly takes just snapshots, he said.
Robertson’s Klan photograph is a lot more than a snapshot, though, said Sidney Monroe, co-owner with his wife, Michelle, of the Monroe Gallery in Santa Fe, N.M. The couple moved their business from downtown New York City after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
The gallery specializes in black-and-white prints, emphasizing documentary photography and photojournalism.
Robertson’s photo is in color, but it belongs with the Monroe Gallery’s other great images, said Sidney Monroe, who hopes to reach an agreement with Robertson to sell prints of the photo in the gallery. The photographers represented in the gallery include outstanding current and young photographers, as well as great names such as Ruth Orkin, Robert Doisneau, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White and Neil Leifer.
“When we saw Todd’s photo, it immediately resonated with us,” Sidney Monroe said. “The image is very arresting, but also because it is sort of symbolic, and ironic because the Ku Klux Klan is still there, real as day. There’s just so much in that picture.”
The photo, Robertson said, contains a still relevant social message.
“It shows that hate is learned,” Robertson said. “Those kids didn’t know the difference between that day and any other day.”
The photographer got the name of the trooper in the photograph — Allen Campbell, now retired after a career in the Georgia State Patrol. Campbell turned down interview requests last week, but said he would meet with reporters Tuesday.
Robertson couldn’t get a full name for the little boy in the photograph.
“The only name I ever got was Josh,” said Robertson. “I’d kind of like to know what happened to him.”
