Category Archives: Art

The Lake Where Cultures Meet

Posted on May 12, 2013 by

A desert lake.  Paruku.  Lake Gregory. This is the place where the ancestral hero, Kiki, came down from the east, a falling star.  Landed in the water and created seeds, grapes, bandicoot, and blue-tongued lizard. This is the place where … Continue reading →

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Billy Benn’s Hills and Ranges

Posted on April 28, 2013 by

Exploring the work of the first great artist to emerge from Alice Springs’ Mwerre Anthurre Artists’ studio, Billy Benn (IAD Press, 2011), co-authored by Benn and the studio’s former arts coordinator Catherine Peattie, is a shifting, hopscotch analysis of the … Continue reading →

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Crossing Cultures at the Toledo Museum of Art

Posted on April 21, 2013 by

“You’ve captured the imagination of a twelve-year-old boy,” his father said with some pride. Of all the memorable things I heard during the past weekend when Crossing Cultures opened at the Toledo Museum of Art, that is the quotation that … Continue reading →

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Crossing Cultures / Toledo Museum of Art Slideshow

Posted on April 21, 2013 by

Here is a selection of photographs of the installation of Crossing Cultures from the Toledo Museum of Art, shot on the opening day, April 12, 2013.  I wasn’t able to capture every angle and image and artwork included in the … Continue reading →

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Reception Theory

Posted on April 14, 2013 by

In its article on reception theory, Wikipedia quotes Harold (not Herbert) Marcuse to aid in defining the field: reception history is “the history of the meanings that have been imputed to historical events. It traces the different ways in which participants, … Continue reading →

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The Last Great Art Movement of the 20th Century

Posted on April 7, 2013 by

I got buzzed and felled by a mean (and I mean mean) intestinal flu bug this week, so I’m lying low on all fronts.  Just two brief topics to note this week: Robert Hughes’s assessment that Aboriginal art is the … Continue reading →

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A Classic Revisited

Posted on March 31, 2013 by

Last May, on our first evening in Seattle for the opening of Ancestral Modern, we stepped out of a taxicab in front of Margaret Levi and Robert Kaplan’s loft apartment for the first social evening of the week.  A kindly looking, … Continue reading →

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Tiwi: Art, History, Culture

Posted on March 10, 2013 by

Among the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, with all the variety of language and culture they encompass, the Tiwi still stand apart.  Their language is an isolate, unrelated to those of the mainland.  Despite being among the first people to come … Continue reading →

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Colin

Posted on February 11, 2013 by

It was with deep sadness that I learned that Colin Laverty passed away on Saturday, February 9. Although I only met Colin and Liz for the first time in 2005, the influence of their collecting had made itself felt on … Continue reading →

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Larrakirtj: Encyclopedia of the Yolngu

Posted on February 10, 2013 by

On our first trip to Australia in 1990, still largely ignorant of Aboriginal art (despite the trip being inspired in large part by the Dreamings exhibition seen at the Asia Society in New York CIty two years earlier), we hit … Continue reading →

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