by Jeanne Willette | Jun 1, 2018 | Contemporary Art, Postmodern
Painting While Black Métissage as Biomythography Launch Gallery 170 S. La Brea Boulevard Los Angeles Summer 2018 Holly Tempo, James Panozzo of Launch Gallery, and Loren Holland Holly Tempo Of Unknown Value For the artist, Holly Tempo, the question becomes what does...
by Jeanne Willette | May 25, 2018 | Contemporary Art, Reviews
Theorizing Post-Colonial Art Art in Post-Racial Los Angeles From the very beginning, the problem has been that of language. Not how to speak the dominant dialect; that was all too easy. The words, as Hamlet would say, come trippingly off the tongue, leaving the...
by Jeanne Willette | May 18, 2018 | Contemporary Art, Postmodern
The Deterritoriality of the West Peter Goin and the Photographic Caption In 1960 famed photographer Ansel Adams returned to one of his favorite sites in Yosemite, the Half Dome and waited for the moon to rise in the late winter afternoon. The towering half-mountain...
by Jeanne Willette | May 11, 2018 | Contemporary Art, Postmodern
The Meaning of “Waste Land” Mis-Use of the Western Desert In 1945, the foremost artist of the American West, Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) produced an extraordinary work of art, usually placed harmlessly within her Pelvis series. For the past ten...
by Jeanne Willette | May 4, 2018 | Contemporary Art, Postmodern
Rephotographic Survey Project Following Footsteps of the First Photographers, Part Two One of the re-photographers doing “repeat photography” of the western territories, Rick DIngus (1951-), said “For the Rephotographic Survey Project, I was most...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 27, 2018 | Contemporary Art, Postmodern
Rephotographic Survey Project Following Footsteps of the First Photographers The idea of re-photographing the already photographed was not exactly a new one in the 1970s as evidenced by the re-photographing of Canyon de Chelly by Ansel Adams who stood in the shoes of...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 20, 2018 | Contemporary Art, Postmodern
New Topographics The New West, Part Two The New Topographics movement in America was an attempt to be “objective” about its survey of the West in post-war America. Writing in relation to The New West, the 1974 book of photographs of the developing of the...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 13, 2018 | Contemporary Art, Postmodern
New Topographics The New West, Part One Park City, Utah was always a bit of an oxymoron. Not a park, the “city” was a mining town with all the attendant hardscrabble buildings that marked the place where mine shafts probed be depths of the earth searching...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 6, 2018 | Contemporary Art, Postmodern
New Topographics Reconsidering the Present: Introduction Impacted by the new environmental movement, American Topographics was one of the major photographic attitudes of the 1970s, concentrating on measuring the change with an eye to conservation and ecology and most...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 30, 2018 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
The First Twin Towers–The Chrysler Building (1930) and the Empire State Building (1931) Part Two: The Empire State Buil In the beginning, the architects who dreamed of tall buildings in the late nineteenth century faced the same problems as their Medieval...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 23, 2018 | Modern, Modern Art, Modern Culture
The First Twin Towers–The Chrysler Building (1930) and the Empire State Building (1931) The Empire State Building: Part One Like the clouds of fog hovering around its spire, the Empire State Building is shrouded in myth, lore, and legend. Design-wise, it is an...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 16, 2018 | Modern, Modern Art
Raymond Mathewson Hood (1881-1934) The Radiator Building (1924) Alone among a gathering of preening male artists commandeered by her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, to represent American Modernism, Georgia O’Keeffe began painting the most phallic of topics, the New...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 9, 2018 | Modern, Modern Art
Walter Teague and the Radio Technology as Furniture In 1936, designer Walter Teague discussed “Industrial Art and Its Future” at New York University in relation to the upcoming New York World’s Fair, saying that although the fair would be a large...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 2, 2018 | Modern, Modern Art
Walter Dorwin Teague (1883-1960) The Camera in Style The timing of the Gift Kodak could not have been worse and boded ill for the new partnership of Walter Teague and America’s most famous maker of cameras. Released in November of 1931, the “Gift...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 23, 2018 | Modern, Modern Art
Walter Dorwin Teague (1883-1960) From Art Deco to Streamline It is now time to speak of Bluebirds and Bantams and the occasional Marmon, with the inclusion of the late arrivals, Pringles, all of which were designed by Walter Teague. Teague brought us the modern gas...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 16, 2018 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
A Fair at the Edge of Time The Futurama of Norman Bel Geddes In the early decades of the twenty-first century, when women speak out and say “Me Too,” one has grown accustomed to the time-honored art historical practice of ignoring the bad behavior of male...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 9, 2018 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Aerodynamics and the American Home Norman Bel Geddes and Consumerism The American public learned how to spend money on consumer goods in the Roaring Twenties. The Great War had forced the United States to grow up quickly and the techniques of mass production or...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 2, 2018 | Modern, Modern Art
Bringing Streamline Design Home Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958) Today the name “Mar-a-Lago” is on everyone’s lips but for all the wrong reasons. The current owner is not important in the history of design but the architect for this famous dwelling was...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 26, 2018 | Modern, Modern Art
Streamline Design of the 1930s Art Moderne as a Consumer Product This is the story of two Budds, unrelated to one another but joined together historically in the design and development of a new train, sleek, light and fast, shaped like a speeding bullet. Until the...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 19, 2018 | Modern, Modern Art
A Century of Progress International Exposition The Streamlined World’s Fair Chicago 1933-34 With Mussolini occupied far away in Italy and the name of “Adolf Hitler” just a mention in a newspaper article, one was able to come to the Chicago...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 12, 2018 | Modern, Modern Art
Subverting Fascism Elsa Schiaparelli (1890 – 1973) Italian fashion between the Wars is a case study of how ineffectual Fascism was when it came to controlling women. Although the women of Italy are considered today to be much less liberated than their European...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 5, 2018 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Controlling Women In Italy Designing Submission, Part One Any authoritarian regime, of any age, regardless of location on the globe will move immediately to control the uncontrollable: women. The first step is always to take away as many of the pre-given rights...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 29, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
The Melancholy Afterlife of Italian Fascist Architecture Funerary Architecture, Part Two If there is any consolation in losing a war that the Austro-Hungarian Empire started, it is that a resounding defeat wiped out the Empire, thus absolving all those involved in the...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 22, 2017 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
The Melancholy Afterlife of Italian Fascist Architecture Funerary Architecture, Part One If the population of a nation is alert to warning signs–and usually we are oblivious to portents–it would be well to take notice when that nation begins to build...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 15, 2017 | Modern, Modern Art
Design as Theater, Part Two Designing for Dictators To design for dictators in the twentieth century was to invent a new art form. The first challenge to designers was that the new modern dictator was not of the blood royal and prided himself on his common origins,...
