I’m one of those Philistines. I dig modern art more than the classics, and Rothkos are pretty to look at, but their high price utterly escapes me. I’m very finicky about what I read, but I sometimes feel like I was born without certain senses. A sommelier in my kitchen might be bored by the mundaneness of the choices. I wish someone would sit down and say, ‘It’s ok. Most people think someone is crazy-eyed when they mention the top notes in a wine’s bouquet. Really, you’re perfectly normal.’

So I’m probably not the best person to introduce this post, but here goes. A NYC art gallery is exhibiting the works of the eminent Indian abstract painter Syed Haider Raza:

Raza’s form was heavily influenced by the Abstract Expressionism of the New York School of Painters including Sam Francis, Kandinsky and Rothko. He has also been especially inspired by moderist masters, particularly by the feverish intensity of color of Cezanne and Van Gogh’s work. However, the underlying and continuing inspiration in his work has been his homeland, India…

Born in Madhya Pradesh, India in 1922, Raza studied at the JJ School of Art, Bombay. In 1950 he received a scholarship from the French government to study at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He was awarded the Prix de la Critique in 1956 in France. In 1962, The University of California, Berkeley, invited him as a visiting lecturer where he did some pivotal work. He was awarded the Padma Shri by the President of India, the highest honor bestowed by the Indian Government. He currently lives and works in Gorbio [in France] and Paris.

This is the first show for my buddy Priyanka Mathew, the new gallery director. She says, ‘He’s 82, and this probably will be a rare and perhaps final visit to New York. A disciple of his, Sujata Bajaj, will also be mounted.’ I assure you she’s referring to Bajaj’s paintings  Bajaj shuttles between homes in Norway, France and Pune along a disjoint meridian.

Here are photos from an exhibition of Raza’s work last year. Here’s the gallery’s current Indian art exhibit, Shakti 2005. It’s quite lovely.

Syed Haider Raza exhibition, Gallery Arts India, Sep. 16 – Oct. 9, 2005; opening reception Sep. 16; 206 Fifth Avenue at 25th St., 5th Floor, Manhattan; times TBD Continue reading →

One of the two young girls picked up by the government (on suspicion of terrorism) re-appeared in her Harlem neighborhood in May. Sixteen year old Guinean immigrant Adama Bah was released by the Feds without explanation (and she’s under court order not to talk about it). Her friend Tashnuba Hayder was deported back to Bangladesh. Her classmates missed her and let her know recently via an impressive art exhibit they prepared to tell her story. The New York Times reported a few days ago (tip from Priya):

When Adama Bah’s schoolmates decided to make a public artwork project about her case last spring, she and another 16-year-old girl were being held by the federal government after it had identified them, without explanation, as potential suicide bombers.

“We didn’t know if we would ever see her again,” said Kimberly Lane, who was then an art teacher at the school, the Heritage School in East Harlem, where many viewed Adama’s detention as unjust and incomprehensible. “This was a way for the students to use art to speak out at a time when a lot of people, including adults, were afraid to do anything.”

The result towers over anything that most people would expect high school students to produce. At Columbia University’s Teachers College, where the work is on display through Thursday, the director of art education, Prof. Judith M. Burton, says it reminds her of Rodin’s “Burghers of Calais.”

Life after being thrown in jail without explanation isn’t easy on a poor immigrant family as you can imagine:

“I asked the students why are they doing that,” Adama recalled. “They said they just wanted to let my story be heard and help me out.”

These days, Adama acknowledges that her family is in difficult financial straits. The telephone has been shut off and her mother stays late at her trinket stand in Brooklyn, trying to earn enough to buy groceries for Adama and four younger children. But Adama was bubbling over about her summer job, reading to children at Bellevue Hospital Center.

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The Christian Science Monitor reports that collecting contemporary Indian art is the new rage in the art world. Some pieces are fetching anywhere from $50,000 to $70,000.

“The market for Indian contemporary art is turning bullish and aggressive,” says Anuradha Mazumdar of Sotheby’s. “India is now recognized as a major growth market, forcing international auction houses to pay more attention to it.”

I guess the big bucks that NRIs and Indian dot-commers are raking in have to be spent on something. But it isnÂ’t all FUBU (For Us By Us). Demand for these pieces is coming in from various parts of the world including France, Germany, Japan and the Middle East.

IÂ’m getting in on the ground level on a promising young surrealist. HeÂ’s going to be big some day. Continue reading →

SM reader Laks Raghupathi sends us a link to an article in the May 30th European edition of Newsweek Magazine, titled The Big Squeeze. In it we see a yellow man, ostensibly representing a Chinaman, and a brown guy with a small red dot on his forehead. The brown guy appears to be squeezing the balls of the poor white guy (a.k.a. white-collared worker), as if all Americans and Europeans losing jobs are white. The white guy also appears to be wearing a bow-tie (what IS it with bow-ties?).

15 years after U.S. and European multinationals started shipping large numbers of manufacturing jobs overseas, experts are saying that the “second wave” of offshoring is at hand—and it promises to be bigger and more disruptive to the U.S. and European job markets than the first. In the years ahead, sizable numbers of skilled, reasonably well-educated middle-income workers in service-sector jobs long considered safe from foreign trade—accounting, law, financial and risk management, health care and information technology, to name a few—could be facing layoffs or serious wage pressure as developing nations perform increasingly sophisticated offshore work. The shift portends a dramatic realignment of wealth over the next couple of generations—valued by the U.S. consultancy McKinsey Co. at “hundreds of billions of dollars.”

I went over to Joel Elrod’s website to see his other work (which is quite good) and couldn’t find anything with this sort of xenophobic tone, which leads me to believe that Newsweek must have specifically commissioned this type of thing from him. Continue reading →

It’s about time someone got around to carving the Taj Mahal on to a watermelon (via BoingBoing):

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There’s only three days left to check out “Wondertoonel,” an exhibition of paintings by Mark Ryden, at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. One of his many haunting creations includes honest Abe, baby Krishna, and an om flag:

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A Manhattan gallery honors artist Rajkamal Kahlon this Friday with a reception opening her latest exhibit, ‘Unbound.’ Kahlon’s work, which I first saw at ‘Fatal Love,’ reminds me of the tortured visions of Frida Kahlo and Tarsem Singh, director of The Cell. (I said Kahlo, not J.Lo.)

Kahlon literally paints over history:

Kahlon’s new series of paintings respond to a nineteenth century tome entitled Cassell’s Illustrated History of India. After finding this book in 2003 on auction at Sotheby’s, Kahlon borrowed $400… with the intention of unbinding [it]… painting over texts and manipulating the illustrations set in front of her… she creates a charged, fragmented narrative about her relationship to India’s history and its colonial past.

You can see more of her work here and here.

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