When Claudine Faifer unwrapped the 165 oil paintings that arrived at her Miami Beach home last May, the first thing she thought was, “ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod!” There, among the vibrant scenes of clowns, carnivals and cafés, were 65 erotic images painted by her father, the late Jacques Faifer, a little-known artist whose colorful works capture…
Chicago’s first minyan gathered for Yom Kippur in 1845; before then, the 12-year-old city hadn’t been able to muster a prayer quorum of even 10 men. Yet it was only two years later that Chicago welcomed its first rabbi, the Reverend Ignatz Kunreuther, and its first synagogue. This history lesson is displayed in the first…
Though it features illustrations of a menagerie of animals that carry Jewish symbolism, an ancient Roman mosaic discovered in Lod, Israel, in 1996, is not a religious work, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the fourth-century artifact is on exhibit for the first time until April 3, 2011. According to the museum’s press…
If you had a lost or hidden other half, who would it be? A rocker? A mad scientist? Someone sluttier or cooler than yourself? Fantasy comes to life in Leonard Nimoy’s “Secret Selves,” a collection of 26 moving, often provocative photographs on display at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art through January 2, 2011. Nimoy,…
“Roy Lichtenstein: The Black-and-White Drawings, 1961-1968” opens and closes, quite fittingly, with doors. “Knock Knock,” a 1961 drawing, greets visitors entering the single-room exhibition. The title words splay from an all-white door, its shape defined by heavy, even black lines. Short marks indicate the thwap of invisible knuckles. Later, after circling the perimeter, you step…
The conceit behind “Blow Up,” the latest group show at The Society of Illustrators, is somewhat overblown, if you will. The show, billed as “an open window onto the visual melting pot of contemporary image making,” presents work by Tomer Hanuka, Yuko Shimizu and Sam Weber, three artists with different backgrounds who meet “at the…
In the 1960s, Hannah Wilke caught the attention of the New York art scene and shocked the public with her frank and sexual sculptures, which forced viewers to confront the body as a site of pleasure and eroticism, death and decay. Wilke is now best known for her “vulva sculptures,” (a body of work readers…
According to the MoMA website, Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe screen-print series challenged “the concept of the unique art work by repeating the same mechanically produced image until it appeared to be drained of all meaning.” It’s tempting to cite Warhol’s Marilyns as the inspiration for the 18 screen prints in Miriam Mörsel Nathan’s “Greta” series,…
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