Tag Archives: museums

Arnold Newman: Masterclass at the Contemporary Jewish Museum

Posted on January 3, 2015 by Larissa Archer

One of my favorite photography exhibits in San Francisco last year was the Contemporary Jewish Museum’s “Arnold Newman: Masterclass.” While some of the artist’s portraits have achieved iconic status (think of the composer Igor Stravinsky. The image you have in … Continue reading →

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Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa, Ponte City, for Art Practical

Posted on September 12, 2014 by Larissa Archer

“It was a place where the wave crashed inwards upon itself, with the seething violence of delayed hope. It was Africa coming back, but with nowhere yet to go…. It was 54 floors of people in between other places.”—Denis Hirson, … Continue reading →

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“Desert Jewels” and “Anima and Tuareg” at the Museum of the African Diaspora

Posted on October 19, 2012 by Larissa Archer

The Museum of the African Diaspora is hosting two small but excellent shows this month. “Desert Jewels: North African Jewelry and Photography from the Xavier Guerrand-Hermès Collection” features tribal jewelry and nineteenth-century photographs from an era when  advancements in photographic … Continue reading →

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The Cult of Beauty: Victorian Avant-Garde at the Legion of Honor, for Art Practical

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Larissa Archer

The temptation to sigh and swoon through The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde, 1860–1900, at the Legion of Honor, is strong. The mostly male artists gathered here have borrowed the French poet Charles Baudelaire’s concept of “Art for art’s sake,” … Continue reading →

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Francesca Woodman at SFMOMA, Huffington Post

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Larissa Archer

There are things in that paper which nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman … Continue reading →

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Masters of Venice at the De Young, Art Practical

Posted on December 8, 2011 by Larissa Archer

Masters of Venice: Renaissance Painters of Passion and Power, composed of work on loan from Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, provides a small but potent display of both the flights of inspiration and technical advancements that made fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venice an … Continue reading →

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I had problems with Asian Art Museum’s (and V&A’s) Maharaja show, SF Weekly

Posted on November 2, 2011 by Larissa Archer

Any exhibition on the wealth of a nation’s royal class is an exhibition of the inflated amour-propre of men with money and armies at their beck. Well-fed bluebloods wrap themselves in theater curtains, pile on the baubles, and commission royal portraits for … Continue reading →

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