This is an essay about learning Photoshop. I have to learn it for a class. I am in graduate school, see. I still have a hard time believing this. I’m in this multimedia experimental MA program in Specialized Journalism The Arts at the University of Southern California. I’ll tell y’all more about tall this later. So, [...]
1988 was a rotten time to be a teenager. During the Reagan-Bush era, you had to put in a lot of work to hear something other than Bon Jovi. There was no internet, and the indie revolution in film and music and fashion and new media was still years away. A girl interested in [...]
Hey y’all. This morning, I went to an intro to meditation workshop held at Shambhala Center Los Angeles. I woke up early to go! To a meditation workshop! it felt vaguely like I was going to church except the Shambhala Center is in a sort of Zen late midcentury low-slung combination office residential compound in [...]
There’s this faction of contemporary artists who seem to feel at pains to jargonize, obfuscate and otherwise Other-ize their own work. If you need to have read Derrida and to have seen the whole canon to get what an artist is doing, that’s cool. But cool is a value of middling worth. The pernicious cycle of [...]
That’s Wolverton! They’re a San Antonio art-rock band made up of Caralyn Snyder (vocals), Kate Terrell (vocals, keyboards), Jeremiah Teutsch (vocals, electric bass, fiddle, banjo), Hills Snyder (vocals, guitar). If you follow that first link, you’ll get to hear their music, which I like a lot. It’s got a durable alt-rock-folk-country top hand and is excellently [...]
There’s been a grave interruption in my tour reporting, I realize. Rigoberto Gonzalez Facebooked me thusly the other day: WTF? (I’m paraphrasing). Here’s what happened: from January through May, I amassed more than eight hours of video footage, about that many hours of audio field recordings, including interviews and some highly trippy bits of RGV AM [...]
Continued from Part I… V. Reynosa, Narcolandia and sad, sad data It’s important to point out that Rigoberto Gonzalez is not a Chicano artist, though he shares a lot of the same concerns, and is deeply interested in Chicano art and culture. But he’s a Mexican artist living (legally, understand) in the United States. He [...]
I. Some Art Context I have so much to show you. This is the first painting I ever saw by Rigoberto Gonzalez. It appeared in the Virginia Rutledge-curated Texas Biennial show of 2011, and it stopped me cold. The marriage of subject matter and technique felt shockingly fresh. This is a hell of an accomplishment; [...]
Basketball season brings out the aggrieved San Antonian in me. I am a Spurs fan, of course. Not a basketball enthusiast, necessarily, but a Spurs fan. This is a congenital condition. It’s brought on not just because San Antonio has no other major league sporting teams to diffuse our ardor, but because San Antonio is [...]
Hello, and thank you for joining me for this, the inaugural blog post for the Chupacabrona Tour. (For some background info on the tour’s mission and plans, you can read this post if you want — in recap, I wanted to travel around South and West Texas and document art making in places with [...]
Did you go to this thing? Houston’s Art Ball — aka Disaster Ball, a fundraiser for this here publication, it was. I went all the way from San Antonio. I was impressed by the breadth and inventiveness of the costumes, the tipsy friendliness of the crowd, and the funky hauteur of the Colombe D’Or. There [...]
My former landlord in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—a sphinx-like Teutonic manchild who sublet me one of the ad-hoc drywall sleeping lofts in the colossal warehouse he leased near the Bedford Avenue subway stop—still owes me $1200. It was my security deposit from 2008 and I don’t expect to get it back. I don’t mean this story as revenge [...]
Justin Boyd’s Window Works installation at Artpace is called “Natural Black, Sprinkled With Cosmic Iridescence.” This title struck me as maybe unnecessarily long when I first heard it, but after “seeing” the installation several times and talking to Justin Boyd about it, it’s won me over. Because not only does ”Natural Black, Sprinkled With [...]
This is Guillermina “Gisha” Zabala, an artist and filmmaker from Argentina who makes her home in San Antonio with her Uruguayan husband Enrique Lopetegui, music editor of the San Antonio Current, and their daughter Shanti. You can watch an excerpt of her San Antonio Artist Foundation Award-winning film, F-Watch, here. “I, Me, Light,” Zabala’s [...]
Hi again, Glasstire readers! This is what I think y’all look like: And also like this: Hello to you all. This December, I embark on The Chupacabrona World Tour (of South and West Texas). Over the course of five months, I aim to make ten two- and three-day trips from SATX to urban centers [...]
Hi again, Glasstire readers! This is what I think y’all look like: And also like this: Hello to you all. This December, I embark on The Chupacabrona World Tour (of South and West Texas). Over the course of five months, I aim to make ten two- and three-day trips from SATX to urban centers [...]
My friend Rebecca watches ”RuPaul’s Drag U” with her six-year-old daughter, who’s a big fan. The six-year-old, her mother believes, doesn’t understand that Jujubee, Raven and the other drag queens are not biological women. The little girl watches for more or less the same reason her mom does — for the kitschy glamor (although the kiddo [...]
So, the Texas Contemporary Art Fair is over. (Which gives me an excuse to post the above image. This particular Rachel Hecker piece is impactful and funny in-person, too.) So I’m still processing everything I saw, PLUS I’m recovering from a bout of dog-days writer’s block, which I blame on 9/11, heatstroke and having watched [...]
Look, these are all gonna be iPhone photos. I’m sorry about that. Soon as I can, I plan to purchase a real camera, but meanwhile, this is what I’ve got to work with. Also, I’m posting this as fast as I can because it’s timely. Part 2 will come this evening, as I have to [...]
Aaron Forland, San Antonio visual artist, SA’s unofficial DIY/underground/punk rock historian and creator of the “Keep San Antonio Lame” meme, has been and continues to extol the paradoxical and decorate the prosaic. Some of my favorite “undocumented” works by Forland, the clandestine installation of small but potent abstract works affixed to the doors on [...]
